by Irwin Shaw
“Shake your ass,” the guard said languidly, leaning on the shotgun. The prisoners paid no attention to him.
“Whitacre,” said the guard, “whip out the bottle.”
Michael looked glumly at him. The police, he thought, everywhere the same, collecting their blackmail for overlooking the breaking of the law. He took out the bottle and wiped the neck of it before handing it to the guard. He watched jealously as the guard took a deep swig.
“I only drink on holidays.” The guard grinned as he handed back the bottle.
Michael put the bottle away. “What’s this?” he asked. “Christmas?”
“Haven’t you heard?”
“Heard what?”
“We hit the beach this morning. This is D Day, Brother, ain’t you glad you’re here?”
“How do you know?” Michael asked suspiciously.
“Eisenhower made a speech on the radio. I heard it,” the guard said. “We’re liberating the frigging frogs, he said.”
“I knew somethin’ was up yesterday,” said one of the prisoners, a small, thoughtful-looking man who was in for thirty years because he had knocked out his Lieutenant in the orderly room. “They came to me and they offered to pardon me and give me an honorable discharge if I would go back into the infantry.”
“What did you say?” Fahnstock asked, interestedly.
“Screw, I said,” said the prisoner. “An honorable discharge right into a military cemetery.”
“Shut your goddamn mouth,” said the guard languidly, “and pick up that wheelbarrow. Whitacre, one more drink, to celebrate D Day.”
“I have nothing to celebrate,” Michael said, trying to save his gin.
“Don’t be ungrateful,” said the guard. “You’re here nice and dry and safe and you ain’t laying on any beach with a hunk of shrapnel up your ass. You got plenty to celebrate.” He held out his hand. Michael gave him the bottle.
“That gin,” Michael said, “cost me two pounds a fifth.”
The guard grinned. “You was gypped,” he said. He drank deeply. The two prisoners looked at him thirstily and longingly. The guard gave Michael the bottle. Michael drank, because it was D Day. He felt the sweet wave of self-pity sweep alcoholically over him. He glared at the prisoners coldly as he put the bottle away.
“Well,” said Fahnstock, “I guess old Roosevelt is finally satisfied today. He’s gone and got himself a mess of Americans killed.”
“I’ll bet he jumped up out of his wheelchair,” the guard said, “and is dancin’ up and down on the White House floor.”
“I heard,” said Fahnstock, “the day he declared war on Germany, he had a big banquet in the White House with turkey and French wine, and after it they was all laying each other on the tables and desks.”
Michael took a deep breath. “Germany declared war on the United States,” he said. “I don’t give a damn, but that’s the way it happened.”
“Whitacre is a Communist from New York,” said Fahnstock to the guard. “He’s crazy about Roosevelt.”
“I’m not crazy about anybody,” Michael said. “Only Germany declared war on us and so did Italy. Two days after Pearl Harbor.”
“I’ll leave it up to the boys,” said Fahnstock. He turned to the guard and the prisoners. “Straighten out my friend,” Fahnstock said.
“We started it,” said the guard. “We declared war. I remember it as clear as day.”
“Boys,” Fahnstock appealed to two prisoners.
They both nodded. “We declared war on them,” said the man who had been offered an honorable discharge if he would join the infantry.
“Roger,” said the other prisoner, who had been in the Air Forces before they caught him forging checks in Wales.
“There you are,” said Fahnstock. “Four to one, Whitacre. The majority rules.”
Michael glared drunkenly at Fahnstock. Suddenly it became intolerable to bear the pimply, leering, complacent face. Not today, Michael thought heavily, not on a day like this. “You ignorant, garbage-brained son of a bitch,” Michael said clearly and wildly, “if you open your mouth once more I’ll kill you.”
Fahnstock moved his lips gently. Then he spat, a long, brownish, filthy spurt. The tobacco juice splashed on Michael’s face. Michael leapt at Fahnstock and hit him in the jaw, twice. Fahnstock went down, but he was up in a moment, holding a heavy piece of two by four with three large nails sticking out of one end. He swung at Michael and Michael started to run. The guard and the prisoners stepped back to give the men room. They watched interestedly.
