This book is dedicated to my wife, Margaret. She knows why.
ABOVE AND BEYOND THE CALL OF DUTY
Lieutenant Eve Cramer inspected her patients in the darkness, using a veiled flashlight to study the charts. She was nearly finished with her round when she came to the bed of a figure swathed in bandage and plaster. The boy was sleeping, his young face in quiet repose. As she stared down at h im, at the beauty of him, her heart began to beat more rapidly and her mouth turned dry and coppery. Of all the young men in the ward, this was the one for whom her heart ached most.
He was so young, so hurt, so ... beautiful.
She stood in the shadows, feeling a monumental helplessness and something else, something acutely familiar ... a growing and illicit desire to reach down and caress him. Dizzy with mounting desire, she closed her eyes and bit hard on her lip, but it took control of her as she had known it would: the quivering of her legs, the curiously exciting aching of her breasts, the spasmodic imageries that flashed through her mind.
So young ... so in need of comfort....
Eve Cramer shut off the flashlight, trembling, knowing she couldn't stand there another second without ... without giving way to the thing that had been slowly consuming her of late. She moved away from the bed, her legs still weak, and walked down the darkened aisle ... wondering if she would be strong enough to walk away from him the next time.
PART ONE
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal December 1st, 1944
Sitting on the floorboards of the swaying truck, snugly packed between Pickett and Keller, hunched for warmth in the thick embrace of my overcoat, I listened to the rhythmic slap-slap of the canvas roof as it cracked in the frigid wind of the speeding Alsatian night. Through the side flaps I caught occasional glimpses of the start, chips of ice in the black velvet of the sky. Some of the platoon were conversing, a couple even whistling softly, and the truck was like a roomful of club members, on wheels: it was almost pleasant being in it because every turn of the tyres took us farther south, farther away from Strasbourg.
We were going to a new area, which in itself is cause for rejoicing because one of the greatest immeasurable factors of morale among soldiers is the blind dumb faith that the next post will not only be better than the last but will undoubtedly be the land of milk and honey, and the enemy, if he even exists, has no more ammunition and is on the verge of outright collapse. That this forlorn hope accompanied us in this convoy which was merely an internal shift in the human land-mass of the front line, was a tribute to the powerful force of the calculated leaks that serve to anaesthetize and divert the rifleman.
Although some of us suspected that this time the faith was not quite as blind and dumb, that things were going to get worse before they got better, we were still happy to be shaking the snow of Strasbourg from out boots. I for one wished it were as easy to shake off the memories of the events there, the things that occurred in the very shadow of the massive grey cathedral....
Oh, it didn't take long to convince ourselves that we'd had ample justification, that it was the Army, as usual, at fault. None of us thought it queer that we could magnanimously lay the blame at the feet of that faceless monolith called The Army-when the truth was, we were The Army and there was no such thing as outwitting or outlying or out-bluffing The Army. As the poet said, you are your own jury and you hand down your own sentence, the fate you get is the one you have fashioned for yourself.
For instance, some of the guys said it was the Army's fault for throwing us into the line so fast, without so much as a combat officer to lead us. But, no-boom: we were in it over our heads before we'd learned to distinguish between howitzers and mortars.
Well, it would be convenient and pleasant to dispose of the matter that simply, thus adding another fraction of an ounce to the millions of tons of iniquities already heaped upon the Herculean shoulders of The Army.
I say we behaved as we did because of two very real and measurable things: the accident that befell Captain Roberts the day we debarked in Marseilles, and the fact that the enemy constructed his tanks of such panta-gruelic size and ferocity. Either one of these items we could have handled and absorbed without difficulty-separately. But one right after the other was too much for us.
Sitting in the truck, obliged to do nothing but sit and be transported, I could see the entire Strasbourg affair with a certain objectivity....
Our troopship along with a dozen others, slunk out of New York Harbour one sleety November night, and two weeks later sailed into the wreckage of the port of Marseilles, and almost at once like a scene right out of William March the Company's commanding officer, Captain Roberts, slid off the gang-plank and broke his leg. Five days later Roberts was flying back to the States and we, the rest of Easy Company, were on the way up the Rhone Valley to Strasbourg. Our platoon leader, Lieutenant Dawida, was named Acting CO., and since we spent three solid, stinking, freezing days in the forty-and-eight boxcars our fathers had travelled in thirty years earlier, Dawida could hardly be blamed if he was unable to exert much authority and get the feel of the Company as a unit.
