CHAPTER SEVEN
“There was a moment of silence when the morning stood waiting, not breathing….”
March 3.
We’re in the town of Gladbach, to which we retired two days ago. Since then we’ve done nothing but sleep, wake to eat, and return again to sleep. There’s a stove in our room, and we cannot get enough of this blessed warmth. A final miracle: the windows are unbroken. We keep the doors tightly closed and drowse contentedly in the heat.
I dine from china these days. It is apparently a German custom of long standing in these parts to honor a child on his First Communion by presenting him with a porcelain cup, designed for the occasion. I’ve been drinking my coffee from such a cup, presented to one Friedrich in 1887, and have grown quite fond of it and of the fat cherubim who simper so pinkly from its sides. My fancy has been caught by another ceremonial cup, however, which is lumpy with full-blown, life-size gilt roses. Having shaved this morning, I do feel elegant and airily rococo with such a cup in my hand. It’s my last opportunity for such elaborate refinements—we’re alerted for a move before dawn tomorrow. Ho hum.
I’ve been officially “put in” for a buck sergeancy. I have to wait until confirmation filters down through channels, and then—an “acting gadget” no longer! One privilege to which I look forward hungrily is our next rest period in a room alone. List among other army complaints: “Always a private and never alone.”
In spite of early Hitlerian efforts to revive the ancient Teuton mythology, Germany today offers denial to the feeble Allied propaganda that whimpered of empty churches and a dying Christianity. If one could accept the evidence at face value, Germany is as ardently religious as France and Belgium. The average home in these small towns is a rat’s nest of holy pictures, plaster images, relics, crucifixes, testaments, and rosaries. Enshrined in a niche over the main entrance of most houses is a statue of the Virgin Mother or the Holy Family, and it is the rare room that lacks a crucifix, a lithograph of the Bleeding Heart, and a wall receptacle for holy water. Catholic Germany... and what an ironic paradox that a people so seemingly devoted to One who preached “Love thy neighbor” should be the most intolerant, the most rapacious and warlike nation of our time.
March 4.
Early in the morning we left Gladbach and rode in the rain to a town whose name I do not know. We detrucked there and waited for darkness, took shelter from the rain in an empty house and “explored.”
I’m the world’s lousiest looter. While the canny soldier busies himself searching for jewelry, pistols, cameras, and liquor (usually in that order), I am deep in somebody’s fruit cellar, gorging myself on canned fruits. This house was notable for the preserved strawberries I discovered, cold and sweet, as large as plums and floating in thick syrup. I ate a quart, then started on a can of plums.
My remarks about looting would doubtless offend a lot of people. Well, perhaps George really did win that Leica in a crap game, and maybe it’s true that Johnny swapped a Luger for that string of pearls. There were men who didn’t loot, and their relatives can be proud of them. But I’ll hazard a guess and say that eighty percent of the men looted, whenever and wherever possible. I make a distinction between confiscation and looting. All weapons, for instance, however outmoded or rusty, were legitimate prizes according to the rules of warfare, as were cameras. But there were strict orders prohibiting the seizure of jewelry, silverware, personal belongings, clothing, food, and so on. Sometimes a special order was issued, putting a specific Verboten on leather goods, furs, etc.
The officer or noncom bestrode a delicate fence on the question of looting. By superior command he was constrained to repress pillage, but the officer who followed every command to the letter soon found himself no longer in rapport with his men. I could not agree with the rule of thumb frequently quoted by field grade officers that “it isn’t necessary for an officer to be liked; the important thing is that he be respected.” That’s double-talk to me—in the intimacy of frontline army life, respect and liking are too closely bound to permit a clean line of demarcation to be drawn between them. It may be good barracks discipline, but it isn’t for the front line.
Most of the officers I knew best agreed with me that the liking of the men was a necessary element of real discipline and morale—not spit-and-polish discipline, but the kind that held when all the chips were down.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that sometimes I deliberately shut my eyes to the acquisition of items the army regarded as loot. There were also occasions when it became necessary to step in and say flatly, “No! This you will not take!”
