Wiggy: No one can spell or pronounce his real name. Hungarian mother and a German father who died when Wiggy was a baby. He’s nineteen now and fuzzy-faced. His accent is an unbelievable and hilarious blend of heavy Slavic, Harvard Yard, and slum. His favorite sayings: “Dere’s jist me ma an’ me, dat’s all!... Chee, I miss me ma!... Me ma is da swellest cook... Four letters, dat’s all I had from me ma in four munts!” Poor kid... his ma speaks English very badly and writes it not at all. Her infrequent letters to Wiggy are written by a neighbor at her dictation.
Wiggy sings himself to sleep every night. I like the kid, but his singing is execrable! Not only does he sing out of key and out of rhythm, but he has the maddening and unmusical habit of never finishing a song, never making the full circle of the cadence, never arriving at the final resolution. He will repeat a phrase over and over again, and each time he approaches the middle of the chorus, I make the mental prayer, “For God’s sake, go on, go on! Finish it!” But he never does—he just starts from the beginning again.
That particular failing of the unmusical drives me to the point where I want to beat my head against the wall and howl! I remember a wistful harmonica player on the bleak train ride from Fort Dix to Camp Wheeler who made one night a screaming hell for me by playing, over and over and over, the first sixteen bars of “Over There.” He never finished the song, never played the complete chorus all night long, but he played the unresolved half chords until I shuddered like a frayed violin string.
Wiggy’s choice of music is oddly touching. His favorite songs are “K-K-K-Katy,” the “Notre Dame Victory March,” and—Christmas carols! When we stayed in the cement factory near Eschweiler, he slept next to me on the floor, and every night when the room was quiet, soft over the heavy breathing of the sleeping men I’d hear Wiggy singing... a faint murmur of sound, barely recognizable as a song. Straining my ears, I’d hear, “Noel, Noel... Noel, Noel... Born is duh ki-i-ing of I-I-Israel.”
That day, Wiggy went to the hospital. Trench foot. [Note: I never saw him again. He had it bad, and after a long hospitalization, was transferred to another outfit. I wonder if he got back to his “ma.”]
Dillon: Irish, black Irish out of Chicago. A friend of Shorty’s. Bill’s a little moody at times, a little unpredictable, but a helluva good Joe. Married, but no children. He has a beautiful, rich voice and he loves to sing. He knows hundreds of old songs, including many I have never heard, and he will sing for hours with little urging, or, lacking an audience, will sit quietly in a corner, singing to himself. One night in the cement factory the talk died away as the men settled down for the night, and those who continued to talk dropped their voices to a murmur. The night was quiet, the sound of guns only a distant mutter, and homesickness hung in the room like a heavy mist. Bill had been singing quietly in the corner all night, and one by one the talkers hushed to listen. Old songs, songs that everyone knew, the songs that people sing when everything’s right and the world is good. He finished “Love’s Old Sweet Song.” There was a moment’s hush, and then he started “Home on the Range,” so low, so soft, you could hardly hear him, the big voice like a muted cello.
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play;
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word,
And the skies—
The song was never finished. A lonely Texan raised his head from the blankets and said savagely, his voice shaking, “For Chrissake, shut up, will ya! The room was quiet after that. But I woke during the night and heard a man crying.
Dillon went to the hospital that day, too. The medic didn’t know what was wrong with him, but it was bad. [Note: Bill was very ill. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but I believe it was jaundice. At any rate, he was shipped to England and spent the duration of the war in the hospital there, rejoining the company in Bamberg some weeks after the war ended.]
December 13. Minerie, Belgium.
Following the customary hours of waiting, the familiar hike through mud and snow, the usual frigid ride in an open truck, we were neatly tucked away in this little mining town, not far from Venders. As per promise, we were billeted in houses. There are nine of us in this house—which has been labeled “Number 152” by the army—and all of us are wedged into a single, small bedroom. Never mind, we’re in a house! With a stove, even. And cots to sleep on, nine cots so tightly jammed together that a sneeze from the man in number one will shake the bed of number nine. Still, it seems like luxury to us.
