The Roer lies in the valley below us, and we’re dug in on the side of a steep hill. Across the river, on hills that sheer abruptly from the water’s edge, are the Germans. As I would later discover, we were not in Belgium anymore but in Germany. Our holes, lately inhabited by another outfit, are halfway down the hill, and it took us an hour to descend the tortuous hillside trail in the dark. Chief and I and a new man named Frank Eifler share the same hole. As dugouts go, it’s not bad, but it leaks.
February 10.
We’ve been here four days now, expecting to move out at any moment. We get two meals a day—breakfast and supper—both of which are served up in darkness and at the top of the hill. The first time we tried to find our way to the chow line we were forced to resort to a military braille: we traced the phone wire from the platoon C.P. near us to the company C.P. at the top of the hill, passing the thin wire delicately through our fingers and moving blindly through the night-black woods. The trip took us an hour and a half, although in daylight it would be but a ten-minute walk. The following day the engineers marked a path with white tape, tying the tape from tree to tree. Thirty minutes was par for the course after that. Playing in the rough was forbidden: before departing for the far side of the Roer, the Germans had heavily mined our hill, and it had not yet been cleared.
The squad on our right flank is in houses, the lucky stinkers. Shorty is with that squad. He rejoined us at Faymonville but was assigned to another squad in order to keep a balance between old men and replacements.
Far out on our left flank is an old castle. A neighboring platoon is stationed there. They have a long trek to chow, and the Jerries have our mealtimes so well figured that every morning at breakfast time and every night at suppertime the enemy mortars and machine guns open up, just as those poor buggers from the castle start for chow. So far no one has been hit because they’ve learned to anticipate the gambit, but it’s demoralizing nonetheless.
We can see the Roer clearly. It is swift and swollen, flooding most of the valley. We’ve heard that the Germans blew the dams above us to halt our advance, to slow us down. Every time I look at the grim hill across from us, the sheer slopes that we may be required to assault, I am well content to have my advance slowed down. Even stopped for a while.
We left the holes on February tenth, or maybe the eleventh. I don’t know whether we went forward, backward, or sideways—I’m sure only that we moved, that we walked a long time through the mud (and a blizzard) and ended our journey in another pine woods. The Roer is not far away, although we cannot see it. We’re to wait until the river goes down.
We waited until February 25.
We were confident in that period that the European war was nearly over. No longer a matter of months, but of weeks. Even days. I guess that was the feeling at home, too, although the Bulge had sobered some of the premature rejoicers. I thought a lot about what it would be like when the end of the war came, how the “Cease Firing” would affect us. In a letter to Ree I conjectured: “There’ll be a few tears, I think, and some devout prayers of thanks, and a nervous, high-strung gaiety bordering on hysteria. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there will be only a quiet weariness and a great relief, as though something heavy had tumbled from our shoulders.”
[One of those guesses was right. I learned which one it was somewhere in Czechoslovakia, on the last day of the ETO war.]
Eifler and I set up housekeeping together in the woods. Through a series of swapping deals far too complicated to remember, we acquired four shelter halves and constructed an elaborate but unorthodox tent at the edge of the woods, bordering on a field. We collected pine boughs for a bed, ruthlessly slashing off live branches. A far cry from the Bastogne woods, where we’d been forbidden to cut a single pine tree because Belgium billed the USA for every tree felled or damaged by American troops, or so we’d been told.
Every afternoon Frank and I built a small fire that we maintained to the last moment of dusk, the hour of curfew. Having no guard duty, we spent long, luxurious hours in bed. It was a good war at that moment
Last night I had a dream that haunted me all day. I dreamed that a cow with a gaping wound in its head leaned its starved body against a snowbank and looked at me with empty eyes for a long moment. Then, laying its ruined head against the snow, it died—quietly, without sound of crying—and the body sank and swiftly dissolved into a shapeless huddle against the earth, as I have seen the bodies of animals long dead. Why should one who is not a farmer be so oppressed by memories of starved and frightened beasts? Often I recall them more vividly than the dead men I have seen. The animals, the broken spectacles of an old woman, forsaken toys discovered in ruined houses... the testaments of innocence.
