Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  All I can say is, the moments of high drama were just that—moments. There were battles and bloody assaults. But for every minute of dramatic encounter with the enemy, there were long dreary hours of waiting, watching, stalking, patrolling, digging in, guarding, more waiting, tense but uneventful miles of pushing, then more digging in and more waiting. To people who long for tales of single-handed heroism, it must seem anticlimactic to be told of the “gallant boys”—man, whoever dreamed up that phrase ought to get a Good Conduct Medal, pinned right through his hide!—who went to the rear with trench foot, frostbite, and similar unromantic ailments. But that’s the way it was.

  That vast numbers of people still have a phony idea of war even in this enlightened and jaundiced day can be blamed in part on the Richard Harding Davis school of journalism. Since returning home I’ve talked to many civilians whose vision of modern warfare is a little askew. The Homeric phrases of the correspondents frequently conjured up a phony. Examine, for instance, that iron phrase “a tank battle.” To many civilians, led astray by a magnificently written but puffed-up account, a “tank battle” meant hundreds of tanks rushing madly around the countryside, bumping each other like Dodgem Juniors in an amusement park. A battle of tanks was truly a grim affair, and bloody and dramatic enough—I have no wish to minimize it. And there were panoramic tank battles, magnificent as tapestries, especially during the African campaign. But for Pete’s sake, a tank is a costly weapon, hard to replace and worth preserving. It’s also a death trap for the luckless crew that gets rash—and gets caught. There was no dearth of heroics in tank outfits, but those guys didn’t go out looking for valor, slavering over the smoky fields of Europe in search of an excuse to be picturesquely reckless. It took a lot of war bonds at $18.75 per to pay for a tank; it took a lot of time to train a crew to handle it, and the men in that crew were plenty cautious, as it was their business to be. More tank battles were won by shrewdness, speed, and outguessing than by fenderbumping. (And just for the record, some of the tankers I knew were too damn cautious! But that’s another story and I’ll come to it.)

  As for the jokers who thirst for heroism in large doses, they’ll have to look for it in the movies and the comic magazines.

  Meese came back from the C.P. one morning and told us to pack up: we were moving back to Faymonville for a rest. No relief outfit came to take our place: the front had shifted and we were no longer needed in that sector.

  A final irony: the day before we moved back to Faymonville we were at last issued the winter equipment about which you’d been reading for months back in the States: knee-high shoes (called Snow-Paks) and heavy wool socks, scarfs, elbow-length gauntlets of leather and waterproof poplin. Late though they were, we welcomed them.

  The company started for Faymonville, leaving me behind as a one-man guard over the piles of equipment that would be picked up by half-tracks and “weasels.” To pass the time, I policed our late area, picking up forgotten ammunition and equipment.

  Let no one ever grumble that the occasional frontline shortages were due to the derelictions of American industry and failures on the home front In that snow-choked pine woods was enough equipment—clothing, blankets, ammunition, and food—to make a Czech or Chinese guerrilla army weep for joy. Only weapons were lacking: apparently no man was bold enough to throw away or abandon a firearm. Knives, axes, bayonets, and entrenching tools—yes. But no rifles, machine guns, or BARs.

  Painstakingly, I searched the area, gleaning hand grenades, clips and full bandoliers of M-l ammunition, rifle grenades, bazooka rockets, belts of machine-gun ammo. When an officer appeared, making a last inspection tour, I waved proudly toward my pile of salvage. He glanced at it and said carelessly, “Oh, don’t bother with the ammunition! Leave it here! There’s plenty in the rear, and we can’t be bothered with taking all this crap back!”

  We left it. The only things we took—because I threw them on the jeep trailer when he wasn’t looking—were two full boxes of hand grenades and a dozen bandoliers of M-l ammo. And as we drove to Faymonville, we dribbled bits of equipment at every sharp turn in the road.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “There is snow on the altar…”

  January 1945. Faymonville, Belgium.

