Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  would chisel some bread from a baker—we lacked the necessary bread coupons, and the bakers drove hard bargains, trading bread for cigarettes or soap—get a little drunk, and gloomily trudge back to the woods.

  Life in our pine woods camp was like life in a hobo jungle. It was a marking-time period, lax and empty, held together loosely by a few organizational activities: calisthenics in the morning, rare mail calls, formations for meals three times daily, and the so-called orientation periods, badly run and ineptly taught but our only source of news. All of us soon reached the point where we’d have preferred combat to this slow death of monotony. There were a few small luxuries that helped, helped out of all proportion to their actual worth. And there was gaiety at times, and high spirits and horseplay.

  From a letter written in the Bastogne woods on November 9, 1944, which illustrates the morale value of quite small comforts as well as the kind of hilarity that sometimes infected us:

  Something new has been added: the kitchen now serves hot coffee every evening at 7:30 to anyone interested in going after it. It’s a kindly gesture and there are only two things wrong with it: one, drinking coffee at that hour and then hitting the sack for eleven hours means that you have to get up at least once during the night to relieve yourself. Two, the kitchen is a helluva long way from our company area, and the only two routes are a bad proposition at night. Route 1 is the road, ankle deep in slimy, treacherous mud. Route 2 is a path through the woods, where the hazards are the stumps and the trees, the slit trenches and the straddle trenches. Neither Walt nor I have a flashlight, of course. (Walt Dunn is my current tentmate.)

  Last night Walt and I went down for the coffee and the evening turned into something crazy and hilarious. The captain and two lieutenants were there for coffee, too, and when they started for home, we decided to tag along because they had a light. They elected to travel by the woods route, and we plunged along gallantly in their rear. But there’s a funny thing about traveling single file at night when the only light is in the hands of the leading man. The head of the line begins to pull away from the rear elements, forgetting that the men in the rear are compelled to move more slowly. (This is especially true, of course, when the head of the line is an officer and the rear is a buck private.)

  That’s the way it was last night. The captain, closely followed by the other two officers, moved quickly through the woods, which were draped with wet, clinging snow, the kind of snow that slumps from the trees in heavy clots whenever someone passes below. I’ve made a careful study of that phenomenon and I’m convinced that a tree can hold an immeasurable quantity of snow without complaint: the moment of discharge is coincidental with the appearance of a human.

  I am always at a disadvantage in night movements. Anyone who wears glasses has special hazards. Trees appear where there were none a moment ago, branches claw in vicious ill-humor, the man ahead of you inevitably stops without warning and his rifle or bazooka hits you between the eyes. When I walk at night, I have learned to sling my rifle and travel with my arms curved before my head like the bumper on a car. I can’t see where I’m going, of course, but I don’t break my glasses getting there.

  The officers and their light quickly outdistanced us and we were alone in the woods, and lost. Then it started.

  walt: Where are you, Ray?

  me: Here!

  walt: Where’s that?

  me: Over—ugh! That goddamn tree! Here!

  walt: Oh...

  me: Where are you?

  walt: Right over—owww!—here! On the right!

  me: Well, which way is that? If we don’t happen to be going in the same direction (and I don’t think we are), your right may be Germany and mine may be France.

  walt: Well, I’m right here. Follow my voice.

  me: Okay. Keep talking and I’ll get to you.

  walt: Mary had a little lamb Her fleece was white as snow,

  And everywhere that Mary went—

  me: (This is real anguish) Owooooooo! How the hell did

  you get through this tree to get where you are?

  walt: (Icily) I didn’t go through it. I went around it.

  me: Well, why the hell didn’tcha say so? Okay, here I

  am. Let’s go.

  walt: Which way?

  me: Let’s try this way. It looks different.

