David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘I like engines,’ McGee said. ‘I’m gon’ be a mechanic.’

  Joe Amos sped on and kept speaking of his own home.

  ‘I was the baby child, you know, so I got to do what I wanted a little more. My sisters’ husbands took care of the place, so I got to go off to school. Three years. Then I joined up.’

  ‘You gonna finish college when you get back?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. Mama said she’d hide me good if I don’t.’

  McGee enjoyed this, the notion of a houseful of women telling Joe Amos what to do.

  McGee said, ‘My girlfriend an’ my little girl, they livin’ with her mama. I’m gonna ask her to marry me when I get home.’

  Joe Amos let this nestle with the rest of the flowing afternoon. Home. We’re all going to do the right things when we get home. But today was special because it was France and this was a war, and Joe Amos and McGee had the day to themselves.

  Another convoy crept up on Joe Amos’s rear. This put him in the center of a column several miles long, a thousand tons of supplies headed toward the struggle for St. Lô. Joe Amos relaxed at the wheel; in the heart of an immense column there was nothing to do but follow. He enjoyed a secret glee that he was not going where the other hundreds of trucks were headed. Today he had his own destination, of his own choosing. He saw France differently this afternoon with no load in his bed. Emerald hills swelled on every side, ridged with hedges and stone fences. Sheep and cattle grazed, shade lay sweetly by barns and streams. Joe Amos felt pride knowing he helped liberate this beautiful land. The emptiness of his truck bed tweaked him, riding selfish and bare when he might be full and useful for the fight. He passed the place where Lucky lost her rear end two nights ago. His regrets faded and he watched the next kilometer for the turnoff to the Marquis’s chateau.

  McGee made no comment when Joe Amos slowed and turned out of the convoy. The dirt lane did not reveal any home, just unpruned brush for a long, winding way. Then the shrubs gave over to grass and there was a palace.

  Joe Amos caught his breath. The building was stucco and brick. Three chimneys stood high above a slanted roof. Wings extended left and right from a half-turret in the middle, topped by a fleur-de-lis wind vane. Windows and doorways showcased marble carvings in corners and cornices. All the mortar and frames looked weathered and grainy, just right for a home like a castle. Joe Amos entered a gravel driveway that rounded at front doors so wide he could drive through them if both were swung open. He stopped the Jimmy and shut the engine. He laughed, gazing at flowering bushes and a carpet of grass. A statue balanced on a pedestal in a dry fountain.

  ‘Where the hell we at?’ McGee asked.

  ‘Man, I don’t know....’

  The war was gone from this place, banished off the grounds. Joe Amos climbed from the cab and set foot on the gravel, thinking a change might come over him, too, only magic could do this. No one came from the great doors to greet them. With McGee, he walked along the facade of tall windows and scented bushes.

  The sounds of rasping, a rotor, slipped around the corner. With McGee a step behind, Joe Amos ambled to the noise. He whistled.

  Clearing the long wall, Joe Amos stopped. A man wearing slacks with no shirt pushed a lawn mower over a green sward. Brick walkways diced the wide yard, and in islands of dirt between the grass and brick, roses bloomed, fat and pink. The man wore his gray hair long down his neck, his back was white and soft. He was lean, likely from labor and hunger. He stopped mowing and bent for a large rake. He scraped at the clippings.

  ‘Marquis!’

  The man turned and let go the rake. He opened his arms. Against the pastels of the roses and the intensity of the grass, the Marquis seemed pale and unkempt, a boney gardener, not the royal magician who lived here.

  ‘Bonjour, mon ami. Vous êtes revenu pour me rendre visite, oui?’

  Joe Amos strode forward. McGee stayed a step behind.

  ‘Joe Amos Biggs, you have come back to visit me, yes? And you have brought a friend? Bon!’

  McGee uttered, ‘This guy knows you?’

  Joe Amos let the question stand. ‘Marquis. Yeah, man, we had the day off. And you know, you said ...’

  ‘Yes! I said you should come and here you are!’

