A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  Far up ahead – impossibly far, it seemed – the forward part of the column was still intact and marching in good order, and he could see that the last man in that section, plodding along as if nothing had happened, was Quint. He bounded and ran, carrying his rifle at the balance as he tried to keep from vomiting into his mask, which smelled of mildew and rubber and his own breath. They walked another fifty yards before the command came down:

  “Test for gas!”

  He pulled the sopping rubber away from his cheek and took in a mouthful of sweet fresh air.

  “Remove your masks!”

  His face was free at last, and he was stuffing the mask back into its pouch as if it were a squirming snake. Then the company was brought to a halt and re-formed into squad and platoon formations in a clearing, away from the road, while the captain climbed a slippery pine-needled rise to address them.

  “At ease, men,” he said, wiping his own streaming cheeks with a khaki handkerchief. He was lean and austere and hawk-nosed, a veteran of Anzio and widely reputed to be a tough son of a bitch. “Will the ambush party please come forward?”

  They were coming forward already, four old-time Camp Pickett cadremen led by a hefty staff sergeant whose fatigues were faded almost white. They had lain in wait for this company all afternoon, ready to throw their tear-gas capsules and assess the results. Now it was over, and they were plainly anxious to get back to the post for supper.

  “Sergeant,” the captain said. “How’d it look to you?”

  “Well, sir, I can’t say it looked too good. There was a good deal of confusion and hesitation when the capsules went off – more so ’n usual, I’d say. Seemed to take your men a long time to figure out what was goin’ on. Lot of ’em just stood there kind of hunched over, and a lot of ’em lost their helmets. I saw one man go ass-over-teakettle—” there was a faint tittering at this, and somebody said “Prentice” – “one man go ass-over-teakettle before he got his mask on. Your front part of your column did seem to get through pretty well; they kept moving right along; but in the overall, sir, I’d have to say it didn’t look too good.”

  “Thank you.” And the captain laboriously blew his nose. His eyes were still red and weeping, and he had to clear his throat several times. “I wonder,” he said, “I wonder if you men realize that if this had been poison gas, more than half of you would be dead or dying by now. Think about that. And think about this. You men will be going into combat within a very short time. We know your enemy probably won’t use gas, but you can be damn sure of one thing. You can be damn sure your enemy is going to employ the tactic of ambush, the element of surprise, whenever it suits his purposes. That means you men are going to have to cultivate the habit of alertness, and you’re going to have to cultivate it in one hell of a hurry.”

  He put his handkerchief away and drew himself straight. “Now, nobody needs to remind me that you men are re-treads. I’m well aware that you’ll be going over with six weeks’ training, instead of the minimum sixteen weeks a combat rifleman is supposed to have. If any of you feel that’s not fair, I’ll agree with you. It’s not fair at all. My point is simply this. My point is simply that your enemy is not likely to make allowances for that fact. All right.”

  The column of twos was re-formed, and soon they were marching at route step again, wiping their eyes and the skin of their faces and necks, which felt as though it had been lightly brushed with nettles. Prentice gave most of his attention to the avoidance of Connor’s heels, but from time to time he glanced down at Quint’s profile, which was half hidden under the curve and shadow of his helmet. Had Quint seen him go ass-over-teakettle? Other conversations had broken out in the column, but he waited a long time before he felt it would be safe to resume his own.

  “Quint?”

  “What.”

  “How do you feel about dessert?”

  “What?”

  “I said what do you think we ought to have for dessert?”

  “Oh. Hell, I don’t know. Let’s shut up about it now, and try to stay on the ball.”