  Four wet feet later, we figure we must be nearly home. By this time we have been walking long enough to be near the Siegfried line.

  me: We’re nearly there now. I can see the clearing—I think!

  walt: Yeah. Hey, where are the latrines? The straddle trenches?

  me: Jeez, I forgot all about ’em! But they’re right along

  in here somewhere. We’d better go slower.

  walt: No, wait a minute! (A pause. Then confidently): I

  know where we are now.

  me: (Suspiciously) Ya sure?

  walt: Sure I’m sure! We’re nowhere near the latrines: they’re way on the other side. This is all clear sailing —ugh!

  me: (Innocently) What’s the matter, Walt? walt: (In anguished tones) I stepped in one!

  BLACKOUT

  A floundering quarter hour later we finally arrived at our own tent. No sooner had we dropped our rifles and belts inside than we realized, almost simultaneously, that we had to go back to the straddle trenches on pressing business. (I ought to explain that Belgian pine forests, being a money crop, are planted in precise, equidistant rows. We have been digging our straddle trenches between the rows, moving farther and farther into the woods as a trench is filled and closed up and a new one dug. To be prepared for nighttime emergencies, I keep a mental count of how many rows of trees from the clearing the current latrines are located.)

  I said to Walt, “They’re easy to find—just ten rows in from the clearing. Follow me!” Fifteen minutes later we found them and stood teetering on the brink of a straddle trench, wondering why in hell we had gone through all this just to take a leak.

  Returning to our tent, we climbed in and began the nightly contortions necessary when two men try to undress in a space designed for a single undernourished midget (a maneuver that was doubly complicated last night because the tent was wet and to touch it meant a leak at that spot all through the night). At last we were between the blankets, our feet slowly getting warm, and our numbed hands just strong enough to hold a cigarette.

  We talked for a while, began to get sleepy, and were engaging in amiable argument over whose turn it was to warm whose back when I became aware that the 7:30 coffee was exerting uncomfortable pressure and I’d better get up. I told myself sternly that I didn’t really have to go, but all the time I knew I would and I groaned inwardly at the prospect of crawling from the warm blankets, slipping wet, icy shoes on my feet, unbuttoning the frozen tent flap and going out to face the cold wind we could hear in the treetops. When Walt saw me getting up, he laughed heartlessly and curled deeper in the blankets, making rude and vulgar comment on the riotousness of a past which had so devastated my kidneys. Just as I was struggling into my second shoe he sat up and said in deep disgust, “Damn it, I think I’ve got to go, too!” This last felicitous circumstance convulsed us, and we burst into howling laughter, pummeling each other and careless of the sides of the tent. Let the bitchin’ thing drip, what the hell do we care?

  You can see from this that our life here is not always keyed to the darker pages of Chekhov or Turgenev. Today, in the middle of a training march through the rain and mud, a cold wind cutting the flesh from our bones like ribbons, I thought: “It’s my birthday, I haven’t seen Ree or the kids in months, I haven’t had a word from home in forty-nine days, I’m cold, I’m wet and hungry, I don’t think I’ll get any mail today, I don’t like the army and I’m not very fond of Belgium! And yet, dammit, I’m not as miserable as I ought to be with such a burden of woes!” And I wasn’t I have been thinking: when I get home, people will ask me, “What was it like?” [Note: They didn’t. Damn few people at home were interested in the
war once the war was over.] And I’ll have to say, “It was muddy. It was cold and it was muddy. It was wet and it was cold and it was muddy. It was altogether unpleasant and it was cold and wet and it was muddy. It was not a good time.” And then I’ll hesitate and look for the words that will tell them what it was really like, and finally I’ll turn in despair to anecdotes. Because I can’t find the words to tell even you what the unceasing cold is like, or what the special quality of the mud is and how it is forever and everywhere, or how it is to be always so numbed by the wet coldness that your body feels like someone else’s, or what the combination of everything adds up to. It’s a fourth dimension of sorts, beyond the definitive terms of shape, proportion, color, taste, smell, or touch. You’ll come closest to understanding, I know. As for the others... well, there are anecdotes.