When the train drew into the smoking ruins of the station a few weeks ago snow was falling, the temperature was about two above zero and most of us were exhausted and hungry. Less than an hour later we were struggling in the middle of the night to erect a street barricade out of frozen junk and rubble, still exhausted and hungry and, now, bitter. Dawida's first orders to the Company were unpopular ones-many of the men barely knew him by sight-and none of it made sense. Sergeant MacFarland, who had assumed command of the first platoon, could be counted upon to keep us informed, and he told us that the street we were guarding was a direct route through the city to the bridge that led to Germany-and safety-for the retreating enemy. The Company's task that night was to seal off the escape artery. That was all. Just let nobody through that street. A hundred and fifty men ought to be able to carry out that mission easily enough. Even a hundred and fifty men more or less fresh off the boat.
The battle for the city had reached a critical stage and we could hear its pulsations around us as we crouched and waited behind our fortress of flotsam. First one sector and then another would burst into exploding fury, as if a troupe of minstrels were strolling aimlessly through the byways to entertain the citizens. Orange flashes of gunfire eerily lighted up the snowy background. We were in the eye of a metallic hurricane.
Eventually the racket died away, and Dawida, anxious to make a good impression on the men, deployed two platoons into the deserted buildings near by, leaving the first and third platoons to man the barricade. About midnight the snow began to let up.
And as the snow ceased those of us on the street could see to our rear, emerging through the greyness like the prow of an enormous ship breasting a foggy sea, the colossal mass of the cathedral. Its Gothic columns thrust heavily upwards; the spire was more hinted at than visible; the glassless windows stared at us with a hundred blind accusing eyes. We hadn't noticed it before through the protective curtain of snow and somehow it gave us the shivers as it squatted across the square silently brooding down, as impassive as a melancholy god.
Some of us, unable to maintain the high pitch of interest and anticipation, dozed. Lieutenant Dawida, moving among the men with his broad Slavic face and his wiry angry body, kicked them to wakefulness. Sergeant MacFarland, tall and awkward as a young giraffe, kept ranging up and down the empty street, obviously disappointed at the lack of action. I think he was afraid that the battle-if not the entire war-had already come to its conclusion and he was to be cheated of a chance to prove himself.
But the battle was not over. It came to life again and, in the manner of a club-footed maniac dripping gore, lurched in our direction. The guttural stutter of machine guns, the crisp crack of small-arms, the whoomp of heavy mortars, the harsh exclamations of anti-tank guns. For a minute I remembered how the Fourth of July fireworks used to sound when I stood in Garfield Park in the middle of Chicago and marvelled at the endlessly glorious eruptions on all sides.
But this was war. The War. And I gripped my M-l rifle tighter, checking that it was loaded and the safety was off. And then, at the far end of the street across which our defences were flung, I saw an iron monster in the first pale light of dawn. Big as a house, it trundled heavily over cobbles, it brushed a wall and brought it tumbling to the ground.
Lieutenant Dawida yelled: Tiger tank! Get set, men!' His voice shook with keen delight-he was so excited he forgot to alert the other two platoons. Just behind me was Sergeant MacFarland, peering over my head, absently clicking his teeth together.
Training had not prepared us for anything like this. The tank was bigger and uglier and more frightening than anything I'd ever seen. It simply filled the street, beyond measurement, like all of your nightmares condensed into a single brutal object. Projecting out of its head, like the antennae of a deadly centipede, was its eighty-eight-mm. cannon with its chancre-shaped muzzle-tip.
As I gaped at this mechanical wonder the tip suddenly spat flame and a half ton of masonry crumbled from the corner of one of the buildings in the square. With that single shell-blast all the discipline whipped into us in those camps four thousand miles away vanished as airily as the dust that rose out of the smoking rubble. You could see the fear in the men's eyes and smell it in their breaths. Again the weapon fired, and this time hot iron and cold rock sprayed just above our heads and Easy Company's first casualty, Coster, let out the first cry of shock and pain.
Dawida and MacFarland were yelling at us to fire at the peep-holes and bogie-wheels because if we could disable the tank it would serve to dam up the Germans coming behind it and trap them in the narrow street. Our rifle shots sounded ridiculously petty, of no more annoyance than mosquitoes pestering an elephant. Then the tank's machine gun opened up and we all went flat and forgot about the bogie-wheels. Heralded by its grinding tread and growling motor, the tank plunged towards our fragile exposed flesh and bones.