  The first few days here were given over to the unfamiliar delights of baths, shaves, haircuts, and clean clothes. And sleep. Then the new replacements began to arrive. Some were two weeks out from the States and very green indeed. And very young. With their assignment to platoons, reorganization was begun.

  We have a new squad leader, an Oklahoma Indian known, naturally, as “Chief.” He is one of the old men of the outfit, recently returned from the hospital following wounds received some months ago. Reputedly the best sniper and the best one-man patrol in the company, he is also, in some important respects, a sonofabitch. He has the sneak’s habit of helping himself to the property of others and the bully’s habit of blustering mightily when discovered. He is moody and given to bursts of wild temper. The company grapevine has warned us to beware when he’s been drinking: three sniffs of a cork and he runs amok, taking with him a tommy gun for comfort. He is unpredictable and erratic at all times. Anyway, he’s the new leader of the first squad, and I’m his assistant, although my rating remains at the same moldy state—private.

  We’ve taken over what’s left of the houses in this battered town. I think there cannot be an undamaged building in the entire area. Dead cattle and horses fitter the fields and streets. Already they swell and stink. There’s a dead horse near our chow line, and at every mealtime we must hurdle its grossly swollen belly, the rigid legs pointing in the air like dried branches.

  Faymonville was in the path of the “Bulge” offensive. Long ago, during the fall of Belgium, German troops were quartered here. Last year our advancing armies pushed them out. Came the Bulge, our forces retreated and the town was reoccupied by the Germans. When the Bulge was deflated and the Germans again withdrew, we returned once more. With such a seesawing of armies, it’s surprising that Faymonville exists at all.

  Our house is in the quarter of the town that took the worst beating. Not a room is whole. Most of the roof is gone, and the second floor is a windswept shambles. The ceiling of our room drips constantly, and daylight peers through the sieved walls. There are no windows, of course. We nailed blankets and comforters over the empty window frames, and we live in perpetual dusk, lit dimly by candlelight

  Scattered like confetti in the mud around the house are the homely, small things that once marked this as a home. Pictures, well-scoured pots and pans, old letters and colored postcards, the scraps of bright embroidery that bespeak the good hausfrau, broken dishes, shattered furniture, toys—the empty and mournful things that say simply, “A family lived here.”

  The house has been fiercely fought over, several times. The exterior walls are pocked with the scars of many bullets, and around it lie shell cases and clips of ammunition, German and American.

  The cows in the barn have been dead a long time.

  The civilians are returning to Faymonville. Every day we see them—old men and young women, children. All wear several layers of clothing, all carry backbreaking loads of house gear, push baby carriages, carts, and wheelbarrows that bulge with feather ticks, luggage, treasured bits of furniture. They move wearily, their heads inclined to the ground, their shoulders curved under the freight they carry. When they reach home—the place where home used to be—they stand and look long at the crumbled walls, the bare girders of ancient roofs, the shards of broken roof slate, the dead animals, the rabble of dismembered furniture scattered like old bones in the street. Sometimes they weep, the weak tears of the aged. But they are never surprised—these were old anticipations in the blood, now come to bitter fruit.

  Today an old man and his daughter returned to their home, the building just across the road. She was very pregnant. I’d been watching them for an hour. She bent painfully over a mound of rubbish, sorting the fragments of roof slate—the large
pieces here, the middle-sized ones here, the splinters ... Already the old man was on the roof, patching the gaping holes. Just now she brought an armful of wet linen from the house and carefully hung it on the branches of a ruined apple tree in the front yard. From the filthy mud of the street, she’d salvaged her tablecloths, doilies, pillow slips, and towels, rinsed them in cold and soapless water, and now they flap in the cold wind. Why should there be tears in my eyes?

  A rest camp has been set up in nearby Herve, and already I have had an overnight pass. Had a hot shower, saw a movie, and stuffed myself with fabulously expensive Belgian pastries. But I returned to the outfit with a curious sense of coming home.