We’ll be here for an indefinite period, we were told, anywhere from two weeks to a month. At any rate, we’re assured of spending Christmas here. We’re under no illusions, having been informed with brutal directness that we are resting before going into something rugged. But the important thing is, we’re here, and miraculously free—we don’t even have to carry arms when we go out! Blackout regulations have been relaxed and we smoke on the streets after dark without challenge. There will be overnight and weekend passes to Verviers, Liege, and Paris, baths, movies, clean clothes, USO shows, light duties ... ah, don’t wake me up! To cap it all, I already found three pianos in passable condition and have been joyously pounding all afternoon in happy disregard of the pain of my frostbitten fingers.
I write this while sitting only a foot away from the cherry- hot stove in our room. The heat is making me very sleepy, but there are a few things I must record for you before I forget them entirely. Most of them are quite small, hardly worth relating. (Yet, do you remember? “Words must have been made by man for telling about quite small delights only.” Very well, these are small delights.)
The army would be a treasure trove for the scholar interested in speech differences, for the poet who seeks the flavor of rare and authentic idiom. I have been listening carefully to the speech of a Texan and a southerner, pondering a judgment, and decided that I prefer the Texan. It is simple speech, so honest and unswerving that the softer syllables of the South proper are mincing in comparison.
My nomination for “Worst Citizen-Soldier of the Year” is a guy named B. He has the sharp features of a weasel and something of the weasel’s shrewdness, but no real intelligence. He talks ceaselessly, but without purpose, relevancy, or coherence. His nose drips. Thirty-three years old and convinced that his advanced age should excuse him from the rigors of army life, he mutters darkly about the draft board that “railroaded me because the chairman of the board had a nephew who wanted my job.” B. is certain that “an old scar on my lungs” has freshened, and each night predicts, with snivels, that he’ll be coughing blood by morning. He has a standing offer of one thousand dollars—on cold days he raises it to two or three—to anyone who can get him out of the army. He is invariably the source of the latest rumor, and always he has a better ending to the story someone else has just finished telling. He is stuffed to overflowing with misinformation, which he presses shrilly upon anyone unwary enough to be maneuvered into a corner. He bitches without cease but is essentially a rabbit, cringing and backing down without shame when told to “put up or shut up.” He is late for everything, and at the end of every line, then complains bitterly because he is at the end. He is invariably the last man in the outfit to read our rare copies of Stars and Stripes, but when the well-thumbed paper reaches him at last, he immediately reads every item aloud in the “Hey fellas listen to this” manner of one revealing information new and startling. All the bets are that he will prove completely craven when we go back up, but there’s a growing belief that he’ll get a bullet hole in the back of his head before we go back up.
I started to tell you about the women in the German household we just left. They were gracious in manner and never once hinted that we were unwelcome guests in their home. They were gentle and sad and kind. The small baby, incidentally, was named Sylvia, a curiously English name to be attached to so unmistakably German a baby. Sylvia’s mother did all the heavy chores on the farm, and was silent and unsmiling at all times. She hadn’t had word of her husb
and in five months and did not know whether he was a prisoner or dead.
One night I talked at length with the old ladies and was startled and amused by the naivete of their questions about America. We are still the land of golden mystery, heavy with rich promise, to the average European, it seems. It is assumed that Americans are spared even the minor unpleasantness of bad weather, and the old ladies were dumbfounded to learn that it snows in New York State. They had believed that oranges and lemons grew in profusion throughout America, and snow was found only in Canada.
I edged them toward comment on Hitler and Goebbels and Germany in the war. I think I believed them when they said the German people never wanted war and wished desperately for it to be over. (When they said “German people,” they meant people like themselves—peasants, small landowners, villagers—not city people. In Germany, as in America, there exists a gap of distrust and suspicion between the people of the land and the people of the city.) And I acknowledged the sincerity of the fear and loathing on their faces when reference was made to the SS and the Gestapo. But when they said, “Hitler! Pfui!" I wasn’t quite convinced. I think the authenticity of Hitler’s godhead is not yet seriously questioned by the average German. I wonder if it will be questioned even when we have won the war and brought him to trial and punishment?
