Was this what America and the people back home were like? I wondered after reading that newspaper story. Were we expected to toss away our lives so that someone could pay off his mortgage? (I was bitterly aware of the unpaid mortgage on my own home, of the hundred dollars a month that was my wife’s sole income, and of my legal liability to pay up my accrued debts within six months after I should arrive home and be discharged.) Maybe I had no right to feel so violently bitter. I hadn’t risked my life yet, and I was conscious of the mock heroics in my attitude. But the fact remained that my life was on a note-of-demand and I was likely to be called on to pay up. Others had already paid up—so that another mortgage back home could be written off?
Since that time I have had occasion to wonder if someone might not raise the question of the suitability of that kind of news item reaching the men on the fighting front. I know damn well that there must be thousands of people, well-meaning and sincere, who would argue that such unsavory revelations should have been kept from our tender sensibilities: it would be “bad for our morale.” Well, it was bad for our morale. Whose fault was that?
My argument and the argument of every man I talked to was that we had a right to know about things like that if they were happening back home. No one had a better right; not a soul back in that fat country of ours had a better right to know that there were some who were gaining weight on a diet of blood. Maybe our knowing was a knowledge that would pay off ill in the end; maybe it is partially responsible for the inevitable postwar bitterness that many veterans carry like a live grenade in their pockets. (What the hell am I talking about—“maybe it’s responsible”!) But I never heard of a soldier who deserted or refused to fight because of it, I never encountered any men who refused to risk their own lives for the preservation of civilians who were busy paying off mortgages. Whatever bad effect it had on our morale, it wasn’t our fighting morale that was affected: the disfiguring results are being displayed now in the peace world, the postwar world that has no homes for us, no patience with our pleas for tolerance and understanding, no charity in its tawdry schemes to chisel us for clothing, food, jobs, cars, and homes.
I sound more bitter, more maladjusted than I am. My own personal complaints are small: I have a job that is stimulating and good, and I came home to a home. I was lucky. But I know many veterans who have neither home nor job, who are hurt and bewildered and will eventually be angry because the world hurries coldly by and offers them not even the crust of understanding. How come?
What I want most to know is this: How many mortgages were paid off? How many people should have been hit in the face with lemon meringue pies? I cannot and will not believe there were many. But sometimes I wonder... every now and then I wonder.
As for the news item, I firmly defend our right to read it, whether we happened to be overseas or not. In spite of the daily bitching about “4F bastards” and “draft dodgers” and the story about the jerk with the wealthy old man (always with a wealthy old man) who hastily found an “essential” job in a war plant when the draft breathed down his neck—despite the savagery of our griping, we never really decried the importance of the stateside jobs. We had a grudging respect for the factory worker, the shipyard worker, and the farmer; we felt a kind of pity for the white collar worker even though we admitted that somebody had to do it. But we knew the value of what we were doing, too, and we thought the term “heroism” rather ill-used when applied to home-front labors. I think our balance was healthy, in general. And we hated the guts of the mortgage payers and thought the woman who threw the pie ought to get the Bronze Star, and we bitched a little and felt a little sick at heart. And went out and took the next town on schedule.
Sunday, December 3.
The Red Cross Clubmobile is due here this afternoon and we are excited at the prospect of seeing some women, American women. The coffee-and is incidental; the girls are the big attraction. [The Clubmobile, for unexplained reasons, failed to show up.]
We were told that the woods between us and the plains of Cologne had been taken. The armored moved up toward the front several days ago, and yesterday the artillery moved up and began shelling the small towns that still blocked the path to Cologne. Once those towns were softened up, we’d move forward.
For lack of anything more interesting, I went to church today. Protestant services, held in the open air and about thirty feet from the two dead Germans who have not yet been buried. I went because I felt like singing. Unfortunately, I’d just finished rereading Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” and with that stern negation of morality still chilling my blood, the mewling of “Safe in the Arms of Jesus” was an intolerable mawkishness. I watched the faces of the thirty-odd men who made up the congregation, looked for the visitation of peace on the tired, strained faces. It didn’t come.
After the service I roughed out a short story. It wasn’t good and it will never be finished, but I quote it here because it’s the easiest way to describe what happened.
They straggled from the dead factory. Some of them opened mined doors and stepped out gravely and with dignity, as though from their own homes; many walked casually through the raw shell holes in the sides of the building. Picking their way over rough heaps of brick and mortar, balancing across crazily tilted steel girders, they came in their several manners—diffident, earnest, half ashamed. They formed a ragged half circle where the little chaplain waited. A late straggler stepped swiftly across the courtyard, his movements curiously blurred, as though lacking the last fine edge of coordination. In the shadow of the tilted helmet, his eyes were very tired.
When they had come to where the chaplain stood, they kicked aside the broken tiles, the discarded clothing, the German burp gun, and the shrapnel-torn lengths of gutter pipe. Forming a meek line (this was army training and instinctive and no command was necessary), they accepted the thin red hymnals with the docility of well-trained dogs accepting the largesse of biscuits. Then they squatted soberly, sitting on their upturned steel helmets, and waited for the grace of God. No one looked at the two dead Germans who sprawled in the shadow of the building, their faces covered with the skirts of their own overcoats, their muddy feet turned out and strangely flat against the ground.
