by Irwin Shaw
“What’s it like?” Speer asked nervously. He was a nice-looking blond boy, with wavy hair and mild blue eyes, and you got a vision, looking at him, of a long line of governesses and aunts and related women who took him to hear Koussevitsky on Saturday afternoons. “What’s it like in the infantry?”
“What’s it like in the infantry,” Krenek sang, “You walk, walk, walk …”
“No, I mean seriously,” Speer said. “What do they do, just take you up there and leave you out there to fight right away?”
“If you want to know, do they do it gradual,” Krenek said, “they don’t do it gradual. Anyway, not in the old Red One.”
“How about you?” Speer asked Michael. “Which division were you in?”
Michael went over to his cot and sat down heavily. “I wasn’t in any division. I was in Civil Affairs.”
“Civil Affairs,” Speer said. “That’s what they should have put me in.”
“Civil Affairs?” Krenek said, surprised. “How the hell could you get a Purple Heart in Civil Affairs?”
“I was run over by a French taxicab in the city of Paris, Michael said, “and my left leg was broken.”
“You’d never get a Purple Heart in the First for anything like that,” Krenek said proudly.
“I was in a ward with twenty other guys,” Michael said, “and one morning a Colonel came in and he handed them out to everybody.”
“Five points,” Krenek said, “toward graduation. Some day, you’re liable to be mighty grateful to that busted leg.”
“My heavens,” Speer said, “what a classification system—putting a man with a broken leg in the infantry.”
“It isn’t broken now,” Michael said mildly. “It works. It is cosmetically unsatisfactory, according to the doctors, but it is guaranteed to work, especially in dry weather.”
“Even so,” Speer went on, “why don’t you go back to your Civil Affairs unit?”
“Sergeant or below,” Krenek chanted, “they do not bother to send you back to your original organization. Sergeant or below, you are an interchangeable part.”
“Thanks, Krenek,” Michael said soberly. “That’s the nicest thing anybody has said about me in nine months.”
“What’s your Army Specialty number?” Krenek asked.
“745,” Michael said.
“745,” said Krenek. “Basic rifleman. That is some specialty. An interchangeable part. We are all interchangeable parts.”
Michael could see Speer’s soft, pleasant young mouth twisting a little in nervousness and distaste. Speer obviously did not like the concept of himself as an interchangeable part. It did not fit in with the picture of himself which had been built up by the rosy years among the governesses and the Harvard classrooms.
“There must be some divisions that’re better to be a replacement in than others,” Speer persisted, working on his problem.
“It is possible to get killed,” Krenek said wisely, “in any division in the American Army.”
“I mean,” said Speer, “a division where they break a man in gently. Not all at once, I mean.”
“That must of been some course they gave you at Harvard College, feller,” Krenek said, bending over his rifle. “They must of told you some pretty rich stories about the service.”
“Papuga!” Speer turned to the other man in the tent, who had been lying straight out on his cot in silence, his eyes open, staring unblinkingly up at the damp, sloping canvas above his head. “Papuga, what division were you in?”
Papuga did not turn his head. He continued to stare reflectively at the canvas. “I was in the anti-aircraft,” Papuga said, in a flat, remote voice.
Papuga was a fat man of about thirty-five, with a sallow, pock-marked face and long dry black hair. He lay on his cot all day long, and Michael had noticed that he often skipped meals. On all Papuga’s clothes there were the faded marks where Staff Sergeant’s stripes had been ripped off. Papuga never joined in the conversations in the tent, and with his dark, daylong staring into space, and his habit of not eating, and the signs of his broken rank on his sleeve, he was something of a mystery to the other men.
“The anti-aircraft,” Krenek said, nodding judiciously. “Now, there’s a nice assignment.”
“What’re you doing here?” Speer wanted to know. Speer was looking for comfort on this wet, November plain, with the smell of the slaughterhouse in his nostrils, and he would take it away from any of the veterans around him. “Why didn’t you stay in the anti-aircraft?”
“One day,” Papuga said, without looking at Speer, “I shot down three P-47’s.”