The validity of their contempt was questionable on further grounds: although they appeared to be sincere in their distaste for the end results, the now results that Hitler’s dreams had visited upon them, the intermediate results—the results up till then—must have been highly gratifying to them, and I have no doubt they licked them up like a cat turned loose in a creamery. Having crucified their own Cassandras in the purge of intellectuals, liberals, and dissenters, they were now second guessers themselves—and getting quite good at it. Emotionally, I sympathize with second guessers—are we not all guilty? And these little people are pathetic creatures. They mounted a horse that promised (and proved) he could ran fast, and by the time they realized they had passed their destination and could not now dismount, the horse had become a tiger. With which elaborate metaphor I gracefully withdraw from this discussion.
By peasant standards their home was luxurious. The furnishings were comfortable, and included some very handsome modern furniture. And everything was spotlessly clean. Even the cows’ tails were laundered daily!
By way of contrast, the Belgian home in which we had our quarters afterward was noticeably poorer, though neat and clean. But not quite so clean. It was a very old house, by the way: the date carved in the stone over the door was 1758.
We couldn’t desire more hospitality than greeted us there. The family that occupies the house had moved into one room to make room for us. All of them—the old couple, the son and daughter-in-law, and the three grandchildren! When we arrived in the morning, cold and wet and hungry, the old lady insisted on making a pot of coffee, apologizing meanwhile for its poor quality. It wasn’t very good, but the sensation of being an honored guest was.
One last thing I must report before hitting the sack tonight. While we were up on line, shivering in our mud holes and standing guard in puddles of ice water, word got around that I spoke a little German. One day a runner came in search of me: a certain officer billeted in a farmhouse wanted me to report to him. I trotted up the road on the double, for the moment forgetting my water-soaked shoes, my cold and aching body. My brain whirled with dizzy excitement. What did he want of me? To interrogate prisoners? A soft desk job? Maybe I was going to be a spy! (My blood ran cold, not entirely with the thrill of anticipation.)
I knocked at his door, removed my helmet, scraped five or six pounds of mud from my shoes, and entered on the command. Saluting, I stated my name and reported according to the Book. Stretched in lazy indolence on a couch, his shoes off, he didn’t bother to sit up. A pot of coffee was simmering on the stove, and the pervasive warmth of the room made sweat spring out on my face. Food on the table, soft quilts, pillows, easy chairs, a radio, a couch! Want to know why he sent for me? I was ordered to summon the aged frau who owned this house (and spoke no English) and tell her to provide a better radio and an easy chair with an adjustable back! My small knowledge of German deserted me utterly when I learned how I was expected to use it... and maybe I didn’t try very hard, anyway. I did what I had to do, he dismissed me
impatiently, and I returned to my mud hole, blind for once to the puddles on the road.
Not all officers were like that. And it wasn’t that I blamed him for living comfortably or felt that he ought to be living as we were. It was the cruelty of having my nose rubbed in the evidence of that contrast; it was his careless indifference to our lot; it was his arrogance in summoning me from a mud hole and ordering me to use my knowledge of German for his personal comfort—then sending me back to my dirt without saying, “Thanks, soldier,” or offering me the small grace of a cup of hot coffee.
I hated that officer ever afterward, with a fierce and abiding hatred. Fortunately, he was transferred to another outfit before many weeks passed.
December 15, Minerie.
Ten days to Christmas. That’s how I mark off the days.
We’ve started a training program here. Honest! Close order drill, calisthenics, inspections... war is hell!
The weather remains crisp and clear and the sun is faintly warm all day. Today I saw buttercups in the fields and a rose blooming in a garden. June in December.