  The Marquis embraced Joe Amos. He was careless about his sweat, his smell was green and part of the place.

  Joe Amos patted him on his damp back. He’d never in his life been held like this by a white man. It seemed odd. Joe Amos squirmed.

  ‘And your friend?’ The Marquis bounded like a butterfly from Joe Amos to McGee, but with only a hand out. McGee clasped hands.

  ‘This is Private McGee Mays, my assistant driver.’

  ‘Bienvenue. Welcome. Now, Joe Amos. Can you stay awhile?’

  The Marquis rubbed palms, greedy for company. The man’s ribs showed. The sun had pinked his shoulders, a small copse of white curls matted his chest. He seemed ready to bloom.

  ‘Yeah. We can hang around.’

  ‘Excellent! I apologize, you have caught me in the middle of my groundskeeping. As your host, I can offer you some hours of work at my side, a glass or two of wine, and later a meal of mutton and potatoes I have purchased with your gasoline. McGee? What do you think of this?’

  McGee screwed his face at Joe Amos. ‘What gasoline?’

  ‘Forget it, it’s nothing. You want to rake or mow?’

  ‘Can we get the wine first?’

  The Marquis clapped at this. ‘Très bien! Yes, I have a cellar full! One moment.’

  He cupped hands to his mouth, calling to the giant rear of the house, ‘Geneviève! Du vin!’

  The Marquis turned again to McGee.

  ‘Come! Join me, take off your shirt and have some sun. We will work and we will drink, yes? You, Joe Amos Biggs, let’s go! Up, up!’ The Marquis hoisted his hands in a gesture to make them peel off their tunics. McGee complied and unbuttoned his shirt, then stood smiling in his OD sleeveless.

  ‘You will mow first, McGee. You are a strong boy, I see this. We will finish the work in half the time! Joe Amos and I will rake and clip the bushes.’

  McGee shrugged and took up the mower. He shoved it and the blades spun, chewing grass. The Marquis watched after him, seeming to admire the dark American boy, a new color added to his garden.

  Joe Amos unbuttoned his tunic slowly. He couldn’t just throw himself in like McGee. Even AWOL, he stayed a sergeant.

  ‘What’s up with the house, man? How’d you keep it like this, with the war and all?’

  ‘The Germans made a headquarters here. Officers took my house and allowed us to live in a corner. I have been the gardener. Geneviève was their maid.’

  The Marquis kept his face placid, mentioning the Germans. The man had lived under the heel of the Krauts for four years, serving them in his own home. Joe Amos looked from the Marquis to the ancient house, and thought the two were like this whole country, patient survivors. Not me, he thought, I’d spit, man, I’d spit every time I said the word German.

  Joe Amos finished pulling off his tunic and OD. His color was lighter than McGee’s but still many shades deeper than the Frenchman’s. To him, their skins, their stations, seemed to pose no barriers. The Marquis had been the laborer in his own home, Joe Amos thought. Is that what changed him, shining the Krauts’ boots so they could walk over his grass? What does that kind of change cost a man?

  ‘Who’s this Geneviève?’

  The answer came out the door before the Marquis could reply. She carried a silver tray bearing a jug and three glasses. She was linen white and thin, long-armed and gangly, swaying in a cotton dress barefoot over the lawn. She wore her brown hair long, like the Marquis. She seemed at first glance Joe Amos’s age, maybe a few years older.

  Geneviève held the tray while the Marquis poured. She did not speak and her father did not introduce her, as though she were a maid. He lifted two glasses and turned to take one to McGee. When he walked away, she moved closer to Joe Amos, offering the tray. Her head in
clined down, she looked at him under thick brows. Some instinct told Joe Amos not to speak but just take the glass and smile. The girl seemed to appreciate this; she returned his smile.

  She set the tray on the grass. Joe Amos admired the way she moved, graceful, balanced. She backed away, looking at him before turning to the house.

  ~ * ~

  ‘Rabbi!’

  A captain lay only a yard from Ben, bellowing to be heard. Chunks of earth splattered their helmets and backs. Ben lifted his chin out of the dirt.