There was silence in the tent. Uncomfortably, Michael wished Papuga wouldn’t say anything else.
“I was on a 40 mm gun,” Papuga said after awhile, in his flat, automatic-sounding voice. “Our battery was guarding a P-47 airstrip. It was nearly dark, and the Germans had a habit of sending planes over to strafe us just at that time. I hadn’t had a day off for two months, and I never sleep good, anyway, and I’d just got a letter from my wife, she told me she was having a baby, only I hadn’t been home in two years …”
Michael closed his eyes, hoping that Papuga would stop. But there was an accumulated mass of agony in Papuga that had been simmering in silence all this time. Now that he had started, he didn’t seem to be able to stop.
“I was not in good shape,” Papuga said, “and a buddy of mine gave me half a bottle of marc, that’s a French drink that the farmers make, it’s like plain alcohol, it bites the back of your throat like a trap. I drank all of it by myself, and when some planes started to come in low, and somebody began to yell, I must of got a little confused. It was almost dark, understand, and the Germans had a habit of …” He stopped and sighed and passed his hand across his eyes slowly. “I turned the gun on them, I’m a good gunner, and then the other guns started in on them, too. I’ll tell you something, the third one, I saw the stripes on the underside of the wings, I saw the star and the bar, but somehow I couldn’t stop. He flew right over me, real slow, with his flaps down, trying to land, I couldn’t explain it, I couldn’t stop …” Papuga took his hand away from his eyes. “Two of them burned,” he said flatly, “and the other one crashed and turned over. Ten minutes later, the Colonel in command of the Group came over to me, he was just a young feller, you know those Air Force Colonels, he got the Congressional Medal for something while we were still in England. He came up to me and he smelled my breath and I thought he was going to shoot me right there and then, and to tell the truth, I don’t blame that Colonel, I don’t hold nothing against him.”
Krenek slipped the bolt of the Ml into place with a sharp snapping noise.
“But he didn’t shoot me,” Papuga said dully. “He took me out to the field where the planes were, and he made me look at what was left of the two guys that burned, and he made me help carry the other one, the one that turned over, back to the doctor’s tent, only he was dead anyway.”
Speer was making a nervous, sucking sound with his tongue, and Michael was sorry the boy had had to hear this. It would do him no good, in the approaching time when they would put him, not gradually, into the line in front of the Siegfried fortifications.
“They held me for court-martial, and the Colonel said he was going to have them hang me,” Papuga said, “and, like I said, I didn’t blame that Colonel for a minute, he was just a young feller, anyway. But after awhile, they came to me and they said, ‘Papuga, we will give you a chance, we will dispense with the court-martial, we will put you in the infantry,’ and I said, ‘Anything you say.’ They took off my stripes and the day before I came up-here the Colonel came to me and he said, ‘I hope they shoot your balls off in the infantry the first day.’”
Papuga stopped talking. He stared flatly and expressionlessly up at the canvas above his head.
“I hope,” said Krenek, “they don’t put you in the First.”
“They can put me anywhere they like,” Papuga said. “It don’t make no difference to me.�
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A whistle blew outside. They all got up and put on their raincoats and helmet liners and went out to stand the Retreat formation.
There was a big new batch of replacements that had just come over from the States. The swollen, oversize, casual company stood in the drizzle, the mud thick on their boots, answering to their names, and the Sergeant said, “Sir, L Company all present and accounted for,” and the Captain took the salute and walked away to supper.
The Sergeant did not dismiss the Company. He strolled back and forth in front of the first line, peering out at the dripping men standing in the mud. The rumor was that the Sergeant had been a chorus boy before the war. He was a slender, athletic-looking man, with a pale, sharp face. He wore the good-conduct ribbon and the American defense ribbon and the European Theatre ribbon, with no campaign stars.
“I have a couple of things to say to you guys,” the Sergeant began, “before you go slop up your supper.”
A slight, almost inaudible sigh rustled through the ranks. By this stage of the war everyone knew that there was nothing a Sergeant could say that could be listened to with pleasure.
