by Irwin Shaw
In the November mud, the thousands of men, waiting in the camp to be sent up to divisions to make up combat losses, milled slowly about, in a restrained, quiet manner that was very different, Michael thought, from the usual boisterous and loudly complaining habits of any other American soldiers he had ever seen. This camp, Michael thought, standing at the entrance to the tent in which he was quartered, peering out into the dull drizzle, and the men in the wet raincoats moving aimlessly and restlessly about on the long, thick streets, is not really human. The only thing it can be compared to is the stockyards at Chicago, with the beasts caught in the corrals, uneasily aware that doom is near, sniffing the scent of the waiting slaughter house.
“The infantry!” Young Speer was saying bitterly inside the tent. “They send me to Harvard for two years and I’m supposed to be an officer when I come out, and then they change their minds and stop the whole damn thing! A Private in the infantry, after two years at Harvard! What an Army!”
“It’s tough,” Krenek, on the next bed, said sympathetically. “There’s no doubt about it, this Army is in a terrible mess. It all depends who you know.”
“I know plenty of people,” Speer said sharply. “How do you think I got into Harvard? But they couldn’t help when the transfer came through. My mother nearly died.”
“Gee,” Krenek said gently, “it must of been a real disappointment to everyone concerned.”
Michael grinned sourly and turned back to look at Krenek, to see if he was making fun of the young man from Harvard. Krenek was a machine gunner from the First Division, who had been wounded in Sicily and then again on D Day, and was now going up for his third time around. But Krenek, who was a small, wiry, dark-faced boy from the slums of Chicago, was honestly sorry for the young lordling from Boston.
“Ah,” said Michael, “maybe the war will be over tomorrow.”
“You got any private information?” Krenek asked.
“No,” Michael said, “but in Stars and Stripes it says the Russians are advancing fifty miles a day …”
“Oh, the Russians,” Krenek shook his head. “I wouldn’t depend too much on the Russians winning any war for us. It’s going to take the First Division, finally, to go into Berlin and finish it.”
“You going to try to get sent back to the First Division?” Michael asked.
“God, no,” said Krenek, shaking his head mildly, looking up from the Ml, which he was cleaning on his cot. “I want to come out of this war alive. The First Division is too good and everybody knows it. It’s too famous. The publicity is murderous. Is there a tough beach to hit, is there a hill to take, is there an attack to lead, they call on the old Red One. You might just as well put a bullet right here between the eyes as join the First Division. I want to be sent to a nice, mediocre division that no one has ever heard of, that hasn’t taken a town since Pearl Harbor. You join the First Division, the best you can hope for is a wound. I was Purple-Hearted twice and each time all the guys in my platoon congratulated me. They always give the First Division the best Generals in the Army, always fighting, ain’t afraid of nothing, and that’s Good night, Happy, for the enlisted man. I came through this far, my motto now is, Let the other fellow in on the glory.” He went back carefully to cleaning the oily parts of the Ml.
“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.”
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 l
ike 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.