by Irwin Shaw
The first man they saw was Lieutenant Green, who took one look at them and said, “There are some blankets over there. Roll up and go to sleep. I’ll ask you questions later.”
On the way over to the blankets they passed Shields, the Company Clerk, who had already set up a small desk for himself, made out of two ration boxes, in a ditch under the trees along the edge of the field. “Hey,” Shields said, “we got some mail for you. The first delivery. I nearly sent it back. I thought you guys were missing.”
He dug around in a barracks bag and brought out some envelopes. There was a brown Manila envelope for Noah, addressed in Hope’s handwriting. Noah took it and put it inside the dead man’s shirt he was wearing and picked up three blankets. He and Burnecker walked slowly to a spot under a tree and unrolled the blankets. They sat down heavily and took off the boots that had been given them. Noah opened the Manila envelope. A small magazine fell out. He blinked and started to read Hope’s letter.
“Dearest,” she wrote, “I suppose I ought to explain about the magazine right off. The poem you sent me, the one you wrote in England, seemed too nice to hold just for myself, and I took the liberty of sending it …”
Noah picked up the magazine. On the cover he saw his name. He opened the magazine and peered heavily through the pages. Then he saw his name again and the neat, small lines of verse.
“Beware the heart’s sedition,” he read, “It is not made for war …”
“Hey,” he said, “hey, Burnecker.”
“Yes?” Burnecker had tried to read his mail, but had given up, and was lying on his back under the blankets, staring up at the sky. “What do you want?”
“Hey Burnecker,” Noah said, “I got a poem in a magazine. Want to read it?”
There was a long pause, then Burnecker sat up.
“Of course,” he said. “Hand it over.”
Noah gave Burnecker the magazine, folded back to his poem. He watched Burnecker’s face intently as his friend read the poem. Burnecker was a slow reader and moved his lips as he read. Once or twice he closed his eyes and his head rocked a little, but he finished the poem.
“It’s great,” Burnecker said. He handed the magazine to Noah, seated on the blanket beside him.
“Are you on the level?” Noah asked.
“It’s a great poem,” Burnecker said gravely. He nodded for emphasis. Then he lay back.
Noah looked at his name in print, but the other writing was too small for his eyes at the moment. He put the magazine inside the dead man’s shirt again and lay back under the warm blankets.
Just before he closed his eyes he saw Rickett. Rickett was standing over him and Rickett was shaved clean and had on a fresh uniform. “Oh, Christ,” Rickett said, off in the distance high above Noah, “oh, Christ, we still got the Jew.”
Noah closed his eyes. He knew that later on what Rickett had said would make a great difference in his life, but at the moment all he wanted to do was sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THERE WAS a sign on the side of the road that said “You Are Under Observed Shellfire for the Next One Thousand Yards. Keep an Interval of Seventy-five Yards.”
Michael glanced sideways at Colonel Pavone. But Pavone, in the front seat of the jeep, was reading a paper-covered mystery story he had picked up in a staging area in England while they were waiting to cross the Channel. Pavone was the only man Michael had ever seen who could read in a moving jeep.
Michael stepped on the accelerator and the jeep spurted swiftly down the empty road. On the right there was a bombed-out airdrome, with the skeletons of German planes lying about There was a strip of smoke farther off in front, lying in neat folds over the wheatfields in the bright summer afternoon air. The jeep bounced rapidly over the macadam road to the shelter of a clump of trees, and over a little rise, and the thousand observed yards were crossed.
Michael sighed a little, to himself, and drove more slowly. There was a loud, erratic growling of big guns ahead of them, from the city of Caen, that the British had taken the day before. Just what Colonel Pavone wanted to do in Caen, Michael didn’t know. In his job as a roving Civil Affairs officer, Pavone had orders which permitted him to wander from one end of the front to another, and with Michael driving him, he visited all over Normandy, like a rather sleepy, good-humored tourist, looking at everything, when he wasn’t reading, nodding brightly to the men who were fighting at each particular spot, talking in rapid, Parisian French to the natives, occasionally jotting down notes on scraps of paper. At night Pavone would retire to the deep dugout in the field near Carentan, and type out reports by himself, and send them on some place, but Michael never saw them, and never knew exactly where they were going.
