by Irwin Shaw
The General laughed hoarsely and good-naturedly. “I know when I’m being given the business,” he said. “Her mother. That’s a new one.” He clapped Michael heavily on the back. “Good luck, Son;” he said, “glad to have met you.” He peered around the room. “Where’s Ottilie?” he demanded. “Is she giving out those damned cards here, too?” He strode off, the Captain with the moustache in his wake, looking for Mrs. Kearney, who was locked by now in the bathroom, with one of the Sergeant pilots.
Louise smiled at Michael.
“Having a good time?” Michael asked.
“Charming,” Louise said. “The General fell right on top of me when the bomb hit. I thought he was going to spend the summer there. Ready to go?”
“Ready,” said Michael.
He took her hand and they went out.
“I raise you five hundred,” the Hungarian was saying as the door closed behind them.
Outside there was a sullen smell of smoke in the air, foul and threatening. For a moment, Michael stopped, feeling his jaws and his nerves panicking again, and he nearly turned around and ran back inside. Then he controlled himself, and started down the dark, smoky street with Louise.
From St. James’s Street came the thin tinkle of glass, and the heavy orange flicker of fire, spitting up through the smoke, and a new sound, thick and gurgling, that he had not heard before. They turned the corner and looked down toward the Palace. The street reflected the quivering orange fire in a million angles of broken glass. Down in front of the Palace, the fire shone back off a small lake of water. The gurgling was being made by ambulances and fire trucks pushing through the water in second gear. Without saying anything to each other, Michael and Louise walked swiftly, their shoes crackling on the glass, making a sound like people walking through a frozen meadow, toward the spot where the bomb had fallen.
A small car had been hit right in front of the Palace. It was lying against a wall, crushed and compressed, as though it had been put through a giant baling machine. There was no sign of the driver or any of the passengers, unless what an old man on the right-hand side of the street was carefully sweeping into a small pile, might be they. A woman’s beret, dark blue and gay, rested, almost untouched by the catastrophe, a little to one side of the car.
The houses facing the Palace still stood, although their fronts had slipped down into the rubble. There was the familiar and sorrowful picture of rooms, ready for living, with tablecloths laid, and counterpanes turned back, and clocks still ticking the time, laid open to the eye of the night by the knife-like effect of the blast. It is what they are always striving to achieve in the theatre, Michael thought, the removal of the fourth wall and a peep at the life inside.
No sounds came from the broken houses, and somehow Michael felt that very few people had been caught by the bomb. There were many deep air-raid shelters in the neighborhood, he comforted himself, and probably the inhabitants of the houses had been cautious.
Nobody seemed to be making any effort to rescue anybody who might still be in the blasted buildings. Firemen sloshed methodically through the pond of water, from the gushing, ruptured main. Air Raid Rescue people pushed desultorily and quietly at the more obvious bits of wreckage. That was all.
Against the wall of the Palace, where the sentry boxes had stood, and the sentries had marched and saluted in their absurd wooden-toy manner whenever they saw an officer half a block away, there was nothing now. The sentries, Michael knew, had not been permitted to leave their posts, and they had merely stood there, in their stiff, pompous, old-fashioned version of soldiers, and had accepted the whistle of the bomb, accepted the explosion, stiffly died as the windows evaporated behind them, and the old clock in the tower above them tore loose from its hinges and hung grayly out from its springs. While he, Michael, a hundred yards away, had been sitting with the whiskey in his hand, smiling, listening to the Hungarian describe The Guided Tour System of Democracy. And overhead, the desperate boy had crouched in the bucking plane, blinded by the searchlights, with London spinning crazily below him in an erupting glitter of explosions, with the Thames and the Houses of Parliament and Hyde Park Corner and Marble Arch swinging murderously around his head, and the flak ticking at the wings. The boy had crouched in the plane, peering shakily down, and had pressed, finally, whatever button the German Air Force pressed to kill Englishmen, and the bomb had come down, on the automobile and the girl with the beret and the houses that had stood there for a hundred years and on the two sentries whose organizations had been relieved from other duty and honored with the job of guarding the Palace where the Prince of Wales used to live and have his quiet, notorious parties. And if the boy in the plane above had touched the button a half second sooner, or a half second later, if the plane had not at that moment bucked to port in a sudden blast, if the searchlights hadn’t blinded the pilot for a second earlier in the evening, if, if, if … then he, Michael would be lying in his own blood now in the wreck of the Canteen of the Allies, and the sentries would be alive, the girl with the beret alive, the houses standing, the clock running …
It was the most banal idea about a war, Michael knew, that if of fatality, but it was impossible not to think of it, impossible not to think of the casual threads of accident on which we survive to face the next if that comes tomorrow.
