by Irwin Shaw
The girl disappeared.
“Let’s go in,” said Pavone.
The inside of the church was very dark after the brilliant sunlight outside. Michael smelled it first. Mixed with the slight, rich odor of old candles and incense burned in centuries of devotion, there was a smell of barnyard and the sick smell of age and medicine and dying.
He blinked, standing at the door, and listened to the scuffle of children’s feet on the great stone floor, now strewn with straw. High overhead there was a large, gaping shell hole. The sunlight streamed down through it, like a powerful amber searchlight, piercing the religious gloom.
Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, he saw that the church was very crowded. The inhabitants of the city, or those who had not yet fled and not yet died, had assembled here, numbly looking for protection under God, waiting to be taken away behind the lines. The first impression was that he was in a gigantic religious home for the aged. Stretched out on the floor on litters and on blankets and on straw heaps were what seemed like dozens of wrinkled, almost-evaporated, yellow-faced, fragile octogenarians. They rubbed their translucent hands numbly over their throats; they pushed feebly at blanket ends; they mumbled with animal squeaky sounds; they stared, hot-eyed and dying, at the men who stood over them; they wet the floor because they were too old to move and too far gone to care; they scratched at grimy bandages that covered wounds they had received in the young men’s war that had raged in their city for a month; they were dying of cancer, tuberculosis, hardening of the arteries, nephritis, gangrene, malnourishment, senility; and the common smell of their disease and their helplessness and their age, collected together like this in the once-shelled church, made Michael gasp a little as he regarded them, lit here and there in a mellow and holy beam of sunlight, dancing with dust motes and shimmering over the wasted, fiercely hating faces. Among them, between the straw paillasses and the stained litters, between the cancer cases and the old men with broken hips who had been bedridden for five years before the British came, between the old women whose great grandchildren had already been killed at Sedan and Lake Chad and Oran, among them ran the children, playing, weaving in and out, swiftly and gaily shining for a moment in the golden beam from the German shell hole, then darting like glittering water flies into the rich pools of purple shadow, the high tinkle of their laughter skimming over the heads of the gravebound ancients on the stone floor.
This was the war, Michael thought, this was finally the war. No captains hoarsely shouting among the guns, no men flinging themselves on bayonets for great causes, no communiques or promotions, merely the very old, the brittle-boned, toothless, bleached, deaf, suffering, sexless very old, gathered from the ill-smelling corners among the ruins and put carelessly down on a stone floor to wet themselves and die among the flashing feet of children playing tag, while the guns spoke outside in their own energetic afternoon rhetoric full of windy meanings, echoing slogans that seemed great truths three thousand miles away. The very old lay, outside the reach of all slogans, moaning their dumb animal moans among the dancing feet of the children, waiting for a Quartermaster Captain to wheedle an extra three trucks away from carrying ammunition for a couple of days, so that they could be transported with all their accumulated agonies, to another broken town, and put down and forgotten where they would not interfere with the fighting.
“Well, Colonel,” Michael said, “what has Civil Affairs to say about this?”
Pavone smiled gently at Michael and touched his arm softly, as though he realized, out of his greater age and deeper experience, that Michael felt somehow guilty for this and must be forgiven for his sharpness because of it. “I think,” he began, “we had better get out of here. The British got this, let them worry about it …”
Two children came up to Pavone, and stood in front of him. One was a tiny, frail four-year-old girl, with large, shy eyes. She held onto the hand of her brother, two or three years older than she, but even more shy.
“Please,” the little girl said, in French, “may we have some sardines?”
“No, no!” The little boy pulled his hand away from hers angrily and slapped her harshly on the wrist. “Not sardines. Not from these. Biscuits from these. It was the others who gave sardines.”
Pavone grinned at Michael, then bent down and gently hugged the little girl, to whom the difference between Fascism and Democracy was merely that from one children might expect sardines and from the other hardtack. The little one fought back tears. “Of course,” he said in French. “Of course.” He turned to Michael. “Mike,” he said, “go get a K ration.”
Michael went outside, grateful for the sunlight and the fresh smell, and picked up a K ration from the jeep. Back in the church he looked for Pavone. As he stood there, the cardboard box in his hand, a seven-year-old boy, with a wild mop of hair and a tough grin, skidded up to him and said pleadingly and at the same-time impudently, “Cigarette, cigarette for Papa?”
Michael reached into his pocket. But a thick-set woman of about sixty bustled over to the little boy and grabbed his shoulders. “No,” she said to Michael. “No. Do not give it to him.” She turned on the boy with grandmotherly indignation. “No!” she said angrily. “Do you wish to stunt your growth?”
A shell landed in the next street and Michael did not hear the boy’s reply. He wriggled out of his grandmother’s grasp and danced away between the aisles of old men and women.
The grandmother shook her head. “Wild,” she told Michael, “these days they are impossibly wild.” She bowed gravely and moved off.
Michael saw Pavone, squatting, talking to the girl and her brother. Michael went over to Pavone, smiling a little. Pavone gave the little girl the K ration and kissed her gently on her forehead. The two children backed away gravely and slipped off to a niche on the other side of the church, where they could open their treasure and sample it in peace.