  Back in the company street, as they stood waiting to be dismissed, the first sergeant announced that there would be a Battalion Retreat Parade in fifteen minutes; and this caused an explosion of groans and swearings. Prentice joined in the complaint as the formation broke up and ran jostling for the barracks, but he did so only for the sake of appearances. The truth, which he would never have dared to admit, was that he didn’t really mind Retreat Parades. He didn’t even mind the outrage of there being one this evening, with no time to take a shower before changing. In fifteen minutes, they had to climb out of their sweated pack harnesses and fatigues and go straight into the dress uniform of woolen O.D. pants and shirt, necktie, brass-buttoned blouse, clean shoes, and overseas cap; they had to detach their cartridge belts from their packs, unhook their bayonet scabbards and affix them to the belts; they had to readjust the frogs of their rifle slings to pull them taut and give the rifles a cursory wiping down with Blitz cloth (they’d have to clean them properly after supper), and if there was any time left over they used it to pick clods of mud off their belts before putting them on and hooking them shut. Then:

  “Fall out!”

  Sullen and sweating, with a week’s grime under the prickle of their clean woolen clothes, they shaped up once again in the company street to be called to attention, given dress-right-dress and parade rest. Within each platoon the lieutenant and platoon sergeant moved in muttering conference to rearrange the men in the order of height, and this always meant that Prentice, to his secret pleasure, had to be put in the first place of the first rank because he was the tallest. Then the command group came hurrying from the Orderly Room to take their places at the head of the company: the captain (looking very natty in his dark, tailored uniform with its brilliant campaign ribbons), the executive officer, and the first sergeant; and with them came Quint, carrying the long shaft from which hung the guidon, a bright pennant of infantry blue bearing white crossed rifles, the company initial, and the regimental number.

  “Any of you old Army men know how to handle a guidon?” the first sergeant had demanded of his newly assembled company on the first day of training. Half a dozen men had lethargically volunteered, and Quint had been chosen for the job. He did it well: he knew how to hold the shaft of the banner at parade rest, at attention, and on the march; he knew how and when to snap it down in salute, pointing it straight out parallel to the earth, and how to whip it up again without letting it wobble.

  “Cuppadeep!” the captain called, and each of his platoon leaders said, as if in parenthesis, “Patoon—”

  “Tetch – hut! Right shoulder – homms! Right – face! Forrad – hotch!”

  And following the guidon they set off down the company street. They made a column right and fell neatly into place behind the other two companies of the battalion, just in time to hear the opening drumbeats of the regimental band as it stood waiting at an intersection with the color guard. Then they moved in full battalion strength toward the parade ground, and the band, whose drums by now had made it no trouble at all to keep in step, broke into music. The tune they played on the way to Retreat Parades and back was always the same, the Colonel Bogey March, and a tired sotto-voce chorus behind Prentice always gave it the same words:

  “Hitler

  Has only got one ball;

  Goering

  Has two but very small …”

  On the parade ground the battalion drew up at attention before its commander, a small ruddy major whom they never saw except at this precise distance and under these circumstances. Far behind him, along the opposite border of the field, the regimental commander and his aides stood waiting to review the troops; and beyond that, away up past the flagpole in the haze of a gentle hill leading back into the pines, there were always a number of parked civilian cars surrounded by women and children – officers’ families come out to watch the parade before supper. In the abrupt silence after the band had stopped the little m
ajor threw back his head to yell, “Battally-awn!” Then, bellowing the commands with such force that it seemed his red neck might burst with every syllable, he put them through a massive manual of arms.

  And nobody ever noticed it, but Prentice was very nearly perfect on parade. He was never out of step, his posture was impeccable, and his eyes always where they were supposed to be; he performed his manual of arms with a speed and precision he could never achieve in the company street, where it mattered so much more, and he took a craftsman’s pride in making his own small role indistinguishable from the mass. He wanted it to look good for the women and children on the hill.

  When the arms drill was over there was a long, stock-still wait until they were called to attention to hear the faraway notes of the bugler sounding the Call to Retreat, and the pause after this first, intricate part of the call was filled with nothing but silence.

  “Pre-sent – homms!”

  All the rifles snapped vertical at chest height, the company guidons whipped earthward, the major wheeled to join his superiors in a hand salute, and the bugle took up the simpler and more melancholy strains of “To the Colors” as the flag came down.