He wasn’t really a little chaplain. Actually, he was a big man with broad cheekbones, a wide mouth, and the singularly sweet and vacant smile of a Swede. His uniform was well-fitting, but again, it didn’t seem to fit at all; somehow it gave the impression of hanging on him uncertainly. The man who had been late in arriving sat well to the back of the ragged semicircle and looked curiously at the chaplain. I bet... he thought. I bet...
The chaplain’s voice was high and uncertain, his manner tentative. Everything about him was faltering, and the man thought, He’s been overseas too long. He’s had it! In this place and before us, with those two dead Jerries lying over there... it’s no dice... no dice.
They sang first, the chaplain setting the pitch and starting them off because there was no field organ. “Sweet Is the Hour of Prayer,” all three verses and pitched too high, the male voices straining to reach the high notes and cracking. After a moment the man on the outer edge of the circle started singing. There was a perverse satisfaction in bellowing the banal and uninspired harmony as loudly as possible and he sang it strongly. But why was the harmony part always a monotonous third below the melody in these dreary hymns?
Responsive reading followed, and the bleating voice drained all the magnificence from the words, changing the sonorous phrases into something arid and barren. The men chanted the responses vigorously, rolling the language on their tongues, feeling the beat of it like a jazz rhythm. Startlingly, between the phrases of their full chorus rose the thin voice of the chaplain, clutching at protest and fighting for command.
Another song, “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Even the most devout in that unshaven group were pricked by the incongruity, the familiar words suddenly as bitter as aloes:
Onward, Christian soldiers,
; Onward as to war!
With the cross of Jesus
Going on before...
There were embarrassed smiles, furtive glances in the direction of the two dead Germans, the belts around the dead waists that were fastened by huge buckles. The dull sunlight caught the buckles, and those sitting nearest could see the uncompromising boast of shining letters, set in bold relief against a background of dull metal, gott mix uns!
They swung into the next verse:
Brothers, we are treading
Where the saints have trod;
We are not divided,
All one body we,
One in hope, in doctrine,
One in charity...
The chaplain felt the rising amusement, and his eyes flickered timidly over the lustily singing men. As they reached the end of the chorus, he held up his hand for silence. He did not explain why only three verses had been sung instead of the four originally announced.
The sermon followed, mercifully brief because legs were going to sleep from the sharp pressure of helmet edges against thighs and buttocks. He faced the restless men defiantly and read the text in a high, nervous voice. It was from the 46th Psalm: “Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desolations he hath made in the earth. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.”
He was soon lost. The men closed themselves against the turgid rhetoric and withdrew, and sensing their retreat, he pursued them in wild metaphysical leaps, fumbled despairingly for words. “The trembling of the mountains and the desolations in the earth stand for the turmoil in the world today, and that turmoil is because man has broken God’s laws. God created the turmoil because we broke His laws, and God will put an end to it and will stop all wars when men in their innermost consciousness receive God into their souls!”
The circle drew tighter together, and now the chaplain was a long ways away from them, a tiny leaping figure on a far distant stage. Poor guy, they thought. He’s had it! They felt an embarrassed pity because they were strong, and out of pity they endured the empty divinity school phrases the defeated man was reciting in a last spurt of despair.
At last it was over. They repeated a prayer, sang “Jesus Is Calling Me,” and rose to receive the benediction, furtively pulling at their crotches to loosen tight underwear. They returned the little red hymnals, and after a momentary hesitation drifted off, disappearing into the shadows of the factory as they sought their beds. For a moment the chaplain looked after them and his face was tired. It seemed to be coming apart, like something that had been mended with poor glue. Wearily, he packed the hymnals in a small trunk, climbed into the jeep with the large white cross painted on the hood and sweet chariot painted gaily on the windshield, and gave the driver an order in a low voice. They bounced away, and only the straggler watched them go. Then he turned to hunt his own bed, and as he fumbled with the blankets on the dirty straw he was dimly aware that something significant had just happened, a signal had been flashed. There was something in this he meant to think out sometime, but not now. He fell asleep quickly and did not dream.
That’s it. It’s no story, but it is reasonably accurate in its measure of the church’s failure to provide real consolation or encouragement to men at war.
Perhaps I’m too hasty. I think there must have been many
men who found a measure of comfort in what the chaplains gave them; I think there must have been some perceptive and intelligent chaplains. I know there were some gallant ones, and gallantry helped, but it wasn’t enough. Let it go at this: I found a momentary peace in the ministrations of the Church only twice during the war, and though I am not a Catholic, they were Catholic services that gave me a measure of serenity. The first time it was a GI service; the second occasion was after the war, and I walked into a cathedral and found myself in the middle of a civilian service and could not understand a word that was said.
