No Man's Land: Writings From a World at War

by Pete Ayrton

  There must be a frozen potato in it – every time he moves, something rattles in the sack.

  ‘Eh bien, what do you want?’

  ‘My name, you see, is Monsieur Marescot,’ the civilian whispers, and bows. ‘That is why I’ve come…’

  ‘So?’

  ‘I would like to bury Madame Marescot and the rest of my family, Monsieur Lieutenant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘My name, you see, is Papa Marescot.’The old man lifts his hat from his gray forehead. ‘Perhaps you have heard of me, Monsieur Lieutenant!’

  Papa Marescot? I have heard this name before. Of course I have heard it. This is the story:Three days ago, at the beginning of our occupation, all non-enemy civilians had been issued the order to evacuate. Some left, others stayed. Those who stayed hid in cellars. But their courage was no match for the bombardment – the stone defense proved hopeless. Many were killed. A whole family had been crushed beneath the debris of a cellar. It was the Marescot family. Their name had stuck in my mind, a true French name. They had been a family of four, the father, mother, and two daughters. Only the father survived.

  ‘You poor man! So you are Marescot? This is so sad. Why did you have to go into that damned cellar, why?’

  The corporal interrupted me.

  ‘It looks like they’re starting up again, Lieutenant!’

  That was to be expected. The Germans had noticed the movement in our trenches. The volley came from the right flank, then it moved farther left. I grabbed Papa Marescot by the collar and pulled him down. My boys ducked their heads and sat quietly under cover, no one as much as sticking his nose out.

  Papa Marescot sat pale and shivering in his Sunday best. A five-inch kitten was meowing nearby.

  ‘What can I do for you, Papa? This is no time to beat about the bush! As you can see, we’re at each other’s throats here!’

  ‘Mon lieutenant, I’ve told you everything. I would like to bury my family.’

  ‘Fine, I’ll send the men to collect the bodies.’

  ‘I have the bodies with me, Monsieur Lieutenant!’

  ‘What?’

  He pointed to the sack. In it were the meager remains of Papa Marescot’s family.

  I shuddered with horror.

  ‘Very well, Papa, I will have my men bury them.’

  He looked at me as if I had just uttered the greatest idiocy.

  ‘When this hellish din has died down,’I continued, ‘we shall dig an excellent grave for them. Rest assured, père Maresco, we will take care of everything.’

  ‘But I have a family vault.’

  ‘Splendid, where is it?’

  ‘But… but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘But we’re sitting in it as we speak, mon lieutenant.’

  Isaac Babel was born in 1894 in Odessa, the inspiration for many of his best short stories. Schooled by private tutors because there was a quota for Jewish pupils at state schools, he grew up speaking fluent French, the language in which he first wrote. In 1915, he moved to Petrograd. At that time he was much influenced by French writers and ‘Papa Marescot’s Family’, one of the first stories Babel wrote in Russian, shows clearly the influence of Maupassant. According to one of his stories, Babel fought on the Romanian front until the end of 1917. He returned to Petrograd in 1918 and worked as a reporter on Gorky’s newspaper Novaya zhizn. As the Russian Revolution hardened, Babel became more and more disillusioned. A trip in 1930 to the Ukraine enabled him to see at first hand the effects of the forced collectivization of the peasantry. His response was to become ‘a master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence’. But this wisdom came too late. His works were deemed to be ‘off message’, and not even Maxim Gorky, his patron, could save him. As part of Stalin’s Great Purge, Babel was arrested in 1939. After ‘confessing’ to being a Trotskyist terrorist and foreign spy, he was executed in January 1940.

  *What do you expect, one holes up where one can.

  DALTON TRUMBO

  A DATE WITH THE SHELL

  from Johnny Got His Gun

  HE HAD LOST ALL TRACK OF TIME. All his work to trap it all his counting and calculation of it might just as well never have happened. He had lost track of everything except the tapping. The instant he awakened he began to tap and he continued until the moment when drowsiness overcame him. Even as he fell asleep the last portion of his energy and thought went into the tapping so that it seemed he dreamed of tapping. Because he tapped while he was awake and dreamed of tapping while he was asleep his old difficulty in distinguishing between wakefulness and sleep sprang up again. He was never quite positive that he was not dreaming when awake and tapping when asleep. He had lost time so utterly that he had no idea how long the tapping had been going on. Maybe only weeks maybe a month perhaps even a year. The one sense that remained to him out of the original five had been completely hypnotized by the tapping and as for thinking he didn’t even pretend to any more. He didn’t speculate about the new night nurses in their comings and goings. He didn’t listen for vibrations against the floor. He didn’t think of the past and he didn’t consider the future. He only lay and tapped his message over and over again to people on the outside who didn’t understand.

  The day nurse tried hard to soothe him but she did it only as if she were trying to calm an irritable patient. She did it in such a way that he knew he would never break through as long as he had her. It never seemed to occur to her that there was a mind an intelligence working behind the rhythm of his head against the pillow. She was simply watching over an incurably sick patient trying to make his sickness as comfortable as possible. She never thought that to be dumb was a sickness and that he had found the cure for it that he was trying to tell her he was well he was not dumb any longer he was a man who could talk. She gave him hot baths. She shifted the position of his bed. She adjusted the pillow in back of his head now higher now lower. When she moved it higher the increased angle bent his head forward. After tapping for a time in this position he could feel pain shooting all the way down his spine and across his back. But he kept right on tapping.

