by Irwin Shaw
But Noah did not seem to be bothered by any such reflections. He had walked the last three miles at a blistering, eager pace, through all the mud. There was a tense, trembling smile on his lips as he threw the door open and went in. Slowly, Michael followed him.
Captain Green was talking over the handset, his back to the door. “My Company front is a joke, Sir,” he was saying. “You could drive a milk wagon any place through us, we’re stretched so thin. We need at least forty replacements right away. Over.” Michael could hear the thin voice of Battalion, over the wire, angry and abrupt. Green flipped the lever on the handset and said, “Yes, Sir, I understand we will get the replacements when the goddamn Corps sees fit to send them down. Meanwhile,” he said, “if the Krauts attack, they can go through us like Epsom salts through an eel. What should I do if they put in an attack? Over.” He listened again, Michael heard two crisp sounds over the wire. “Yes, Sir,” said Green, “I understand. That is all, Sir.” He hung up the phone and turned to a Corporal who was sitting at an improvised desk. “Do you know what the Major told me?” he asked aggrievedly. “He said if we were attacked, I should notify him. A humorist! We’re a new branch of the Army, notification troops!” He turned wearily to Noah and Michael. “Yes?”
Noah didn’t say anything. Green peered at him, then smiled wearily and put out his hand. “Ackerman,” he said, as they shook hands, “I thought you’d be a civilian by now.”
“No, Sir,” said Noah. “I’m not a civilian. You remember Whitacre, don’t you?”
Green peered at Michael. “Indeed I do,” he said in his almost effeminate, high, pleasant voice. “From Florida. What sins have you committed to be returned to C Company?”
He shook Michael’s hand, too.
“We haven’t been returned, Sir,” Noah said. “We’re AWOL from a replacement center.”
“Excellent,” said Green, grinning. “Don’t give it another thought Very good of you, very good of you indeed. I’ll straighten it out in no time. Though why anyone should be anxious to come back to this miserable Company, I won’t inquire. You boys now constitute my reinforcements for the week …” It was plain that he was touched and pleased. He kept patting Noah’s arm in a warm, almost motherly gesture.
“Sir,” Noah said, “is Johnny Burnecker around?” Noah was trying to keep his voice level and casual, but he was not having much success with it.
Green turned away and the Corporal at the table drummed slowly with his fingertips on the wood. It’s going to be awful, Michael realized, the next ten minutes are going to be very bad.
“I forgot for the moment,” Green said flatly, “how close you and Burnecker were.”
“Yes, Sir,” said Noah.
“He made Sergeant, you know,” Green said. “Staff Sergeant. Platoon leader, way back in September. He is a hell of a fine soldier, Johnny Burnecker.”
“Yes, Sir,” Noah said.
“He was hit last night, Noah,” Green said. “One freak shell. He was the only casualty we’ve had in the Company in five days.”
“Is he dead, Sir?” Noah asked.
“No.”
Michael saw Noah’s hands, which had been clenched into fists along his trousers seams, slowly relax.
“No,” Green said, “he isn’t dead. We sent him back right after it happened.”
“Sir,” Noah asked eagerly, “could I ask you a favor, a big favor?”
“What is it?”
“Could you give me a pass to go back and see if I can talk to him?”
“He might have been sent back to a field hospital by now,” Green said gently.
“I have to see him, Captain,” Noah said, speaking very quickly. “It’s terribly important. You don’t know how important it is. The field hospital’s only fifteen miles back. We saw it. We passed it on the way up. It won’t take more than a couple of hours. I won’t hang around long. Honest, I won’t I’ll come right back. I’ll be back by tonight. I just want to talk to him for fifteen minutes. It might make a big difference to him, Captain …”
“All right,” Green said. He sat down and scribbled on a sheet of paper. “Here’s a pass. Go outside and tell Berenson I said he was to drive you.”
“Thanks,” Noah said, his voice almost inaudible in the bare room. “Thanks, Captain.”
“No side expeditions,” Green said, staring at the cellophane-covered sector map, symboled in crayon on the wall. “We need that jeep tonight.”
“No side expeditions,” Noah said. “I promise.” He started toward the door, then stopped. “Captain,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Is he hurt bad?”
“Very bad, Noah,” Green said wearily. “Very, very bad.”
