by Irwin Shaw
“AttenSHUN! Company, disMISS!”
Captain Colclough had not been seen all day. Perhaps he was below decks preparing another speech to signalize their arrival in France, perhaps he was dead. And Lieutenant Green, who had never made a speech in his life, was pouring sulfanilamide into wounds and covering the dead and grinning at the living and reminding them to keep the barrels of their rifles covered against the water that was spraying over the sides …
At four-thirty in the afternoon, the Navy finally got the engines working as Lieutenant Green had promised, and fifteen minutes later, the Landing Craft Infantry slid onto the beach. The beach looked busy and safe, with hundreds of men rushing back and forth, carrying ammunition boxes, piling rations, rolling wire, bringing back wounded, digging in for the night among the charred wrecks of barges and bulldozers and splintered fieldpieces. The sound of small-arms fire was quite distant by now, on the other side of the bluff that overlooked the beach. Occasionally a mine went off, and occasionally a shell struck the sand, but it was clear that, for the time being, the beach was secured.
Captain Colclough appeared on deck as the Landing Craft nosed into the shallow water. He had a pearl-handled forty-five in the fancy leather holster at his side. It was a gift from his wife, he had once told somebody in the Company, and he wore it dashingly, low on his thigh, like a sheriff on the cover of a Western magazine.
An Amphibious Engineer Corporal was waving the craft onto the crowded beach. He looked weary, but at ease, as though he had spent most of his life on the coast of France under shell and machine-gun fire.
The ramp went down on the side of the Landing Craft, and Colclough started to lead his Company ashore. Only one of the ramps worked. The other had been torn away when the boat was hit.
Colclough went to the end of the ramp. It led down into the soft sand, and when the waves came in it was under almost three feet of water. Colclough stopped, one foot in the air. Then he pushed back onto the ramp.
“This way, Captain,” called the Engineer Corporal.
“There’s a mine down there,” Colclough said. “Get those men …” He pointed to the rest of the squad of Engineers, who were working with a bulldozer, making a road up across the dunes, “… to come over here and sweep this area.”
“There’s no mine, there, Captain,” said the Corporal wearily.
“I said I saw a mine, Corporal,” Colclough shouted.
The Naval Lieutenant who was in command of the vessel pushed his way down the ramp. “Captain,” he said anxiously, “will you please get your men off this vessel? I’ve got to get away from here. I don’t want to spend the night on this beach, and my engines aren’t strong enough to pull a sick whore off a pisspot. We’ll never get off if we hang around another ten minutes.”
“There’s a mine at the end of the ramp,” Colclough said loudly.
“Captain,” said the Engineer, “three Companies have come off barges right in this spot and nobody got blown up.”
“I gave you a direct order,” Colclough said. “Go over and get those men to come here and sweep this area.”
“Yes, Sir,” said the Engineer, shrugging. He went toward the bulldozer, past a row of sixteen corpses, laid out neatly, in blankets.
“If you don’t get off this boat right away,” the Naval Lieutenant said, “the United States Navy is going to lose one Landing Craft Infantry.”
“Lieutenant,” Colclough said coldly, “you pay attention to your business, and I’ll pay attention to mine.”
“If you’re not off in ten minutes,” the Lieutenant said, retreating up the ramp, “I am going to take you and your whole goddamned company out to sea. You’ll have to join the Marines to see dry land again.”
“This entire matter,” said Colclough, “will be reported through proper channels, Lieutenant.”
“Ten minutes,” the Lieutenant shouted violently over his shoulder, making his way back to his shattered bridge.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Green said, in his high voice, from halfway up the crowded ramp, where the men were lined up, peering doubtfully into the dirty green water, on which abandoned Mae Wests, wooden machine-gun ammunition boxes and cardboard K ration cartons were floating soddenly, “Captain,” said Lieutenant Green, “I’ll be glad to go ahead. As long as the Corporal said it was all right … Then the men can follow in my footsteps and …”
“I am not going to lose any of my men on this beach,” Colclough said. “Stay where you are.” He gave a slight, decisive hitch to the pearl-handled revolver that his wife had given him. The holster, Noah observed, had a little rawhide fringe on the bottom of it, like the holsters that come with cowboy suits little boys get at Christmas.
The Engineer Corporal was coming back across the beach now, with his Lieutenant. The Lieutenant was a tall, enormous man without a helmet. He was not carrying any weapons. With his windburned, red, sweating face and his huge, dirt-blackened hands hanging out of the sleeves of his rolled-back fatigues, he didn’t look like a soldier, but like a foreman on a road gang back home.
“Come on, Captain,” the Engineer Lieutenant said. “Come on ashore.”
“There’s a mine in here,” Colclough said. “Get your men over here and sweep the area.”
“There’s no mine,” said the Lieutenant.
“I say I saw a mine.”
