by Irwin Shaw
“Oh, Mother,” Cowley kept muttering to himself, his voice shrill and nervous, “oh, Mother, Mother, Mother.” But he stuck close behind Noah, and even in the deep part, he kept going steadily. When they reached the other bank, Noah did not stop. He turned and pushed against the tide, searching for the broken part of the bank up which he and Burnecker had gone before.
He reached it long before he expected to. “Here,” he said, turning. “Let me help you up.”
“Mother,” Cowley said, “oh, Mother.”
Shoving and pushing, Noah managed to get Cowley started up the bank. Cowley was heavy and clumsy and he knocked a stone out of place that fell with a loud splash. But he got one knee up to the top of the bank and started to get his other leg up. Then there was a short burst of gunfire.
Cowley stood up crazily and waved his arms around. He tried to lunge forward, but he whirled and fell back. His shoe hit Noah a heavy, stunning blow along the head. Cowley screamed once. Then he crashed into the water. He never came up. Noah stood under the bank, dazedly watching the spot where Cowley had disappeared. He took a step in that direction, but he couldn’t see anything and he felt his knees begin to go. He lurched back to the bank. Then, slowly, numbly, he crawled up. He had a dream he was going to drown, Noah thought stupidly, he had a dream.
He was shaking uncontrollably when he reached the top of the bank. He was still shaking when Burnecker and the man from Georgia picked him up and ran with him, away from the canal.
A half hour later, dressed in a uniform three sizes too large for him that had been taken from a dead man outside the Company CP, Noah was standing in front of the Division G2. The G2 was a gray-haired round little Lieutenant Colonel with purple dye all over his face, staining his skin and grizzled beard. The G2 had impetigo and was trying to cure it while doing everything else that was expected of him.
Division CP was in a sandbagged shed and there were men sleeping everywhere on the dirt floor. It still wasn’t light enough to work by and the G2 had to peer at the map Noah had drawn by the light of a candle, because all the generators and electrical equipment of Headquarters had been sunk on the way in to the beach.
Burnecker was standing dreamily beside Noah, his eyes almost closed.
“Good,” the G2 was saying, nodding his head again and again, back and forth, “good, very good.” But Noah hardly remembered what the man was talking about. He only knew that he felt very sad, but it was hard to remember just why he felt that way.
“Very good, boys,” the man with the purple face was saying kindly. He seemed to be smiling at them. “Above and beyond the … There’ll be a medal in this for you boys. I’ll get this right over to Corps Artillery. Come around this afternoon and I’ll tell you how it came out.”
Noah wondered dimly why he had a purple face and what he was talking about.
“I would like the photograph back,” he said clearly. “My wife and my son.”
“Yes, of course,” the man smiled even more widely, yellow, old teeth surrounded by purple and gray beard. “This afternoon, when you come back. C Company is being re-formed. We’ve got back about forty men, counting you two. Evans,” he called to a soldier who seemed to be sleeping standing up against the shed wall, “take these two men to C Company. Don’t worry,” he said, grinning at Noah, “you won’t have to walk far. They’re only in the next field.” He bent over the map again, nodding and saying, “Good, very good.” Evans came over and led Burnecker and Noah out of the shed and through the morning mist to the next field.
The first man they saw was Lieutenant Green, who took one look at them and said, “There are some blankets over there. Roll up and go to sleep. I’ll ask you questions later.”
On the way over to the blankets they passed Shields, the Company Clerk, who had already set up a small desk for himself, made out of two ration boxes, in a ditch under the trees along the edge of the field. “Hey,” Shields said, “we got some mail for you. The first delivery. I nearly sent it back. I thought you guys were missing.”
He dug around in a barracks bag and brought out some envelopes. There was a brown Manila envelope for Noah, addressed in Hope’s handwriting. Noah took it and put it inside the dead man’s shirt he was wearing and picked up three blankets. He and Burnecker walked slowly to a spot under a tree and unrolled the blankets. They sat down heavily and took off the boots that had been given them. Noah opened the Manila envelope. A small magazine fell out. He blinked and started to read Hope’s letter.