“This book stinks,” Pavone said. He tossed it into the back of the jeep. “A man has to be an idiot to read mystery stories.” He looked around him, with his perky, clown’s grimace. “Are we close?” he asked.
A battery concealed behind a row of farmhouses opened fire. The noise, so near, seemed to vibrate the windshield and Michael had, once again, the expanding, tickling concussion feeling low down in his stomach, that he never seemed to get over when a gun went off nearby.
“Close enough,” Michael said grimly.
Pavone chuckled. “The first hundred wounds are the hardest,” he said.
The son of a bitch, Michael thought, one day he is going to get me killed.
A British ambulance passed them, fast, going back, loaded, bumping cruelly on the rough road. Michael thought for a moment of the wounded in back, gasping as they rolled on the stretchers.
On one side of the road was a burned-out British tank, blackened and gaping, and there was a smell of the dead from it. Every new place you approached, every newly taken town which represented a victory on the maps and over the BBC, had the same smell, sweet, rotting, unvictorious. Michael wished vaguely, as he drove, feeling his nose burn in the strong sun, squinting through his dusty goggles, that he was back on the lumber pile in England.
They came over the brow of a hill. Ahead of them stretched the city of Caen. The British had been trying to take it for a month, and after looking at it for a moment, you wondered why they had been so anxious. Walls were standing, but few houses. Block after block of closely packed stone buildings had been battered and knocked down, and it was the same as far as the eye could reach. Tripe a la mode de Caen, Michael remembered from the menus of French restaurants in New York, and the University of Caen, from a course in Medieval History. British heavy mortars were firing from the jumbled books of the University library at the moment, and Canadian soldiers were crouched over machine guns in the kitchens where the tripe had at other times been so deftly prepared.
They were in the outskirts of the town by now, winding in and out of stone rubble. Pavone signaled Michael to stop, and Michael drew the jeep up along a heavy stone convent wall that ran beside the roadside ditch. There were some Canadians in the ditch and they looked at the Americans curiously.
We ought to wear British helmets, Michael thought nervously. These damn things must look just like German helmets to the British. They’ll shoot first and examine our papers later.
“How’re things?” Pavone was out of the jeep and standing over the ditch, talking to the soldiers there.
“Bloody awful,” said one of the Canadians, a small, dark, Italian-looking man. He stood up in the ditch and grinned. “You going into the town, Colonel?”
“Maybe.”
“There are snipers all over the place,” said the Canadian. There was the whistle of an incoming shell and the Canadians dived into the ditch again. Michael ducked, but he could not get out of the jeep fast enough, anyway, so he merely covered his face jerkily with his hands. There was no explosion. Dud, Michael’s mind registered dully, the brave workers of Warsaw and Prague, filling the casings with sand and putting heroic notes among the steel scraps, “Salute from the anti-fascist munitions workers of Skoda.” Or was that a romantic story from the newspapers and the OWI,
too, and would the shell explode six hours later when everyone had forgotten about it?
“Every three minutes,” the Canadian said bitterly, standing up in the ditch. “We’re back here on rest and every three bleeding minutes we got to hit the ground. That’s the British Army’s notion of a rest area!” He spat.
“Are there mines?” Pavone asked.
“Sure there’re mines,” the Canadian said aggressively. “Why shouldn’t there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?”
He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn. “Where you from, Soldier?” Pavone asked.
“Toronto,” said the soldier. “The next man that tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears.”
There was the whistle again, and again Michael was too slow to get out of the jeep. The Canadian disappeared magically. Pavone merely leaned negligently against the jeep. This time the shell exploded, but it must have been a hundred yards away, because nothing came their way at all. Two guns on the other side of the convent wall fired rapidly again and again, answering.