The men behind the Captain listened uneasily. Now that they were so close to the beach it was intolerable to remain on the craft on which they had suffered so much that day, and which still made a tempting target as it creaked and groaned with the swish of the rollers coming in off the sea. The beach, with its dunes and foxholes and piles of material, looked secure, institutional, homelike, as nothing that floated and was ruled by the Navy could look. They stood behind Colclough, staring at his back, hating him.
The Engineer Lieutenant started to open his mouth to say something to Colclough. Then he looked down and saw the pearl-handled revolver at the Captain’s belt. He closed his mouth smiling a little. Then, expressionlessly, without a word, he walked into the water, with his shoes and leggings still on, and stamped heavily back and forth, up to the ramp and around it, not paying any attention to the waves that smashed at his thighs. He covered every inch of beach that might possibly have been crossed by any of the men, stamping expressionlessly up and down. Then, without saying another word to Colclough, he stamped back out of the water, his broad back bowed over a little from weariness, and walked heavily back to where his men were running the bulldozer over a huge chunk of concrete with an iron rail sticking out of it.
Colclough wheeled suddenly from his position at the bottom of the ramp, but none of the men was smiling. Then Colclough turned and stepped onto the soil of France, delicately, but with dignity, and one by one his Company followed him, through the cold sea water and the floating debris of the first day of the great battle for the continent of Europe.
The company did not fight at all the first day. They dug in and ate their supper K ration (veal loaf, biscuit, vitamin crowded chocolate, all of it with the taste and texture of the factory in it, denser and more slippery than natural food can be), and cleaned their rifles and watched the new companies coming into the beach with the amused superiority of veterans for their jitteriness at the occasional shells and their exaggerated tenderness about mines. Colclough had gone off looking for Regiment, which was inland somewhere, although no one knew just where.
The night was dark, windy, wet and cold. The Germans sent over planes in the last twilight and the guns of the ships lying offshore and the anti-aircraft guns on the beach crowded the sky with flaming steel lines. The shrapnel dropped with soft, deadly plunks into the sand beside Noah, while he stared up helplessly, wondering if there ever was going to be a time when he would not be in danger of his life.
They were awakened at dawn, at which time Colclough returned from Regiment. He had got lost during the night and had wandered up and down the beach looking for the Company, until he had been shot at by a ne
rvous Signal Corps sentry. Then he had decided that it was too dangerous to keep moving about and had dug himself a hole and bedded himself down until it was light enough, so that he would not be shot by his own men. He looked haggard and weary, but he shouted orders in rapid-fire succession and led the way up the bluff, with the Company spread out behind him.
Noah had a cold by then, and was sneezing and blowing his nose wetly. He was wearing long woolen underwear, two pairs of wool socks, a suit of OD’s, a field jacket, and over it all the chemically treated fatigues, which were stiff and wind-resistant, but even so he could feel his chilled bones grinding within his flesh as he made his way through the heavy sand past the smoke-blackened and ruptured German pillboxes and the dead gray uniforms, still unburied, and the torn German cannon, still maliciously pointed toward the beach.
Trucks and jeeps pulling trailers loaded with ammunition bumped and skidded past the Company, and a newly arrived tank platoon clanked up the rise, looking dangerous and invincible. MP’s were waving traffic on, Engineers were building roads, a bulldozer was scraping out a runway for an airfield, jeep ambulances, with wounded on stretchers across the top, were sliding down the rutted road between the taped off minefields to the clearing stations in the lee of the bluff. In a wide field, pocketed with shell holes, Graves Registration troops were burying American dead. There was an air of orderly, energetic confusion about the entire scene that reminded Noah of the time when he was a small boy in Chicago and had watched the circus throwing up its tents and arranging its cages and living quarters.
When he got to the top, of the bluff Noah turned around and looked at the beach, trying to fix it in his mind. Hope will want to know what it looked like, and her father, too, when I get back, Noah thought. Somehow, planning what he was going to tell them at some distant, beautiful, unwarlike day made it seem more uncertain to Noah that that day would arrive and he would be alive to celebrate it, dressed in soft flannels and a blue shirt, with a glass of beer in his hand, under a maple tree, perhaps, on a bright Sunday afternoon, boring his relatives, he thought with a grin, with the long-winded veterans’ stories of the Great War.
The beach, strewn with the steel overflow of the factories of home, looked like a rummage basement in some store for giants. Close offshore, just beyond the old tramp steamers they were sinking now for a breakwater, destroyers were standing, firing over their heads at strong-points inland.
“That’s the way to fight a war,” Burnecker said beside Noah. “Real beds, coffee is being served below, Sir, you may fire when ready, Gridley. We would have joined the Navy, Ackerman, if we had as much brains as a jackrabbit.”
“Come on, move!” It was Rickett, calling from behind them, the same, snarling, Sergeant’s voice, which no sea voyage, no amount of killing, would ever change.
“My choice,” Burnecker said, “for the man I would like most to be left alone with on a desert island.”
They turned and plodded inland, leaving the coast behind them.