  Then it was time to pass in review. The band started up again, proclaiming Hitler’s deformity to all Virginia; the color guard led the musicians out across the field and back, and the companies fell in behind them at shoulder arms. There was a left turn and then a difficult left flank, a long moment of tension as they passed the reviewing party at eyes right, each man trying mightily to stay in line; then they turned eyes front again and another left-flank command put them back into easier marching order, and then it was all over.

  All they had to do now was get back on the road and back to the barracks. At the intersection the music dwindled quickly as the band disappeared down its own street; then the other companies peeled away until only the single company was left, marching to the distant sound of the drums.

  “Bunch of God damned chickenshit Boy Scouts,” somebody muttered, and somebody else said something about playing tin soldiers. Soon the grumbling and the bitter laughter had become so general that the first sergeant had to turn around and call, “At ease back there.”

  But Private Robert J. Prentice was not among the offenders. Even without the music he was marching well in the gathering dusk, his face very sober and his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the high, fluttering infantry blue of the guidon.

  Chapter Two

  Late in December, just after the German breakthrough in the Belgian Ardennes, long trainloads of infantry replacements began to arrive many times a day at Fort Meade, Maryland. The men were counted off and formed into long shuffling columns, and they stood in the snow waiting for everything – to eat, to be medically examined, to receive new issues of clothing and equipment, and to be told where to go next. In the overheated barracks there were hours of preparation for full-field inspections that didn’t, at the last minute, take place after all, and there were full-field inspections that took place hysterically on ten minutes’ notice; and there was such a continual breaking up and reforming of groups that everybody said you were lucky if, by the end of your several days at Meade, you had any friends left at all.

  Prentice was lucky: owing to the alphabetical proximity of their names he got to stay with Quint, and he was lucky too in that most of the more troublesome men from Camp Pickett were alphabetically sheared away. He and Quint came to share a double-decker bunk in a squadroom full of strangers from other training camps, and he knew that if his luck held they might stay together through all the separations and re-groupings of the days to come: they might well ship out in the same replacement draft and end up in the same outfit.

  After a day or so at Meade they made a third friend, or at least a third companion, a portly Arkansas farmer of twenty-nine named Sam Rand who had arrived with a detachment from some Texas camp and taken the lower half of the bunk beside theirs. He had looked forbiddingly grim and sour as he went about the business of unpacking his gear; then, still unsmiling, he had stepped across the narrow space between the bunks and held out a hand from which the index finger was missing. “Sam Rand’s my name,” he said. “I’m happy to meet you boys.” He had served for three years in a noncombatant Engineer outfit until a power saw sliced off his finger; when he got out of the hospital he found that his unit had been dissolved and all its members transferred for re-tread training as riflemen. “I thought the finger’d keep me outa th’infantry; didn’t see how I’d be much use to th’infantry without a trigger finger, but they said it didn’t make no difference. Said I could farr with my social finger instead.”

  Quint seemed to take unfailing pleasure in his company, to be consistently amused by his sayings and respectful of his country wisdom; he began at once to call him “Sam,” though he never called Prentice by anything but his last name, and the two of them would sometimes leave the barracks together without asking Prentice to come along, which made Prentice a little jealous. So it happened that Prentice sat alone on the top half of the bunk one afternoon, not knowing where Quint and Sam Rand were and determined not to care. His new equipment was heaped around him in a muddle and he knew he ought to do something about getting it organized, but first he had something more important to do: he was trying to answer a letter from Hugh Burlingame, who had been his roommate in his senior year at school.

  Letters from Burlingame came only about once a month and required serious reading, for Burlingame had made it plain that he had no patience with the trivia of ordinary correspondence. “If we’re going to write to each other,” he’d told Prentice when they were still at school, “let’s at least try to say things in our letters. If I ever get one from you about what the weather’s like, and hoping I’m well, and making a lot of little dumb-assed jokes, I can guarantee I won’t answer it, and I’ll expect the same from you. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  And the result was that Prentice had spent hours over each of his letters to Burlingame, first in the Air Force and then at Camp Pickett, copying and recopying his manuscript, going to the post library to check his literary references, making sure that each paragraph made its own trenchant point and that the finished product could be read without apology as part of a continuing intellectual dialogue. It was hard work.