Looting was base and I do not seek to justify it, but it rarely distressed me, as did deliberate, purposeless destruction. I winced at the havoc we visited upon German homes—the furniture smashed, silks and laces ripped for the fun of hearing them tear, delicate embroideries and fine linens used as toilet paper, books and pictures defaced, fragile porcelain thrown against a wall, noble crystal shattered in a tinkle of outraged chimes. It was the bullyboy aspect of war that sickened me.
A final word on looting: in writing this I have employed the reference “the men,” and it will be interpreted as meaning “enlisted men.” Let me set that straight. Notwithstanding the many fine and upright officers who did not loot, the most ruthless, avaricious looters of all were officers. The explanation is simple. It’s not that the cupidity of officers was greater, but that—by virtue of their bars, their leaves, their eagles, or their stars—they had greater opportunities. True, they could only rarely indulge in the furtive searching of bureau drawers, but they could loot on a grand scale quite beyond the humble GI. When we moved into a town, the most handsome houses were set aside for officers’ quarters. Looting in mansions was always good, and many an officer’s home in the States is now enriched by objets d’art he did not purchase. Further, the enlisted man’s domain of command was never more than a house or two at best, while officers frequently had control over large areas of conquered enemy country and over items in quantity. There were jeeps and trailers to transport the belongings of officers—belongings that included both regular army equipment and those “little things” picked up en route—fine hunting rifles and shotguns, chests of sterling silver, rugs, oil paintings, fur coats, all the cumbersome things the overladen doggie was forced to pass up because he was physically unable to carry them on his back. If I seem particularly bitter, I have reason: once, I acquired a magnificent double-barreled shotgun, a weapon fashioned with loving care by the hands of a craftsman. For all of one weary day I carried it; then, bleeding inwardly with self-pity and rage, I surrendered it to the officer who had several times offered to “take it off my hands.” I could carry its added weight no more. I saw it the next day in his jeep, swaddled tenderly in a shelter half to protect it from being marred. He hadn’t offered to carry it for me—he just wanted to help me out by “taking it off my hands”!
Lastly, an officer could send home loot of a sort that the GI did not dare submit for mailing, knowing it would be censored or confiscated. Further, we believed firmly that postal inspectors in the States would open the packages of an enlisted man with more alacrity than those mailed by a major or a colonel. And so officers could—and did—send home fur coats, sets of fine china, boxes of silverware, lace curtains, Oriental rugs and the like, and the doggie did not, because the doggie would have had his ass chewed and been asked to explain his “outrageous looting.”
At dark we moved to the edge of the no-name town and relieved Easy Company. I had to split my squad: half in one house, half in another. My C.P. was in a cellar already occupied by two women, two children, and an eighty-nine-year-old man. They’d been there for some days and furnished it with a bed, several chairs, and a stove, plus a rocking chair for the old man. It was cold and the kids were fretful and would not sleep, a circumstance not surprising, considering the way kids, women, blankets, and quilts were tumbled together on the crowded bed. The old man dozed restlessly, stretched between two c
hairs, a quilt around his shoulders. He did not speak to us or notice our existence by so much as a glance. We sat near the stove and talked in low voices, feeling our lack of welcome but too tired to care.
Next door the men shared their cellar with a doggie who’d been killed by a freak shell that afternoon. The shell had come clean and sharp through the cellar window without touching the frame and killed him where he stood. Of the other three men in the cellar, one was slightly wounded.
The night was long and uneventful. The squad being far below normal strength, every man was overworked with guard duty, so I waived my prerogatives and stood guard for two tricks, sustained by a comfortable sense of virtue.
Early the next morning we pulled out for the town of Weilerswist. Arriving there, we spent most of the afternoon in a factory near the railroad tracks, waiting for darkness to cover our next move. An adjacent warehouse was filled with boxes and crates, labeled and ready to be loaded on a train that would never come. Curious, we kicked the slat from some of the crates and discovered plate glass, car fenders, blowtorches, flatirons, and washing machines. A reassuring display: as long as the world continues to manufacture flatirons and washing machines, the final debacle is not yet at hand. An ingenious doggie decided to take along a blowtorch “to heat his next foxhole,” and the idea spread. Within an hour a blowtorch dangled from the pack of every man in the battalion, and jeeps from units behind us were racing up in dusty frenzy to drive away with springs groaning under a load of blowtorches. The American doggie is a wonderful guy.