Noah arranged his face neatly and coldly, and went out, with the pass in his hand. A moment later, Michael heard the jeep starting up, and moving through the mud, making a chugging, motor-boat kind of noise into the distance.
“Whitacre,” Green said, “you can hang around here until he gets back.”
“Thank you, Sir,” Michael said.
Green peered sharply at him. “What kind of soldier have you turned out to be, Whitacre?” he asked.
Michael thought for a moment. “Miserable, Sir,” he said.
Green smiled palely, looking, more than ever, like a clerk after a long day at the counter in the Christmas rush. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. He lit a cigarette and went over to the door and opened it. He stood there, framed against the gray, washed-out colors of the autumnal countryside. From afar, now that the door was open, could be heard the faint chugging of a jeep. “Ah,” Green said, “I shouldn’t’ve let him go. What’s the sense in a soldier going to watch his friends die when he doesn’t have to?”
He closed the door and went back and sat down. The phone rang and he picked it up languidly. Michael heard the sharp voice of Battalion. “No, Sir,” Green said, speaking as though on the brink of sleep. “There has been no small-arms fire since 700 hours. I will keep you informed.” He hung up the handset and sat silently, staring at the patterns his cigarette smoke was making before the terrain map on the wall.
It was long after dark when Noah got back. It had been a quiet day, with no patrols out Overhead, the artillery came and went, but it seemed to have very little relation to the men of C Company who occasionally drifted into the CP to report to Captain Green. Michael had dozed all afternoon in a corner, considering this new, languid, relaxed aspect of the war, so different from the constant fighting in Normandy, and the wild rush after the break through. This was the slow movement, he thought sleepily, with the melody, such as it was, being carried by other instruments. The main problems, he saw, were keeping warm, keeping clean and keeping fed, and Captain Green’s big concern all day had seemed to be the growing incidence of trenchfoot in his command.
Michael remembered with wonder all the huge bustle and movement of men and vehicles he had seen on his way up to the front, all those thousands of men, all those busy officers, all those jeeps and trucks and railroad cars busily rattling around just to keep these few, forlorn, sleepy-eyed, slow-moving soldiers rooted and secure on this forgotten strip of line. Everywhere else in the Army, Michael realized, thinking of Green demanding forty replacements, there had always been two or three men for every job; in the supply rooms, in the offices, in the Special Services departments, in the hospitals, on the convoys. Only here, in the face of the enemy, were the numbers sparse. Only here, in the dreary autumn weather, among the damp and slit-trenches, did it seem as though the Army were representing a decimated, impoverished nation of beggars. One-third of the nation, he dimly remembered the President saying long ago, ill-housed, ill-nourished. The Army here, by some curious trick of distribution, seemed to be representing only that third of America …
Michael heard the jeep coming up through the darkness outside. The windows were covered with blankets to show no light, and a blanket hung over the doorway. The door swung open and Noah came in slowly, followed by Berens
on. The blanket flickered in the light of the electric lantern, blowing in the raw gust of night air.
Noah closed the door behind him. He leaned wearily against the wall. Green looked up at him.
“Well?” Green asked gently. “Did you see him, Noah?”
“I saw him.” Noah’s voice was exhausted and hoarse.
“Where was he?”
“At the field hospital.”
“Are they going to move him back?” Green asked.
“No, Sir,” Noah said. “They’re not going to move him back.”
Berenson clattered over to one corner of the room and got out a K ration from his pack. He ripped open the cardboard loudly, and tore the paper around the biscuits. He ate noisily, his teeth making a crackling sound on the hard biscuit.
“Is he still alive?” Green spoke softly and hesitantly.
“Yes, Sir,” said Noah, “he’s still alive.”
Green sighed, seeing that Noah did not wish to speak further. “O. K.” he said. “Take it easy. I’ll send you and Whitacre over to the second platoon tomorrow morning. Get a good night’s rest.”
“Thank you, Sir,” said Noah. “Thanks for the use of the jeep.”
“Yeah,” said Green. He bent over a report he was working on.
Noah looked dazedly around the room. Suddenly he went to the door and walked out. Michael stood up. Noah hadn’t even looked at him since his return. Michael followed Noah out into the raw, black night He sensed rather than saw Noah, leaning against the farmhouse wall, his clothes rustling a little in the gusts of wind.
