“I’m next,” Ray Landis said mournfully, watching his pal go. “It’s a sure thing.”
I didn’t contradict him. It was a sure thing that one of us would be next. Which one? Without a word, then, Charlie nervously began to do his laundry for a second time that week, and I decided to take a walk on my own, to worry about the question alone.
The next day, another jeep pulled up, this time bringing Willie’s replacement, a vast swarthy giant, with bones like a dinosaur’s, whose name I can no longer remember (something Slavic, I think, something Rumanian). But it was too late for this stranger. We didn’t have it for him. The energy for a new friendship, or even a companionable collaboration, had been dissipated in the effort we had all made for each other. We were exhausted by it. And Willie Goodenough’s melancholy departure had proved again, in case we had forgotten, just how vulnerable we were. No, the ties were coming loose, that much was clear; events were beginning to take over again, and we were starting to grow uneasy.
THEN, what had to happen finally happened. Orders came through to separate out the duffel bags of the third platoon, C Company, 104th regiment. It was the obvious possibility to which I had blinded myself for weeks while I was sipping cognac in the Place Stanislas in the middle of the day and listening to Charlie Beale talk about baroque composers I had never heard of. How could I have been surprised?
It was a job I had to do—there was no other way—and of course I chose Charlie to do it with me. We began right after breakfast. I didn’t want to waste time. I wanted the job behind me. We moved fast at first, stumbling over ourselves. The “system” Ray Landis had talked about was that within each unit all the bags were stacked in very rough alphabetical order. As stupidly simple as that.
I was demanding with Charlie, even querulous, as though I was some kind of superior NCO who ruled the roost. As though I owned everything. But I soon settled down, in the face of the reproving look Charlie gave me. He was standing at the top of the pile, calling off the names that were stenciled on each of the bags, before tossing them down to me on the floor below.
So we proceeded, through half a dozen vaguely familiar names, echoes of the second and third squads, remnants of old roll calls. Peters. Schwartz. Juneman. Oliver. Reese. Schiffman. Green. Each time Charlie called a name, he threw a bag to me, and I tried to catch it—all that was left of those who were killed or missing in action at Bézange-la-petite.
“P. Willis,” Charlie called after resting a moment.
I paused. “Here!” I yelled.
Then “Roger Johnson.” There was an echo in the shed, Charlie’s voice bouncing back at us. I looked up at the filthy glass ceiling, checking for bats.
“Yo!” I shouted. The bag fell like a corpse alongside me.
“Barnett Barnato.” Charlie was beginning to acquire a kind of rhythm that carried us along.
“Barnett?”
“Barnett Barnato,” Charlie repeated, pronouncing Barney’s mysterious surname on the first instead of the second syllable. “Bar-na-toe,” when it was really “Bar-nah-toe.” For some reason, this irritated me. It seemed important, the correct pronunciation of everybody’s name; even Barney’s.
“Ja!” I finally yelled. I piled his bag on top of Johnson’s.
“There’s rat shit up here,” Charlie said. I could hear a shudder in his voice. “R. Hubbell,” he called, after a moment.
R. Hubbell, I thought. Capers and beautitudes. “Toss it,” I called up.
The work was getting warm. Charlie and I were both in a sweat. “Want to break for a couple of minutes?” I asked. I was beginning to smell myself, and Charlie, I saw when I looked up, was sniffing shyly at his armpits.
“Let’s keep going while we have some momentum,” Charlie said. That was all right with me. Then, “I. Fedderman.”
I waited a moment.
“I. Fedderman,” Charlie said again.
What was I waiting for?
“Fedderman!” This time Charlie was shouting.
“Ici!” I shouted back and felt Fedderman’s bag hit me on the shoulder. It hurt. It was filled with jagged edges, box-like objects, unidentifiable sticks or rods, things that were sharp and strange. What did he have in there, for God’s sake? My shoulder began to ache from the onslaught. I found myself cursing Ira Fedderman. Again. It never seemed to end. What in the hell could his personal effects amount to? What had he collected and stashed in his duffel bag over the many months since we began basic training at Fort Benning? Why hadn’t I written to his mother? When would I?