We moved out at dusk, and the next twenty-four hours were just like the twenty-four preceding: into another town (Metterich?), go out to the point (yes sir!), dig in, stand guard. I pulled guard with the men again, and it was a raw, rainy night. I felt low, and wanted desperately to sleep. Finally I did, for two hours, the first in forty-eight. I fried some potatoes when I got up, and after eating felt much better.
The pattern was the same on the next day, March 6. This time the town was Brenig (I think!). The name may be wrong—many times we never knew where we were, and town succeeded town so rapidly that all blurred together. Ernie Pyle said it: “Eventually it all works itself into an emotional tapestry of one dull, dead pattern—yesterday is tomorrow and Troina is Randazzo and when will we ever stop and God, I’m so tired.” No one ever said it better.
At Brenig the third platoon ran into trouble and we were held up. We halted at a prosperous farm and waited for the firelight on the other side of the town to sputter out.
As we carve deeper and deeper into Germany, we find that most of the villages are unscratched, or scratched very lightly. These tiny agricultural hamlets, most of them without any military significance, have been bypassed by our bombers. This farmhouse, for example, was unscarred by war save for a few small cracks in its smooth plaster walls, the result of a bomb that had been jettisoned in a nearby field by a wounded American bomber. For the farmer and his family, that “bombing” was the high spot of the war. They told me the story in highly excited German, pantomiming their remembered fright with dramatic clutching at their bosoms and much rolling of eyes.
Civilians become more and more of a problem as we advance. They get in the way, and they require of our emotions a softness we’re loath to give—the giving is painful, and it makes for inefficiency. Civilians absent, we could be tough and ruthless and a helluva lot more comfortable. But now...! We limp past houses that are draped in white, every window fluttering hysterically with sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths—mute pleas for mercy. The people huddle together, well out of our path, and only barely concealed behind the frightened faces are the ingratiating smiles, tugging at the leash of fear and wanting only a nod of tolerance, the flicker of a grin from an American face to warm them into full beaming. Most of the faces are ready to beam—a few diehards glower and look contempt upon us.
Back to the prosperous farm. I posted the men and they dug in. I retired to the kitchen and called the men in, one at a time, for the benison of half an hour near the stove. (One of the most unpleasant features of these pushes is that we move at such a clip that we’re drenched with sweat before we’ve gone a mile. We’re warm while we’re moving, sometimes too warm, but once we stop, the March air chews the marrow from our bones in the space of minutes and the wet wool of our garments hangs clammy on our shivering flesh.)
So I sat in the kitchen, drank hot, but vile, ersatz coffee, and talked with the farmer’s family. They moaned a plaint that has become very familiar of late: “Deutschland ist alles kaput! ” I wondered if they knew how “kaput”? But they were pleasant and tried hard to be agreeable, even the shrewish-looking hausfrau, the obvious boss of the household, squeezing out an occasional tight smile. She was busy with supper, a meal apparently composed of fried potatoes and canned fruit. The potatoes smelled like steak to my starved nose, but I refused their not-very-pressing invitation to share their meal. They loaded the food on platters and disappeared down the stairs to the cellar, their present living quarters. I watched the steaming platters out of sight and then cursed myself for being weak and spineless. Why the hell didn’t I commandeer the food for myself and my men? After all, we were hungry and we were the conquerors! No, it wouldn’t do ... I couldn’t sustain an arrogance like that.
The men had just finished their holes when the expected order came: “Okay, get it on!” With groans, curses, and whimpers, we started off again. I was breaking in a new pair of shoes, and this final move seemed the last indignity my tortured feet could endure.
Those shoes ... I have them yet: size 9½A and curled upward at the toe like Turkish slippers; 9½A, and my correct size is 8 or 8½. The story is this: I arrived overseas with two pairs of shoes, which fitted me properly and felt good. But a soldier’s life is a muddy one, and after endless soakings and dryings, the shoes shrank and shrank until walking became an agony. In one vagrant encounter with our supply tent I asked for other shoes, but the supply sergeant brushed me off. However, while we were in Gladbach, Supply caught up to us. Loeb, a buddy who worked in Supply, tipped me off one afternoon that the cognac was flowing and the supply sergeant mellowing into carelessness, sprawled in the kitchen of the farmhouse where he’d set up his stand. Sneaking around corners and down alleys, I crept up to the house from the rear. As I slipped into the shed where the shoes had been dumped, I could hear the drunken singing of the sergeant and his cronies. There were the shoes, a great pile of them—some new, but some of them secondhand turn-ins. Before entering the shed, I’d loosened the laces of my own shoes and now I shucked them off. I had to move fast now ... get out of there before someone came. There’s a pair of new ones, I thought, combat boots, too. Try ’em on! Mmmm ... a little large ... 9½A. Wow! A full size larger than my others! Well...