The Canadian raised himself out of the ditch again. “Rest area,” he said venomously. “I should have joined the bloody American Army. You don’t see any Englishmen around here, do you?” He glared at the broken street and the smashed buildings with hatred flaring from his clouded eyes. “Only Canadians. When it’s tough, hand it to Canada. There isn’t an Englishman who’s got further than the whorehouse in Bayeau.”
“Now …” Pavone began, grinning at this wild inaccuracy.
“Don’t argue with me, Colonel, don’t argue with me,” the man from Toronto said loudly. “I’m too nervous to argue.”
“All right,” Pavone said, smiling, pushing his helmet back, so that it looked like an unmilitary chamber pot over his bushy, burlesque eyebrows. “I won’t argue with you. I’ll see you later.”
“If you don’t get shot,” said the Canadian, “and if I don’t desert in the meantime.”
Pavone waved to him. “Mike,” he said, “I’ll drive now. You sit up in back, and keep your eyes open.”
Michael climbed in back and sat high up on the folded-down jeep top, so that he could fire more easily in all directions. Pavone took the wheel. Pavone always took the most responsible and dangerous position at moments like this.
Pavone waved once more to the Canadian, who didn’t wave back. The jeep growled down the road into town.
Michael blew at the dust in the carbine chamber and took it off safety. He sat with the carbine over his knees and peered ahead of him as Pavone slowly drove down the battered street among the ruins.
Again and again British batteries hidden among the ruins spoke up in fierce, rolling succession. Pavone had to snake in and out to avoid piles of building bricks and stones that blocked the road.
Michael scanned the windows of the still-standing houses. Suddenly it seemed that Caen was composed of windows, with blinds drawn, that miraculously had survived the bombings, the tank fights, the artillery of the Germans and the British. Michael felt naked and insanely vulnerable sitting up so high, going down the empty, broken street, among all the windows, behind any one of which a German sniper might be hiding, babying his rifle, with the fine telescopic lenses, smiling quietly to himself as he waited for the open, foolish jeep to come just a little closer …
I wouldn’t mind being killed, Michael told himself unhappily, suddenly twisting because he thought he heard a window opening behind him. I wouldn’t mind being killed in a battle, in a battle in which I was fighting, but like this, sightseeing with an idiotic ex-circus gambler … Then he knew he was lying to himself. He would mind getting killed, no matter what. There didn’t seem to be much sense to getting killed. The war went on at its own slow, deliberate pace, and if he got himself killed it would make no difference one way or another to anyone but himself, and to his family, perhaps. Whether he was dead or not, at exactly the same moment of the twentieth century the armies would move, the machines in which the real fighting finally took place would destroy each other, the surrender would be signed … Survive, he remembered desperately from the lumber pile, survive, survive …
The batteries crashed all around him. It was hard to imagine the organization, the men telephoning, jotting down numbers on maps, correcting ranges, fiddling with the delicate enormous mechanisms that raised a gun so that it would fire five miles this minute and seven the next, all going on unseen among the cellars of the old town of Caen, and behind ancient garden walls and in the living rooms of Frenchmen who had been plumbers and meatpackers before this and were now dead. How large was Caen, how many people had lived in it, was it like Buffalo, Jersey City, Pasadena?
The jeep went slowly on, with Pavone looking interestedly around him, and Michael feeling increasingly naked in back.
They turned a corner and came to a street of three-story houses which had been badly mauled. Cascades of rubble swept down from the back walls of the houses to the street and there were men and women patiently bent over, high in the ruins, like berry pickers, taking a rag here, a lamp there, a pair of stockings, a cooking pot, out of the thick pile of rubbish which had been their homes, oblivious to the English guns around them, oblivious to the snipers, oblivious to the German guns across the river that were shelling the town, oblivious to everything except that these were their homes and in these torrents of stone and lumber were their possessions, slowly accumulated in the course of their lives.
On the street were wheelbarrows and baby carriages. The gleaners gathered up armloads high in the pile and slid down, balancing their dusty treasures, and put them neatly in the small conveyances. Then, without looking at the Americans who were passing them, or at the occasional Canadian jeep or ambulance that ground by, they would climb methodically up the static torrent and begin digging all over again for some remembered and broken treasure.