I don't know who first suggested we seek shelter near the cathedral, but a voice full of authority did cry out: 'Back! We can't stop that bastard! Back!' At least several of us heard the cry, although no one afterwards could say who actually called out. To be sure, Dawida and MacFarland were shrilly ordering us to stand fast and fling grenades, but that other voice cried 'Back!'
In the smoke and weak light identification was impossible and no one could say who was the first to obey the invisible speaker, but in a matter of seconds a good many men were fleeing light-footedly through the snow that covered the square, angling towards the enormous impregnable sanctuary of the cathedral.
The tank's next round tore a jagged gap in our wretched barricade and that settled it. The Company simply melted away from the ruins and streamed across the square and I was among them, drawn along by the magnetism that The Army had instilled in us. My back felt as broad as a door and my legs just couldn't go fast enough. Far behind I could hear Lieutenant Dawida cursing in a powerful voice, a voice that was quickly swallowed in the thunder of the tank's roar and then in the shrieking of the junk fortress as it was smashed flat.
The tank came out of the street into the open square and looked around, got its bearings and then set out for the bridge road. MacFarland lay flat on the snow, firing calmly and steadily at the turret. But Dawida was not so calm. He chased the machine across the square, as though he were pursuing Honour itself. As casually as a cow flicking its tail the tank's machine gun chattered and Lieutenant Dawida was hit. Yet he kept running, kind of, in the air, and then whirled in a clumsy pirouette, still in the air, until, finally, all at once, his momentum ceased and he crumpled in an impotent heap on the bottom step of the cathedral.
The tank proceeded on its way towards the bridge with no more interruptions.
The chief witness to the disgrace, the great grey church, was as unmoved, as calmly neutral, as an umpire at a football game.
Now in the van of the six-by-six, surrounded by the men of the first platoon of Easy Company, I knew it was time to dismiss the memory of the tank and all of the darker meanings lurking beneath the bare surface of the episode. I'm one of those people with a conscience that is squid-like: it manufactures and disposes its own ink-screen of rationalization.
For what it was worth this was my life, and around me were the most important men alive, and although I would not have dared say it aloud I held them in high affection: I knew their smells and their sounds and their flaws. Unlike some, I did not hate The Army or The War or the merciless winter or the prospect of getting shot at. This was the way things were-Strasbourg being one of the things. Because it was my Army it was a good Army and I was engaged in a noble mission.
Long ago I had learned never to look back, never to dwell upon the mistakes and errors among the military-I say look only forward and assume that tomorrow will be infinitely better. That way you can halve the misery of today while doubling the joy. And when it comes time to pay off those post-dated cheques you'll owe only one lone day....
The convoy screeched to a halt and the troops spilled out of the backs of the trucks, and presently countless miniature fountains of steam hissed out of the snowbanks on both sides of the road. Standing in the lee of a poplar tree I felt a curiously burgeoning exaltation, inhaling wintry air sharpened on the near-by mountain ridges, and I almost cried out in sheer animal glee. Soon, as the familiar hissing died away. I heard another familiar sound-that of the muffled drumming of distant artillery. Dull man-made lightnings danced on the southern horizon.
Behind us, stalking as restlessly as a conscientious sheepdog, Sergeant MacFarland was whispering urgently: 'Lets go, let's go. 'Less you want it to break off like an icicle. His anxious boots squeaked on the frozen snow with his steps. You could feel MacFarland's eagerness to get into action again, as though it were solely up to him to redeem the Company's pride and honour with the currency of his own valour. He wasn't even the Company's CO. Lieutenant Kranich was now in charge-but MacFarland acted as if the outcome of the whole war depended on getting us to button up our flies and climbing into the trucks.
As I passed by his long lean storky figure I glanced up into his small-boned face, a face that resembled nothing less than a clenched fist, and I heard him mutter 'I'll show them, I'll show them', and I knew he was referring not to us but to the enemy. I nearly stopped and spoke to him, to agree with him, but MacFarland never did encourage small talk: nobody ever called him Mac.
Our truck jerked forward again, following the dim pink running lights of the one ahead as relentlessly as a lonely man obeying the beckoning hips of a willing woman in a strange city.