“Dearest,” she wrote, “I suppose I ought to explain about the magazine right off. The poem you sent me, the one you wrote in England, seemed too nice to hold just for myself, and I took the liberty of sending it …”
Noah picked up the magazine. On the cover he saw his name. He opened the magazine and peered heavily through the pages. Then he saw his name again and the neat, small lines of verse.
“Beware the heart’s sedition,” he read, “It is not made for war …”
“Hey,” he said, “hey, Burnecker.”
“Yes?” Burnecker had tried to read his mail, but had given up, and was lying on his back under the blankets, staring up at the sky. “What do you want?”
“Hey Burnecker,” Noah said, “I got a poem in a magazine. Want to read it?”
There was a long pause, then Burnecker sat up.
“Of course,” he said. “Hand it over.”
Noah gave Burnecker the magazine, folded back to his poem. He watched Burnecker’s face intently as his friend read the poem. Burnecker was a slow reader and moved his lips as he read. Once or twice he closed his eyes and his head rocked a little, but he finished the poem.
“It’s great,” Burnecker said. He handed the magazine to Noah, seated on the blanket beside him.
“Are you on the level?” Noah asked.
“It’s a great poem,” Burnecker said gravely. He nodded for emphasis. Then he lay back.
Noah looked at his name in print, but the other writing was too small for his eyes at the moment. He put the magazine inside the dead man’s shirt again and lay back under the warm blankets.
Just before he closed his eyes he saw Rickett. Rickett was standing over him and Rickett was shaved clean and had on a fresh uniform. “Oh, Christ,” Rickett said, off in the distance high above Noah, “oh, Christ, we still got the Jew.”
Noah closed his eyes. He knew that later on what Rickett had said would make a great difference in his life, but at the moment all he wanted to do was sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THERE WAS a sign on the side of the road that said “You Are Under Observed Shellfire for the Next One Thousand Yards. Keep an Interval of Seventy-five Yards.”
Michael glanced sideways at Colonel Pavone. But Pavone, in the front seat of the jeep, was reading a paper-covered mystery story he had picked up in a staging area in England while they were waiting to cross the Channel. Pavone was the only man Michael had ever seen who could read in a moving jeep.
Michael stepped on the accelerator and the jeep spurted swiftly down the empty road. On the right there was a bombed-out airdrome, with the skeletons of German planes lying about There was a strip of smoke farther off in front, lying in neat folds over the wheatfields in the bright summer afternoon air. The jeep bounced rapidly over the macadam road to the shelter of a clump of trees, and over a little rise, and the thousand observed yards were crossed.
Michael sighed a little, to himself, and drove more slowly. There was a loud, erratic growling of big guns ahead of them, from the city of Caen, that the British had taken the day before. Just what Colonel Pavone wanted to do in Caen, Michael didn’t know. In his job as a roving Civil Affairs officer, Pavone had orders which permitted him to wander from one end of the front to another, and with Michael driving him, he visited all over Normandy, like a rather sleepy, good-humored tourist, looking at everything, when he wasn’t reading, nodding brightly to the men who were fighting at each particular spot, talking in rapid, Parisian French to the nativ
es, occasionally jotting down notes on scraps of paper. At night Pavone would retire to the deep dugout in the field near Carentan, and type out reports by himself, and send them on some place, but Michael never saw them, and never knew exactly where they were going.
“This book stinks,” Pavone said. He tossed it into the back of the jeep. “A man has to be an idiot to read mystery stories.” He looked around him, with his perky, clown’s grimace. “Are we close?” he asked.
A battery concealed behind a row of farmhouses opened fire. The noise, so near, seemed to vibrate the windshield and Michael had, once again, the expanding, tickling concussion feeling low down in his stomach, that he never seemed to get over when a gun went off nearby.
“Close enough,” Michael said grimly.
Pavone chuckled. “The first hundred wounds are the hardest,” he said.
The son of a bitch, Michael thought, one day he is going to get me killed.
