The load swayed coming onto the bulldozed flats of the draw. The remains of blasted German bunkers spoiled the bluffs on either side, raw marks of the ferocious fighting through here. Private Mays didn’t look at them, he watched Joe Amos.
‘Where you from?’
Mays didn’t answer right off. The question seemed to be submitted to some authority in his head before he spoke.
‘Little town in Florida.’
Mays didn’t name the town. Joe Amos tried another question.
‘What’s your first name?’
The low voice replied, ‘McGee.’
Eyes on the road, Joe Amos screwed up his face. ‘That’s a last name. That ain’t a first name. How the hell’d you end up with that?’
Another pause preceded the answer.
‘Name of the doctor that birthed me.’
‘Well, hell. Didn’t the doctor have a first name?’
‘Yeah.’
Joe Amos shook his head. The boy didn’t appear dull-witted or anything, but getting him talking was worse than dragging this overloaded Jimmy up the hill.
‘What was it?’
‘Adolph.’
Joe Amos rammed the gear knob into second and laughed.
‘Your mama named you Adolph McGee Mays?’
‘I go by McGee.’
‘I guess you do. Shit.’
Joe Amos lugged the Jimmy up to the road and had to wait for another convoy to speed past. These trucks carried stacks of five-gallon jerricans. Every driver ignored the twenty-five-mile-an-hour limit. It didn’t matter, the roadside MPs just waved you by. Now that the invasion was equipped with the Mulberry harbor, the pulse of arriving supplies, vehicles, and soldiers had quickened. The American beachhead grew more crowded, the Krauts gave up ground like misers. The GIs were packing in. The hunger for materiel grew with their numbers, the need for replacements rose with the fighting. From the orange blinks in the night sky and the chatter and boom of guns all day long, Joe Amos got the notion that battle commanders weren’t skimping on ammo or manpower in combat. Feeding them all were the convoys, and only them, right off the beaches. The French rail system was a shambles after three months of hard bombing before D-Day by the Brits and the Americans and sabotage by the French underground. That’s why this road connecting OMAHA to UTAH teemed with traffic twenty-four hours a day, and not just Jimmies. Now there were huge tankers and five-ton tractor trucks towing massive trailers or artillery. The road began to show the wear and tear of constant contact with rubber and weight.
The convoy passed the intersection. Joe Amos gunned the Jimmy onto the paved surface and built momentum. Another column closed fast and he had to step on it to keep from slowing them down. He shifted deftly.
‘See,’ he said to McGee Mays, ‘go ahead and wind her up. Don’t baby her or she’ll stall. She won’t break.’ The Jimmy whined high into second before Joe Amos released her into third. ‘Don’t break, baby.’ Mays chuckled.
Up on the road now, accelerating in front of the Jimmy behind him, Joe Amos pronounced his own full name. He kept both hands on the wheel, which shimmied under the burden. He explained how he was named after Joseph, a son of Jacob, who got sold into slavery by his brothers and became a high official in the Egyptian government. Joseph interpreted dreams and wore a many-colored coat. Also, he was named after Amos, one of the twelve prophets of Israel, who preached about justice and the coming day of God. Amos started out as a shepherd, but once he became a prophet he really let the people have it when they strayed.
‘I like my names. A dream reader and a prophet. Gives you ... I don’t know, some juice. Like a boost or something.’
Joe Amos stalled his chatter. He was accustomed to Boogie always running the talk. It felt good to be the corporal now, the one yammering on. McGee listened hard, he watched hard. Joe Amos didn’t want to take advantage of the boy’s silence.
‘Now, a doctor, that’s good, too ...’ Joe Amos nodded. ‘McGee’s a good name.’
McGee made no answer. He watched the countryside slide by, checked out the dunes turning into hedges and trees. Joe Amos jounced behind the wheel, fixing on the road and the engine.
‘I’m gonna bring you up to speed, alright?’ If the new boy didn’t want to yak about hometowns and women, then fine. But Joe Amos intended to talk.