Snug once agin between Pickett and Keller, both of whom were sound asleep, I wondered if I had stood and urinated in the exact spot utilized by, say Charlemagne or Napoleon or Ney or Pershing or any of those other giants who had trampled these vineyards in the past. Perhaps even The Doctor who played the organ in the little wooden church a few miles away and who used to tread this very road between his village and Strasbourg. The whole wide night seemed alive with life and history and enchantment. Why, but half a mile to the east ran that magnificent river, the jugular vein of a continent, all the way from the Alps to the North Sea, silently reflecting the black forests of the fairy-tale princesses and the ghost-filled castles and the cathedral spires that stopped somewhat short of heaven and the crimson fires of blast furnaces and the ebony mounds of coal, echoing with the song of the Lorelei and-and-all the other wonderful and awful things of the land.
Lost in the thrilling kaleidoscope, I was barely aware that someone was singing-singing in a clear thin tenor.
'Jesus Christ, Bennett,' somebody said. 'You must think this is fun."
And I realized, with a start, that I was the singer, incapable of restraining the peculiar glee any longer. Oh, I knew the trucks were racing us nearer and nearer to the iron and steal, the wire and bayonets. I knew a cold-eyed enemy peered patiently over the polished barrels of machine guns, an enemy entrenched in his last encampment on French soil. I knew we were on the way into the Colmar Pocket but I didn't particularly care. I felt like singing.
Soon two or three others joined in and we all sang, even though the words were torn from our mouths and were shredded in the truck's snowy wake. I'd never felt better in my whole life.
The minstrel boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you'll find him; His father's sword he has girded on, And his wild harp slung behind him ... '
CHAPTER ONE
The naked girl got one foot into the sleeping-bag when the silence was ripped by a rising cry of pain from Ward Two, a sound that expanded in the manner of a baloon being blown up. It was too intense to be a mere physical protest: more than violated nerve-ends were involved. As a screaming indictment against the very fact of life itself, it swelled so swiftly in volume that it seemed it must end in an explosion.
Arrested by the cry, the naked girl paused in the mouth of the sleeping-bag. Corporal Neary tried to force her in, but his eyes were impaled on the last line he had read and she had to stand there in the chill Spanish night, shivering, half in and half out. Across the desk The Dumpling eyed Neary as if waiting for him to tell her what to do. Wrapped in the prickly discomfort of a woollen blanket, nostrils twitching with the pungency of burning kerosene, Neary unsuccessfully attempted to ignore both the patient on Two and the fearful gaze of the nurse by burying himself in the dog-eared pages of the book.
What was that, Corporal?' asked Lieutenant Biddle. The orderlies had nicknamed her The Dumpling because she was plump and pale and her uniform fitted like a pup-tent over a cabbage patch.
"What was what, ma'am?' said Neary absently, keeping a finger between the pages to mark his place.
"That cry. Someone must want something."
This was only Lieutenant Biddle's second night at the hospital and she still did not know her way around, and hesitated to make a move without Neary's approval.
'Aw,' he yawned. Probly that shave-tail they brought in last night. Delirious.' He hoped his nonchalance would make her relax. He was worried that she would suggest they investigate the dark ward together-which would leave the naked girl shivering at the bottom of the page. Just one minute more and she could be inside with the guy who was waiting with a--
'Perhaps I'd better check,' said Lieutenant Biddle bravely. She fiddled with a morphine syrette, her eyes not meeting Neary's. She wanted him to accompany her but she did not yet have the courage to issue a direct order to that effect. A sly smile flickered over Neary's vulpine face. All the nurses were that way at first; it took them about two weeks to wise up; and he had no intention of wising her up any sooner. Let her find out for herself.
The cry dame again, a shrill keening note, and Lieutenant Biddle strode purposefully to the door, hesitated a split second, sniffed audibly and waddled off, following the yellow beam of the flashlight as it sliced into the darkness. Neary's left foot snaked out from under the blanket and pushed the door shut.
Smirking with satisfaction at his schrewd finesse, he hurried back to the Spanish Civil War and got the girl into the sleeping-bag pronto. He became so absorbed in the narrative he scarcely heard the next cry, his subconscious mind dismissing it as the whistle of another locomotive about to depart the Zarbach station for the journey west to Paris. Or maybe it was just another troop train chugging eastward towards Strasbourg.