  ‘Yeah!’

  ‘You got a prayer for this, how ‘bout sayin’ it!’

  Another shell brayed overhead to slam into the ground a hundred yards down the line. Ben felt more than heard the explosion; after an hour under the German guns, he was as deaf as every man in 3rd Battalion. Along with five hundred soldiers, he lay in the poor cover of high grass, weathering the worst Kraut barrage of the day. He set his chin on his forearm to glare at Hill 122, Mont Castre, a green welt in the flatness of Normandy.

  American artillery answered the Krauts shell for shell. Orange bursts peppered the crest of Mont Castre, cracking and toppling trees. The difference was the big guns attached to the 90th fired blindly at the hilltop, and the Germans laid their rounds with lethal accuracy, looking from the high ground straight down the throats of the 359th lying in the fields.

  It was impossible to know the casualties his battalion was taking lying here. Every German shell was a lottery ticket, maybe you won, maybe you lost. Every soldier with his face dug in the dirt kept frenzy at bay while the concussions beat on him to flee, panic, beg for the earth to stop erupting. Every man on his belly with hands over his helmet plumbed his courage, reviewed his life, and fought not to pee himself when the explosions probed near.

  Retreat from this field was out of the question. They’d just have to come this way again and pay for the same ground twice. The big shells weren’t as deadly in an open pasture against an army on its belly as they were against a town, where they could knock down buildings and flush out defenders. But artillery could stop an advance, send the attackers to ground, and pin them there. Ben and the battalion could do nothing but lie exposed in the weeds, waiting for dusk, still an hour away. Once night covered them, they would move up to the rim of the Mont Castre forest.

  He hid his eyes in the crook of his elbow, feeling the bombardment through his hips and chest. Though Ben Kahn was one of hundreds in these weeds and thousands at the foot of Mont Castre, the falling German shells, the muted shouts of men left and right, the stench of powder and cindered grass, made these private moments. Inside the little cave of his bent arm, memories of his home and his lost son and his other war dropped on him, too.

  Ben said a prayer, in praise of God, not for the defense of his life. Of all the men in these erupting fields, he did not have to be here. So he would not ask God to preserve him. He asked only that God use him to end the war as fast as it could be stopped.

  In the first two days of the assault through the hedgerows, the 90th had suffered a ten percent casualty rate, twelve hundred men. This was terrible and would worsen on the slope of Mont Castre. Ben would not pray that any American soldier be spared. The GIs around him and across Normandy were the instruments to rid the world of Hitler and the Nazis. No man could accept this mission and ask for his life, too. There would be no miracles of punishment, no plagues or crashing Red Sea. Here there were only men and guns: courage, sacrifice, and numbers would decide. Ben lay among the dogfaces to steady them, not to save them.

  ~ * ~

  ‘You alright?’ Ben asked the soldier. ‘Can you make it back?’

  The private tapped his helmet beside his good eye. The other was swollen shut behind caked blood where shrapnel had cut his socket.

  ‘I can see where I’m goin’.’

  Ben laid a hand behind the GI’s neck. ‘God bless you, son. Go on.’

  The boy turned away, one hand extended. He wandered into the murk of night under the trees and was gone. He had almost a half mile to go north through the field and hedges to reach the collecting station. Ambulances could not come this close to the MLR. Those wounded who could walk were told to do so. The rest waited for litter bearers.

  Ben did not watch the soldier disappear. He knelt beside the final stretcher. Automatically, his hand stroked the brow of the soldier lying there. He offered his canteen and noted it was almost empty. This boy had caught a shard in his calf. He was not in danger of bleeding out or losing the leg, so the medics triaged him to the end of the line of twenty wounded. The soldier didn’t mind going last.

  ‘Well, I’m outa here,’ he said under Ben’s hand. The final light from the tail-end of dusk trickled into the forest. The soldier’s face was a mix of pain and grin. ‘I got me the million-dollar wound.’

  ‘Looks like you did.’

  The soldier drank the last of Ben’s water.

