“Please.” Cooley hands him a china teacup full of steaming orange pekoe tea.
“Where’d you get a cup like that?”
“The ruins of the adjoining house. There was a perfectly preserved English tea set in there.”
“Good work, as always,” commends Jim.
Cooley smiles, salutes, and walks away. Jim tries the tea. It is surprisingly good, sugary and tempered with milk presumably bartered for from a local farmer. Real milk, not powdered milk—sometimes behind the lines miracles are worked, particularly by batmen, the de facto miracle workers of the army. Jim lights one last cigarette to go with his tea. He drinks the tea too quickly, and his stomach contracts and curdles. His cigarette, burning in his hand, is suddenly off-putting, and he snuffs it out in his teacup and it hisses with one final protest before dying, a sodden cork-tipped butt floating in a cup of half-drunk tea. God, not again ...
He steps outside for air. A moment later, the attack announces itself suddenly. Seven hundred guns erupt in earth-shattering unison, a fugue of thunder. Stunned, he blocks his ears, falls to his knees. He looks up. The sky is lit by the fireworks of muzzle flashes and the consequent trajectories of hundreds of shells. The fillings in his teeth rattle. He looks above at the streaking shells as they hiss and moan and whistle through the sky, and he looks back down to his watch. It is 2101, one minute past the point of no return. The attack is on.
With the sudden discharge of artillery comes a strange elation: at last, after a week of waiting under fire for his next attack orders, he can finally consummate his fear, get it over and done with, sally forth and seek his prey, take it to the enemy, for a time his nerves no longer frittering away but their tension concentrated into trained soldier’s instincts, to be transmuted into action, correct action and reaction, a Newtonian ballet of bodies and bullets. Become your orders, carry them out, make the men instruments to carry them out, and lead bravely by example. Be an officer and all that that entails. The day he received his commission, he burned with pride. Even Marianne looked proud of him. She probably was, then. He cut an impressive figure, holding the signed scroll and wearing his dress uniform with peaked cap, posing in front of the mirror, his image as an officer rhyming back at him in a heroic couplet, compound glory, twice the man.
He absorbs the pounding pyrotechnic display about him. The sky is streaked in trajectories. The earth rumbles underfoot and the horizon flares with countless muzzle flashes that bruise the clouds in their flicker. An overbearing overture of power, the prelude to every major offensive in which he has taken part. There is a pounding in his ears, and he tears two pieces from a Kleenex tissue, wets them with his spit and plugs his ears to what little avail they can offer, the bombardment pounding at his eardrums like a battering ram at the gates of a beleaguered castle, rippling through his bones, shaking his teeth like chinaware, echoing through his head, the shrapnel of noise shearing and snapping the frail filaments bonding his thoughts, reducing the interior of his head to a crashing, jangling catastrophe of noise disrupting all possibility of coherent thought. Here and there, flash by flash, are illumined trees, houses, hills, recoiling guns and men in action, captured in flared snapshots, yellow and orange flicker, red glow, a purple bruise of clouds.
The bombardment underway, Jim realizes that it is time to meet with his fellow officers, and he makes his way to Tactical Headquarters, now situated in a dilapidated, gutted stone farmhouse. An upper corner of the house has been bitten out by a shell, exposing the gaping maw of the attic. Inside, Hobson addresses them in the scanty, wavering half light of an oil lamp, all the company and support platoon commanders, as well as Lieutenant McGann and RSM Albert and other officers and NCOs attached to HQ, and the artillery and heavy mortar officers from Division, some seventeen men in all huddled round a wooden table in the kitchen upon which is spread an operational map. About them is the usual hubbub of busy clerks and signallers.
“Get on with the tea, will you, Olafson?” asks the colonel in a commanding question to his batman.
“Yes, sir.”
“Now where were we ... Okay, gentlemen, final orders for this evening. You all know your movements. There is no change in the general plan thus far.” The phone rings, a piercing jangle, and a clerk answers it in the next room.
“Sir, it’s for you, it’s General Hoffman.”