For weeks Frank’s been waiting for word from home that his baby was born. His first child, it was due some weeks ago and he’s pretty confident that the big event is over. Frank’s a quiet, likable youngster and a very earnest guy. He brought a box of cigars with him when he came overseas so he would have the proper tokens of new parenthood to distribute when the time came. Since we expect to shove off at any time, he broke down today and passed out the cigars, gravely assuring everyone that although he didn’t know whether it was a boy or a girl, he was sure it was! Although he doesn’t smoke, he saved one cigar for himself and lit it last night when we went to bed. He felt he ought to smoke one for his firstborn—it was his first responsibility as a parent. The first tentative puff brought on such a paroxysm of coughing and thrashing about that he nearly pulled the tent down around our ears. He persisted valiantly for a few minutes but at last decided that the gesture did not require entire consumption of the cigar. Soberly, I concurred, and with great dignity he dropped it in the ditch behind the tent.
Our fireside talk is not devoted exclusively to home, food, and sex. Lately we’ve been discussing a news item from a recent Stars and Stripes that recounted the details of a meeting between De Gaulle and Giraud in Metz. De Gaulle is credited with two statements that alarm the pants off me: “We will make the Rhine a French stream from one end to the other,” and, “It is a curious peace that is being prepared for us.”
Those statements have an ominous ring. Most of us don’t like France in the role of the fourth policeman of Germany. Some share in German control, yes, but not on a parity with the Big Three. For twenty-five years France has kept a slovenly house, and there is small evidence that the more noxious closets have been cleaned out. De Gaulle as a housekeeper is yet unproven, and he may be a good one. His inferior statesmanship, however, is already revealed.
His pronouncement on the guardianship of the Rhine indicates that France will be as avaricious after this war as she was in 1918. As for his second statement, heavy with grievance, it hints that France will be the same screaming termagant at this peace table that she was at Versailles—greedy, vindictive, and jealous, ready to sabotage larger interests out of pique, avarice, and the desire for revenge.
Making the Rhine a French river would be tantamount to making Germany a dependent vassal of France. The Rhine a free river under the jurisdiction of the Big Three is the way we see it here. But this is the woods of the Roer, and we’re young and trusting, believing still in words that start with capital letters. So we say, hotly, “A free river, yes, but not French! Germany would be destroyed and impotent—and a good thing, too!—but France would be too powerful, too dominant.”
With a France that is still rotten inside—and we think she is—a French Rhine would be a disaster for Western Europe and the world. We are soured by the memory of French chicanery, French “diplomacy” during the past twenty years; we remember the “impregnable Maginot line,” the “phony war,” the newsreel pictures of French soldiers bicycling home for supper each night in the early days of the war. We feel that France—like England, like us—is not entirely innocent of war guilt.
From a letter to Ree, dated February 14:
You ask if there are compensatory human relations in war to make up for some of the misery. That’s
a difficult question. They are not truly compensatory, because they are incomplete. They are half relations only, sometimes comforting and close, but arising primarily from the need of the body to reassure itself with the warmth and security of another person at hand. That sounds cold and snobbish, and I guess it is. That self-accusation runs me right into the ground every now and then. I’d like to be able to deny the charge; I’d like to say that I don’t judge and grade and label another man’s taste in music and books; I’d like to say that I don’t measure his likes against my own and find mine superior. But I can’t say that, damn it! The other night the twilight conversation moved softly and we felt warm and close and easy, and somehow we got started on books and poetry. Because that is always succulent bait to me, I began quoting what shreds and fragments of poetry I could remember. No sequence, no plan to my rambling. I had just finished “When I have fears that I may cease to be,” and the silence was deep and embracing. Then, out of the darkness and the silence came the question, honest and sincere and interested: “Didja ever hear Edgar Guest read his poetry?” So all right, goddamn it, I winced! I made my reply as sincere as I could because the question had been deeply, honestly meant, and the talk went on from there. But do you see what I mean? The magic had gone from the evening for me. Later that night the realization came to me that I should have been happy and proud. Had they not been moved by Keats’s lines, they would never have had the courage to bring out their own treasures. That was the important thing, and I was overwhelmed with belated shame.