Speaking of blossoms, my wildflower soul has been shocked near to swooning by the spectacle of young Belgian children smoking cigarettes. And I mean children, even as young as seven years, and I mean really smoking, not the strutting mischief of an American kid aping his elders. Kids of both sexes stroll the streets, unconcernedly puffing cigarettes and inhaling with Mephistophelian savoir faire. There is something pale and wizened and almost evil about these children... the guttersnipe greed with which they race for the smoking butt just discarded by a passing soldier, the viciousness of their fighting over it, the cocky and snarling triumph of the victor. And it makes me “come queer all over” to see a barefooted, dirty-faced little girl, dressed in a single thin garment and lacking even the hint of a budding breast, yet puffing a cigarette with the hardened, calculating grace of a pool parlor pickup. Incongruity—something much worse than incongruity—meets me on every street corner and jolts me like a slap in the face. And they look so wise, so weary and jaded with the evil knowledge of flesh, that I feel bucktoothed and virginal beside them, a gauche and fumbling beginner in a school whereof they hold master’s degrees.
I wonder what the war news is. We have had no direct news, but an English-speaking resident of the village—a charming Irishwoman who married a Belgian many years ago—told us that the radio reported a big German counterattack and all fronts were static at the moment, holding only.
I learned that the reason we were relieved from our line position in Germany was that three other divisions had pushed up almost as we’d pulled out, and attacked the German positions on the ridge we’d been watching so grimly. I should have guessed: guns and ammunition had been moving up to our sector all the preceding week, and even as we pulled out that dark morning, the “Long Toms” in the field near our kitchen were blazing away in earthquakes of white fire. That must have been the softening up before the push.
Today we saw hundreds of B-26s and P-38s overhead. And for the past several days the Jerries have been sending dozens of buzz bombs through the sky, day long, night long. More than I’ve ever seen before. I’ve seen as many as five in flight at the same time. I wonder what’s brewing? One story going around is that a probing arm of our attacking forces is getting so dangerously close to one of the places from which the buzz bombs are launched that the Germans are using them up as fast as possible to save them from capture. Somehow that story doesn’t ring quite true.
One more thing I forgot to tell you about: the last night I had outpost duty was memorable for one thing. About two o’clock in the morning our ack-ack batteries
fired some practice rounds to clear their guns. The spectacle was so breathtaking that I woke the other men to see it. (Was it Benito Mussolini who chanted so rhapsodically of the “beauties of war”?) It was a soundless display, the guns so far distant and the wind so strong that the report of the shells could not be heard. And it was a display almost theatrically vivid: the night was black and starless and the rounds a brilliant, glowing crimson. In an enchanted silence the shells formed a magical coruscation in midair, floating up and out in long, slow curves of scarlet, a chain of red Christmas-tree lights flung against the black sky. And as each fireball reached the predestined point in its curved flight, it exploded briefly in a small, blinding flash of white fire. The entire scene—although too restrained in decor, perhaps—was suggestive of a backdrop for an Ice Follies, and you half expected a spotlight, a blare of trumpets, and Sonja Henie gliding forth in one of her usual appropriate costumes—a Hawaiian grass skirt or an Indian chiefs war bonnet.
Today we had a dress formation for the purpose of awarding some decorations. The townspeople contributed to the festive air by hanging flags and banners from their windows and then assembling in admiring awe in the square by the old cathedral, taking photographs and applauding warmly and vigorously as the men to be honored stepped forth. The delight and approval of the civilians made us stick our chests out still farther, and the ceremony was truly impressive.
December 15. From a letter:
Today, in an old issue of Time, I read about the Morgenthau plan for Germany after it has been conquered. I was sickened by it and its implications, and began to understand why Germany so desperately continues to fight a war that has long since been lost. The men with whom I talked about the article hate Morgenthau violently, not only because they believe his proposal blind and evil—though they hate the Germans, too, you understand!—but because it was so ill-timed. They believe, and I half agree with them, that the war would end sooner and with less pain and bloodshed if the politicians at home would keep their big mouths shut and lay off the fire-breathing talk of vengeance. If there’s any fire-breathing to be done, let it come later, and let it come from the people who have most cause to talk of vengeance.
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