Michael and Pavone went outside. At the door of the church Michael could not help turning around and taking a last look at the high-vaulted, evil-smelling, lavender-shadowed interior. An old man, lying near the door, was waving one hand feebly in the air and no one was paying any attention to him; and far off, infinitesimal and frail at the other side of the church, the two children, the boy and the girl, were crouched over the K ration box, alternating at nibbling at the chocolate bar they had found there.
Outside, they climbed silently into the jeep, with Pavone at the wheel again. Standing next to the jeep was a squat, sixty-year-old Frenchman, dressed in a blue denim jacket and ragged, baggy pants, patched twenty times. He saluted Pavone and Michael, in a quivering French military salute. Pavone saluted the old man, who had a bristling yellowed moustache and who looked a little like Clemenceau, a large, fierce head under his workingman’s cap.
The Frenchman went around to Pavone and shook his hand, then shook Michael’s hand. “Americans,” he said, in slow English. “Liberty, fraternity, equality.”
Oh, God, Michael thought sourly, a patriot. After the church, he was not in the mood for patriots.
“I was in America seven times,” said the old man, in French. “I once used to speak English like a native. But I have forgotten it all.”
A shell landed in the next street and Michael wished Pavone would start. But Pavone leaned easily over the wheel, listening to the Frenchman.
“I was a sailor,” said the Frenchman. “Merchant Marine. I visited the cities of New York, Brooklyn, New Orleans, Baltimore, San Francisco, Seattle, North Carolina. I still can read English fluently.”
He wavered back and forth a little as he spoke and Michael decided that he was drunk. He had a strange yellow look in his eyes and his mouth quivered under his wet and drooping moustache.
“In the first war,” the Frenchman went on, “I was torpedoed off Bordeaux. I spent six hours in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.” He nodded briskly, looking more drunk than ever.
Michael shuffled his feet impatiently, hoping to show Pavone that he thought they ought
to get out of there. Pavone did not move. He listened interestedly to the Frenchman, who was patting the jeep fondly, as though it were a fine, proud horse.
“In the last war,” said the Frenchman, “I volunteered for the Merchant Marine again.” Michael had heard this before. Frenchmen describing the battles of 1940, the fall of France, as the last war. This makes the third one, then, Michael computed automatically. Too many, even for Europeans. “I was too old, they told me at the bureau,” the Frenchman went on angrily, stroking the jeep hood, “they would call me if affairs became desperate.” He laughed sardonically. “Affairs never became desperate enough for the young men at the bureau. They never called me.” He looked vaguely around him, at the sunlit church and the piles of shabby luggage in front of it, and the rubble-strewn square and bombed-out homes. “My son, however, was in the Navy. He was killed at Oran, by the British. Oran, in Africa. I hold no ill will. A war is a war.”
Pavone touched the man’s arm delicately in sympathy.
“He was my only son,” the Frenchman went on, calmly. “I used to describe to him the cities of San Francisco and New York when he was a small boy.” The Frenchman suddenly rolled up his left sleeve. There was something tattooed on his forearm. “Observe,” he said. Michael leaned forward. On the old, powerful arm, over the bulging muscle, there was a green, tattooed picture of the Woolworth Building, rearing up above romantic clouds. “The Woolworth Building, in the city of New York,” said the ex-seaman proudly. “I was immensely impressed.”
Michael leaned back and made a small tapping noise with his foot to try to get Pavone to move. Pavone did not move.
“A beautiful representation,” said Pavone warmly to the Frenchman.
The Frenchman nodded and rolled down his sleeve.
“I am enchanted that you finally came,” said the French-. man, “the Americans.”
“Thank you,” said Pavone.
“When the first American planes flew over, even though they dropped bombs on us, I stood up on my roof and waved. And now you are here, in person. I also understand,” he said delicately, “why you took so long in coming.”
“Thank you,” said Pavone again.
“A war is not a matter of minutes, no matter what some people say. And each war takes longer than the one before it. It is the simple arithmetic of history.” The Frenchman nodded vigorously in emphasis. “I do not deny it was not pleasant waiting. You have no idea what the Germans are like, to live under day after day.” The Frenchman whipped out an old, tattered leather wallet and flipped it open. “All during the occupation, from the first day, I carried this.” He showed the wallet to Pavone and Michael bent forward to look at it. There was a waded piece of tricolor bunting from a penny flag under the yellow celluloid cover in the wallet. “If they had found it on me,” the Frenchman said, regarding the sleazy muslin, “they would have killed me. But I carried it, four years.”
He sighed, and put the wallet away.
“I have just come back from the front,” he announced. “Someone told me, on the bridge across the river, in the middle, between the British and the Germans, there is an old woman lying. Go and see if it is your wife. I went and looked.” He paused and stared up at the damaged church steeple. “It was my wife.”