Fahnstock was very fast, despite his fat, and he got close enough to hit Michael’s shoulder. Michael felt the sharp bite of the nails in his shoulder and wrenched away. He stopped and bent down and picked up a plank. Before he could straighten up, Fahnstock hit him on the side of the head. Michael felt the scraping, tearing passage of the nails across his cheekbone. Then he swung. He hit Fahnstock on the head and Fahnstock began to walk strangely, sideways, in a small half circle around Michael. Fahnstock swung again, but weakly, and Michael leapt out of the way easily, although it was getting difficult to judge distances correctly, because of the blood in his eye. He waited coldly, and just as Fahnstock raised his plank again, Michael stepped in, swinging his board sideways, like a baseball bat. The plank caught Fahnstock across the neck and jaw and he went down on his hands and knees. He stayed that way, peering dully at the thin dust on the bare ground around the lumber pile.
“All right,” said the guard. “That was a nice little fight. You,” he said to the prisoners, “sit the bastard up.”
Both prisoners went over to Fahnstock and sat him up against a box. Fahnstock looked dully out across the sunny bare ground, his legs straight out in front of him. He was breathing heavily, but that was all.
Michael threw away his plank and got out his handkerchief. He put it to his face and looked curiously at the large red stain on it when he took it away from his face.
Wounded, he thought, grinning, wounded on D Day.
The guard saw an officer turn a corner of a barracks a hundred yards away and said hurriedly to the prisoners, “Come on, get moving.” Then to Michael and Fahnstock, “Better get back to work. Here comes Smiling Jack.”
The guard and the prisoners went off at a brisk clip, and Michael stared at the approaching officer, who was called Smiling Jack because he never smiled at all.
Michael grabbed Fahnstock and pulled him to his feet. He put the hammer in Fahnstock’s hand and automatically Fahnstock began to tap at the boards. Michael picked up some boards and ostentatiously carried them to the other end of the pile, where he put them down neatly.
He went back to Fahnstock and picked up his own hammer. Both men were making a busy noise when Smiling Jack came up to them. Court-martial, Michael was thinking, court-martial, five years, drunk on duty, fighting, insubordination, etc.
“What’s going on here?” asked Smiling Jack.
Michael stopped hammering, and Fahnstock too. They turned and faced the Lieutenant.
“Nothing, Sir,” Michael said, keeping his lips as tight as possible so that the Lieutenant couldn’t smell his breath.
“Have you men been fighting?”
“No, Sir,” said Fahnstock, united against the common enemy.
“How did you get that wound?” The Lieutenant gestured toward the three raw, bleeding lines across Michael’s cheekbone.
“I slipped, Sir,” said Michael blandly.
Smiling Jack’s lip curled angrily and Michael knew he was thinking, They’re all the same, they’re all out to make fools of you, there isn’t a word of truth in a single enlisted man in the whole goddamn Army.
“Fahnstock!” Smiling Jack said.
“Yes, Sir?”
“Is this man telling the truth?”
“Yes, Sir. He slipped.”
Smiling Jack looked around helplessly and furiously. “If I find out you’re lying …” He left the sentence threateningly in the air. “All right, Whitacre, finish
up here. There’re travel orders for you in the orderly room. You’re being transferred. Go on and pick them up.”
He glared once more at the two men and turned and stalked away, after exacting a salute.
Michael watched the retreating, frustrated back.
“You son of a bitch,” said Fahnstock, “if I catch you again I’ll razor-cut you.”
“Nice to have known you,” Michael said lightly. “Clean those pots nice and bright now.”
He tossed away his hammer and strode lightly toward the orderly room, tapping his rear pocket to make sure the bottle wasn’t showing.
With his orders in his pocket, later on, and a neat bandage on his cheek Michael packed his barracks bag. Colonel Pavone had come through, and Michael was to report to him in London immediately. As he packed, Michael sipped at his bottle, and planned, craftily, to take no chances, volunteer for nothing, take nothing seriously. Survive, he thought, survive; it is the only lesson I have learned so far.
