by Irwin Shaw
Abstractly, squinting out in front of him through the hedge toward the enemy’s lines, shaking his head a little to clear his ears of the shock of the percussion of the bombs, he felt sorry for the Germans behind the bloody imaginary fall line of the Air Forces. On the ground himself, armed with a weapon that carried a two-ounce projectile a pitiful thousand yards, he felt a common hatred for the impersonal killers above him, a double self-pity for those helpless men cowering in holes, blasted and sought out by the machine age with thousand-pound explosives hurled from the impregnable distance of five miles. He looked at Burnecker beside him and he could tell from the pained grimace on the thin young face that something of the same thoughts were passing through his friend’s brain.
“God,” Burnecker whispered, “why don’t they stop? That’s enough, that’s enough. What do they want to do, make mince pie?”
By now, the German anti-aircraft guns had been silenced and the planes wheeled calmly overhead, as safely as though they were conducting maneuvers over Wright Field.
Then there was a whistling around him, a roaring and upheaval of the green earth. Burnecker grabbed him and dragged him down into the hole. They crouched together, as far down as they could get, their legs jumbled together, their helmets touching, as bomb after bomb hit around them, deafening them, covering them with a pelting shower of earth, stones and broken twigs.
“Oh, the bastards,” Burnecker was saying, “oh, the murdering Air Force bastards.”
They heard screams on all sides of them and the cries of the wounded. But it was impossible to get out of the hole while the bombs poured down in a rattling, closely spaced barrage. Overhead, Noah could hear the steady, droning, business-like roar of the planes, untouched, untouchable, going calmly about their business, the men in them confident of their skill, pleased, no doubt, for the time being, with the results they imagined they were achieving.
“Oh, the miserable, easy-living, extra-pay murderers,” Burnecker was saying. “They won’t leave one of us alive.”
This will be the final thing the Army will do to me, Noah thought, it will kill me itself. It won’t trust the Germans to do the job. They just mustn’t tell Hope how it happened. She mustn’t ever know the Americans did it to me …
“Flying pay!” Burnecker was shouting by now, in between explosions, his voice wild with hatred. “Everybody’s a Sergeant, everybody a Colonel! The Norden bombsight! The wonder of modern science! We should’ve expected it! Christ, they even bombed Switzerland one day! Precision bombing! The bastards can’t even tell one country from another, how the hell can you expect them to tell one army from the next!”
He was shouting it directly into Noah’s face, four inches away, spraying saliva over Noah in his rage. Noah knew that Burnecker was shouting and carrying on like this to keep them both sane, both low in the hole, both clutching onto a last hope and shred of life.
“They don’t care,” Burnecker shouted. “They don’t care who the hell they hit. They got a standing order to drop a hundred tons of bombs a day. They don’t care if they drop it on their own mothers! The goddamn navigator probably went out and got clap last night and he’s a little jittery this morning and wants to get back to sick call early, so he pushed the button a couple of minutes in advance. What the hell, it’s another mission, no matter what. Only five more to go, he’ll be back home in another month, anyway … I swear to God, the next guy I see with wings on his chest I’m going to go up and kill him with my bare hands. I swear to God …”
Then, miraculously, the bombing stopped. The noise of engines still continued above them, but somehow, a correction had been made, and the planes were moving on to other targets.
Burnecker slowly stood up and looked out. “Oh, God,” he said brokenly, at what he saw.
Trembling, feeling his knees weak beneath him, Noah began to stand, too. But Burnecker pushed him down.
“Stay down,” Burnecker said harshly. “Let the Medics clean ’em up. They’re mostly replacements anyway. Stay where you are.” He pushed Noah forcibly back and down. “I bet those bloody idiots’ll come back and start dropping things on us again right away. Don’t get caught out in the open. Noah …” He bent beside Noah and gripped Noah’s arms passionately with fierce hands. “Noah, we have to stay together. You and me. All the time. We’re lucky for each other. We take care of each other. Nothing’ll ever happen to either of us if we hang onto each other. The whole damn Company’ll die, but you and me, we’ll come out … we’ll come out …”
He shook Noah violently. His eyes were wild, his mouth was working, his voice was hoarse with the intensity of his belief, tested now so many times, on the water of the Channel, in the besieged stone farmhouse, in the sliding salt tide of the canal on the night that Cowley had drowned.