  Burlingame was now in the Navy, or rather in something called the V-12 Program, which allowed bright students to attend civilian universities in naval uniform, and he seemed to have plenty of time for prose composition:

  … You speak of your Army comrades as “brutally stupid.” I too am surrounded by the type, and can find little compassion for them. Have you read Farrell’s Studs Lonigan? Do so, and you will find the majority of my classmates in its pages. They are without minds; they are without purpose. They think it “Hot shit” to roll in the bed of some downtrodden whore and to talk of it lasciviously afterwards. I am not shocked by their antics – they amuse me – but I find it depressing to realize that these are specimens of the finest America has to offer in her young manhood. And if this is what one encounters in the V-12, I can imagine that the caliber is still lower in a unit such as yours, which must include the very dregs of society. Well, C’est la guerre.

  With regard to religion, I suppose this will startle you (remembering our talks at school about Schopenhauer, etc.) but I am no longer an atheist. In the past several months I have taken honest stock of my philosophical attitudes, and have found to my surprise that Christianity is no longer the anathema I once thought it to be. I can understand now why the greatest thinkers, the most enlightened minds in all of our Western culture have propounded the Christian ideal and the Christian ethic in one form or another …

  It went on for several more pages, but Prentice felt he had read enough. He carefully wiped his fountain pen and went back to work on his partially finished reply. “As for Christianity,” he wrote, “I continue to distrust it, as I distrust all dogma and all moral and/or spiritual certainties.” That sounded right – it had the
right tone – but he would have to compose three or four more sentences in the same vein before he earned the right to copy out his final paragraph, which he had already scribbled in a burst of inspiration: “I don’t imagine you’ll be hearing from me for a while because I’m in the process of being shipped to Europe, where I expect we’ll all be rather busy for some time – the dregs of society, Studs Lonigan, and me.”

  He was still working over the intermediate sentences when Quint and Sam Rand came clumping up to the bunk, smelling of beer. “Prentice, old buddy,” Quint said, “if you ever got out of that sack and looked at the bulletin board, you’d have found out we’ve got eight-hour passes tonight. We’re going to Baltimore. How about getting off your ass?”

  And Hugh Burlingame was instantly forgotten. It was the first time Prentice could remember Quint’s calling him “old buddy,” even in sarcasm, and it was pleasing to know that he and Rand had come back to the barracks to get him before taking off. As they started down the snow-blown company street, turning up their overcoat collars against the wind, he felt uncommonly jaunty. His new uniform seemed to fit much better than his old one, and he was delighted with the new-style “combat boots” they had been issued at Meade: he had already learned how to darken their tawny color by singeing them with a flame and then applying many coats of polish. They made his legs less spindly and put a new, manly authority into his walk. Neither Quint nor Sam Rand had bothered to darken their boots and they walked as if their feet hurt; for that reason, as the three of them set off for what promised to be a rollicking night on the town, Prentice felt he looked much the most trim and soldierly of the group. And he allowed his rising sense of camaraderie to embrace Sam Rand as well as Quint, for he could see now that Rand posed no serious threat: there was reassurance in the very fact that Rand was so simple and unschooled, so “colorful,” like a character actor in the movies. He could serve both Prentice and Quint as a kind of homely, comic relief from the more serious aspects of their friendship, and in that way could safely be welcomed. In combat, when Sam Rand lay wounded, Prentice might run out under heavy fire to bring him back and carry him all the way to the aid station, as Lew Ayres had done with the other man in All Quiet on the Western Front, not realizing he was already dead. And Quint, unashamed of the tears in his eyes, would say, “You did all you could for him, Prentice” (or better still, “Bob”). But in the meantime he had to ask them both to stop and wait for him at the PX near the bus station while he called his mother; and when he was folded into the phone booth, dialing for long distance, he didn’t feel soldierly at all.