At last Charlie was growing impatient. I couldn’t blame him. He was tired of searching out duffel bags that belonged to men he didn’t know or had never heard of, and he was weary of tossing them around. They weighed a lot. He began to complain.
I interrupted him. “Is there a Keaton up there?”
A minute passed. “I don’t see one,” Charlie called. But I didn’t think he was trying very hard.
“Look carefully.”
It took him a while but he finally found it. “Yours is here, too,” he said. “And somebody Brewster. Want them?”
“Forget mine. Just toss the others down.”
The bags landed at my feet. I had almost the whole squad now. “Any Natale?” I asked. I had to spell the name for Charlie.
“Nothing,” he finally said.
No duffel bag for Ralph Natale. No personal effects. Was that possible? It made me feel strange, as though I had failed him, as though he was being cheated for a second time. Charlie was moving around on top of the pile again. He sounded restless. I could hear the soft thud as he jumped from one duffel bag to another. “Just one more,” I said.
“Who?”
“Gallagher, Lieutenant.”
Charlie began rummaging around and muttering to himself. “There aren’t any officers up here that I can see,” he said.
“You sure?” I asked.
I waited for him to check it out again. The smell of guano mixed with my own acrid sweat was beginning to get to me. It was a stink.
“They must be in a special section,” Charlie said.
I waved him off. I was too tired and a little sick to my stomach. “Let’s break,” I said. We had done everything we could do. Dozens of duffel bags littered the floor around me, as evidence. Someone else would have to do the ransacking. Not me. Not me, for sure.
I thought I heard a scurrying sound then, coming from a corner of the shed. It was the click of rats’ feet. It was a sound that I sometimes heard at night, while the four of us lay sprawled on our straw pallet. It always made me shudder. Willie Goodenough had claimed that the rats liked to gnaw their way through our duffel bags in search of food. Candy Whiskey. Cigarettes. Even soap. They ate anything. Paul Willis’s bag, in fact, had holes in it, jagged bites, all up and down one side. While I listened, I held on to Bern’s duffel bag. I knew everything he had in there. Books. Extra fatigues. Tobacco. One blanket. A religious object or two. I had seen him pack it in the States, item by item, back at Camp Jackson, just before we headed overseas. It suddenly felt very heavy. I put it down and sat on it and watched Charlie slide down from the top of the pile. He had two huge sweat marks under his arms. I think I remembered to thank him. I hope I did, but I can’t be sure. I was at absolute zero. There seemed to be nothing left except the sharp hallucinatory clicking of rats’ feet and the sound of Charlie Beale’s heavy breathing as he lighted a cigarette, against Ray Landis’s strict warnings. I hated those foraging rats. They scared me. They gave me the Schreck. They gave Charlie Beale the Schreck, too. They made him crazy.
I had to get out of there.
TEN
No Trumpets, No Drums
I WAS transferred a few weeks later, through the collaboration of the division’s Psych., from the warehouse in Nancy to an intelligence outfit that did research on captured enemy weapons. Maybe I should have been there all along, helping the outfit do its work; it seemed to suit me. I found the research interesting, serious, too, and remote
from the infantry, as everything that is not the infantry is remote from it. And that was what I needed—some distance that could not be easily violated. I was grateful for the move. In a sense, you could say that my real war stopped on a shattered rise in the Moncourt Woods, at Bézange. The rest of the war, for me, was mere footnotes and asides—important, perhaps, but still a subtext made up of subsidiary themes.
I never saw Charlie Beale or Ray Landis again, and never heard from them, nor they from me. Something ended in that blighted warehouse in Nancy; something was concluded, once and for all.
• • •
THE REST of the story, the Yankee Division’s story, was far from finished. There was more to come—there always is in wartime—a continuing zigzag journey, an often bitter march through the heart of Europe that carried the veteran division to the Ardennes, and the Battle of the Bulge and on into Germany and ultimately Czechoslovakia, at the war’s end, when the 26th came face-to-face with the Russians outside the town of Budweis. The next day, they both officially met in the middle of the town square and enthusiastically shook hands, grinning mightily as though they had just accidentally run into each other—then did it all over again, still grinning, for the news cameras.