‘About what?’
‘About the war, damn it. See them dead tanks out there? The war.’
‘Sorry. Go ahead.’
‘Are you dumb or something?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you... Look... sorry.’
‘I ain’t dumb, Corporal. I’m a good driver. I ain’t afraid. And I can kick a man’s ass when I have to.’
‘You talkin’ to me?’
‘I reckon.’
Joe Amos laughed, lifted his hands from the wheel to make a surrender gesture.
‘Alright, then. Gimme that.’ Joe Amos laid out his hand, and McGee, hesitant, slid his palm over the offered skin.
‘Okay,’ Joe Amos said, ‘we got to get used to each other, that’s all. I had a different partner for a while, and that’s, you know, that’s the way he talked. I was just doing the same thing. My fault.’
‘Okay.’
Joe Amos took another glance at McGee Mays. The boy waited, quiet and still. This, thought Joe Amos, this is the real Negro the whites are afraid of. He’s quiet and he may be simple-hearted. He comes from some back-water town in Florida where he’s learned to still that deep voice. They taught him down there to be silent and understanding, and he agreed to be so. They’ve got him convinced of his station. Joe Amos is different, he has some college, he’ll get the rest when he returns home. They figure Joe Amos Biggs is playing the game their way, so they’ll crack the door a little bit for him. But they badly fear McGee Mays in his iron-black and quiet millions. They’re scared he might change his mind, not be so quiet. So they don’t give him a gun, they don’t give him the chance to prove he’s as good as they are at anything they do, work, think, fight. McGee Mays, not Joe Amos, frightens the bejeezus out of them.
‘How you know what’s goin’ on?’ asked McGee. He waved a hand at the terrain. The first busted town came up. ‘1 mean, man, it’s a war. Lookit this.’
‘Same way you’re gonna know,’ Joe Amos answered. He patted the dash of the Jimmy. ‘A week now, I been driving every inch of the beachhead. There ain’t one division I haven’t delivered to. Men, ammo, food, clothes, POL. Then I take back prisoners, wounded, and bodies. By now, I know this part of France better than the generals. And I know what’s going on. I’m gonna show you. You’re gonna know, too.’
‘Yeah,’ nodded McGee. This seemed to strike the boy as a challenge, and he liked it. McGee scanned the land outside the windshield, now risen and diced into the dangerous hedges and fields.
Joe Amos looked from McGee’s shifting features back to the road. His hands tightened on the wheel, not because of any bump in the pavement, but from a temblor up his torso. Like Joseph his namesake, he’d felt a jolt, a dream he’d read on McGee’s face. There’s changes ahead, he saw their coming on this boy like flights of black birds, fluttering and common, turned into clever, squawking crows. There’s change coming and it doesn’t matter who likes it. It was coming like Kingdom.
Joe Amos snagged his thoughts on a hymn, one of his mama’s favorites in their shanty Danville church. Rise up, men of God! His kingdom tarries long. Bring in the day of brotherhood, and end the night of wrong.
‘Tell me,’ said McGee.
‘Alright.’
Joe Amos shoved a thumb over his shoulder, indicating east. ‘Behind us, you got the British and Canadians trying to take Caen. That’s a big crossroads city, right on the highway to Paris. They got themselves stalemated there. Caen’s where the big breakout is supposed to be, get us the hell away from these beaches, but it don’t look like that’s gonna happen anytime soon. The Krauts ain’t giving up Caen. Over on our side we’re getting more crowded every day. So we
might have to break out in our pan of France. The only place to do that is right through the hedges. And that ain’t gonna be a party.’