“Come on, darling,” Louise said. He could feel that she was shivering, and he was surprised, because she had always been so cool, so contained. “We’re not doing any good here. Let’s go home.”
Silently, they turned and walked away. Behind them, the firemen had managed to reach some valve and the gushing from the broken main diminished, then stopped completely. The water in front of the Palace was calm and black.
A great many other things happened that day in the City of London.
A Major General who had just received the plans for the invasion of France pleaded for another division of infantry to be put on the beach in the first two days.
A Spitfire pilot who had completed two tours of duty and who had shot down six planes was grounded for drunkenness and shot himself in his mother’s bedroom.
A new ballet was put into rehearsal in’ which the leading male dancer had to crawl on his stomach completely across the stage, symbolizing subconscious lust.
A girl in a top hat and long black silk, stockings sang, “I’m going to get lit up when the lights go up again” in a musical comedy and was joined in the chorus by the audience, three-quarters of whom were Americans.
An ulcer finally broke through the stomach wall of a Service of Supply Major in Grosvenor Square who had been working sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for two years. He had just picked up a memorandum, marked SECRET, on his desk, which notified him that a hundred and twenty tons of 105 millimeter ammunition, which had been ticketed for Southampton, had been lost due to the breaking apart in mid-ocean, in a mild squall, of a Liberty ship.
A B-17 pilot from Utah who had been listed as missing over Lorient three months before, arrived at Claridge’s, smiling widely, speaking forty words of French, and asked for the royal suite. He made sixteen calls, using a small address book he had never allowed to leave his person, in the next twenty minutes.
A twenty-year-old farmer from Kansas spent eight hours in a cold pool learning how to swim under water so that he could blow up submerged obstacles off the coast of Europe the day of the invasion.
In the House of Commons, a question was asked of the Home Secretary, demanding an explanation of the fact that American soldiers accused of rape were tried and convicted by American courts-martial, and hanged, although there was no capital punishment for rape in British law, and the offense, which must be considered a civil one, was committed on British civilians on territory under the sovereignty of the King.
A Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg, now a Private in His Majesty’s Army, Corps of Pioneers, spent the day painting tarpaulins with a water-resistant shellac. At lunch time, speaking German, he quoted Kant and Sp
engler to a fellow-soldier and compared notes with a new arrival about the barracks at Dachau.
At noon, a maid in a boarding house in Chelsea noticed the smell of gas coming from a room and unlocked the door to find the naked bodies of an American Sergeant and a British girl, locked on the bed. They were both dead. When they went to bed they had left the gas heater on. The girl’s husband was in India and the Sergeant’s wife was in Montana. The American Army finally told the wife that her husband had died of a heart attack. He was twenty-one years old.
A Lieutenant in the Coastal Command had lunch at his club and drove down to his station, where he boarded his Liberator on a routine submarine patrol. The plane rose into the air, wheeled south toward the Bay of Biscay, and was never heard of again.
An Air Raid Rescue Warden dug a seven-year-old girl with black hair out of a caved-in cellar, where she had been trapped in a raid eight days before.
A Corporal in the American Army, on his way to lunch, saluted a hundred and eleven times on his passage across Grosvenor Square.