“Goddamn it. Alright.” He steps away from the table and answers the phone, his free hand blocking his other ear, and he speaks over the muffled thunder of the barrage. “Uh huh, yessir … Yes, sir, everything is going well ... I contacted Colonel Christie earlier, and all targets have been marked and coded, yes sir … You too, sir, thank you.” With a click he hangs the receiver upon its cradle and reemerges into the dimly lit kitchen, the features of which are suggested in shadowy relief: a hanging pot, a wooden spoon, a large wood-fired oven which Olafson stokes for tea, the flare of the paper and kindling in the oven’s mouth briefly lighting the room more, bringing it into a sharper focus flickered with shifting flame shadows until he shuts with a rusty groan the metal oven door.
Hunched or leaning over the table, the men all pore over the map, McGann’s map, and Hobson dictates to them their specific movements, their specific times, and McGann briefs them on the various features they are likely to encounter as identified on the map. Tea is served, and they sip out of tin cups and cups found in the nearly bare cupboards of the ravaged house. The positions of mortars and machine guns are outlined, the names for artillery targets and unit objectives are coded by the colonel and the artillery and heavy mortar observers, the areas for supply dumps as arranged by the quartermasters are pointed out. Each company is thus prepared.
An ashtray is heaped with a felled forest of cigarette butts. As the men are consumed in their plotting, they smoke and smoke and smoke, spinning into cinereal being ghostly spirals of smoke like a dead galaxy of burnt-out and exploded suns, particulate matter drifting apart, breaking loose orbits and caught in casual drafts, caustic smoke adrift, a brief, imperfect gnostic universe born of the happenstance of nervous unrest, dissipating and untwisting and displaced by the opening of the door when a runner comes in to announce the arrival of tanks to their jump-off positions.
“Are there any questions?” asks Hobson, his face in the lamplight a flickering orange, half shadow and half light, his moustache a dark line, his eyes scanning through the semi-darkness. There are none. “Then stay around here until it’s almost time to move up to the start line to monitor any developments. This meeting is adjourned.” The men relax and finish their tea, and some of them begin a poker game to the ambient radio and telephone chatter. Jim joins the game and wordlessly plays awhile, to the coded reports of troop movements repeated and transcribed by the signallers, and to the steady pounding of artillery shuddering the floor and making those reports all too real, winning and losing hand by hand according to the vagaries of fate as dealt and dealing in fate himself when it is his turn to shuffle the deck.
“Alright gentlemen, it’s time to move!” Hobson commands, looming over them, having emerged from the shadows of his plotting. “Get back to your units and give them any last briefings you might have. We move up in precisely half an hour. You know your places. You are dismissed!” Captain Van Der Hecke of Dog gathers his cards into a deck and stuffs them back into the package. Everyone gets moving in a bustle. As they’re all exiting, Colonel Hobson stops Jim, last, with a hand on his shoulder:
“And Jim—”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry about what happened between you and your wife. It’s a real sonofabitch when these things happen.”
“Yessir.”
Hobson looks him in the eye and holds his gaze a moment. “Keep it together, McFarlane, this is a big night, I need all my officers in ship-shape, you understand?”
“Yessir, I do.”
“You are dismissed.”
Jim stamps his right foot
at attention, salutes, spins on his heel in a right turn and marches out into the night toward his headquarters, stumbling and groping in the dark amid the roar and flicker of the bombardment. He arrives at the open door of the barn from inside of which trickles soft, milky lanternlight, his arrival heralded by the bleating of a goat chained just outside.
Back into the barn where it is somewhat quieter, the walls shuddering, the earth quaking, the lanterns wavering and throwing shadows about every uneven surface: jugs, bales of hay, equipment, bodies, faces. Cavanagh, the signalman now detailed to him to operate the company radio, sits in the straw with his radio set, his headphones on and his hands upon the headphones, pressing them to the cups of his ears, a look of strained thoughtfulness on his face as he listens intently for any transmissions worth noting. Beside him four medical runners await their duties, their stretchers leaning against the wall.
“What do you hear?” Jim asks. The spell is broken. Cavanagh looks up at Jim. “Nothing. Not a damn thing but static, sir,” he answers, taking the phones off and placing them upon the bulky set.
