The tension wore off after a while, to be replaced by a kind of drunken excitement, the secret bubbling of inner gaiety that makes some drunks happy drunks. The livestock in the barn looked hungry, so I fed them and it became a game of delicious nonsense. The rabbits were first: outside their hutch was a basket heaped high with superb brussels sprouts. It seemed an extravagant diet, but the great Belgian hares lit into the tender sprouts with the aplomb of long familiarity, and I went away well pleased. The horses and the goats were something else again: I knew goats and horses ate either straw or hay, but I was damned if I knew which. One they ate and one they slept on, but which was which? To return to the house and ask for help would be an embarrassing confession of ignorance, and since the only route was via belly through a courtyard sprinkled with chicken droppings, I asked myself, Is this trip necessary? I decided that horses ate hay, and was stymied a moment later by the realization that I couldn’t tell the difference between straw and hay. I grabbed an armful at random, dropped it before the horse, and stood back to observe his reactions. He sniffed at it disdainfully and turned a solemn eye on me. Hastily apologizing, I backed from his stall and made good on my error. Then I fed the goats, gave water to all the animals, threw some grain in the yard for the chickens, and returned to the house.
In the kitchen cupboard I found a loaf of rye bread, two jars of jam, and a bowl of delicious cottage cheese. So I ate. My next discovery was a pail of still-fresh milk, and I made some hot chocolate from an old D-bar I dug from a pocket. I carried a cup of the hot drink to Jersey City, who was still trembling.
A rickety board fence connected the outbuildings to the house. A door in the fence opened on the quarry, and by hooking my toe under the door to hold it from swinging wide, I could open it cautiously for several inches and peer toward the enemy lines. Observation was good, and I registered a 5—well, maybe a 3 anyway!—on the first target to show himself.
So the day passed and the exchange of fire died to an occasional sputter. When another hour had gone by and there had been no further shots and no sight of the enemy, I sent the two kids upstairs for a nap while I stood guard at the window. The unbroken quiet was more nerve-racking than the previous noisy hours had been, and I wondered if a counterattack was brewing. Another hour of quiet passed and I decided the Germans had really fled. In a second reconnaissance through the house I found an egg and selfishly ate it all.
It seemed safe now, and I decided to send a man back to the C.P. to ask for further orders. I was on my way to wake the sleepers upstairs when I saw two German-helmeted heads bobbing along the courtyard wall. I whispered for Jersey City to come to my side, and we waited. When the wearers of the helmets reached the gate I yelled, “Halt!” and their hands shot up. The startled bewilderment on their faces was real and they were quick to say that they had come in to surrender. One was limping from a slight leg wound, and they were very tired, very dirty, and very sick of war.
Jersey City woke the two boys while I guarded the prisoners, and I told Bowerman to take our haul to the C.P. and ask for orders. He took off down the road, prodding them along on the double while we watched the cliff anxiously, rifles ready. In thirty minutes he was back: Misa wanted us to pack up and come home.
As we passed through the town, familiar faces smiled at us from the windows of the houses and men poured out to surround us. We were astounded to learn that we were the heroes of the moment. We shrugged deprecatingly at this earthy-tongued praise but were puffed by it nonetheless. That moment was ours, and not for a million bucks would we have admitted that what seemed like a heroic stand from the vantage of the town had been only a rather dull guard routine for us. We were heroes, goddamn it, and we ate it with spoons!
The sweetness lingered for days: my hungry searching for food while we were “pinned down out there” [sic!] was interpreted as a supreme nonchalance in the face of danger, and I blossomed like a rose under the awed regard of my companions. Football heroes and such are at liberty to scoff at the naivete of this confession, but any man who looks back on a boyhood in which he never won a fight will appreciate how I felt.
At any rate, it seemed like V-E Day to us. When I entered the C.P., Misa said, “Whaddya tryin’ to do, win the goddamn war all by yerself?” Ahh... comfort me with apples—the hell with apples! Comfort me with big fat syllables!