  Listening to the poker table conversation in the next room, I arrived at the conclusion that the GI would be virtually speechless if a certain four-letter word beginning with F were lifted from his vocabulary. I kept a tally: thirty-four times ... in two minutes!

  I don’t object to the word: it’s the dreary monotony of hearing it over and over again, a repetition that would be equally wearing if the word were innocuous—“consumed” or “blasted.” It’s the paucity of expression, fraying the nerves like the dripping of a faucet in the night.

  I’ll have to watch my own language when I get home. I’m brought up sharply now and then by the realization that my vocabulary is increasingly narrowed to the elementary one- syllables, some of them not designed for mixed company or the eager ears of little children.

  Christ, this is no life ... this suspension between worlds!

  Most of the time I manage to get by, filling the hours with the fundamentals of eating, sleeping, and the particular job of soldiering at hand. But when there’s a lull in the monotonous rhythm of this dull laboring for survival, when I permit myself the luxury of thinking, feeling, remembering, a sense of unreality washes over me in huge waves, and I am submerged. It is as though all vital processes except the beating of my heart have stopped, stopped because there was no purpose in continuing.

  I went to church today. Protestant and Catholic services were being conducted in the village cathedral by army chaplains. I chose the Catholic service because I wanted the solace of form, ritual—I didn’t want to understand what was said. The chaplain foxed me: he preached a short sermon in English.

  Drawn by the tolling bell, some of the townspeople attended services, too. They entered timidly, not sure they would be permitted, and we smiled at them to let them know it was all right. Although they could not understand the sermon, the ritual was familiar to them, and the Latin chanting, and they crossed themselves and genuflected with a trembling ardor unmatched by any of the GIs present Three very old women entered and took the pew in front of me. Their faces were secret with the closed-in sightlessness of the ancient and they tottered as they walked, leaning heavily on crooked canes. They wept silently throughout the service.

  There are many old graves under the shell-scarred lawn of the cathedral. And five new graves, guarded by very new wooden crosses. Hanging on each cross is a German helmet

  The rose window behind the high altar must have been beautiful once. Now it is a twisted agony of melted lead that sags and bulges grotesquely. Shells and bombs, including incendiaries, struck the church several times, and the magnificent windows were shattered and burned. Scattered on the floor are jewel-like gleamings of scarlet deep blue, emerald green, and amber. Directly behind the baroque wreckage of the high altar is a gaping hole in the blackened stone. There is snow on the altar and on the floor behind it.

  In the chancel of the church there is an evil mess where some soldier, German or American, demonstrated the staunchness of his warrior heart by defecating on the ancient stone floor.

  Today the Red Cross Clubmobile arrived, carrying hot coffee, doughnuts, free cigarettes, gum, and two American girls. We splashed eagerly through the rain, more interested in the girls than in the customary handout of coffee-and. The front is a homely girl’s idea of heaven—scores of unattached males, and all of them anxious to exchange at least one word, all loath to leave after receiving their coffee and their allotted smile. The girls were attractive, gracious, and skilled in handling masses of woman-starved GIs. We returned to quarters convinced that the American girl has something her European sisters lack. I don’t know why the sight of two American girls in slacks should be more exciting than the sight of equally attractive Belgian, French, or German girls in more feminine costume, but that’s the way it was. Maybe it was the lipstick, which seems uniquely American and an undreamed-of luxury in these war-ravaged areas.

  There’s a hardware store in our sector, shelled and ruined and open to the weather. Apparently it serviced all the nearby countryside, and the owner was a canny buyer, because there are attached vast sheds and barns, crammed with goods, most of it damaged. Stoves, dishes, glassware, pots and pans, pails, thermos bottles, mops, brooms, scythes, stovepipe—a veritable treasure house to the GI, who must make his home from whatever he can find, beg, or skonavish. The raids on this stockpile have been constant and thorough: all of us required stovepipe for the stoves in our billets, and we prefer to eat from china whenever possible. Of late our chow line has been a miraculous thing to behold: instead of the customary tinware, you see everything from hand-painted fruit bowls to fine-cut glass.