He stood in silence, stroking the jeep. Neither Pavone nor Michael said anything. “Forty years,” the Frenchman said. “We were married forty years. We had our ups and downs. We lived on the other side of the river. I suppose she forgot a parrot or a hen and decided she must go look for it and the Germans machine-gunned her. Machine gun for a sixty-year-old woman. They are inconceivable, the Germans. She is lying there, with her dress up over her legs and her head down. The Canadians wouldn’t let me go out to get her. I will have to wait until the battle is over, they told me. She has on her good dress.” He began to cry. The tears ran into his moustache, and he swallowed them wetly. “Forty years. I saw her a half hour ago.” He took out his wallet again, crying. “Even so,” he said fiercely, “even so …” He opened the wallet and kissed the tricolor bunting under its celluloid cover, kissed it passionately, insanely. “Even so.”
He shook his head and put the wallet away. He patted the jeep once more. He moved off down the street, vaguely, past the torn iron of the shopfronts and the carelessly piled stones, moved off without saluting or saying good-bye.
Michael looked after him, feeling his face rigid and aching.
Pavone sighed and started the jeep. They drove slowly toward the outskirts of town. Michael still watched the windows, but without fear, somehow confident that there would be no snipers now.
They passed the convent wall, but the boy from Toronto was gone. Pavone stepped hard on the accelerator and they sped out of town. It was lucky they had not stopped before the convent, because they hadn’t gone three hundred yards when they heard the explosion behind them. There was a whirling cloud of dust squarely in the road where they had been.
Pavone turned to look, too. Michael and he glanced at each other. They did not smile and they did not speak. Pavone turned back and hunched over the wheel.
They crossed the marked thousand yards, where the road was under observed shellfire, without incident. Pavone stopped the jeep and signaled for Michael to come up and take the wheel.
As he climbed over the seat Michael halted and looked back. There was no sign that a city, ruined or unruined, lay over the horizon.
He started the jeep, feeling better to be at the wheel, and they drove slowly without speaking through the yellow afternoon sun toward the American lines.
A half mile farther on they saw troops coming up on both sides of the road, in single file, and they heard a strange, skirling noise. A moment later they saw that it was a battalion of infantry, Scotch-Canadian, each company led by a bagpiper, walking slowly toward a road that led off into wheatfields to the left. Other troops could be seen, just their heads and weapons showing above the wheat, marching slowly down toward the river.
The noise of the bagpipes sounded wild and comic and pathetic in the open, deserted country. Michael drove very slowly toward the approaching troops. They were walking heavily, sweating dark stains into their heavy battle dress, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers and boxes of machine-gun ammunition. In front of the first Company, just behind the bagpiper, strode the Commanding Officer, a large-red-faced young Captain, with a swooping red moustache. He carried a small swagger stick and he stepped out strongly in front of his troops, as though the crying, thin music of the pipes were a joyous march.
The officer grinned when he saw the jeep, and waved his swagger stick. Michael looked past him to the men. Their faces were strained under the sweat, and no one was smiling. Their battle dress and equipment were fresh and neat and Michael knew that these, men were going into their first battle. They walked silently, already weary, already overburdened, with a blank, wrenched look on their crimson faces, as though they were listening to something, not to the pipes or to the distant rumble of the guns, or the weary scuffle of their boots on the road, but to some inner debate, deep within them, that reached them thinly and to which they had to pay close attention if they wished to catch its meaning.
But as the jeep came abreast of the officer he grinned widely, a twenty-year-old athlete’s, white-toothed grin under the ludicrous and charming moustache, and boomed out, in a voice that could be heard for a hundred yards, although the jeep was only five feet from him, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”
“Good luck,” Pavone said, in the simple, not overloud, well-modulated tone of the man who is going back from the fighting and can now control his voice, “good luck to you all. Captain.”
The Captain waved his stick again, in a jerky, friendly gesture, and the jeep slowly rolled past the rest of the Company, brought up at the rear by the Medic, with the red crosses on his helmet, and a young, listening, thoughtful look on his face, and the aid kits in his hands.
The music of the bagpipes died down into fragile, gull-like echoes as the Compan
y turned off into the wheatfield and wound deeper and deeper into it, like armed men marching purposefully and regretfully into a rustling, golden sea.
Michael woke up, listening to the growing mutter of the guns. He was depressed. He smelled the damp, loamy odor of the foxhole in which he slept, and the acid, dusty smell of the pup-tent dark over his head. He lay rigid, in the complete darkness, too tired to move, warm under the blankets, listening to the sound of guns that was coming closer each moment. The usual air raid, he thought, hating the Germans, every goddamn night.
The sound of the guns was very close now and there was the soft deadly hiss of shrapnel falling near by and the plump, solid sounds as the steel fragments hit the earth. Michael reached in back of him and got his helmet and put it over his groin. He pulled his barracks bag, which was lying next to him in the hole, stuffed with extra longjohns and pants and shirts, and rolled it on top of him, on his belly and chest. Then he crossed his arms over his head, covering his face with the warm smell of his flesh and the sweaty smell of the long sleeves of the wool underwear. Now, he thought, as this nightly routine which he had worked out in the weeks in Normandy was completed, now they can hit me. He had figured out the various parts of himself which were most vulnerable and most precious, and they were protected. If he got hit in the legs or arms it would not be so serious.