We gulped furtively and exchanged secret looks when we learned why we were thus crowned with laurel: observers in town had counted several hundred Germans on the cliff above us. We’d been given up as dead or captured many hours ago.
The German with the burp gun who had started the day’s activity had been captured. (He was in uniform, incidentally, but it was of an unusual type.) He claimed that he’d been forced to fire on us: a German officer with a pistol leveled at his back had been standing behind him. He also insisted that he had fired at the ground so that he wouldn’t hit us!
He’d been captured near the house that our tank had shelled, and the old woman with the rosary, emerging from the cellar, had flown into a rage when she saw him. Seizing a handy chunk of stove wood, she started to beat the bejesus out of him, cursing him for not being “a real German soldier.” In her eyes he was personally responsible for the destruction of her home.
After eating, we curled up for some sleep, woke up for supper and back to bed once more. At five a.m. we were roused and told to pack up, we were going after some snipers who were harassing the supply lines of the 3rd Battalion.
It was a wet, gloomy morning, my feet hurt, and I wasn’t happy. About nine o’clock we saw our objective—a scattering of buildings by a railroad track. My squad was ordered to clear the signalman’s shack, the house at the crossing, and the trenches in the field beyond. There was no sound from within the house as we crept up to it. The rear door stood a little ajar and I kicked it wide, then leaped backward hastily. The three German soldiers who stared, bug-eyed, from their seats at the kitchen table were as startled as I was.
The kitchen was a small arsenal—rifles, burp guns, grenades, machine guns, and piles of ammunition. Food, too—rye bread, jam, fruit, and a supply of the canned meat rationed to German troops. (Delicious meat, incidentally: it made our tasteless and monotonous C and K rations nauseating in comparison.)
The bunkers in the field were well-constructed. There was a luxurious subterranean six-man bunkhouse, containing a stove, and the trench system that radiated elaborately from the bunkhouse embraced nearly seven thousand square feet. Apparently, the three Germans we captured in the house were the only troops manning this strong point. Piled near the trenches as though in preparation for placement were more than sixty mines, some of them antitank Teller mines and some the terrible S mine, nicknamed “Bouncing Betty.”
The day passed quickly, the men standing guard duty in the rain and sleeping between tricks. Hot chow was brought up at dusk, and we prayed silently that we wouldn’t have to move out before morning. It was a cold, wet bitch of a night, and we were warm and comfortable and very tired. At seven p.m. Misa sent for me and drearily I trudged to the C.P., knowing damn well what to expect. It was worse than I’d imagined: we were going to attack Bonn during the night.
Misa briefed the squad leaders carefully, and I liked the assignment less and less. Soberly, I walked back to my bunkhouse and called the men together for the bad news. The tired faces grew still as I talked, and I sensed the flicker of expression behind the noncommittal eyes. It’s a dirty assignment. No one knows what lies ahead in Bonn or what kind of trouble awaits us. All that is certain is there will be trouble. The platoon’s objective is a triangular chunk of the city, a triangle of apartment houses and business buildings bounded by three broad streets. We take the triangle and hold it—that’s what Misa said. We’ll set up four strong points, two of which are my responsibility because I now have the largest squad. (There are eight men in my squad; six in the other squads.)
It’s dark now, a black night, and we’re waiting for the kickoff. There has been no talk
ing in the bunkhouse for several hours. We hug the fire, and eat, and say nothing. Some of the men started to write letters, brief and labored and broken by many long pauses. Finally they stopped and put them away unfinished, or crumpled them up and threw them in the fire. What is there to say now?
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’m beginning to hanker for a world less exclusively masculine.”
I think this is March 9.
I know we are in Bonn, and I know, too, that in a short time I’m going to be very drunk. Even now I feel no pain.
Last night we crept through thin, raining blackness and entered a ghost city. Guns thundered on the other side of Bonn, and we could see the glare of shells and houses burning crimson against the dark sky. But where we passed was only stale destruction and silence and the smell of old death. And the skin crawled cold on our backs because we knew there were snipers hidden in the gutted buildings, watching us, waiting.