The Jimmy rolled with traffic through a tunnel of tree-tops. McGee, new to this place, said, ‘Damn,’ probably figuring how awful and blind it would be to fight field by field through the bocage. Every time Joe Amos drove over this land, five, six times a day, he felt the same twinge, the responsibility of hauling supplies to the men doing that fighting. White boys or not, he didn’t care what color when he saw them limping or on stretchers, wrapped in gauze or mattress covers, when he was close enough to hear the guns blaze beyond the trees and hedges and wreckage. All he wanted was to be shoulder to shoulder and see, just see, if in the smoke another soldier might not care about color, either. For now, hauling was all Joe Amos could do. He tried to content himself with being channelled through ten thousand guns instead of just one in his own hands.
‘South of here, a couple infantry divisions are working their way down to St. Lô. The 35th, the 29th, and the 2nd. They’re bad news, every one of them. Every time I head down that way I get the shit scared out of me, the way them boys are fighting. Man, I have trucked some bodies up out of there. The Krauts are dug in real good. They’re trying to keep us bottled up, probably for a counterattack. But that ain’t going to be easy for them, because our planes flat own the sky. They move in reinforcements, least during the day, we’re gonna see ‘em.’
Joe Amos pointed ahead and to the right, north.
‘Now, up here, where we’re going, we got two infantry divisions, the 79th and 4th, just starting their move up the peninsula to take Cherbourg. That’s the biggest port in Normandy. Once we get it, we can start landing supply ships there. I mean, there’s only so much that can be hauled over the beaches. And there’s probably another million more men and everything waiting over in England to get here and bust us out into open country. So Cherbourg is key.’
Joe Amos revved with his words. He missed Boogie John, sure, but this was good, driving and talking, knowing. He was the corporal now.
‘We got to keep the boys supplied, got to keep taking it to the Krauts hard as we can, day and night. And that means supplies. Ammo, gas, rations, shoelaces, medicine, what the hell ever. Supplies, man, that’s the lifeblood of war. Somebody said that. That’s what we are. Every truck we drive, every load we deliver, the boys can’t do a thing without what we bring ‘em. Got to have lifeblood. So, see, we need Cherbourg. Problem is, the Krauts know it, too. So they’re probably gonna do everything they can to keep it.’
McGee gazed out his window beyond his resting elbow, off to the northeast, building images of importance and battle.
Finally, Joe Amos cast his pointing finger west, straight ahead.
‘Those three divisions heading north for Cherbourg got their backs turned to the Krauts. So to protect the rear, and make sure the Krauts don’t slip out down the peninsula, we got the 101st and the 82nd Airbornes, and the 9th and 90th Infantries cutting off the peninsula, like a chicken neck.’
Joe Amos drew his finger beneath his chin.
‘Just last night I heard the 9th and 82nd got all the way to the ocean. So now that we got the south sealed off, the 79th and 4th can go whup some tail toward Cherbourg. The 9th’ll be heading north, too, I hear tell. That’s where we’re headed, up into that fight.’
McGee’s big eyes stretched wide. ‘Right into the fight?’
‘Damn close, lieutenant said.’
McGee pointed down at Joe Amos’s feet.
‘Then step on it.’
~ * ~
The Lieutenant Colonel dragged on his cigarette and flopped his heavy boots up on his desk. Leaning back in the chair, he crossed his ankles and blew smoke. Ben did not read relaxation in the officer’s pose, but a grim determination to take one last sip of comfort out of the chair and the tobacco before rising.
‘Okay,’ the officer breathed.
Ben said nothing, to allow the man his short idyll.
The officer dropped his boots to the floor. ‘What’d you say your name was, Chaplain?’
‘Kahn.’
‘Chaplain Kahn. I appreciate you checking in with me.’
‘I like to let the COs of every unit know when I’m around. I’m sort of an itinerant for the time being. Until Billups gives me my own battalion.’
‘Sort of a wandering Jew, huh?’
Ben let the officer laugh alone, but smiled to let the man know he wasn’t offended.
‘You want to take a Sunday walk, Chaplain?’
‘Let’s go.’