A British ambulance passed them, fast, going back, loaded, bumping cruelly on the rough road. Michael thought for a moment of the wounded in back, gasping as they rolled on the stretchers.
On one side of the road was a burned-out British tank, blackened and gaping, and there was a smell of the dead from it. Every new place you approached, every newly taken town which represented a victory on the maps and over the BBC, had the same smell, sweet, rotting, unvictorious. Michael wished vaguely, as he drove, feeling his nose burn in the strong sun, squinting through his dusty goggles, that he was back on the lumber pile in England.
They came over the brow of a hill. Ahead of them stretched the city of Caen. The British had been trying to take it for a month, and after looking at it for a moment, you wondered why they had been so anxious. Walls were standing, but few houses. Block after block of closely packed stone buildings had been battered and knocked down, and it was the same as far as the eye could reach. Tripe a la mode de Caen, Michael remembered from the menus of French restaurants in New York, and the University of Caen, from a course in Medieval History. British heavy mortars were firing from the jumbled books of the University library at the moment, and Canadian soldiers were crouched over machine guns in the kitchens where the tripe had at other times been so deftly prepared.
They were in the outskirts of the town by now, winding in and out of stone rubble. Pavone signaled Michael to stop, and Michael drew the jeep up along a heavy stone convent wall that ran beside the roadside ditch. There were some Canadians in the ditch and they looked at the Americans curiously.
We ought to wear British helmets, Michael thought nervously. These damn things must look just like German helmets to the British. They’ll shoot first and examine our papers later.
“How’re things?” Pavone was out of the jeep and standing over the ditch, talking to the soldiers there.
“Bloody awful,” said one of the Canadians, a small, dark, Italian-looking man. He stood up in the ditch and grinned. “You going into the town, Colonel?”
“Maybe.”
“There are snipers all over the place,” said the Canadian. There was the whistle of an incoming shell and the Canadians dived into the ditch again. Michael ducked, but he could not get out of the jeep fast enough, anyway, so he merely covered his face jerkily with his hands. There was no explosion. Dud, Michael’s mind registered dully, the brave workers of Warsaw and Prague, filling the casings with sand and putting heroic notes among the steel scraps, “Salute from the anti-fascist munitions workers of Skoda.” Or was that a romantic story from the newspapers and the OWI, too, and would the shell explode six hours later when everyone had forgotten about it?
“Every three minutes,” the Canadian said bitterly, standing up in the ditch. “We’re back here on rest and every three bleeding minutes we got to hit the ground. That’s the British Army’s notion of a rest area!” He spat.
“Are there mines?” Pavone asked.
“Sure there’re mines,” the Canadian said aggressively. “Why shouldn’t there be mines? Where do you think you are, Yankee Stadium?”
He had an accent that would have sounded natural in Brooklyn. “Where you from, Soldier?” Pavone asked.
“Toronto,” said the soldier. “The next man that tries to get me out of Toronto is going to get a Ford axle across his ears.”
There was the whistle again, and again Michael was too slow to get out of the jeep. The Canadian disappeared magically. Pavone merely leaned negligently against the jeep. This time the shell exploded, but it must have been a hundred yards away, because nothing came their way at all. Two guns on the other side of the convent wall fired rapidly again and again, answering.
The Canadian raised himself out of the ditch again. “Rest area,” he said venomously. “I should have joined the bloody American Army. You don’t see any Englishmen around here, do you?” He glared at the broken street and the smashed buildings with hatred flaring from his clouded eyes. “Only Canadians. When it’s tough, hand it to Canada. There isn’t an Englishman who’s got further than the whorehouse in Bayeau.”
“Now …” Pavone began, grinning at this wild inaccuracy.
“Don’t argue with me, Colonel, don’t argue with me,” the man from Toronto said loudly. “I’m too nervous to argue.”
“All right,” Pavone said, smiling, pushing his helmet back, so that it looked like an unmilitary chamber pot over his bushy, burlesque eyebrows. “I won’t argue with you. I’ll see you later.”
“If you don’t get shot,” said the Canadian, “and if I don’t desert in the meantime.”