Most of the chaplains I met had slipped into one or the other of a pair of pitfalls, the first of which was an attempt to reconcile the naked contradiction between the theory of Christ and the fact of war. Their earnest and stubborn strategy was frequently the old line “God’s on our side because we’re the right side and so anything you do to help the right side win is okay, even if you violate the teachings of Christ.” Devious, and hardly convincing. Sometimes they attempted an elephantine maneuver, top-heavy with rhetoric and symbolism, to prove that it was the sickness of our own souls that had created the present chaos and we must “face the Light of Truth in ourselves first” and so forth and so forth. This was weary and indigestible fare for men who were sick of the whole damn mess and hated the things they had to do, and whose thoughts were fixed on symbols less airy—a woman’s arms, and small faces peeping through a white picket fence.
The second pitfall, encountered through well-meant blundering, was “being one of the boys,” and working too hard at it. The rough camaraderie of male companionship, bawdy, lusty, and vigorous, is denied them. And their endeavors to break down the walls that set them apart from other men are always fumbling, gauche, and pathetic. I think it’s swell for a minister to unbend sufficiently to take a drink with the boys. But his presence inevitably sets the tone of the conversation, and if he is wise, he will not stay long. He will be more highly regarded if he has his drink, tells his quiet joke, and departs. He goes down in the esteem of other men when he attempts to level the walls entirely and tells progressively off-color stories, relating (even though as case histories) some of the startling sexual aberrations he has encountered in his official capacity. The circumstance of war makes a difference, too: an off-color story that would provide a wicked relish if related by a minister in civilian life comes as an additional shock when everything around you is mean and ugly and twisted, and only the word of God and its chosen vessels retain even the dim hope of serenity.
December 4.
Two German planes came over and strafed us today. No one was hit, and our ack-ack batteries in the field knocked down one of the attackers. It plunged to the ground about two miles away, trailing behind it a comet path of flames and dark smoke. We watched silently and did not rejoice until it had slipped behind an intervening hill and we could no longer see it.
The doughnut wagon did not come, and there was no mail today.
December 6.
We left our comfortable cement factory on December 5. Every place we leave always seems, in retrospect, to have been a veritable boudoir of luxury, even though we bitched about its discomforts and inconveniences all the time we’d been there. It always seems to be a steady progression from worse to worse.
In open trucks we rode for three hours in circles—at least we got back into Belgium somehow and passed through Eupen—and ended up in Germany once more, on the fringe of the Hurtgen Forest. This is the front, and we’re on it The German lines are on the edge of the woods two miles from us. The 12th SS is in position there, we are told. It’s to be a waiting game we play here: we’re holding against the danger of counterattack, and they’re poised for further attacks from us. We may be here two weeks or a month.
It’s a quiet sector. Only an occasional plane, and the artillery fire is sporadic on both sides. It makes for a strange day. Hours and hours of quiet are broken only by the moaning of the wind and the sound of the church clock in the little village behind us, telling the hours in a hoarsely sweet voice. At intervals one of our big guns snarls a few rounds over our heads, and we see them burst in the woods in vivid exclamations of orange fire. Then the German guns answer. Yesterday my squad was in the stable of a German farmhouse, getting warm before going out for our stint on the line, when several German 88s opened up and lobbed a few dozen shells over. Some of them landed close enough to scar the walls of the building across the road with shrapnel. We played a form of Russian roulette during the shelling: one of the windows in the stable, lacking glass, was covered with a square of cardboard. The concussion of every ne
arby shell sucked the cardboard from the window, and then one of us dashed into the road to pick it up and replace it in the window before the next shell came in.
We live in the mud. When we arrived here, it was mid- afternoon. We waited in the muddy road until dark, hugging the hedgerows and trying to be inconspicuous. We were relieving another company, and strategy demands that shifts in the disposition of units be performed as secretly as possible.
Just got word that one of the men with whom I bivouacked in the Bastogne woods was killed this week. He was assigned to an outfit at the same time the rest of us were, less than a month ago. Poor Gilman... three weeks...
At dark we moved into our positions, a line of dugouts that hugged a hedgerow along the edge of a field. The field was a pond of mud, with here and there a drowned clump of harsh grass forlornly protesting emptiness. The dugout in which Shorty Fennell and I lived was a good one, as dugouts went. There was straw on the bottom—wet, of course—and a wood roof that didn’t leak in more than a dozen places. No central heating.
Shorty’s nickname is well arrived at—he’s hardly more than five feet tall. His mother is Polish, his father Irish, and when his parents separated, Shorty and his brothers and sisters were reared in an orphanage. I love the guy and trust him even with the secret of my private fears.
I’m a little humble to realize what a long way I’ve come, what a long way I had to come since April 4, 1944, the day I was inducted. I discovered early in my army life that a Phi Beta key had never taught me how to mix unobtrusively, without protest and condescension, in the all-male melting pot that was the army. I didn’t know how to talk to men who couldn’t speak my special language, and I couldn’t speak theirs. I didn’t know where to look for a common meeting ground with them. Inwardly, of course, I was very superior about it all, and I bedded down with annoyed smugness each Sunday afternoon when the first strains of the symphony on the barracks radio brought a howl of protest from all sides: “Fer Chrissake, get somethin’ decent, will ya?”
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