by Colin Asher
A judge seated on the Circuit Court of Cook County granted his request on January 26, 1944, and afterward Nelson Algren Abraham became Nelson Algren—no middle initial. When the judge’s order arrived in Texas, Nelson submitted it to the army so his personnel forms, uniform, and dog tags could be altered. They accepted the papers, but informed him the change could take time—maybe months.
While Nelson waited for the army to act, he became apathetic. He saluted poorly and stopped pressing his uniform or polishing his boots. He trotted casually behind his unit when they ran, and when they marched he slipped out of formation and returned to the barracks.
Don’t bother with these routines, he told the men he bunked with. There’s no point.
Nelson’s sergeant was a stubborn man named Tadday who had a punitive mind. He took Nelson aside when he noticed his insubordination, and spoke about discipline. He yelled at Nelson when he realized talk wouldn’t be enough, and then he threatened him. He assigned Nelson to Sunday detail for a month, told the mess hall staff to give him the nastiest job they had, and challenged him to a fistfight. Then he tried to have Nelson discharged.
“I have found this man to be a very poor soldier both in appearance and in the carrying out of orders,” Tadday wrote in a report. “. . . [N]o amount of punishment or disciplinary action has any effect on him due to his sullen attitude.” His effort failed though. A psychiatrist evaluated Nelson and determined there was nothing wrong with him. He suggested a transfer instead of a discharge, but his recommendation was rejected, just as Nelson’s had been.
By March, Nelson was so desperate to get away from Tadday that he began begging for help. Once, he noticed a captain named Aptheker on base, approached him, saluted meekly, and asked for an audience.* He had never seen Aptheker before and had no reason to expect his request would be granted, but he was pleasantly surprised by the response he received.
“I’m Nelson Algren,” he said.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Aptheker replied.
Nelson was shocked. “You know my work?” he asked.
“Of course,” Aptheker said. He was a historian, a reader, and a longtime member of the Communist Party. He invited Nelson to his quarters and told him to speak his mind.
“You’ve gotta get me out of this,” Nelson said. “I’m going crazy, I’m going to blow my brains out, I can’t remain in the artillery.”
Aptheker demurred when Nelson pleaded, but later he approached a colonel named Parker and had Nelson transferred to the 460th Medical Collection Company. Parker, fortuitously, had also read Never Come Morning.
Amanda, who had recently moved to Los Angeles for work, boarded a train there in the summer and rode to Dallas, where she caught a bus that carried her across prairie grasslands until she reached Paris, Texas. She and Nelson had been corresponding regularly since their breakup, and they had developed a “really deep friendship” through their letters that was more satisfying than their romantic relationship had ever been.
Nelson wrote to Amanda about his frustrations with the army for months, and then, after his transfer, he told her he was going to be sent overseas. He said he would be supporting the troops who had just landed in Normandy, and asked her to visit before he left.
The army provided Nelson and Amanda with a small room on the second floor of the guest house by the lake. They moved in when she arrived, and for two days they pretended to be a couple again. She snapped pictures of him posing with his shirt off when they were on base, and took a shot of him strolling through Paris wearing his peaked private’s cap when they went into town for dinner. They played Ping-Pong and they talked.
Nelson told Amanda that the army had kept him stateside because he was Jewish, but they would have to send him into the war zone now that he was a medic. He was excited about going overseas, Amanda said later, but also scared.
Nelson and Amanda went to bed together on the third night of their reunion as a way of saying goodbye. They lay down, and then Amanda reached for her diaphragm. Nelson balked. He was afraid he might die in the war, and he wanted to get her pregnant so that some piece of him was guaranteed to survive. Amanda refused, and then Nelson stalked the room with his head down until he exhausted himself, climbed into bed, and went to sleep.
Amanda left three days later, and Nelson escorted her part of the way home to make amends for his boorish behavior. They boarded a bus in Paris together, and rode to Dallas, where they parted sadly.