“Don’t sweat it. We’ll hear anything we need to hear from TAC. Just wait out the storm, and we’ll be on our not-so-merry way in no time.”
“Yes, sir.”
A moment later, Staff Sergeant Nichols enters the barn and hollers over the noise, “Any outgoing mail? If you have any letters you want to send before we go, give ‘em to me now!” Various men hand him envelopes which he puts into an already half-filled sack he is carrying, and he then turns his attention to Jim with a look of contempt, his mailbag sagging under the weight of letters. “Hey, Captain! How was the parade?”
“Not now, Nichols.”
Nichols comes close to him and fixes him in his gaze and says, “Allow me to speak freely.”
“Go on, let’s hear it.”
“I’m not sure why you’re leading us tonight. One of the others could be made acting captain tonight and you should sit it out with the rest of the LOBs. You look like you could use some rest. That is just my opinion, sir.”
“And you should mind your duties. That is my opinion.” Jim tries to change the subject. “Just keep the ammo and food coming, Nichols, and we’ll accomplish the mission. Okay?”
Nichols looks him deep in the eye and says, “Yes, sir. Good luck.”
“You too.” Then, after a moment, he says, “You are dismissed, Staff Sergeant.” Nichols’ brows furrow deeply and his face reddens with anger for a moment.
“Yes, sir,” he grumbles, each word squeezed reluctantly out of lips pressed thin, and turns away. As he does so, he chews out a new reinforcement posted to Jim’s HQ section, Private Neidhart, Briggs’ replacement, whose No. 38 radio chest pack lies in disarray at his feet, and who is nervously loading and unloading his rifle as the shells crash about outside.
“Goddamnit, Neidhart! Look at that radio of yours! And don’t be messing with your cartridge, for Christ’s sake! You could let one off in here by accident! Get your shit together!” He approaches Jim again after a moment, after Neidhart’s mumbly apologies and fumbly handling of his radio, and hisses, “Captain, don’t you notice anything around here?”
Jim forgives Nichols this bit of insubordination: “I said, you are dismissed, Nichols.”
“Aye, sir. See you in action.” He departs in a huff. Jim looks around to certify that none of the others in the barn with him have witnessed his tongue-lashing.
Another look at his watch. The Sydneys should be making their move soon. And soon after, the soldiers of the battalion will occupy their abandoned positions on the reverse slope of the ridge. Three cigarettes later, it is about time. He stands up and addresses the men in the barn.
“It is now time to go. Get yourselves ready! Move!” The men pull themselves upward and move out of the barn into the shrieking maelstrom. Jim leaves last. “Come on, Able Company! Up and at ‘em, let’s go!” Jim barks above the blast and wail of guns and shells. “Form up in your squads and platoons and follow me up the hill on the double!” Cavanagh is beside him with his radio set now mounted on his back; Cooley is at his other side, rifle slung.
“Move, move, move!” yells Sergeant Stringer raggedly to his platoon dug into a copse of trees, he standing in for Olczyk who has been left in reserve. They leap out of their holes, donning packs and slinging weapons. Therrien’s men emerge from theirs on the other side of the path on which Jim stands, and Doyle’s emerge from around the barn Jim occupied. Just as they are about to depart they are joined by a Corporal Tillman, who wears a No. 38 radio pack slung over his chest.
“Here I am, sir,” he says to Jim with a wink. “Mortar Platoon at your service.”
“Nice to see you, Tillman. Stick by me and I’m sure we’ll find you some targets before long.”
Down the road march Dog Company who jeer them for being late—“Hey there’s a war on!” yells a cheeky sergeant, “You guys thinking of joining?” Others whistle as if at attractive women.
Captain Van Der Hecke winks at Jim as he marches by, and Jim nods at him and says, “Have your boys dig us some fine holes up there for us!”
“In your dreams, McFarlane.”