I like these guys. Some of them I’ll never forget, like Shorty. In my own defense all I can say is that I have been self-consciously longhair for so many years that I am frequently disconcerted to find myself with a crew cut—and liking it. I am learning humility, but slowly.
From a letter to Ree, written February 15:
Complaining that there is much you don’t know about war, you refer to my silence on things like “going into combat” and ask for explanations. That phrase, “going into combat,” makes me wince. It smacks of the heroic, a mixture of ancient history and ham, battles that were prearranged and orderly affairs (if they ever were!) in the days when knighthood was in flower.
I don’t know how much knowledge you have picked up from books and movies, so I’ll make my explanation very elementary. Remember, too, that personal experience is my only source, and everything I say may be belied by the reports of others.
An outfit is (a) in the rear, thus out of danger and the likelihood of immediate action; (b) moving up to the line; (c) in defensive positions on the line; (d) making a push, which may mean house-to-house stuff in a village; (e) waiting in an assembly area for the strategic moment at which to embark on a push. A push may mean trouble, may mean “going into combat,” but it ain’t necessarily so. And being on line may mean that you’re getting the living bejesus shelled out of you, but again, it ain’t necessarily so. No two situations are identical, and you don’t know beforehand what you may encounter two hours from now. The thing is this: “going into combat” can out-Hollywood Hollywood—and sometimes does. Or it may be as innocuous as a tug-of-war at an Epworth League picnic. Don’t, for heaven’s sake, picture this life as one bloody battle sequence after another. It’s an ugly, dirty, miserable, frequently dangerous business, but it is not a constant slugging it out in hand-to-hand combat with the Jerries. I wish the rules of censorship would permit me to be more specific in my letters so that I could ease the dark tension under which you live. But I can only plead with you, “Don’t imagine the worst when my letters are infrequent or noncommittal!”
From the same letter:
Thanks for sending the quotations from the new Leland Stowe book [They Shall Not Sleep]. The guy’s apparently been around in this war. So far as my own small knowledge goes, he is entirely correct in saying that “our men in uniform ... are ill-informed about current events and major developments between the Allied governments.” And it is our Orientation Program that’s partially at fault. The trouble starts further back, of course—it starts with the men themselves. In justice to Stars and Stripes and Yank, I must admit that current events are reported, however cursory or slanted the manner. The basic fault lies in the men, in the “not thinking about politics or economics or sociology” backgrounds from which we’ve sprung. And the most evil footnote to a statement of that condition is that nonthinking is condoned and even subtly encouraged by the army. I’ve watched the men here read Stars and Stripes, and waited for comments about the Greek situation, or Poland, or Italy. Baiting them with questions, I’ve discovered that they haven’t read that news because they weren’t interested in it. The direct progress of the war, yes! But aside from developments of a purely military nature, their interest lies in news of home. They will have none of the world picture, thanks just the same.
That’s the basic fault: the soft unreality in which we Americans are cushioned from birth, a way of life in which who’s pitching for the Yankees this year is more important than who’s running for the presidency of the United States. That disinterest in real problems, that absorption in the romantic and the trivial, is peculiarly American and doesn’t exist in any other country in the world to such a degree. Obviously, the army cannot be held responsible for this basic condition, but the Orientation Program of the army was designed (in theory, at least) to meet the problems of disinterest and ignorance. And the job is not being done.
It is not only that there is little or no effort to educate the politically ignorant; worse than that, we are frequently misinformed, informed in sketchy fashion, and bluntly advised to shut up when we want to exercise the rights of free men. Undo- the masthead of Stars and Stripes is the newspaper’s credo, a statement credited to George Washington: “When we assumed the role of soldier, we did not lay aside the role of citizen.” Army administration tends to scorn that admonition, understandably, perhaps. The commanding officers of armies, the makers of policy and decision, are professional soldiers for whom the prosecution of wars is a career and a business. They are right in arguing that winning the war is the first consideration, and I would not have their efficiency hamstrung by the well-meant blundering of congressmen, politicians, and presidential advisers. But someone ought to remind these professional soldiers that we are batting in this league, too, and we have entered this profession reluctantly. There are fifteen million of us who were civilians first, soldiers second, and someday we will be civilians again, preparing to pick up civilian tasks and responsibilities for which our months and years in the army have ill prepared us.