“You got to promise me, Noah,” Burnecker whispered, “we don’t let them break us up. Never! No matter how hard they try! Promise me!”
Noah began to cry, the tears rolling down his cheeks softly and helplessly at his friend’s need and mystic faith. “Sure, Johnny,” he said. “You bet, Johnny.” And for a moment, he believed, along with Burnecker, that they had been given a sign, that they would survive whatever lay ahead of them, if somehow they clung to each other.
Twenty minutes later what was left of the Company got up from the line of foxholes and advanced to the positions from which they had withdrawn to give the planes a margin for error. Then they broke through the hedge and started across the bomb-marked field toward where the Germans were theoretically all dead or demoralized.
The men walked slowly, in a thin, thoughtful line across the cropped pasture grass, holding their rifles and tommyguns at their hips. Is this the whole Company, Noah thought with dull surprise, is this all that’s left? All the replacements who had been put in the week before, and who had never fired a shot, were they already gone?
In the next field, Noah could see another thin line of men, walking with the same slow, weary thoughtfulness toward an embankment with a ditch at its bottom that made a sharp traversing line across the green landscape. Artillery was still going over their heads, but there was no small-arms fire to be heard. The planes had gone back to England, leaving the ground littered with shining silver bits of tinsel that they had dropped to confuse the enemy’s radar equipment. The sun caught the strips of brightness in sparkling pinpoints among the rich green of the grass, attracting Noah’s eye again and again as he walked side by side, close to Johnny Burnecker.
It seemed to take the line a long time to get to the cover of the embankment, but finally they were there. Automatically, without a signal, the men threw themselves into the small ditch, against the safe grassy slope of the shielding embankment, although there still hadn’t been a shot fired at them. They lay there, as though this had been a dear objective and they had fought for days to reach it.
“Off your ass!” It was Rickett’s voice, the same tone, the same vocabulary, whether he was snarling at a man to clean a latrine in Florida or charge a machine-gun post in Normandy. “The war ain’t over. Get up over that there ditch.”
Noah and Burnecker lay slyly, with heads averted, against the soft sloping grass, pretending that Rickett was not there, that Rickett was not alive.
Three or four of the replacements stood up, with a jangle of equipment, and started climbing heavily up. Rickett followed them and stood at the top shouting down at the rest of the men. “Come on, off your ass, off your ass …”
Regretfully, Noah and Burnecker stood up and clambered up the slippery six feet. The rest of the men around them slowly were doing the same thing. Burnecker, who reached the top first, helped Noah. They stood for a moment, peering ahead of them. A long field, dotted with blown-up cows, stretched ahead of them toward a row of hedges, spaced with trees, in the distance. It still seemed very quiet. The three or four replacements who had been the first to climb up were tentatively walking out ahead, and Rickett was still snarling away.
As he took the first few steps across
the quiet field, following the other men, Noah hated Rickett more fiercely than he ever had before.
Then, without warning, the machine guns started. There were the high screams of thousands of bullets around him, and men falling, before he heard the distant mechanical rattling sound of the guns themselves.
The line hesitated for a moment, the men staring bewilderedly at the enigmatic hedge from which the fire came.
“Come on! Come on!” Rickett’s voice yelled crazily over the noise of the guns. “Keep moving!”
But half the men were down by now. Noah grabbed Burnecker’s arm, and they turned and raced, crouching low, the few yards back to the edge of the embankment. They flung themselves down, sobbing for breath, into the green safety of the ditch. One by one the other men came tumbling back over the edge to crash, sobbing and exhausted, into the ditch. Rickett appeared on the brink, swaying crazily, waving his arms around, shouting something thickly through an arching spurt of blood that seemed to come from his throat. He was hit again and slid face down on top of Noah. Noah could feel the hot wetness of the Sergeant’s blood on his face. He pulled back, although Rickett was clinging to him, his hands around Noah’s shoulders, gripping into the pack-harness on his back.