  She got to massaging him and he liked that she had such a brisk gentle touch to her fingers but he kept on tapping. And then one day he felt a change in the touch of her fingers. They were not gentle and brisk any longer. He felt the change through the tips of her fingers through the tenderness of her touch he felt pity and hesitancy and a great gathering love that was neither him for her nor her for him but rather a kind of love that took in all living things and tried to make them a little more comfortable a little less unhappy a little more nearly like others of their kind.

  He felt the change through the tips of her fingers and a sharp little twinge of disgust went through him but in spite of the disgust he was responding to the touch responding to the mercy in her heart that caused her to touch him so. Her hands sought out the far parts of his body. They inflamed his nerves with a kind of false passion that fled in little tremors along the surface of his skin. Even while he was thinking oh my god it’s come to this here is the reason she thinks I’m tapping goddam her god bless her what shall I do? – even while he was thinking it he fell in with her rhythm he strained to her touch his heart pounded to a faster tempo and he forgot everything in the world except the motion and the sudden pumping of his blood…

  There was a girl named Ruby and she for him was the first. It was when he was in the eighth maybe the ninth grade. Ruby lived down in Teller Addition on the other side of the tracks. Ruby was younger than he maybe only in the sixth or seventh grade but she was a great big girl an Italian and very fat. All the boys in town somehow began with Ruby because she never embarrassed them. She came right to the point and that was that although once in a while you had to tell her she was pretty. But no other nonsense and if a guy didn’t have any experience why Ruby never laughed at him and never told on him she just went right ahead and gave it to him.

  The guys liked to talk about Ruby when there wasn’t anything better to
talk about. They liked to laugh about her in such talks and say oh no I never see Ruby any more I manage to get around I’m finding something new every day. But that was all talk because they were really very young guys and Ruby was the first and only girl they knew they were too shy with other girls with nice girls. They soon grew ashamed of Ruby and when they went down they would always feel a little dirty and a little disgusted. They came away blaming Ruby somehow for making them feel that way. By the time they got to the tenth grade none of them would ever speak to Ruby and finally she disappeared. She just wasn’t around any more and they were all kind of glad they didn’t have to meet her on the street.

  There was Laurette down at Stumpy Telsa’s place. Stumpy Telsa had a house in Shale City. She had five or six girls there and the finest pair of Boston bulls in town. The guys when they were young when they were maybe fourteen or fifteen used to wonder a great deal about Stumpy Telsa’s place. For them it was the most wonderful the most exciting the most mysterious house in Shale City. They would hear stories from older guys of what went on down there. They could never quite decide whether they were for it or against it but they were always interested.

  One night three of them went down through the alley in back of Stumpy Telsa’s and crept through the back yard and tried to peek in through the kitchen door. There was a colored cook there making sandwiches and she saw them and let out a howl. Stumpy Telsa came swinging into the kitchen on her peg leg and grabbed a butcher knife and came out into the back yard. They all ran like hell with Stumpy Telsa yelling after them that she knew who they were and she was going right inside and phone their folks. But it was a bluff. Stumpy hadn’t seen their faces and she didn’t telephone anybody.

  Later on when they were seventeen or eighteen and practically ready to get out of high school he and Bill Harper decided the hell with talking about the place all the time so they went down to Stumpy Telsa’s one night to find out for themselves. They walked right into the front room and nobody pulled a knife on them or anything. It was about eight o’clock and evidently things weren’t very busy because Stumpy came into the parlor and talked to them and wasn’t sore at all. They were too embarrassed to say anything to Stumpy about why they came and Stumpy didn’t say anything to them about it either so it turned out to be just a visit. Stumpy called upstairs to the girls for a couple of them to come down and sit in the parlor and she told the colored woman to make up a plate of sandwiches. Then she went away. Alone in the parlor they could hear the two girls coming down from upstairs and they knew that now they were going to find out whether all the things they had heard about such places were true. Some guys said that the girls came right smack into the parlor stark naked and other guys said they’d never let you see them naked they always wore a kimono or something. Nothing they hated said these guys so much as a man who wanted to see them without any clothes at all. So they sat with their hearts in their throats and waited and watched.

  But when the girls came down they were fully dressed. They were dressed better than most of the girls in Shale City and they were prettier than most of them too. They came in and sat down and they talked just like anybody else would talk. One of them seemed to like Bill Harper the best and the other one seemed to like him. The one who liked him talked about books all the time. Had he read this had he read that and he hadn’t read any of them and he got to feeling pretty much like a dummy. After about a half hour of munching sandwiches and talking about books Stumpy Telsa came in all beaming and smiling and told them it was time to go home. So they got up and shook hands with the two girls and went away.

  That night they took a long walk through the town discussing all the things they had heard about Stumpy Telsa’s place and deciding they were either lies or else they were the kind of guys that women didn’t like in that way. That was bad maybe they’d be failures with women all their lives maybe there was something they didn’t have. They decided not to tell anybody about their visit because they felt they were much more disgraced than if things had turned out differently.