Pavone waved to him. “Mike,” he said, “I’ll drive now. You sit up in back, and keep your eyes open.”
Michael climbed in back and sat high up on the folded-down jeep top, so that he could fire more easily in all directions. Pavone took the wheel. Pavone always took the most responsible and dangerous position at moments like this.
Pavone waved once more to the Canadian, who didn’t wave back. The jeep growled down the road into town.
Michael blew at the dust in the carbine chamber and took it off safety. He sat with the carbine over his knees and peered ahead of him as Pavone slowly drove down the battered street among the ruins.
Again and again British batteries hidden among the ruins spoke up in fierce, rolling succession. Pavone had to snake in and out to avoid piles of building bricks and stones that blocked the road.
Michael scanned the windows of the still-standing houses. Suddenly it seemed that Caen was composed of windows, with blinds drawn, that miraculously had survived the bombings, the tank fights, the artillery of the Germans and the British. Michael felt naked and insanely vulnerable sitting up so high, going down the empty, broken street, among all the windows, behind any one of which a German sniper might be hiding, babying his rifle, with the fine telescopic lenses, smiling quietly to himself as he waited for the open, foolish jeep to come just a little closer …
I wouldn’t mind being killed, Michael told himself unhappily, suddenly twisting because he thought he heard a window opening behind him. I wouldn’t mind being killed in a battle, in a battle in which I was fighting, but like this, sightseeing with an idiotic ex-circus gambler … Then he knew he was lying to himself. He would mind getting killed, no matter what. There didn’t seem to be much sense to getting killed. The war went on at its own slow, deliberate pace, and if he got himself killed it would make no difference one way or another to anyone but himself, and to his family, perhaps. Whether he was dead or not, at exactly the same moment of the twentieth century the armies would move, the machines in which the real fighting finally took place would destroy each other, the surrender would be signed … Survive, he remembered desperately from the lumber pile, survive, survive …
The batteries crashed all around him. It was hard to imagine the organization, the men telephoning, jotting down numbers on maps, correcting ranges, fiddling with the delicate enormous mechanisms that raised a gun so that it would fire five miles this minute and seven the next, all going on unseen among the cell
ars of the old town of Caen, and behind ancient garden walls and in the living rooms of Frenchmen who had been plumbers and meatpackers before this and were now dead. How large was Caen, how many people had lived in it, was it like Buffalo, Jersey City, Pasadena?
The jeep went slowly on, with Pavone looking interestedly around him, and Michael feeling increasingly naked in back.
They turned a corner and came to a street of three-story houses which had been badly mauled. Cascades of rubble swept down from the back walls of the houses to the street and there were men and women patiently bent over, high in the ruins, like berry pickers, taking a rag here, a lamp there, a pair of stockings, a cooking pot, out of the thick pile of rubbish which had been their homes, oblivious to the English guns around them, oblivious to the snipers, oblivious to the German guns across the river that were shelling the town, oblivious to everything except that these were their homes and in these torrents of stone and lumber were their possessions, slowly accumulated in the course of their lives.
On the street were wheelbarrows and baby carriages. The gleaners gathered up armloads high in the pile and slid down, balancing their dusty treasures, and put them neatly in the small conveyances. Then, without looking at the Americans who were passing them, or at the occasional Canadian jeep or ambulance that ground by, they would climb methodically up the static torrent and begin digging all over again for some remembered and broken treasure.
As the jeep passed these patient harvesters, Michael forgot for a moment that he might be shot in the small, tender part between his shoulder blades that always seemed ready and about to receive a bullet, or in the throbbing part just under his rib cage where he knew he would be hit if he were hit in front at all. He wanted to stand up and make a speech to the Frenchmen searching the ruins of their homes. “Leave,” he wanted to shout, “flee the town. Nothing you find there is worth being killed for. Those sounds you hear are shells bursting. And when a shell bursts the steel makes no distinction between uniform and flesh, civilians and military. Come back later, when the war has gone by. Your treasures are safe, because no one wants them or can use them.”