“Noah …”
“Yes?” The voice told nothing. Even, exhausted, emotionless. “Michael …”
They stood in silence, staring at the bright distant flicker on the horizon, where the guns were busy, like the nightshift in a factory.
“He looked all right,” Noah said finally, in a whisper. “At least his face was all right. And somebody had shaved him this morning, he’d asked for a shave. He got hit in the back. The doctor warned me he was liable to act queer, but when he saw me, he recognized me. He smiled. He cried … He cried once before, you know, when I got hurt …”
“I know,” Michael said. “You told me.”
“He asked me all sorts of questions. How they treated me in the hospital, if they give you any convalescent leave, whether I’d been to Paris, if I had any new pictures of my kid. I showed him the picture of the kid that I got from Hope a month ago, the one on the lawn, and he said it was a finelooking kid, it didn’t look like me at all. He said he’d heard from his mother. It was all arranged for that house back in his town, forty dollars a month. And his mother knew where she could get a Kelvinator second-hand … He could only move his head. He was paralyzed completely from the shoulders down.”
They stood in silence, watching the flicker of the guns, listening to the uneven rumble carried fitfully by the gusty November wind.
“They were crowded in the hospital,” Noah said. “There was a Second Lieutenant in the next cot. From Kentucky. He’d had his heel blown off by a mine. He was very pleased, the Lieutenant said. He was getting tired of being the first man to poke his head over every hill in France and Germany to be shot at.”
Silence again.
“I’ve had two friends in my whole life,” Noah said. “Two real friends. A man called Roger Cannon, he used to sing a song, ‘You make time and you make love dandy, You make swell molasses candy, But, honey, are you makin’ any money, That’s all I want to know …’” Noah moved slowly in the cold mud, rubbing against the wall with a small, scraping sound. “He got killed in the Philippines. My other friend was Johnny Burnecker. A lot of people have dozens of friends. They make them easy and they hold onto them. Not me. It’s my fault and I realize it I don’t have a hell of a lot to offer …”
There was a bright flash in the distance and a fire sprang up, surprising and troubling in the blacked-out countryside, where people on your own side would fire at you if you struck a match after dark because it exposed your position to the enemy.
“I sat there, holding Johnny Burnecker’s hand,” Noah’s voice went on evenly. “Then, after about fifteen minutes he began to look at me very queerly. ‘Get out of here,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to let you murder me.’ I tried to quiet him, but he kept yelling that I’d been sent to murder him, that I’d stayed away while he was healthy and could take care of himself, but now that he was paralyzed, I was going to choke him when nobody was looking. He said he knew all about me, he’d kept his eye on me from the beginning, and I’d deserted him when he needed me, and now I was going to kill him. He yelled that I had a knife on me. And the other wounded began to yell too, and I couldn’t get him quiet. Finally, a doctor came and made me leave. As I went out of the tent, I could hear Johnny Burnecker yelling for them not to let me come near him with my knife.” For a moment, Noah’s voice stopped. Michael kept his eyes on the distant flare of the German farm going up in flames. Vaguely he thought of the featherbeds, the table linen, the crockery, the photograph albums, the copy of Mein Kampf, the kitchen tables, the beer steins, being brightly eaten away there in the darkness.
“The doctor was very nice,” Noah’s voice took up in the darkness. “He was a pretty old man from Tucson. He’d been a specialist in tuberculosis before the war, he told me. He told me what was the matter with Johnny, and for me not to take what Johnny said to heart. Johnny’s spine had been broken by the shell, and his nervous system had degenerated, the doctor said, and there was nothing to be done for him. The nervous system had degenerated,” Noah said, horribly fascinated by the word, “and it would get worse and worse until he died. Paranoia, the doctor said, from a normal boy to an advanced case of paranoia in one day. Delusions of grandeur, the doctor said, and manias of persecution. It might take him another three days to die, the doctor said, and he would finally be completely crazy.… That’s why they weren’t even bothering to send him back to a general hospital. Before I left, I looked in the tent again. I thought maybe he would be having a quiet period. The doctor said that was still possible. But when he saw me, he began to yell I was trying to kill him again …”
Michael and Noah stood side by side, leaning against the flaking, damp, cold stone wall of the CP, behind which Captain Green was worrying about trenchfoot. In the distance, the fire was growing brighter, as it took hold more strongly on the timbers and heirlooms of the German farmer’s home.