Lieutenant Colonel Trow stood and trod on his cigarette. Ben followed him through the remains of the shop to the open doorway. The door stood propped against a crumbling plaster wall, blown off its hinges when 3rd Battalion entered Gourbesville two days ago.
The officer strode into the street and headed west, Ben beside him. The town, like every contested burg so far in Normandy, had been laid waste by American artillery. Only imagination could describe it, fill in the interrupted lines of walls, and lift the colors from beneath the mortar dust and akimbo bricks.
Trow, a lean man with early-graying hair, slung his M-1 into his hands. The town was not large and they reached the outskirts quickly. Instantly, the bocage greeted them on both sides of the skinny road. The Colonel’s pace slowed, his eyes scanning the green unknown.
‘You’re looking pretty gamey, Rabbi. Where you been? Not at the aid station?’
‘I spent the last three days with the 358th, north of here.’
‘Taking an infantry tour of the Tough Ombres?’
‘You could say.’
‘Now you’re doing the 357th. How’s the division look to you so far?’
‘It was pretty quiet where I was. But so far I’d say troubled.’
‘Yeah, troubled.’ The Lieutenant Colonel tugged his ear. ‘That’s a word for it.’
Ben glanced over his shoulder to the rubble of Gourbesville. GIs shuffled between ruins. The spikes of gun barrels rose like bristles in the debris facing west. The Krauts might try to take the town back, though this was unlikely; the enemy strategy was a slow withdrawal into the hedges, to make every step forward for the doughs tortured and bloody.
‘I got here on the 16’th, just before they took it,’ Trow said. ‘I was reassigned over from the 9th when the battalion CO got waxed on the road leading in.’
Ben kept his dismay to himself. Here was one more officer in the 90th who’d been on the job only hours or days, replacing commanders killed or wounded or evacuated for shock or demoted for ineffectiveness. No wonder the division was in disarray.
Trow told his account, keeping his eyes on the bocage. The scrub thickened on the hedges the farther they walked out of town, into a warm and windless embrace.
‘The Krauts had the road pre-sighted with a battery of eighty-eights. That forced the battalion to go through these fields. But the battalion CO, he wanted the road, so he jumped in a jeep and blared right through Bloody Corner. One round took him out, and his driver, they fired that eighty-eight right down his throat. That’s not leadership, Chaplain. That’s plain stupid, getting killed like that. Then both the regimental CO and his assistant bought it, trying to get these men going. These fucking guys.’
Ben had noticed how the men, officers and foot soldiers alike, did not curb their cursing around him. Maybe they sensed that Ben Kahn had been in their boots before, scared, in another country, in a land of dying. Ben didn’t mind their language, it was sincere, and that’s what any man of God wants.
Trow pivoted south, lifting an arm to indicate the acres of fields and hedgerows. Ben squinted in the afternoon light. He raised a hand as a brim to his helmet. He touched the tape wrapped over his red cross by Allenby. In the pastures he spotted the black-rimmed gouges made by 105 mm howitzers and the smaller scoops of 81 mm heavy mortars. The fields and town had hunkered under a downpour of American shells. The town melted away and the ground was grilled. Fat lumps lay in th
e fields. Butchered cattle. They, thought Ben, were stupid, too, the worst thing to be in a war.
‘They ran, Chaplain.’ Trow lowered his arm. He resumed his walk west, with Ben beside him.
‘We called in the artillery pretty close, about a hundred yards off the nose of the lead company. And they must have got confused or something, thinking the rounds were incoming from the Krauts, because they up and ran. Lit out right for the rear. I saw it. Some of them dropped their weapons. And I’m thinking, What the hell is going on?’
Ben listened. He was likely a decade older than Trow and already this officer sounded like an old father, burdened like all fathers by the price their sons pay for wisdom. Ben felt the urge to tell this younger man some story about his own son, share an anecdote of loss. But Ben had nothing he could say. He did not know and might never know if his son was either brave or stupid. He couldn’t even say if the boy was alive or dead.
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 10