We parted from the rest of the platoon at the apex of the triangle and set out to establish our two strong points. Ruins and rabble choked the streets, and twice we lost our way, mistaking the raw gap where a building had once stood for the street turning we sought.
Bonn was our first city, the first time we’d tackled the job of clearing buildings five and six stories high, the first time we’d seen at close hand what war could do to a large city. There didn’t seem to be much left of it, although most of the damage had been done a while ago. Many of the buildings showed evidence of recent care—shell holes boarded up, shattered windows replaced by cardboard, rubble piled neatly by the curb.
Our progress was not silent. In the darkness we bumped into things, stumbled over each other, and cursed and clattered loud enough to wake all Bonn. I capped this burlesque of “carefully on tiptoe stealing” by falling into a bomb crater in the middle of the street and requiring the aid of two men to pull me out. I hadn’t realized the damn things were so hard to climb out of. Then, climbing through a window of the building on the corner, I failed to see the table piled high with household equipment and fell ass over teakettle in a clatter of tinware and glass.
Leaving four men in the corner building, the rest of us moved to an apartment house a block away, smashed an entrance through a boarded-up window, and set up our second post. For the balance of the night we waited and watched. It was cold, a quiet, penetrating cold, and we hung the stiff folds of the living-room rug over our shoulders and huddled together for warmth. There was no furniture in the apartment except a davenport and a dollhouse. In the kitchen was a stove, which we regarded wistfully but dared not light.
Every two hours—at two, four, and six a.m.—I was required to send a contact patrol to our other strong point and thence to the strong point beyond, which was held by another squad. On the uneven hours—one, three, and five a.m.—the neighboring squad sent a contact patrol out to us.
Bill Bowerman and I did the patrols, and on one of them we had a fright that turned our bones to Jell-O. As we left our building we heard tanks nearby and wondered uneasily if they were ours or German. We’d reached the middle of the block when, with a shattering roar, the tanks turned the corner and came charging down the street. Our eyes raced helplessly for somewhere to hide, but there wasn’t a damn place we could reach in a hurry. A high concrete wall guarded the nearest building, and there was no visible opening in it. We flattened ourselves against it, hoping foolishly that we would be inconspicuous against its creamy whiteness. The tanks were nearly upon us now, and we tensed ourselves. ... Were they ours or German? The question arched in our throats and it was hard to breathe. One tank thundered by ... then another. We hung against the wall, impaled by fear. The third tank approached and we strained to see ... Christ, to see just a little bit! But in the misty dark there was nothing to see, only the blurred shape of a darker darkness hurtling by ... and from it a fragment of voice and a fragment of phrase, “Friggin’ sonofabitch ...” We slumped in exquisite relief, appreciating as never before the incomparable savor of Shakespeare’s tongue.
I’m sure that tank crews felt a sense of easy familiarity with the tools of their trade, but many infantrymen were secretly awed and a little terrified by them: by their forbidding size, their sound, their grim and evil appearance. Even our own tanks affected us this way. We’d grin with silly pride when they lumbered past, and we’d preen foolishly on the rare occasions when we were lucky enough to hitch a ride, but we weren’t at ease on them.
The night ended at last. Rummaging for loot, I found a large swastika flag that had been discreetly hidden away in the attic. I stowed it in my pack: “Souvenir of Bonn, 1945.” We built a tiny fire in the kitchen stove and I made some feeble soup from a dehydrated preparation I found in the cupboard.
The civilians appeared as soon as it was light, emerging from seemingly nowhere like black beetles from an old log when the ax strikes. Most of them came from the “bunkers” —vast subterranean air raid shelters—to which they retreated every night, emerging in the day only to procure food and to inspect the latest bomb damage to their homes. They queued up at the door of the bakery across the street, and we sat in the window and watched them—women, children, and old men, each with a purse in one hand, ration stamps convenient in the other. At seven o’clock the line started to move forward, and within half an hour the bread supply for the day had been sold and the latecomers were turning sadly away.