A Scotchman in a bomb-disposal squad reached carefully in between two crossed girders and slowly withdrew the fuse of a two-thousand-pound bomb that had failed to explode the night before. The bomb had been making a curious ticking noise for forty-five minutes.
An American poet, aged twenty-five, now a Sergeant in the Engineers, in London on a three-day pass, walked slowly through Westminster Abbey, and noticed that there was more room devoted to the remains of obscure nobility than to all the company of Keats, Byron, Shelley, et al., and reflected that if there were a Westminster Abbey in Washington, there would be more Goulds there than Whitmans, more Harrimans than Thoreaus.
A joke about the Americans, which ran, “What’s wrong with Americans?” “Nothing. It’s just that they’re overpaid, overfed, overdressed, oversexed, and over here,” was repeated twelve hundred times during the day.
The mother of three small children, whose father was at the moment crouched in a hole south of Anzio, being shot at by a German mortar crew, stood in a queue for an hour and three-quarters and returned home with a pound of boned haddock. She looked at her children and considered killing them, but thought better of it, and made a stew of the fish, with one potato, and some soybean flour.
A committee of high-ranking officers of both Armies met to discuss making a motion picture about the invasion of Europe, in which the teamwork of all concerned was to be the main theme of the effort. The man representing the RAF quarreled with the man representing the British Ground Forces, the man representing the Eighth Air Force quarreled with the man representing the American Navy, the man representing the American Services of Supply grew furious with the British Captain who represented the Coastal Command, and it was resolved that the matter should be sent to a higher committee.
At noon, a squad of British enlisted men, clerks in the offices off Berkeley Square, could be seen practicing bayonet drill among the air-raid shelters and the wan trunks of dead trees, while other clerks sat on the cold benches and ate their lunch in the watery sunshine.
A British committee finished a carefully worded report to their Headquarters proving that American daylight bombing was wasteful and impractical.
The first jonquils appeared on barrows on street corners and shabby people in patched clothes stopped, with longing hearts, and bought the frail bunched blossoms and carried them selfconsciously to their offices and their homes.
At the luncheon concert in the National-Gallery, a trio played the works of Schubert, Walton and Bach.
Near Whitechapel a fence on which had been printed in large white letters, in 1942, Open the Second Front Now, was torn down for firewood.
In the Thames Estuary off the India docks, a Merchant Marine seaman from Seattle prayed for a raid that night, because his wife expected another child in two months, and he got a bonus for every raid on his ship while he was in port.
Also … four million souls went into offices and factories and warehouses and worked steadily and slowly and methodically, taking time out for tea at ten and four, at adding and subtracting, and mending and polishing, at assembling and stitching, carrying and sorting, typing and filing, making and losing. They did it all in a slow, sensible competent manner that irritated all the Americans who came into contact with them. Later they went home and some of them died in the night’s raid, in exactly the same slow, dignified, sensible manner.
Four days after the opening of Hamlet, Michael was called into the orderly room of the Special Services Company to which he was attached for rations and quarters and told that he was ordered to report to the Infantry Replacement Depot at Litchfield. He was given two hours to pack his bags.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE LANDING BARGE went around in a monotonous circle. The spray heaved in over the side, puddling on the slippery deck. The men crouched over their weapons, trying to keep them dry. The barges had been rolling a mile off the beach since three o’clock in the morning. It was seven-thirty now, and all conversation had long ago ceased. The preliminary barrage from the ships was almost over, and the simulated air attack. The smoke screen thrown across the cove by a low-flying Cub was even now settling on the water’s edge. Everybody was wet, everybody was cold, everybody, except for the men who felt like throwing up, was hungry.
Noah was enjoying it.
Crouched in the bow of the barge, tenderly keeping dry the charges of TNT that were his especial care, feeling the salt spray of the North Sea batter against his helmet, breathing the sharp, wild, morning air, Noah was enjoying himself.