“We had a little trouble here the last few days,” the Sergeant said, nastily. “We are close to Paris and some of the boys got the notion it would be nice to slip off for a couple of nights and get laid. In case any of you boys’re entertaining the same idea, let me tell you they never got to Paris, they never got laid, and they are already way up front in Germany and I will give any man here odds of five to one they never come back.” The Sergeant walked meditatively, looking down at the ground, his hands in his pockets. He walks like a dancer, quite graceful, Michael thought, and he looks like a very good soldier, the neat, dashing way he wears his clothes …“For your information,” the Sergeant began again in a low, mild voice, “Paris is out of bounds to all GI’s from this camp, and there are MP’s on every road and every entrance leading into it, and they are looking at everybody’s papers, very careful. Very, very careful.”
Michael remembered the two men with full packs pacing slowly back and forth in front of the orderly room at Dix, in payment for going to Trenton for a couple of beers. The long continuing struggle of the Army, the sullen attempts by the caged animals to get free for an hour, a day, for a beer, a girl, and the sullen punishments in return.
“The Army is very lenient over here,” the Sergeant said. “There are no courts-martial for being AWOL like in the States. Nothing is put on your record. Nothing to stop you from getting an honorable discharge, if you live that long. All we do is, we catch you and we look up the requests for replacements, and we see, ‘Ah, the Twenty-ninth Division is having the heaviest casualties this month’ and I personally make out your orders and send you there.”
“That son of a bitch is a Peruvian,” a voice whispered behind Michael. “I heard about him. Would you believe it, not even a citizen, a Peruvian, and he’s talking to us like that!”
Michael looked with new interest at the Sergeant. It was true that he was dark and foreign-looking. Michael had never seen a Peruvian before, and for a moment he was mildly amused at the thought of standing here in the French rain being lectured to by a Peruvian Master Sergeant who had been a chorus boy before the war. Democracy, he thought appreciatively, how inscrutable are your works …
“I have been handling replacements for a long time,” the Sergeant was saying. “I’ve seen fifty, maybe seventy thousand GI’s go through this depot, and I know what’s going on in your minds. You been reading the newspapers and listening to the speeches, and everybody keeps saying, ‘Our brave fighting boys, the heroes in khaki,’ and you feel, as long as you are heroes you can do whatever you damn well please, go AWOL into Paris, get drunk, pick up the clap from a French whore for 500 francs outside the Red Cross club. I’m going to tell you something, boys. Forget what you read in the newspapers. That’s for civilians. Not for you. That’s for guys making four dollars an hour in the airplane factories, that’s for the air-raid wardens in Minneapolis with a bottle of Budweiser in one hand, and some dogface’s loving wife in the other. You ain’t heroes, Boys. You’re culls. Culls. That’s why you’re here. You’re the people nobody else wanted. You’re the guys who can’t type or fix a radio or add up a column of figures. You’re the guys nobody would have in an office, you’re the guys nobody could find any use for back in the States. You’re the frig-ups of the Army, and I’m the boy who knows it. I don’t read the papers. They heaved a sigh of relief back in Washington and it was on the boat for you, and nobody cares do you come home or don’t you come home. You’re replacements. And there’s nothing lower in this Army than a replacement, unless it’s another replacement. Every day they bury a thousand like you, and the guys like me, who never frigged up, go over the lists and send up a thousand more. That’s how it is in this camp, Boys, and I’m telling it to you for your own good, so you know where you stand. There’s a lot of new boys in camp tonight, with the beer from the Kilmer PX still wet on their lips, and I want to put things straight for them. So don’t get any fancy ideas in your head about Paris, Boys, it won’t work. Go back to your tents and clean your rifles nice and neat and write your final instructions home to the folks. So forget about Paris, Boys. Come back in 1950. Maybe it will not be out of bounds for GI’s then.”
The men stood rigidly, in silence. The Sergeant stopped his pacing. He smiled grimly at the ranks, his jaws creasing in razored lines under his soft garrison cap with the cellophane rain-covering over it, like an officer’s.