Our presence in the window was noted, and we were accorded a recognition that varied in quality and degree. We had an amiable conversation with a fourteen-year-old boy who sat on his bicycle and grinned up at us. He said everyone in Bonn was hungry. There was no meat in the city, no butter, no eggs, no milk. The diet was bread; bread and potatoes. I wondered what was on the menu in the Warsaw ghetto the year before last.
When the last customer had gone, the baker stepped out for a stretch and a breath of air. He glanced at our window, appeared to hesitate, and reentered his shop. In a moment he was out again and coming toward us, a paper-wrapped package in his hand. He smiled ingratiatingly and held up the package for our inspection. He wanted to make a deal: a half-pound wedge of marzipan for a pack of cigarettes. I shut my ears to the squeals of outraged conscience and made the swap. We were hungry for something sweet, and I was lousy with extra cigarettes. So both of us were guilty of “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.”
At noon the city was in our hands, completely ours except for mopping-up operations. Our part in the victory had hardly been glorious, but we felt like conquerors nonetheless. We were led to another section of the city, ushered into a vast apartment house and told to make ourselves at home. At once we started the scramble for quilts, mattresses, candles, and drinking stuff, the necessaries of GI housekeeping.
Now I’m going to leave the kitchen where I’ve been writing this. Shorty is waiting for me in his squad’s suite of rooms on the floor below. There’s a piano there, and we have ample supplies of beer and wine. All this day we were pursued by civilians and by displaced persons, most of them drunk, all of them eager to embrace the nearest American. We were not surprised by the ardor of the erstwhile slave laborers, but it was startling to receive moist and fervent kisses from the bearded lips of elderly gentlemen who were unmistakably German. However, since such a display of emotion is always accompanied by the invitation to “have a drink,” we accept the excesses of affection as nonchalantly as possible. And take the drink.
The next day.
We just heard the sobering news that we’re leaving Bonn and moving to a little village, a disciplinary move occasioned by our “unsoldierly and shameful behavior.” Not our behavior: The charge was leveled against the whole regiment. As a matter of fact, G Company—according to the HQ grapevine—was absolved of any blame, a circumstance that puffed us with self-conscious and surprised virtue. But innocent or guilty, we were exiled with the rest of the regiment.
It was a wild night. Or so I’m told. The last thing I remember was my frenzied search for a bathroom somewhere aroun
d midnight I reeled through the lightless hallways, jousting with walls and sudden corners, my need driving me on in whimpers of self-pity. Finally, with a last sob of maudlin despair, I stumbled downstairs to the street dimly located the gutter in front of the house, and unbuttoned in time to save my dignity. But the curbstone—surely a treacherous German device!—rose relentlessly under my feet tilted ... more ... more ... and unbuttoned and unfinished, I staggered irresistibly backward across the sidewalk until my head connected smartly with the brick wall of the building and I sat down very gently. It’s a little dim from there on, but I got to bed somehow.
The celebration in other parts of Bonn was a little more vigorous, involving the pursuit of frauleins and fraus, both the willing and the unwilling, as well as some more serious offenses. One avid Joe hit upon the bright idea of halting passing civilians with a threatening wave of his M-l and relieving them of their jewelry and watches. The last and sobering offense was committed by a drunken soldier who commandeered a civilian car, ran amok in it through the city, and ended his ride by driving it over the curb and up on the sidewalk, killing a small girl.
While the night was still young, a soldier from one of the units downstairs had come in search of me. With a Cheshire cat smirk on his face, he asked if I “wanted some.” I considered gravely for a moment, slowly plodding through the obliquity of this invitation, and finally decided no, I didn’t. My attitude toward sex was not what you’d call lofty, but I couldn’t get interested in some countertossed girl when I’d just discovered a good piano. Further, the piano was handsomely crowned with a full complement of bottles, and Shorty and I had just invented some new and breathtaking harmony for “I Want a Girl.”
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