But I wanted combat boots, and the new blond leather looked beautiful, and I assured myself that the extra length would be an advantage—think of the extra warmth in wearing two pairs of woolen socks! I made the swap, burying my old shoes in the middle of the pile, and raced away with laces dangling and buckles flopping.
So now I was on the road out of Brenig, my new blond shoes like red-hot cases of lead on my aching feet.
No, not quite. Before starting out for Brenig, we’d been given a hot meal at the C.P., and after chow most of us crowded into a stable for a last smoke. There was no light save from our glowing cigarettes, and no room to sit down. So we stood, jostling each other, and, being tired and thus easily given to horseplay, trading evil for accident with brutish humor. An awkward GI heel treading on your toes merited a swift kick in the shins, and it didn’t matter if you kicked the wrong guy. A jaw nearly dislocated by the swinging combat pack of someone who only wanted to turn around was quickly repaid by a swift butt stroke from the M-l hanging on your own shoulder. Heaven help the guy behind you who might get slapped silly by the muzzle, as well as the luckless victim who got the butt in his ribs. All good clean fun, and the night was not filled with music. But it tightened our spirits. The hu
mor went out of the sport for me, however, when my bazooka man, an amiable but blundering sheepdog, turned suddenly in the dark, the bazooka hanging from his shoulder striking me in the mouth and putting an unmistakable finis to the wobbly peg tooth I’d been carefully guarding for months. Henceforth and until the end of the war I was known, off and on, as “the Tooth.” The tooth itself I saved and wore for state occasions, like the first drink of the evening on the evenings when we had something to drink. I’d set it carefully in place and hold it with my tip for a brief, one-sided smile. After the third drink it ceased to be important, and I’d remove it and store it in my watch pocket again.
Then, finally, I was on the road out of Brenig, aching feet, toothless jaw and all. This time I thought I’d make it beyond the village limits.
The town we took that night has no name in this muddy odyssey. We’d only been told that it was believed to be crawling with Jerries. As usual, my squad was assigned the point on the far end of town, and we experienced the customary eerie tension as we passed through the darkened streets. The town was spilling over with the dregs left by a whipped and fleeing army—tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, ambulances ... dead men.
Our objective was a road junction with a house on one corner, a water tower on another, and a helluva lot of open ground beyond. When we arrived at the house, I pounded on the door with the butt of my rifle and yelled, “Komme sie raus!” Ten seconds later a faraway voice quavered the information that only civilians were within, all old people, and they were in the cellar. I shouted in reply, “Komme sie raus anyway!” and almost immediately the door opened and a white-haired man stepped out. I asked if there were any German soldiers about. (This is not quite so naive as it sounds. Many times we were spared a fight and the possible loss of some lives by permitting German soldiers to surrender through the medium of civilians. If we stormed their hiding places, they would fight back, selling themselves dearly out of fear and desperation.) The old man answered that there were no soldiers in the house but only civilians—five women and three old men, like himself, and all had been asleep in the cellar. I said I’d have to see for myself and made a move to enter the building, but as I stepped forward a voice from behind the old man said calmly, “I surrender.” I backed up hastily and ordered the voice to show himself. It turned out to be a young man in the uniform of a Luftwaffe pilot. Furious at the elderly civilian (and part of my anger was fear, of course—I knew that), I ordered them into the dark house and pushed them toward the door that was sewn against the inner gloom by a thread of light. Kicking open the door, we saw five women and three men, just as the old man had said. But not asleep in the cellar, not even rubbing their eyes with sudden waking. Fully dressed, they were gathered around a dining table on which were the remains of a recent meal. The coffee cups were still full and steaming.
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