There had been major engagements everywhere, in France and Germany and the Ardennes during the Bulge, small skirmishes as well, ambushes, tank traps, passing firefights, full-scale onslaughts that involved the whole division … and many casualties. In the 104th alone, 666 men died and 2,575 were wounded; 35 remained missing in action. And once again, as in World War I, the 104th was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French, alone among the YD regiments.
The official Yankee Division history, for which I was a presumed source, barely mentions Bézange-la-petite, glossing over the episode in a way that makes it impossible to discover what actually happened or whether, in fact, anything happened at all. It’s both empty and evasive. (I wonder if the division’s historian considered that a “victory”—over me, that is.) Of course, the careless loss of almost an entire platoon—and more—is not necessarily what divisional histories are designed to commemorate. The inflated smell of distant glory is more their style. So I had learned back at the base hospital, and so, I think, I had always known. All of us had, probably to the last man.
The same is true of the official U.S. Army History of World War II. The volume called The Lorraine Campaign, in the course of nearly seven hundred densely packed pages, never refers to C Company’s catastrophic loss at Bézange, even though there are at least a half-dozen listings of Bézange in the volume’s index. Heavily detailed with numbers, citations, maps, and dates, The Lorraine Campaign, while keeping the chronology and statistics in order, nevertheless manages to give the impression that the war in Alsace-Lorraine was fought by an agglomeration of trucks, half-tracks, tanks, and humanoids in uniform, who may have resembled real men, in a physical sense, but who pretty much went through the motions of fighting without having to carry the burden of either names or authentic faces.
The 104th regimental history does it better. Maybe it’s a simple matter of scale or of being closer to the subject or even of a more manageable ambition. The 104th’s own history is far more specific and at times even slightly romantic in tone. Its restrained narrative names names and places, calls a disaster a disaster, and is enriched here and there by curiously lyrical interludes, especially when the facts cannot effectively carry the narrative.
In its restraint, the history catches something essential about the real experience, even while it avoids the central question for the handful of us who survived: that of accountability. Who actually was responsible for that day at the Horseshoe? C Company’s commander? Battalion’s? And what did it ultimately cost him, or them? (I would dearly like to know, but I have accepted the fact that it will probably remain unfinished business, safely buried, in the Army’s terms, forever.) But the 104th’s history, in general, doesn’t avoid bad news. It is easy while reading its pages to recognize the voice of a thoughtful writer—or group of writers, since these narrative efforts were almost always collaborative—when it concludes, in a reflective passage about Bézange that “compared to the activities of the Western Front as a whole, these actions were insignificant—a minor engagement on a nameless [sic] hill somewhere in France. Yet to the regiment, they, as the initial combat encounters, were all-important. With them came the first shock of battle, the realization that combat means closing with the enemy and that closing with the enemy meant, for some, death.”
Perhaps that’s acknowledgment enough for the third platoon. It says something real and says it gracefully, even if it misses the full resonance of what happened, the elusive personal dimension of it, the private griefs and regrets. At least, the regimental history tries to look directly at the subject and describe what it sees—and succeeds often enough.
BERN Keaton and I met for the first time since the war on Sunday, May 7, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. We had not seen each other since October 1944, since Bézange, in fact—a staggering stretch—although we had spoken once or twice on the phone over the years. (He would sometimes call to congratulate me on the publication of a new book.) In our occasional conversations we had talked about getting together, but it never happened. Bern was in New Jersey, I was in New York. He had his life, I had mine. We seemed worlds apart. And there were always other demands and other priorities; we all know them. Then the anniversary of V-E Day approached. Bern called, and we had our usual exchange, but this time everything suddenly seemed right, and we made a date. Most urgent, I think, was the unspoken sense between us of how little time there was left—not only for us but for every ex-GI.