As the jeep passed these patient harvesters, Michael forgot for a moment that he might be shot in the small, tender part between his shoulder blades that always seemed ready and about to receive a bullet, or in the throbbing part just under his rib cage where he knew he would be hit if he were hit in front at all. He wanted to stand up and make a speech to the Frenchmen searching the ruins of their homes. “Leave,” he wanted to shout, “flee the town. Nothing you find there is worth being killed for. Those sounds you hear are shells bursting. And when a shell bursts the steel makes no distinction between uniform and flesh, civilians and military. Come back later, when the war has gone by. Your treasures are safe, because no one wants them or can use them.”
But he said nothing, and the jeep slowly went down the street on which, in a tenacious fever of possession, the inhabitants dug high up for silver-framed pictures of grandmothers, for colanders and carving knives, for embroidered bedspreads that had been white before the shells had hit them.
They came into a wide square, deserted now, and open at one end because all the buildings had been leveled completely there. The Orne River was on the other side. Beyond that, Michael knew, the Germans had their lines, and he knew that somewhere across the river there were enemy eyes peering at the slow-moving jeep. He knew that. Pavone understood that too, but Pavone did not increase his speed. What the hell is the bastard proving, Michael thought, and why doesn’t he go prove it by himself?
But no one fired at them, and they went on.
Everything seemed very quiet, even though the guns kept firing quite regularly. The noise of the jeep engine, so familiar after all the days of traveling through the dust and among the convoys and between the shellbursts, no longer made any particular claim on the eardrums. Michael listened carefully for a rustle, a squeak, the turning of a doorknob, the click of a riflebolt, anywhere around him in the dead and broken streets of the old city, and he was sure he would be able to hear such a noise, even if it came at the exact moment that a whole regiment of artillery opened fire within a radius of a hundred yards.
Pavone wound slowly about the c
ity in and out of the strong summer sunlight and the purple French shadows that Michael had known from the paintings of Cezanne and Renoir and Pissarro long before he had ever set foot on the soil of France, Pavone stopped the jeep to look at a street sign that, untouched and municipally proud, named two streets that no longer existed. Pavone moved in a slow, interested way, and Michael divided his time between staring at the thick, healthy, brown neck under the helmet and at the gaping gray sides of the stone buildings from which at any moment his death might arrive.
Pavone started the jeep again and drove thoughtfully down what had once been a main thoroughfare. “I came here for a week-end in 1938,” Pavone said, looking back, “with a friend of mine who produced movies, and two girls from one of his companies.” He shook his head reflectively. “We had a very nice week-end. My friend, his name was Jules, was killed right away in 1940.” Pavone peered at the jagged shopfronts. “I can’t recognize a single street.”
Fantastic, Michael-thought, he is risking my life for the memory of a week-end with two bit players and a dead producer six years ago.
They turned into a street in which there was considerable activity. There were trucks drawn up alongside a church and three or four young Frenchmen with FFI armbands patrolling along an iron fence and some Canadians helping wounded civilians into one of the trucks. Pavone stopped the jeep in a little square in front of the church. The pavement was piled high with old valises, wicker hampers, carpet-bags, net market sacks stuffed with linen, sheets and blankets in which were rolled an assortment of household belongings.
A young girl in a light-blue dress, very clean and starched, went by on a bicycle. She was very pretty, with lively blue-black hair piled over the bright dress. Michael looked at her curiously. She stared at him coldly, hatred and contempt very plain in her face. She is blaming me, Michael thought, for the bombings, for the fact that her house is down, her father dead perhaps, her lover God knows where. The girl flashed on, her pretty skirt billowing past the ambulance and the shell-marked stone. Michael would have liked to follow her, talk to her, convince her … Convince her of what? That he was not just an iron-hearted, leering soldier, admiring pretty legs even in the death of a city, that he understood her tragedy, that she must not judge him so swiftly, in the flashing of an eye, must have mercy in her heart for him, and understanding, just as she must expect mercy and understanding in return …