The 460th Medical Collection Company received its orders a few weeks after Amanda’s departure. They were headed for the front on September 29, and Nelson was scheduled to leave with them. He climbed out of his bunk on the appointed morning and put on his uniform. He packed his duffel and headed for the train tracks just east of the base, where his unit had been told to assemble, but before he reached the station, someone pulled him aside.
You’ve been transferred, they said—you’re not going.
Richard Wright called Nelson that same week. The two old friends hadn’t been in touch since Nelson entered the army, and Wright wanted to catch up. He had avoided the draft since they last spoke, and had written a memoir called Black Boy that had become a best seller.
Nelson was glad to hear his friend’s good news, but didn’t have much to say for himself. He had no accomplishments to brag about, no stories to relay. He only had complaints, and he saved those for the letter he wrote after getting off the phone.
“I haven’t hit the army with a bang; but there’s been a mighty cracking sound when it hit me,” Nelson told Wright. Until I joined the service, he said, “I didn’t know there were so many ways of getting screwed. Needless to say—the Army does all the screwing.”
Nelson and Wright had both been reluctant to enlist in the military, so Nelson felt compelled to explain why he was eager to get to Europe and disappointed to be stuck stateside. “I wanted the adventure of going across, of course; but I also wanted to share, as a writer, the big stuff of our times,” he wrote. “I would have gladly stayed away from the big stuff, the real thing, had I had any choice. But since I’ve put in fifteen months I feel I ought, and have the right, to see it.”
“I’d feel much better if I knew the reason” for the military’s reluctance to send me overseas, he wrote. The army had changed Nelson’s name to Private Algren by then, so he had dispensed with the idea that he was being held back because he was Jewish, and developed a new theory. “I’ve even gotten the notion that, somewhere along the line somebody a lot higher up wrote ‘Subversive’ in code” on my personnel form, he told Wright. “That’s strictly a notion . . . which I stumbled upon in my brooding over causes and effects in the army.”
Nelson was guessing blindly, but he missed the mark by only a hair. His paperwork was stamped SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT, not “Subversive,” and it wasn’t in code—it was right at the top of the first page.†
The FBI had been keeping a file on Nelson since 1940, when his name was mentioned to the House Committee on Un-American Activities. They didn’t add much to it at first, but the publication of Never Come Morning reinvigorated their interest. The Polish organization whose members sent letters to Edward Aswell at Harper’s also contacted the FBI and accused Nelson of sedition, and the FBI had decided to investigate.
A special agent named John Bowker went to Nelson’s apartment on West Evergreen Avenue in November 1943 and looked around. He asked the building’s tenants what Nelson was like and where he had gone, and then, following a lead, he questioned one of Nelson’s friends. He compiled a dossier when his investigation was complete, and because he knew Nelson had been drafted, he sent a copy of his findings to military intelligence, which, in turn, kept the FBI informed of Nelson’s whereabouts.
According to Camp Maxey gossip, all of Nelson’s mail was read—coming and going—because he was a Communist.
Nelson knew none of that, and never would. He was certain only that something was keeping him out of the war, and suspicion continued to plague him.
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bsp; The army transferred Nelson to a medical company called the 125th Evacuation Hospital next. He moved into one of the base tents his new unit had erected on the sandy soil at the edge of Camp Maxey, and then he began training again. He bandaged fake wounds and carried soldiers around on stretchers. He helped collapse the unit’s tents for practice, erected them again, and languished.
The evacuation hospital received its orders two months after Nelson was assigned to it. They were scheduled to board a train headed for the East Coast on November 27, and to proceed overseas from there.
Nelson prepared to leave on the morning of his departure. He packed his duffel and stripped his cot, but he didn’t expect to make it off base. He had been through the same routine twice before, and had learned about wishful thinking.
Some of the men in Nelson’s unit snuck into the barracks that afternoon and confirmed his suspicion. There were hundreds of duffel bags inside, organized into two piles—one composed of bags that had been stenciled for transport; one of bags that had no markings.