He drove down to London in an Army truck the next morning. The people of the villages along the road cheered and made the V sign with their fingers because they thought every truck now was on its way to France, and Michael and the other soldiers in the truck waved back cynically, grinning and laughing.
They passed a British convoy near London, loaded with armed infantrymen. On the rear truck, there was a dourly chalked legend. “Don’t cheer, Girls, We’re British.”
The British infantrymen did not even look up when the American truck sped by them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
A BATTLE EXISTS on many different levels. There is the purely moral level, at the Supreme Headquarters perhaps eighty miles away from the sound of the guns, where the filing cabinets have been dusted in the morning, where there is a sense of quiet and efficiency, where soldiers who never fire a gun and never have a shot fired at them, the high Generals, sit in their pressed uniforms and prepare statements to the effect that all has been done that is humanly possible, the rest being left to the judgment of God, Who has risen early, ostensibly, for this day’s work, and is partially and critically, regarding the ships, the men drowning in the water, the flight of high explosive, the accuracy of bombardiers, the skill of naval officers, the bodies being thrown into the air by mines, the swirl of tides against steel spikes at the water’s edge, the loading of cannon in gun emplacements, and the building far back from the small violent fringe between the two armies, where the files have also been dusted that morning and the enemy Generals sit in different pressed uniforms, looking at very similar maps, reading very similar reports, matching their moral strength and intellectual ingenuity with their colleagues and antagonists a hundred miles away. In these places, in the rooms where the large maps with the acetate overlays and the red and black crayon markings are hung on the walls, the battle swiftly takes on an orderly and formal appearance. A plan is always in process of being worked out on the maps. If Plan I fails, Plan II is attempted. If Plan II is only partially successful, a pre-arranged modification of Plan III is instituted. The Generals have all studied from the same books at West Point and Spandau and Sandhurst, and many of them have written books themselves and read each other’s works, and they all know what Caesar did in a somewhat similar situation and the mistake that Napoleon made in Italy and how Ludendorff failed to exploit a break in the line in 1915, and they all hope, on opposite sides of the English Channel, that the situation never gets to that decisive point where they will have to say the Yes or the No which may decide the fate of the battle, and perhaps the nation, and which takes the last trembling dram of courage out of a man, and which may leave him ruined and broken for the rest of his life, all his honors gone, his reputation empty, when he has said it. So they sit back in their offices, which are like the offices of General Motors or the offices of I. G. Farben in Frankfurt, with stenographers and typists and flirtations in the halls, and look at the maps and read the reports and pray that Plans I, II, and III will operate as everyone has said they will operate back on Grosvenor Square and the Wilhelmstrasse, with only small, not very important modifications that can be handled locally, by the men on the scene.
The men on the scene see the affair on a different level. They have not been questioned on the proper manner of isolating the battlefield. They have not been consulted on the length of the preliminary bombardment. Meteorologists have not instructed them on the rise and fall of the tides in the month of June or the probable incidence of storms. They have not been at the conferences in which was discussed the number of divisions it would be profitable to lose to reach a phase line one mile inland by 1600 hours. There are no filing cabinets on board the landing barges, no stenographers with whom to flirt, no maps in which their actions, multiplied by two million, become clear, organized, intelligent symbols, suitable for publicity releases and the tables of historians.
They see helmets, vomit, green water, shell geysers, smoke, crashing planes, blood plasma, submerged obstacles, guns, pale, senseless faces, a confused drowning mob of men running and falling, that seem to have no relation to any of the things they have been taught since they left their jobs and wives to put on the uniform of their country. To a General sitting before the maps eighty miles away, with echoes of Caesar and Clausewitz and Napoleon fleetingly swimming through his brain, matters are proceeding as planned, or almost as planned, but to the man on the scene everything is going wrong.