  Later on he got to thinking about the girl who talked books and after thinking about it for a long while he went down to see her again. Her name was Laurette and she seemed glad to see him. She told him if he wanted to see her always to be sure he made it before nine o’clock because after that time things were generally pretty busy. He did come again and several times more and always they sat in the parlor and always they talked. He got to thinking maybe I’m in love with Laurette now wouldn’t that be a fine thing me falling in love with her and how would I break the news to my mother and father? And on the other hand he would think why is it that all we do is talk what does she think I am? All during the winter of that year and on through the spring he went down to see Laurette once maybe twice sometimes even three times a month. And each time he went down just before he knocked on the door he would pull himself together and he would say to himself Joe Bonham be a man this time. But Laurette was so nice he couldn’t figure out how a fellow started things like that without seeming kind of dirty. So he never did.

  When he graduated from high school he got a pair of gold cuff links through the mail and all they had with them was a card that had the initial L written on it. He had a hell of a time explaining to his folks who sent him the links but he prized them very highly and he decided that tomorrow night after graduation he would go down to Stumpy Telsa’s. Now that Laurette had told him in a kind of roundabout way that she loved him things would be different. So about nine o’clock on the big night he went down to Stumpy Telsa’s still hunting for some pleasant and polite way to express the thing that was in his mind. He knocked on the door and Stumpy Telsa invited him in and when he asked for Laurette she told him Laurette wasn’t there. Where had she gone? She had gone to Estes Park. Every year said Stumpy Telsa she takes three months off up there. All winter long she buys new clothes and she saves her money and for three months she lives at the best hotel in Estes Park. She goes out with guys and she dances and she dearly loves to have the guys fall in love with her and when they fall for her she is always nice to them but she is never too nice. She is never as nice as they want her to be. She is a smart girl that Laurette said Stumpy Telsa she eats her cake and she has it too. And on top of that she saves her money and she has a nice little bankroll. Why don’t you get a job in some other town and then come around in the fall after Laurette is rested up and talk things over with her? Maybe you and Laurette would be very happy. But by the time fall came he was working in a bakery fifteen hundred miles away and he never saw Laurette again.

  There was a girl named Bonnie. She clapped him on the back one day while he was sitting in Louie’s drug store near the bakery having a coke. She slapped him on the back and she said to him you’re Joe Bonham ain’t you Joe Bonham from Shale City? Well I’m Bonnie Flannigan we used to go to school together Jesus it’s good to see somebody from god’s country. He looked at her and he couldn’t remember her at all. Oh yes he said I remember you. She nodded and said you were ahead of me in school and you never would give me a tumble how are you and why don’t you come over to see me sometime? I live in the bungalow court just three doors from the bakery. You work in the bakery I know. I see some of the guys once in a while sweet guys all of them they told me you were there.

  He looked at her and he could tell she was younger than him and he could tell what she was. He felt a little pain in his stomach because girls like that might come from New York or Chicago or St. Louis or Cincinnati they might come from Denver or Salt Lake or Boise Idaho or Seattle but they never came from Shale City because Shale City was home.

  He went over to see her. She wasn’t a small girl and she wasn’t a very cute girl but she was awfully good natured and she was busy with plans for the future and she was full of life. I been married three times already said Bonnie I been married three times and all my husbands said I looked just like Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw. Do you think I look like Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw?

  In the mornings around five or s
ix o’clock sometimes they would go over to Main Street for breakfast over in the bright cheap shiny white tiled restaurants where you could get anything for a dime. They would go there and the place would be filled with sleepy sailors wondering what to do now that it was morning and Bonnie would know them all. She would slap them on the shoulders as they walked toward their booth and she would call them by name. Hi Pete well if it ain’t old Slimy hi Dick well if it ain’t old George. When they got to the booth and ordered their ham and eggs she would say to him Joe if you’re a smart guy you’ll stick with me. You want to go through school huh? Joe you stick with me. I’ll send you through school. I make the fleet and I know all these guys and I know where their pocketbooks are and I’m smart and careful I never even had clap you stick with me Joe and we’ll wear diamonds. See that guy over there? He always says I look just like Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw do you think I look like Evelyn Nesbitt Thaw dearie?

  There was a girl named Lucky. She was the Statue of Liberty and Aunt Jemima and the girl-you-left-behind to about a half a million doughboys in Paris. They had a regular American house in Paris and when they were on leave there when they were away from the trenches and the killing all the guys went to the American house and talked to American girls and drank American whiskey and were happy.

  Lucky was the best one of the bunch the nicest and about the smartest. She would receive him in her room and she would be stark naked with a great red scar where somebody had yanked her appendix. He would come into her room pretty tired at the end of a night and maybe a little drunk and he would lie down on her bed and put his hands behind his head and watch Lucky. The minute she saw him she would smile and go over to her dresser and out of the top drawer she would bring a doily. She was always crocheting on that doily. She would sit at the foot of the bed all brightness and gossip and friendliness and crochet the doily and talk to him.