“I told you about the feeling Johnny Burnecker had about us,” said Noah. “How if we stayed together nothing would happen to us …”
“Yes,” said Michael.
“We went through so much together,” said Noah. “We were cut off, you know, and we got through, and we weren’t hurt when the LCI we were on was hit on D Day …”
“Yes,” said Michael.
“If I hadn’t been so slow,” Noah said, “if I’d got up here one day earlier, Johnny Burnecker would have come out of this war alive.”
“Don’t be silly,” Michael said sharply, feeling: Now this is finally too much of a burden for this boy to carry.
“I’m not silly,” Noah said calmly. “I didn’t act quickly enough. I took my time. I hung around that replacement depot five days. I went and talked to that Peruvian. I knew he wouldn’t do what I wanted, but I was lazy, I just hung around.”
“Noah, don’t talk like that!”
“And we took too long on the trip up,” Noah continued, disregarding Michael. “We stopped at night, and we wasted a whole afternoon on that chicken dinner that General arranged for us. I let Johnny Burnecker die for a chicken dinner.”
“Shut up!” Michael shouted thickly. He grabbed Noah and shook him hard. “Shut up! You’re talking like a maniac! Don’t ever let me hear you say anything like that again!”
“Let me go,” Noah said calmly. “Keep your hands off me. Excuse me. There’s no reason why you should have to listen to my troubles. I realize that.”
Slowly Michael relinquished his grip. Once a
gain, he felt, I have failed this battered boy …
Noah hunched into his clothes. “It’s cold out here,” he said pleasantly. “Let’s go inside.”
Michael followed him into the CP.
The next morning Green assigned them to their old platoon, the one they had been in together in Florida. There were still three men left out of the forty who had been in the original platoon, and they welcomed Michael and Noah with heartwarming cordiality. They were very delicate when they spoke of Johnny Burnecker in front of Noah.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
“SO THEY ASKED this GI, what would you do if they sent you home,” Pfeiffer was saying. He and Noah and Michael were squatting on a half-submerged log against a low stone wall, their meat balls, spaghetti and canned peaches in rich combination on their mess kits. It was the first warm food they’d had in three days, and everyone was very pleased with the cooks who had got the field kitchen so close up. The line of men, spaced ten yards apart so that if a shell came it would only hit a few of them at one time, wound through a copse of bare, artillery-marked beeches. The line moved swiftly as the cooks hurriedly dished out the food. “What would you do if they sent you home?” Pfeiffer repeated, through the thick mash in his mouth. “The GI thought for a minute … Have you heard this one?” Pfeiffer asked.
“No,” Michael said politely to Pfeiffer.
Pfeiffer nodded, pleased. “First, the GI said, I’d take off my shoes. Second, I’d lay my wife. Third, I’d take off my pack.” Pfeiffer roared at his joke. He stopped suddenly. “You sure you haven’t heard it before?”
“Honest,” said Michael. Witty table conversation, he thought, in the heart of European civilization. The guests included a smattering of representatives of the arts and military men on a brief holiday (one hour and a half) from their pressing duties at the front. PFC Pfeiffer, well known in Kansas bookmaking circles, and with a local celebrity among the general courts-martial of the region, entertained with reflections on post-war problems. One of the luncheon guests, representing our national theatre in Western Europe, dabbled at his canned peach, a delicacy of the country, and remarked to himself that Private Anacreon of Macedonia, during Philip’s campaign in Persia, undoubtedly heard a similar story outside Bagdad, that Caius Publius, centurion in Caesar’s Army, told somewhat the same enlightening tale two days after landing in Britain, that Julian Saint-Crique, Adjutant in the corps of Murat, drew extensive laughter from his comrades with a literal translation of the epigram the day before Austerlitz. It was not unknown, the thoughtful student of history reflected, looking doubtfully at his mud-encased shoe packs, and wondering if his toes had begun to rot yet, to Warrant Officer Robinson of the Welsh Rifles at Ypres, or to Feldwebel Fugelheimer at Tannenberg, or to Sergeant Vincent O’Flaherty of the First Marines, pausing for a moment of refreshment on the road into the Argonne Forest.