“Thanks for listening, Boys,” the Sergeant said. “Now we all know where we stand. Dis-miss!”
The Sergeant walked springily down the Company street as the lines dissolved into confusion.
“I’m going to write to my mother,” Speer said, angrily, next to Michael, as they walked toward their tent to pick up their mess kits. “She knows the Senator from Massachusetts.”
“By all means,” Michael said politely. “Do that.”
“Whitacre …”
Michael turned around. A small, half-familiar figure, almost lost in a raincoat, was standing there. Michael moved closer. Through the dusk, he could make out a battered face, a split eyebrow, a full, wide mouth, now curved in a small smile.
“Ackerman!” Michael said. They shook hands.
“I didn’t know whether you’d remember me or not,” Noah said. His voice was low and even and sounded much older than Michael remembered. The face, in the half-light, was very thin and had a new, mature sense of repose.
“Lord,” Michael said, delighted, in this strange mass of men, to come across a face that he knew, a man with whom once he had been friendly, feeling as though somehow, by great luck, in a sea of enemies, he had found an ally. “Lord, I’m glad to see you.”
“Going to chow?” Ackerman asked. He was carrying his mess kit.
“Yes.” Michael took Ackerman’s arm. It seemed surprisingly wasted and fragile under the slippery material of the raincoat. “I just have to get my mess kit. Hang onto me.”
“Sure,” Noah said. He smiled gravely, and they walked side by side toward Michael’s tent. “That was a real little dandy of a speech,” Noah said, “wasn’t it?”
“Great for the morale,” said Michael. “I feel like wiping out a German machine-gun nest before chow.”
Noah smiled softly. “The Army,” he said. “They sure love to make speeches to you in the Army.”
“It’s an irresistible temptation,” Michael said. “Five hundred men lined up, not allowed to leave or talk back … Under the circumstances, I think I’d be tempted myself.”
“What would you say?” Noah asked.
Michael thought for a moment. “God help us,” he said soberly. “I’d say, ‘God help every man, woman and child alive today.’”
He ducked into his tent and came out with his mess kit Then they walked slowly over to the long line outside the mess hall.
When Noah took off his raincoat in the mess hall, Michael saw the Silver Star over hi
s breastpocket, and for a moment he felt the old twinge of guilt. He didn’t get that by being hit by a taxicab, Michael thought. Little Noah Ackerman, who started out with me, who had so much reason to quit, but who obviously hadn’t quit …
“General Montgomery pinned it on,” Noah said, noticing Michael staring at the decoration. “On me and my friend Johnny Burnecker. In Normandy. They sent us to the supply dump to get brand-new uniforms. Patton was there and Eisenhower. There was a very nice G2 in Division Headquarters, and he pushed it through for us. It was on the Fourth of July. Some kind of British-American good will demonstration.” Noah grinned. “General Montgomery demonstrated his good will to me, with the Silver Star. Five points toward discharge.”
They sat at the crowded table, in the big hall, eating warmed-up C rations, vegetable hash, and thin coffee.
“Isn’t it a shame,” asked Krenek, lower down at the table, “how the civilians are deprived of all their porterhouse steaks for the Armed Forces?”
Nobody laughed at the ancient joke, which had served Krenek as table conversation in Louisiana, Feriana, Palermo …
Michael ate with pleasure, going back over the years with Noah, filling the gaps between Florida and the Replacement Depot. He looked gravely at the photograph of Noah’s son (“Twelve points,” Noah said, “he has seven teeth.”) and heard about the deaths of Cowley, Donnelly, Rickett, and the breakup of Captain Colclough. He felt a surprising family-like wave of nostalgia for the old Company which he had been so happy to leave in Florida.
Noah was very different. He didn’t seem nervous. Although he was terribly frail now, and coughed considerably, he seemed to have found some inner balance, a thoughtful, quiet maturity which made Michael feel that Noah somehow was much older than he. Noah talked gently, without bitterness, with none of his old intense, scarcely controlled violence, and Michael felt that if Noah survived the war he would be immensely better equipped for the years that came after than he, Michael, would be.