  Yesterday the owner of the hardware store returned to town, arriving on the scene just in time to see a Joe emerging from the store with his arms loaded. The old man danced in his rage like Rumpelstiltskin, snatching the stuff from the arms of the astonished soldier and screaming, “Mine, mine! Not for you!... No steal!” The racket attracted a helluva lot of attention, including that of the C.O., and the old man made a violent squawk to him about the sacredness of his property. The store and all its attached sheds and barns are now off limits.

  1 am a little staggered by the implications of this episode. Faymonville was rained and desolated by war; our guns and planes, and the guns and planes of the Germans, made rabble of it And now it’s been liberated, it’s a free town again, free of the hated German conquerors. However, to that old man—as to hundreds of others in similar towns—the better fate would have been to continue living in the semislavery imposed by the Nazis rather than to have their homes and their property destroyed in the name of a vigorous freedom. We “liberated” these people (I guess!); we restored to them the freedoms their statesmen and poets, their own best minds, so passionately desired, but the cost when reckoned in the sacrifice of material things is difficult for them to accept Confronted with wreckage and desolation, many have a hard time clinging to the reality of those larger freedoms. Most men want only to be let live, and the hardware man would have preferred to trickle out his life under Nazi rale—tax-ridden, despised, disenfranchised—but living a life nearly normal and conducting business nearly as usual. His outraged screams indicate that he would have preferred that to finding his home full of holes, his cattle dead, his dishes broken, and his stoves being carried off (although only to the house next door) by his “liberators.” His point of view is short, and average, and to be expected. There are people here who face the wreckage courageously, willing to accept it for the precious

  sake of the larger intangibles.

  * * *

  A strange day today. Although heavy snow still blankets the fields, the weather has been unseasonably warm, and this morning we got up to find the village wrapped in a heavy mist Stepping outdoors was like being caught in the first reel of a Hitchcock movie. Stretching gauntly from the house as far as the eye could see were the stripped, broken apple trees, gesturing crazily against the blackened skeletons of houses seen through mist Curiously, for a long time the morning was silent—no guns, no planes, not even the rumble of army trucks. Only the far-off cawing of rooks. With every moment anticipation grew that someone... some One moving in mystery and tragic intensity, would come through the mist and the broken orchard. But no one did... all setting and no plot!

  February 5.

  We have been alerted for the past two da
ys. We don’t know where we’re going, and the long-drawn uncertainty is making us edgy. No matter how bad it may be, it would be so much better to know!

  We left on February 6. A truck ride to another woods, a wait until dark, then a walk in the night rain and the mud. Six and a half hours later we ended up on the banks of the Roer River. It hadn’t been a pleasant walk, and floundering through the slimy muck, cursing the darkness, I remembered the pleasure I had found in night walks at home. The midnight stroll with the dogs each night... the dark shadows under the maple trees, the infrequent streetlights that sifted a soft radiance through the leaves, making gently dappled pools for wading. Rarer walks on country roads, and the white glimmer underfoot... lifting your eyes to marvel at stars you had never seen in a city sky. Far away now... the distance of centuries from this German mud, this pure Aryan night.

  We walked in single file, close together so no one would get lost. Chief had gone with the advance party, which preceded us by several hours, so I had the squad. The forced march was a rough introduction to soldiering for some of the new men, and I cajoled, swore, threatened, and persuaded, trying by all means to keep them moving. All along the line of march men were falling from exhaustion, collapsing in the mud or staggering grimly to the side of the road before passing out. One of my new men fainted, and I had to use the last few precious drops of water in my canteen to revive him. Over his protests, we split up his load, and he struggled to his feet and doggedly kept going. I rode his tail like Simon Legree until we reached the Roer, not liking my role very much. But he made it.