  ‘I ain’t ashamed, Chaplain. I did my job, I put my butt on the line. I just got lucky.’

  Ben made no reply. He would not discuss this soldier’s pride in his luck. What if we all rode away and left the Germans on that hill, or the Japanese on their islands? Would that be luck, too? Victory was not close. There was a lot of fighting left everywhere. Ben could not congratulate this soldier for escaping with his honor intact and leaving the work undone. In this world, there were far greater issues than a man.

  The last stretcher bearers came out of the gloom, hoisted the boy, and were gone. Ben stood, listening to the chinking sound of GIs digging foxholes for the night. The other two battalions of the 359th had taken positions on his battalion’s right and left. Once the German cannons quit at nightfall, the doughs had all hustled forward to the base of the hill. The Krauts let them come, watching and prepared. Now two thousand riflemen were poised to assault Mont Castre, the anchor of the Mahlman Line, with the rising sun.

  Ben needed water in his canteen. He wanted to wash out his distaste for the soldier’s glee at going to the rear with a nick in his leg. The noises of shovels and hissed orders told him how close the line was to the Germans. The enemy hovered over their heads on the dark wooded crest. They loomed over tomorrow, filling every man’s fate.

  Ben turned to another chore. The row of dead. This dozen would not be evacuated but buried where they lay, in shallow holes marked on a map. Others would be put here beside them before Mont Castre fell. Then they would be upturned and taken north for better treatment. For tonight they were to be laid in the ground, out of sight where the harm they suffered would not be on display. It was the policy of the U.S. Army that a soldier may contemplate his death but he should not see it.

  Ben did not determine causes, he did not probe wounds and conjure grim last moments for each body. He did not look in faces and imagine more than what lay before him. Ben was the reaper not for these boys but for their families. His duties were to collect identities and mementos, make certain nothing went with them into the earth that loved ones might cherish later. He delved into each boy’s pockets, he harvested dog tags, letters, photos, necklaces, then put them in envelopes. He labeled each with the name on the tags. When Graves Registration came for the bodies he would turn over the envelopes. A few days would go by until Ben received a list of matching addresses of the KIAs from this battle. Then he would write each family and hate how little he knew of each boy, how little he could change each letter from the one before it. The dead were the same, that was why we cling to living. In his hands were the tags of Catholics and Protestants, a Jew, a Mormon, a Hispanic, two officers, a sergeant, the bodies were yellow teeth and fillings, bearded cheeks, mussed hair, each had his own wound and last expression, they were different and Ben despised that they were not. He knew this change from before, from the old time in France, when death became something to note more than fear.

  Dropping the envelopes in the dirt, Ben sat beside the line of corpses, until the light withdrew from them and their deaths went dark.

  ~ * ~

  The M
arquis tipped a bucket of well water over Joe Amos’s head. Joe Amos flapped in the cold cascade, swiping sweat and grass shavings off his chest and arms, out of his hair. Then the Marquis poured another. McGee came for his shower. The boy stood like black stone under the chill, his muscles glistened. The Marquis soaked him with three buckets.

  Dark stopped them from mowing, clipping, and raking. Joe Amos thought it best to skip the mutton dinner and get back to the bivouac. The Marquis complained, pointing to his house and the flicker of kerosene light in the kitchen. Wood smoke coiled from the chimney and Joe Amos caught the smell of meat.

  ‘Sarge,’ McGee implored. ‘We either caught by now or we ain’t. May as well eat good.’

  ‘And drink,’ added the Marquis.

  Joe Amos cast his thoughts to the bivouac. The mess tents were full now at dusk, hundreds of trucks passed bread-and-butter on and off the road, a thousand full cots, ten thousand cups of coffee, and in all that chaos he and McGee would not be missed. Every driver and mechanic had been worked to a frazzle; anyone noticing their absence must figure the two of them had slinked off somewhere to sleep every minute they had left. Joe Amos nodded. He walked, dripping, across the mown lawn behind the Marquis, who waved another empty wine bottle.