I found that I was tuning up before my visit—for we had decided that I would go to New Jersey—trying to find the right pitch for the day, the reasonable tone, and adjust accordingly. I wanted to look good and sound intelligent. I had my hair cut. I chose a flattering shirt and jacket. I looked long and hard in the mirror, regretting the twenty pounds I had put on over a half-century. I made myself ready to laugh or cry, as needed. I would be a smart kid, with Bern, for an afternoon once again.
It was a good move, as it turned out. The meeting went easily, despite obvious nervousness on both our parts. We were instantly comfortable together, once we got over the physical shock of the other’s aging. My waist, Bern’s white hair, our comparative slowness. Bern’s wound had healed well enough so that he did not limp, nor did he complain about it during the time we had together. He made it sound as though it had happened to someone else. I had to admit that Bern had kept his sharp, craggy features, his Irish good looks. About myself, I wasn’t so sure, but it didn’t seem to matter once we had settled down with each other. I soon began to see Bern again as he was at eighteen and I hope he was able to see me in the same way.
We spent eight hours together that Sunday, from lunch, which we shared alone, through the long spring afternoon, then on into the evening through dinner with Bern’s children and grandchildren, all of whom turned out to have more than enough lightning Gaelic wit to spare—more smart kids, I thought. (Like me, Bern is a widower and lives alone; both our wives died in recent years of lung cancer.) Bern did the cooking for the two meals, as he does almost every day of his life for himself, and he is very accomplished at it.
We talked all day about C Company and Bézange, about all that, trying to confirm each other’s memory of events and people. Antonovich (O Captain! Our Captain!), Francis Gallagher, Rene Archambault, Barney Barnato, Roger Johnson, Paul Willis, Rocky Hubbell, and, of course, Ira Fedderman, who, like Francis Gallagher, continues to furiously usurp my nighttime dreams.
The names ran on, so did the events. I think Bern’s memory was surer than mine. It certainly helped to give me confidence in writing this book. At one point, moving on to other matters for the moment, I mentioned to him that I had just read somewhere that more than half the personnel who served in the US Armed Forces during World War II were already dead, a half-century after the
war. This seemed an astonishing statistic to me, hardly possible to accept, in fact, one that somehow carried an important warning, or omen, as though history itself—Bern’s history, my history—might begin to vanish with this lethal roll call. (No war is ever really over until the last veteran is dead.) Bern looked at me blankly when I gave him the news. I think he was as stunned as I was. Then we let it pass, shaking our heads.
We also talked about books. Bern is still a great reader, one of those who seem to have taken a silent pledge early in life never to be without a volume in hand, and he keeps a record—author’s name, book title, date read, and, sometimes, remarks, not necessarily kind—of every book he reads. (My books are there, too.) I found this endearing. I liked its attentiveness, its collaborative sense, its sense of participation; I like to think I share all three as a reader. Then we talked about family and work and marriage, about our wives’ deaths, especially that—so-called ordinary matters out of our ordinary lives, which, after all, had consumed most of the time of most of our years.
Later in the afternoon, however, we were back to the war. It was inescapable. Bézange again. Fort Benning and basic training. Orono, Maine, the great ice palace in the north. The deadly Tennessee floods. Camp Jackson. And Europe, France, Alsace, Bézange once again, irresistible, as always, the nearly forgotten scene of a horrific crime, as one of us put it at some point—never solved. It seemed to me then that the last word could never be said about Bézange or World War II—nor about anything else, for that matter.
Before I left, we spent a lot of time looking at old photos—mainly of our ASTP buddies, taken in South Carolina before we went overseas—which Bern had fastidiously arranged in an immaculate album. The photos looked as fresh as though they had been taken the day before yesterday, fresh and clear and still sharply defined—the result, I’m sure, of Bern’s loving attention. We marveled at those photos, laughed a little, remembered, then corrected each other’s memory. Wonderful young faces, if I may say it myself, without a sign of care on them: skinny teen-age frames, nobody over a hundred and fifty pounds, except for Ira Fedderman, who was always an exception in everything. We laughed a little about that, too, but modestly and with some restraint. We were still not entirely sure how we felt about Ira Fedderman.
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