“Oh, you bathtards!” Rickett said distinctly, “oh, you bathtards.” Then he relaxed and slithered into the ditch at Noah’s feet.
“Dead,” Burnecker said. “The son of a bitch is finally dead.”
Burnecker pulled Rickett’s body to one side while Noah slowly tried to wipe the blood off his face.
The firing stopped and it was quiet again, except for shouts from the wounded out in the field. When a man raised his head carefully to look over the embankment to see what could be done, the guns started again, and the grass on the edge of the embankment snapped and slashed through the air as the bullets cut through it. The remnants of the Company lay exhausted, then, along the ditch.
“The Air Force,” Burnecker said coldly. “All opposition was going to be wiped out. Destroyed or demoralized. They’re pretty demoralized, aren’t they? The next soldier I see with wings, I swear to God …”
The men lay silently, breathing more normally now, waiting for someone else to do something with the war.
After awhile Lieutenant Green showed up. Noah could hear the high, girlish voice as Lieutenant Green came hurrying along the ditch, imploring the men to move. “… impossible,” Lieutenant Green was screaming. “Get up there. You’ve got to keep moving. Keep moving. You can’t just stay here. The second platoon is sending a party out on the left to get those machine guns, but we have to keep them pinned down from here. Come on, get up, get up …”
There was a shrill, hopeless note in Lieutenant Green’s voice, and the men didn’t even look at him. They turned their faces into the soft grass of the slope, ignoring the Lieutenant.
Suddenly, Lieutenant Green clambered up the side of the embankment himself. He stood on top, calling out, imploring, but none of the men moved. Noah watched Lieutenant Green with interest, waiting for him to die. The machine guns started up again, but Green kept jumping around wildly, like a maniac, shouting incoherently, “It’s easy. There’s nothing to it. Come on …”
Finally Green jumped down again and walked away from the ditch, back across the open field. The guns died down again and everybody was pleased the Lieutenant had left.
This is the system, Noah thought craftily. I’ll live forever. Just do whatever everybody else is doing. What can they do to me if I just stay here?
On both sides of them there were the heavy sounds of battle, but they couldn’t see anything, and there was no way of telling how things were going. But the ditch remained safe and quiet. The Germans couldn’t reach them in the ditch, and the men had no desire to do any harm to the Germans from the ditch. There was a pleasant, warming sense of secure permanence about the arrangement. At some future time, the Germans might withdraw or be encircled from somewhere else, and then there would be time to think about getting up and moving on. Not before.
Burnecker took out his K ration and opened it up. “Veal loaf.” Burnecker said flatly, eating slabs of it off his knife. “Who the hell ever invented veal loaf?” He threw the little bag of synthetic lemonade powder away. “Not if I was dying of thirst,” he said.
Noah didn’t feel like eating. From time to time he stared at Rickett, lying dead five feet away from him. Rickett’s eyes were wide open and there was a bloody grimace of anger and command on his face. His throat was badly torn open under the raw mouth. Noah tried to make himself be pleased with the sight of his dead enemy, but he found it was impossible. Rickett, by the act of dying, had changed from the brutal Sergeant, the vicious bully, the foul-mouthed killer, and had become another dead American, a lost friend, a vanished ally …
Noah shook his head and turned away from staring at Rickett.
Lieutenant Green was coming along the ditch again, and with him was a tall man, who walked slowly, peering thoughtfully at the resting, stubborn men in the ditch. When Green and the other man got closer, Burnecker said, “Holy God, two stars.”
Noah sat up and stared. He had never been this close to a Major General in all his months in the Army.
“General Emerson,” Burnecker whispered nervously. “What the hell is he doing here? Why doesn’t he go home?”
Suddenly, with sharp agility, the General leaped up the side of the embankment and stood at the top, in full view of the Germans. He walked slowly along the edge, talking down at the men in the ditch, who stared up at him numbly. He had a pistol in a holster, and he carried a short swagger stick under one arm.
Impossible, Noah thought, it must be somebody dressed up like a General. Green is playing a trick on us.