It was the final exercise for his regiment in their assault training. It was a full-dress rehearsal, complete with naval and air support and live ammunition, for the coast of Europe. For three weeks they had practiced in thirty-man teams, each team to a pillbox, riflemen, bazooka men, flame-throwers, detonation men. This was the last time before the real thing. And there was a three-day pass, waiting like a promise of Heaven, in the orderly room for Noah.
Burnecker was pale green from seasickness, his large farmer’s hands gripping his rifle convulsively, as though there, at least, might be found something steady, something secure in a heaving world. He grinned weakly at Noah.
“Holy jumping mule,” he said, “I am not a healthy man.”
Noah smiled at him. He had grown to know Burnecker well in the last three weeks of working together. “It won’t be long now,” Noah said.
“How do you feel?” Burnecker asked.
“O.K.,” said Noah.
“I’d trade you the mortgage on my father’s eighty acres,” Burnecker said, “for your stomach.”
There was a confusion of amplified voices across the sliding water. The barge veered sharply and picked up speed as it headed for the beach. Noah crouched against the damp steel side, ready to jump when the ramp went down. Maybe, he thought, as the waves slapped with increasing force against the speeding hull, maybe there will be a cable from Hope when I get back to camp, saying it is all over. Then, later, he thought, I will sit back and tell my son, “The day you were born, I was landing on the coast of England with twenty pounds of dynamite.” Noah grinned. It would have been better, of course, to have been with Hope while it was happening, but this really had its advantages. You were too occupied to worry very much. There was no anxious pacing of corridors, no smoking of too many cigarettes, no listening to the screams. It was selfish, of course, but it had its points.
The barge grated against the smooth beach and a second later the ramp went down. Noah leaped out, feeling his equipment banging heavily against his back and sides, feeling the cold water pouring in over his leggings. He raced for a small dune and flung himself down behind it. The other men lumbered out, spreading rapidly, ducking into holes and behind clumps of scrub grass. The riflemen opened up on the pillbox eighty yards away, on a small bluff overlooking the beach. The bangalore torpedo men crept carefully up to the barbed wire and set their fuses, then ran back. The bangalores exploded, adding the sharp sm
ell of their explosion to the soft thick smell of the smoke that the plane had laid down.
Noah picked himself up, with Burnecker protecting him, and ran forward to a hole that lay near the wire. Burnecker fell in on top of him.
Burnecker was panting heavily. “Goodness,” Burnecker said, “isn’t dry land wonderful?”
They laughed at each other, then slowly poked their heads out of the hole. The men were working precisely, like a football team running through signals, advancing, as they had been taught, on the pale gray sides of the pillbox.
The bazooka went off again and again, in its rushing, noisy explosion, and large chunks of concrete flew up in the air from the pillbox.
“At times like this,” Burnecker said, “I ask myself only one question. ‘What are the Germans supposed to be doing while we go through all this?’”
Noah leaped out of the hole and dashed, crouching, holding his charges, through the opening in the wire. The bazooka spoke again and Noah threw himself to the sand, in’ case any of the concrete flew out toward him. Burnecker was lying beside him, panting heavily.
“And I used to think plowing was hard,” Burnecker said.
“Come on, Farmboy,” said Noah, “we’re on our way.” He stood up. Burnecker got off the ground, groaning.
They ran to the right and threw themselves behind a six-foot-high dune. The grass on top of the dune was snapping in the wet wind.
They watched the man with the flame-thrower carefully crawl towards the pillbox. The fire from the riflemen supporting them still whistled over their heads and ricocheted off the concrete.
If Hope could only see me now, thought Noah.
The man with the flame-thrower was in position now, and the other man with him turned the cock on the cylinders on his back. It was Donnelly who carried the enormous heavy cylinders. He had been picked because he was the strongest man in the platoon. Donnelly started the flame-thrower. The fire spurted out, whipping unevenly in the strong wind, smelling oily and heavy. Donnelly sprayed the slits of the pillbox in savage, arching bursts.