Nelson’s bag was in the second pile, so the soldiers in his unit went looking for him. “You’re not going,” they said.
Nelson went into the orderly room then, saluted a sergeant, and asked if they could speak in private. The man agreed, and when they were alone, Nelson pressed his case. I know I’m not supposed to make it on the train, he said, but I want to see the war. “I don’t want to get left behind, you know.”
The sergeant pleaded ignorance while Nelson begged, but eventually he relented, and had Nelson’s bag loaded onto the train.
Nelson filed onto a passenger car, shoulder to shoulder with a bunch of twenty-, twenty-one-, and twenty-two-year-old boys from Texas and Tennessee who were scared, boastful, and ignorant. The train rolled east until it reached Camp Kilmer, in New Jersey, and then Nelson’s unit bunked down for a week and requested day passes so they could see New York City before they shipped out. “Looking forward to the next step in the game,” Nelson wrote to Jack Conroy.
On December 8, the evacuation hospital traveled north to the New York Port of Embarkation, where its soldiers lined up on a pier. It was cold and raining. Wind blew in strong frigid gusts, and their ship—a luxury liner called the Dominion Monarch that had been modified to carry troops—loomed above them. Timid bay waves lapped against its hull, and Red Cross workers moved through the crowd, distributing coffee, donuts, and concerned farewells. It was dark by the time the Monarch was loaded, and darker still when it slipped away from its berth and began weaving its way through the tangle of boats in New York Harbor. When the troops woke in the morning, the American shore was already a memory.
The 417 soldiers in Nelson’s unit disembarked from the Dominion Monarch when it docked on the southern shore of England after eleven days at sea, and began unloading their gear. That task consumed two days, and when it was complete, they moved into wooden barracks at Camp Penally, in Wales. They expected to move again soon, but instead they remained inactive for months.
The evacuation hospital returned to the English shore in March, boarded a ship called the Llangibby Castle, and crossed the English Chanel. SS President Warfield carried them up the Seine next, and closer, finally, to the front. The soldiers in Nelson’s unit had trained for months and thought seriously about dying, but they were entirely unprepared to perform the duties they would be assigned in Europe. Ready to be heroes, they never suspected that their time in the field would be defined by monotony and tedium, not glory and daring.
When the unit reached the outskirts of Duclair, France, it moved into Camp Twenty Grand—a sprawl of square tents that had been erected on a muddy plain. It was bitterly cold, so they hacked away at the nearby forest and kept fires burning through the night to stay warm. “There was no war near there,” Nelson said. They traveled east in freight cars next, and disembarked at Château-Regnault, where they dug pit latrines near the point where the Meuse River coils back on itself like a snake. Then they waited some more.
On April 3, they loaded into trucks and began driving. They passed through France, Belgium, and Holland, and then they entered Germany. They crossed the Rhine near Krefeld, and joined the battle of the Ruhr Pocket—a fight between three hundred thousand Allied soldiers and the four hundred thousand enfeebled Germans they had encircled. They reached the front lines late at night and decided to stop and pitch their tents. A sentry lit a bonfire to keep warm, and soon the Germans began to barrage them with artillery fire. “They were firing everything they could lay hands on,” Nelson said later, “rocks, old bed springs, everything.”
After operating under fire for a week, the unit loaded its patients and tents onto trucks and retreated to Mönchengladbach, fifteen miles behind the line. They moved again on May 1, and while they were in transit, Adolph Hitler raised a Walther PPK to his temple and pulled the trigger. The war in Europe was over, but the men in Nelson’s unit had no idea. The news reached them several days later, and there was no celebration when it arrived because battles were still raging in the Pacific.
The unit occupied the St. Francis hospital next—a large, regal building in the countryside that looked like a gingerbread house. It was surrounded by manicured lawns, and it had thick Romanesque walls and narrow paired windows. Seventy nuns lived inside, and they had a bakery, steam cookers, and refrigerators at their disposal.