  There was a challenge in the physical discomfort, which most men answered, and they were cheered and strengthened by the proof of their ability to answer. A few men didn’t—a few cowered and whimpered ceaselessly and never squared up to this adversary. Everyone bitched, of course, but the bitching was automatic, and for most of the men there was an obscure zest in this life some of the time. It was a male world and far from the upholstery that padded what we had known as normal life. Once my face got dirty and I found it wasn’t so bad, I was pretty proud of the men around me. Even a little proud of myself.

  One demonstration of spirit that heartened me every time I saw it was the little Christmas tree that a couple men had erected in front of their tent. The decorations included a long strip of white tape, bits of tinfoil from gum and candy, a comb with most of the teeth missing, a clip of German ammunition, an empty Bull Durham sack, a few sprays of holly, the tops of several C-ration cans with the long, silvery “curl” still attached where it had been peeled off the can, the red cellophane tapes from packs of cigarettes, and a few scraps of Christmas wrapping paper and ribbon. (Some of the men had already received Christmas boxes.) It was a gay and brave sight in our mudhole.

  So the long days passed and turned to weary weeks, and we began to wonder what the hell was the rush in getting us over here if they weren’t going to use us? The sense of homelessness that afflicts replacements, casuals, is very acute. Unattached and belonging to no outfit, you are lost and forlorn. And it’s an unhappy life from the practical point of view, too, because there are no ratings for a replacement. You are an “acting” sergeant or “acting” corporal—we called such gratuitous ratings “acting gadgets.” But you remain what you were when you became a replacement, whether it be buck private, master sergeant, or buck private doing the work of a master sergeant. All through my brief career in the army I had been an “acting gadget,” and I was getting a little browned off at the extra responsibilities that carried no extra pay or privileges. Lacking a rating, a man could be an “acting” platoon guide (as I was) and be responsible for running a guard shift (as I was), and two days later, in his real capacity of buck private, be assigned to K.P. or latrine-digging detail.

  But the days went by, and we assembled daily for the orientation talks mid the news, sparse as it was, and we laid wild and hopeful bets on the end of the war. I remember betting one guy everything I had in my pocket—it happened to be the staggering sum of eighteen Belgian francs, but he didn’t know that—that the war in Europe would be over by Christmas, 1944. I never paid the bet: we were assigned to different outfits and I learned much later that he was killed the following February.

  Even our officers were optimistic and assured us that our chances of seeing combat were slim. One officer volunteered to bet six months’ pay on that. And so we wagered and planned and dreamed of Christmas at home, until November 18.

  Up to this point I have used only my letters for reference. From here the source will be twofold: letters, and the rough notes I started to write on November 22 and continued through May 13,1945.1 repeat the admonition I offered earlier don’t look too closely for historical or geographical accuracy. I know damn well that some of my facts are dubious. But, I submit, if I have not checked and verified those physical details, it’s because they are unimportant to the purpose of this report It may be a slipshod way of writing, but my aim is not the recording of facts. The official publications of tire War Department will give you those. I’m trying to capture a sense of some of the things less easily pinned down and tested by tire rules of science. If you’re a perfectionist if you haggle over strict accuracy, I suggest you regard this journal as fiction. You will then be able to swallow what passes for fact without flinching.

  When I started these rough notes I was impelled by panic. My uncomfortable but safe little world in the Bastogne woods had been kicked out from under me and I was plunged into the immediacy of war overnight. It did no good to tell myself that this, after all, was what I’d been trained for, what I was here for. My reason had accepted that eventual destination from the day I was inducted. But emotionally I was still unprepared. I lived in a “but it can’t happen to me” state that had been vastly encouraged by the false security created by our weeks of inaction. All at once it was swept away: our sedate and uneventful existence, our reasonably adequate shelter, our fantastically hopeful bull sessions around the campfire. I seized the first opportunity after we reached the front to write it down—the turmoil, the speed, our fear and confusion—and thus purge myself of a part of my panic. All I can tell you is that it worked. I used the device from then on, partly to maintain my grip on fear that might otherwise run away, partly because the desire grew to tell Ree, and my children Geoff and Sukey, about it someday, and I knew I could not trust memory alone.