The machine guns were going again, but the General did not change the tempo of his movements. He walked smoothly and easily, like a trained athlete, talking down into the ditch as he crossed in front of the men.
“All right, Boys,” Noah heard him say as he approached, and the voice was calm, friendly, not loud. “Up we go now, Boys. We can’t stay here all day. Up we go. We’re holding up the whole line here and we’ve got to move now. Just up to the next row of hedges, Boys, that’s all I’m asking of you. Come on, Son, you can’t stay down there …”
As he watched, Noah saw the General’s left hand jerk, and blood begin to drop down from the wrist. There was just the slightest twist of the General’s mouth, and then he continued talking in the same quiet, but somehow piercing tone, grasping the swagger stick more tightly. He stopped in front of Noah and Burnecker. “All right, Boys,” he was saying kindly, “just walk on up here …”
Noah stared at him. The General’s face was long and sad and handsome, the kind of face you might expect to see on a scientist or a doctor, thin, intellectual, quiet—Looking at his face confused Noah, made him feel as though the Army had fooled him all along. Looking at the sorrowful, courageous face, he suddenly felt that it was intolerable that he, Noah, could refuse a man like that anything.
He moved and, at the same moment, he felt Burnecker move beside him. A little dry, appreciative smile momentarily wrinkled the General’s mouth. “That’s it, Boys,” he said. He patted Noah’s shoulder. Noah and Burnecker ran forward fifteen yards and dropped into a hole for cover.
Noah looked back. The General was still standing on the brink of the ditch, although the fire was very heavy by now, and men all along the line were leaping up and advancing in short bursts across the field.
Generals, he thought hazily, as he turned back toward the enemy, he had never known what Generals were for, before this …
He and Burnecker leaped out of their hole, just as two more men dived into it. The Company, or the half Company that was left, was moving at last.
Twenty minutes later they had reached the line of hedge from which the enemy machine guns had been firing. Mortars had finally found the range and had destroyed one of the nests in a corner of the field, and the other sections had pulled out befo
re Noah and the Company reached them.
Wearily, Noah kneeled by the side of the cleverly concealed, heavily sandbagged position, now blown apart to reveal three Germans dead at their torn gun. One of the Germans was still kneeling behind it. Burnecker reached down with his boot and shoved at the kneeling dead man. The German rocked gently, then fell over on his side.
Noah turned away and drank a little water from his canteen. His throat was brassy with thirst. He hadn’t fired his rifle all day, but his arms and shoulders ached as though he had caught the recoil a hundred times.
He looked out through the hedge. Three hundred yards away, across the usual field of bombholes and dead cows, was another thick hedge, and machine-gun fire was coming from there. He sighed as he saw Lieutenant Green walking toward him, urging the men out once more. He wondered hazily what had happened to the General. Then he and Burnecker started out again.
Noah was hit in the first ten feet, and Burnecker dragged him back behind the safety of the hedge.
An aid man came up with surprising speed. Noah had lost a great deal of blood very quickly and he felt cold and remote and the aid man’s face swam above him dreamily. The aid man was a little Greek with crossed eyes and a dapper moustache, and the strange dark eyes and the thin moustache floated independently in the air as the aid man gave him a transfusion, with Burnecker helping. Shock, Noah remembered fuzzily. In the last war a man would be hit and feel perfectly all right and ask for a cigarette, it had been in a magazine somewhere, and ten minutes later he would be dead. But it was different in this war. This was a high-class, up-to-the-minute type of war, with blood to spare. The cockeyed Greek aid man gave him some morphine, too. That was very thoughtful of him, above and beyond the call of the Medical Corps … Strange, to be so fond of a crosseyed man who used to be a short-order cook in a diner in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Ham and eggs, hamburger, canned soup. Now it was canned blood. His name was Markos. Ackerman, out of Odessa, and Markos, out of Athens, linked by a tube of preserved blood somewhere near the reduced city of St. Lô, in the province of Normandy, on a summer’s day, with an Iowa farmer named Burnecker crouched beside them, weeping, weeping …