The members of Nelson’s unit made themselves at home. They played volleyball, football, and softball on the hospital’s lawns. They produced a daily newspaper called The Gauzette, and they slipped away at night to trade coffee and cigarettes for wine in nearby villages. They returned before the sun rose, and spent the small hours of the morning gambling—Nelson especially. He favored shooting dice with a man who insisted he was the only player allowed to roll.
“Don’t worry,” the man chided when someone tried to take a turn, “gotta golden arm.”
The men in Nelson’s unit had to rotate through the hospital in twelve-hour shifts when they weren’t at play, though, so the time they spent at the St. Francis hospital was like vacationing in the circle of purgatory closest to hell. When they were at work, they bandaged lacerations that had begun to fester, watched diphtheria lesions spread across limbs, and listened to soldiers with pneumonia cough up hunks of phlegm. Two men on each shift did nothing but walk from bed to bed, carrying needles dripping with penicillin.
The unit’s first patients were soldiers, but after the fighting stopped, prisoners and freed slave laborers began arriving. They were Russian, French, Belgian, and Dutch, and most were barely alive.
Once, Nelson helped care for a sixteen-year-old Russian boy. The Germans had forced him to work until his feet froze, and then they discarded him like trash. American soldiers discovered him in a barn, and by the time he arrived at the hospital, he weighed only forty-five pounds. There was a line of ulcerated sores running down his back, and the tip of a vertebra poked through the skin at the center of each one.
Nelson called him a “ghost.” I “never hope to see another,” he told a friend. “The terrible part of looking at him is that his breath still comes and goes—and you still have to reckon with the eyes—which are still living—and look out in a gaze of unrelieved horror from the skull.”‡
After forty-two days, the unit left the St. Francis hospital and drove to Bad Kreuznach. They camped on the shore of the Nahe River, and then they were ordered to prepare for deployment to the Pacific. They moved again, camping outside of Reims, France, and waited for further orders—first for days, then for weeks. Furloughs were granted, and soldiers took leave in Belgium and on the French Riviera.
Nelson was in Paris, staying at the Grand Hotel de Chicago, when the Japanese surrendered. The announcement arrived at 4 a.m., and the party it sparked lasted for four days. Soldiers poured into the streets, carrying English-language newspapers with headlines that read PEACE and JAPS QUIT, and then commandeered army vehicles and drove them in a slow, slithering conga line between the Red Cross club in the Hotel d
e Paris and the Place de l’Opéra—two miles in each direction. Men and women jumped on the trucks as they passed, carried flags through the streets, and yelled, and drank, and kissed.
The war was over, and Nelson had managed to experience all of its tedium without tasting a moment of glory. He returned to Reims when the party ended, and rejoined his unit. Then he boarded a third-class rail coach and headed for Marseille—his last stop, he hoped, before returning home.
Marseille was a ruin when Nelson arrived. The Germans had occupied the city for nearly two years, and they had been brutal stewards. In the Old Port district, walls jutted from piles of rubble like tombstones set at the heads of burial mounds, and cobblestones that had been ripped from the streets had collected into huge piles. Dozens of boats rested on their keels in the shallow water of the port, where the Germans sank them in a vain attempt to hold off the Allies, and the walls of the cathedral overlooking the city—Notre-Dame de la Garde—were pocked with bullet holes.
The muddy hillside beneath the church had become a campground for GIs after the fighting ceased, and when Nelson reached Marseille, he joined them. His superiors ordered him to stay there until they could get him back to Chicago, but they couldn’t say when that would happen or how. “I just had a cot and my belongings,” Nelson said later, “and in the morning the Sargent [sic] would come and tell me what outfit I belonged to. . . . He’d say ‘Now you’re tank corps.’ The next day he’d say, ‘Now you’re field artillery.’ They tried everything to get us on that boat.”