  The opening paragraphs of my rough notes were flamboyant with melodrama, ominous with a sense of the untimely death I was certain would soon cut me down. Pruned of the purple verbiage, I said that I was writing down all the things I could not say in letters, that I hoped to deliver these notes in person, and in the event of my death, would the censors please permit Ree to have them? I’ll pick it up from there.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “A helluva lot of firsts.”

  November 21, 1944. Germany.

  Four days ago we lay in our dugouts near Bastogne and tossed an enchanted phrase back and forth like a shuttlecock. “Moving to winter quarters!” The captain had announced that soon we’d be quitting the woods and moving to a village, possibly into buildings. We’d have stoves, even! Maybe cots! At the very worst, we could count on pyramidal tents, stove-heated. Oh joy! Oh happy November 17!

  On the morning of November 18 we were alerted, not for a move to a village, but for immediate duty on the front. We were numbed by the news, we couldn’t quite believe it. We left the assembly area slowly, soberly, trying to pretend our hearts were not pounding thunderously. We were moving up.

  We spent the day in a rush of silent activity, covering slit trenches and straddle trenches, filling the dugouts we had so laboriously excavated and fined with straw for warmth. We threw away old letters, examined and cleaned our rifles with studious care. When the day passed and the expected order had not yet come, we pitched tents where our dugouts had been and spent a wet, sleepless night, our weapons and ourselves tucked between the blankets against the damp. In the quiet darkness the familiar flashes on the horizon seemed nearer, and our interest in the buzz bombs that rumbled overhead became abruptly personal.

  We pulled out on the following morning, twenty-three men to a truck. It wasn’t a long ride, and by one p.m. we had reached our destination, another pine forest—but this one was in Germany. To our surprise, the setup here was far more luxurious than at the Bastogne camp behind us. Boardwalks and corduroy roads protected our feet against the muck; we were quartered in pyramidal tents, stove-equipped, and the latrines had seats! They were high, wooden thrones, open-frame in construction and thus a little drafty, but you could sit down, that was the thing. The high seat was a little conspicuous—you saw some remarkable silhouettes against the skyline as you came through the woods—but after weeks of tortured cro
uching over a straddle trench, any kind of a seat was luxury, and modesty be damned!

  The food seemed delicious to us: real potatoes, canned vegetables, and we commented with some bitterness on the dehydrated and tasteless sawdust that had been our daily rations in Belgium. After a moment’s sober reflection, we admitted the justice of this difference: it was right that the best food go to the men at the front, even if rear area groups ate less well as a result.

  Blackout was strictly enforced. Setting out for home after an hour in the special services tent, I stepped into blinding darkness and was lost before I’d gone ten paces. After staggering over unfamiliar paths and falling at last into a slit trench filled with water, I called in desperation for a tentmate to be my bellwether and ring me home with his voice.

  In spite of my bed of dry straw and the glowing stove nearby, I didn’t sleep well. None of us did. A ceaseless barrage of neighborhood artillery kept us tense and alert. Once, a passing buzz bomb came so low that its muttering became a roar that shook the sides of the tent like a strong wind. The sound hushed abruptly just after the bomb passed overhead—the sudden silence warned of an impending hit—and we froze in anticipation. The gut-walloping explosion seemed only yards away, but we learned the next morning that the bomb had landed three miles from us.

  Up early on November 20, a slippery march through knee- deep mud, and a truck ride eastward, in the direction of Aachen. We bivouacked in the woods near a village called Walheim. I pitched my tent with a chap named Dempsey who raised dalmatian dogs (Walt and I had already been separated), and we smoked endless cigarettes during the night, listened to the artillery barrage, and tried to estimate how near a certain 105mm gun was. The war seemed very close.

  The next morning, November 21, we were assembled in a little clearing in the woods and our names and assignments were read from a roster by an officer. At last I had a home and a family, Company G, 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division. We were mildly lectured on our good fortune in being assigned to such an outfit, and we were properly impressed; we knew something of the 1st Division record. However, we were more impressed and less happily, by the discovery that the 1st was up front, in the Hurtgen Forest and engaged in what was called the “Big Push.”