“Alright Able, let’s move! Move, move, move!” As he says this, the sky flares up, and the light bathes the world about in a glowing yellow orange; turning his head to look at the source, he is suddenly buffeted by a tremendous thunderclap, and he squats to his knees, watching as a great roiling ball of orange fire and black smoke rises into the sky upon a stalk of flame, consuming itself as it does so, fissures of black smoke expanding as the fireball is spent on itself in its brief flowering. An ammunition truck or a fuel truck has been hit, likely. Flames hiss and crack and lash the sky red. Awestruck soldiers stand around as the fire roars like the inside of a furnace and then makes the noise of a flag flapping in a furious wind, tugged by the vacuum of the wind and snapping—standards and banners and pennants, great tatters of flame pulled up into the sky, the resultant smoke dissipating into the darkness. A filmy, fumy smell of burning fuel permeates the nostrils. The goat, chained up outside the nearby barn, is cowering and trembling, folded up on its haunches, making a whimpering sound—
In the glow of the fire he is back at Cassino, on a steep hillside, making his way up to the line with the carrier platoon, his charge for the month in a rotation of duties, moving ammunition up to the forward companies at night along a winding path while watching the night bombardment before a Polish attack, the members of the platoon slowly making their way in the darkness pulling a train of pack mules laden with ammunition and supplies. The mules are both led and ridden by soldiers, and a few of them bray restlessly, their heehawing like the swinging of a rusty gate, and they chew at the bits in their mouths and yank at their reins, twitching their ears in aggravation, unaccepting of their role as slave animals. The mules give off a barnyard smell of manure and leather and oily hair, earthy and sweetish, no doubt triggering homey farm memories from more than a few of the men leading them by their snouts. Together they are silhouetted in the flash of the guns, in orange and red and yellow and purple. Explosions ring their rhymes and terzias of terror off the mountains and are distorted and amplified by the rocks and the ruins. There is an off-kilter whirring sound and a short round comes sizzling and wobbling out of the sky, trailed by smoke like the curled shreds of the air through which it rips. It crashes nearby, sending him and the others to the ground with the shock of its impact. He looks back up and sees a mule combust, flaring up and blazing bright like a torch in a great hiss of phosphorus flame as an incendiary grenade on its back ignites, and he hears its agonized braying, a sandy honk mixed with a shrieking piggish squeal, stark animal terror, and there is the oily rug-reek of burning hair, the sweet pork smell of burning flesh, the unearthly raving of an animal on fire and leaping about in throes of incendiary agony as twisting, hissing snakes of flame uncoil from its body. The other mules leap backward o
ut of the way, braying with a primal fear of fire and scarred by the pain of one of their own, and they pull at their reins and shake their heads and snort at the air in an attempt to get away, the soldiers clutching the reins from their prostrate positions like trainee rodeo clowns, trying not to get dragged through the dirt. The sharp cracks of his own pistol as he empties his clip into the blazing beast, into the centre of its tormented mass. Its legs buckle out from underneath as it collapses to the side, its tongue lolling out from its mouth stupidly like that of a dazed cartoon character.
“Stay down!” he shouts needlessly to his men as they wait for the explosion of ammunition, which occurs a moment later as banana clips full of machine-gun rounds crackle and burst and spark like so many fireworks, erupting from the burning mule, a hundred starbursts flickering off crouched helmets and rocks and faces under a sky rent by the howling of the shells, wayward bullets pinging off stones and chucking into the bark of skeletal trees.
“Any casualties?” he hears himself say after the surreal display has burned itself out, and he stands up, choking greasy smoke roiling up from the charred, steaming remains of the mule, its yellowed buckteeth bared in a burnt and lipless sneer—
“Casualties?” Jim asks louder. “Are there any casualties?”
“No, sir.” It is Doyle, hand on his shoulder. “Not that I can tell. One hell of a bang that was, eh? Jesus!” He looks shaken, the sharp features of his angular face changing and shifting in the firelight. “So, are we moving or what, Captain?”
“Yes, yes, we’re moving, Lieutenant, we’re moving. Sorry, just a little stunned from the fuel truck.” God almighty, I don’t belong here anymore. The goat continues to cower amid the noise and is shushed and patted by a concerned young soldier, a trembling new reinforcement who looks at a glance to be about eighteen.
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