“Oh, God,” sobs the man on the scene, when the shell hits the Landing Craft Infantry, H hour plus two, one mile out from shore, and the wounded begin to scream on the slippery decks, “Oh, God, it is all screwed up.”
To the Generals eighty miles away, the reports on casualties are encouraging. To the man on the scene the casualties are never encouraging. When he is hit or when the man next to him is hit, when the ship fifty feet away explodes, when the Naval Ensign on the bridge is screaming in a high, girlish voice for his mother because he has nothing left below his belt, it can only appear to him that he has been involved in a terrible accident, and it is inconceivable at that moment to believe that there is a man eighty miles away who has foreseen that accident, encouraged it, made arrangements for it to happen, and who can report, after it has happened (although he must know about the shell, about the listing Landing Craft Infantry, about the wet decks and the screaming Ensign) that everything is going according to plan.
“Oh, God,” sobs the man on the scene, watching the amphibious tanks sink under the waves, with perhaps one man swimming up out of the hatch, “Oh, God,” he sobs, looking down at the queer, unattached leg lying beside his face and realizing it is his, “Oh, God,” as the ramp goes down and the twelve men in front of him pile up in the cold two feet of water, with the machine-gun bullets inside them, “Oh, God,” looking for the holes on the beach he has been told the Air Force was going to put there for him, and not finding them, and lying there face down, with the mortar shell dropping silently on top of him, “Oh, God,” he sobs, seeing the friend he has loved since Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1940, blow up on a mine and hang across a barbed-wire fence with his back wide open from neck to hip, “Oh, God,” sobs the man on the scene, “it is all screwed up.”
The Landing Craft Infantry wallowed in the water until four o’clock in the afternoon. At noon a barge took off their wounded, all properly bandaged and transfused. Noah watched the swathed, blanketed men being swung over the side on stretchers, thinking, with a helpless touch of envy: They are going back, they are going back, in ten hours they will be in England, in ten days, they may be in the United States, what luck, they never had to fight at all.
But then, when the barge was only a hundred feet away, it was hit. There was a splash beside it, and nothing seemed to be happening for a moment. But then it slowly rolled over and the blankets and the bandages and the stretchers whirled in the choppy green water for a minute or two, and that was all. Donnelly had been one of the wounded, with a piece of shrapnel in his skull, and Noah looked for Donnelly in the froth and he
avy cloudy water, but there was no sign of him. He never got a chance to use that flame-thrower, Noah thought dully. After all that practice.
Colclough was not to be seen. He was down below all day and Lieutenant Green and Lieutenant Sorenson were the only officers of the Company on deck. Lieutenant Green was a frail, girlish-looking man, and everybody had made fun of him all through training, because of his mincing walk and high voice. But he walked around on deck, among the wounded and the sick and the men who were sure they were going to die, and he was cheerful and competent and helped with the bandages and the blood transfusions, and kept telling everyone that the boat was not going to sink, the Navy was working on the engines, they would be in on the beach in fifteen minutes. He still walked in that silly, mincing way, and his voice was no lower and no more manly than usual, but Noah had the feeling that if Lieutenant Green, who had run a drygoods store in South Carolina before the war, had not been on board, half the Company would have jumped over the side by two in the afternoon.
It was impossible to tell how things were going on the beach. Burnecker even made a joke about it. All morning long he had kept saying, in a strange, rasping voice, holding violently onto Noah’s arms, when the shells hit the water close to them, “We’re going to get it today. We’re going to get it today.” But around noon he got hold of himself. He stopped vomiting and ate a K ration, complaining about the dryness of the cheese, and then he seemed to have either resigned himself or become more optimistic. When Noah peered out at the beach, on which shells were falling and men running and mines going up, and asked Burnecker, “How is it going?” Burnecker said, “I don’t know. The boy hasn’t delivered my copy of the New York Times yet.” It wasn’t much of a joke, but Noah laughed wildly at it and Burnecker grinned, pleased with the effect, and from then on, in the Company, long after they were deep in Germany, when anybody asked how things were going, he was liable to be told, “The boy hasn’t delivered the New York Times yet.”