What Stowe says is deeply troubling. The one bright thing I see on the credit side of the ledger is the evidence of the letters that appear every now and then in the “B-Bag” column of Stars and Stripes. There are men, here and in the Pacific, whose brains have not yet fallen victim to army sleeping sickness, men who will be prepared to battle the peace when they come home, if they have to.
This noon I saw the first miracle of spring, a promise so bright that I am warmed yet by the memory of it A small thing only—a butterfly dancing incongruously above the muddy road—but men called in wonder and pointed it out to each other with more joy than if it had been Dorothy Lamour, sans sarong, strolling along the road.
As if to remind us that there was a war on, we had winter and death and desolation a few hours later.
Four days ago a big tent was erected in the field near my tent and the word soon spread that we were going to have movies every day. (Formerly a hospital tent the red crosses have been smeared over with paint so the Germans will not be able to accuse us of cravenly seeking the immunity of the red cross.)
There are two showings nightly: at six and at eight. I went to the early performance tonight and while we waited for the tent to fill so the movie could start some enemy planes came over. (The Germans are aware that a push is brewing, and daily they send out reconnaissance planes to scout our strength.) Their appearance was greeted with the customary signs of recognition from our ack-ack batter
ies. It was noisy and exciting, and most of the men crowded out of the tent to watch the fun. A few of us, having choice seats, stayed inside to retain them. We were a little blasé about the fun outside— we’d seen all this so many times before, and stuff. You know. Perched uncomfortably on an empty gas can, I was talking to a neighbor when a man sitting a few feet in front of me grunted or coughed and gently, slowly, toppled forward on his face. There was a puzzled hush for a moment, and then, uncertainly, the laughing and talking in the tent resumed. Then someone bent over the fallen man and shouted, “Get a medic!” and our paralysis was broken. We turned him over. His hand and arm were covered with blood and his face was a red mask. Before we could carry him from the tent, he was dead. For a long time we could not guess how he’d been hit, until someone discovered a two-inch slit in the canvas roof, directly above the box where he was sitting. A piece of falling shrapnel from our own ack-ack had knifed through the canvas and pierced his back as he leaned forward, elbows on knees.
We carried his body outside and the medics took it away. The tent filled, and we were soon absorbed in watching the enchanting Miss Bergman storm beguilingly through Saratoga Trunk. Not until I was in bed, some hours later, did the memory of his face return and drive away sleep. It was the eye I could not forget, the half-open eye drowning in blood. All through the night the darkness of my tent was lit by the faint gleam of that half-open eye, rolled back in the bloody head... and how it blinked rapidly for a terrible moment, trying to wipe away the blinding blood in a last, automatic obedience.
You used to hear a lot of bitter comment about “rear echelon heroes.” Or maybe you didn’t—maybe it was strictly army talk and the civilian never heard it, never guessed the gap between line troops and rear echelon. But the gap was there, and I guess it was inevitable. In our rational moments we appreciated the work done by rear echelon units, and we recognized our own dependency on that work. But when the going was rough, when the chow was late or nonexistent, when the weather was below zero and there’d been no mail and the mud was up to our asses, we’d bitch and grouse about “those bastards all safe and warm in the rear.” None of the bitching was serious: we didn’t really mean it, but it lent a bitter savor to our own misery. I mention it now only because at times there was serious misunderstanding, real rancor. Once, I came nearly to blows, via correspondence, with one of my best friends, who was with an Engineer’s outfit back in Normandy. I had just received a letter from him, which I read in my foxhole on the hilltop near Waimes. It was during the most bitter period of the Bulge, with deep snow and below-zero temperatures. It was a good letter, but there were a couple of things in it that made me forget my chilblains and start a scotching reply on the spot. He asked, “What kind of quarters do you have?” and he went on to comment, “I understand frontline troops are being billeted for the winter.” And then he told me of the suite of rooms he shared with another noncom in a Normandy hotel.
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