They marched for a half hour and then it became evident that Colclough was lost again. He stopped the Company at a crossroad where two MP’s were directing traffic from a deep hole they had dug to one side, with just their helmets and shoulders sticking out above ground level. Noah could see Colclough gesturing angrily and he could hear the violence in the Captain’s voice as he yelled at the MP’s, who were shaking their heads in ignorance. Then Colclough got out his map again and yelled at Lieutenant Green, who came up to help.
“Just our luck,” Burnecker said wagging his head, “we got a Captain who couldn’t find a plow in a ballroom.”
“Get back,” they heard Colclough shout at Green. “Get back where you belong. I know what I’m doing!”
He turned into a lane between high, gleaming green hedges, and the Company wound slowly after him. It was darker between the hedges, and somehow much quieter, although the guns were still going, and the men peered uneasily at the dense, intertwined leaves, made for ambush.
Nobody said anything. They trudged on both sides of the damp road, trying to hear a rustle, the click of a rifle bolt, a whisper of German, over the everlasting infantry squash squash of their shoes, heavily scuffing in the thick clay of the lane.
Then the road opened up into a field and the sun broke through the clouds for awhile and they felt better. An old woman was grimly milking her cows in the middle of the field, attended by a young girl with bare feet. The old woman sat on a stool, next to her weathered farm wagon, between whose shafts stood a huge, shaggy horse. The old woman pulled slowly and defiantly at the teats of the smooth-shouldered, clean-looking cow. Overhead the shells came and went and occasionally, from what seemed like a very short distance, there was the excited rattle of machine guns, but the old woman never looked up. The girl with her was not more than sixteen years old, and was wearing a tattered green sweater. She had a red ribbon in her hair and she was interested in the soldiers.
“I think maybe I’ll stop off right here,” Burnecker said, “and help with the chores. Tell me how the war comes out, Ackerman.”
“Keep moving, Soldier,” said Noah. “Next war we’ll all be in the Services of Supply.”
“I love that girl,” Burnecker said. “She reminds me of Iowa. Ackerman, do you know any French?”
“A votre santé,” Noah said. “That’s all I know.”
“A votre santé,” Burnecker shouted to the girl, grinning and waving his rifle, “à votre santé, Baby, and the same to your old lady.”
The girl waved back at him, smiling.
“She’s crazy about me,” Burnecker said. “What did I say to her?”
“To your health.”
“Hell,” said Burnecker, “that’s too formal. I want to tell her something intimate.”
“Je t’adore,” said Noah, remembering it from some echo in his memory.
“What does that mean?”
“I adore you.”
“That’s more intimate,” Burnecker said. He was near the end of the field now, and he turned and took off his helmet and bowed low, with a gallant sweep of the large metal pot. “Oh, Baby,” he called thunderously, the helmet light and dashing in his huge, farmer’s hand, his boyish, sunburned face grave and loving, “Oh, Baby, je t’adore, je t’adore …”
The girl smiled and waved again. “Je t’adore, mon Americain,” she called.
“This is the greatest country on the face of the earth,” Burnecker said.
“Come on, Hot Pants,” Rickett said, prodding him with a bony, sharp thumb.
“Wait for me,” Burnecker howled across the green fields, across the backs of the cows so much like the cows in his native Iowa. “Wait for me, Baby, I don’t know how to say it in French, wait for me, I’ll be back …”
The old lady on the stool, without looking up, brought back her hand and smacked the girl across her buttocks, sharply. The stinging, mean sound carried to the end of the field. The girl looked down and began to cry. She ran around to the other side of the cart to hide her face.
Burnecker sighed. He put on his helmet and went through the break in the hedge to the next field.
Three hours later Colclough found Regiment and a half hour after that they were in contact with the German Army.
Six hours later, Colclough managed to get the Company surrounded.
The farmhouse, in which what was left of the Company defended itself, seemed almost to have been built for the purposes of siege. It had thick stone walls, narrow windows, a slate roof that would not catch fire, huge, rock-like timbers holding up the floors and ceilings, a pump in the kitchen, and a deep, safe cellar where the wounded could be put out of harm’s way.
It could be depended upon to stand up for a long time even against artillery. So far the Germans had not used anything heavier than mortars on it, and the thirty-five men who had fallen back on the house felt, for the moment, fairly strong. They fired from the windows, in hurried bursts at the momentarily seen figures among the hedges and the outhouses sur
rounding the main building.
In the cellar, in the light of a candle, lay four wounded and one dead, among the cider barrels. The French family whose farm this was, and who had retired to the cellar at the first shot, sat on boxes, staring silently down at the stricken men who had come so far to die in their basement. There was a man of fifty who limped from a wound he had received in the last war at the Marne, and his wife, a thin, lanky woman of his own age, and their two daughters, aged twelve and sixteen, both very ugly, and both numb with fear, who cowered between the doubtful protection of the barrels.