Anyway, he told himself as if replying to an accusation at a court martial, anyway, he wasn't a medic. He was only an orderly. A guy yelling like that on Two didn't want no noncom: he wanted genuine medical attention.
Under his booted feet the floor vibrated noiselessly and he responded like a seismograph: somebody was catching hell somewhere. He knew if he concentrated he could not only pinpoint the distance and direction but could ascertain whether the vibrations were caused by bombs or artillery shells. But he did not want to get to thinking about that, otherwise he'd start counting the hours until the casualties were driven up to the entrance in mud-stained ambulances. A few blasts on the Rhine inevitably resulted in repercussions in Zarbach, twenty miles away-sleepless nights, emergency operations, a scramble for blankets and bandages, cooks to be awakened to provide midnight coffee. God, what a mess. It would come soon enough without his brooding about it.
Neary much preferred to deal with the war in the book. What a war! Lots of fresh air, a beautiful girl getting herself raped and then making the earth move in sleeping-bags, wine to guzzle, bridges to blow, no officers to boss you around, peasants going around talking like Quakers. You felt heroic just reading it. The author was supposed to hate war, of course, but he sure knew how to make it attractive. Nothing in there about the rotten stink of gangrene in the Italian campaign last summer, or about the toes and feet turning black as coal from trench-foot in the Vosges campaign this winter, or about steel barrels overflowing with amputated limbs or guys screaming curses because of wounds that morphine couldn't numb.
Corporal Neary suspected that the author only pretended to hate war. He was probably something like Major Reynolds, the hospital's CO. who was always mouthing off about 'the poor brave G.I.'s', when everybody knew the only thing that butcher cared about was making out with the nurses. Neary was in his second year of working under Reynolds and he knew. In fact, he knew who was a likely candidate for Reynold's next piece of....
Beyond the black-out curtain the outer door opened and slammed. A bubble of cold air broke over Neary's face and hands. He put the book down and began to study the Morning Report. Entering the orderly room, the figure of a woman blended briefly with the olive-drab curtain-she wore dark green jacket, trousers and cap. On her feet were regulation field-boots. She came into the circle cast by the kerosene lantern, revealing a face flushed with cold, lips parted breathlessly.
'Evening, Lieutenant Cramer, ma'am,' said Neary respectfully.
'Good evening, Neary,' said Lieutenant Cramer. 'Carry on."
Neary frowned as he scanned the Morning Report. In reality he was furtively observing Lieutenant Cramer as she shed the oversized jacket to display such glorious contours even the lumpy knitted sweater couldn't disguise them. And when she braced one boot on a chair to adjust a lace the flannel trousers drew taut across her splendidly curved flanks, clearly defining the enchanting line of demarcation. The girl in the sleeping-bag had nothing on Lieutenant Cramer, decided Neary.
She stood up straight and the curves vanished. Neary sighed. 'Getting colder, ma'am,' he said.
'Yes,' she said, holding her hands over the lantern flame. 'We've run out of fuel in our quarters. Do you think you can locate some wood for our fireplace in the morning, Neary?'
He looked at the delicately boned face with its short firm nose and inviting mouth. It was an uncomplicated face, as though it had been carved with a minimum of effort out of a single piece of topaz. It was about as emotional as a piece of topaz, too, thought Neary.
'I'll do what I can, Lieutenant,' he said. 'You know that.' The prospect of wandering around the nurses' quarters sent a tremor into his loins. 'Mighty chilly in here tonight,' he went on. 'A good night to curl up in bed with a good book or somebody.' He chuckled at the old gag, not sure how she would react. She didn't.
'Mmhmm.' Lieutenant Cramer glanced through the report Lieutenant Biddle had been preparing when she went upstairs.
Neary wondered if it were possible that Major Reynolds had Lieutenant Cramer's number. If so, then he was one lucky bastard. And smart. These quiet types were supposed to be dynamite once you got them alone. And, after all, weren't nurses passionate by nature? On top of that she had a body. Oh, brother, what a body!
He must have been staring at the few inches of flesh bared by her open shirt collar, because with a deft gesture she secured the topmost button. "What are you reading, Neary?' she asked a little sharply. Lantern light shimmered in her burnt-gold hair as she nodded at the book.
Before he could deny he had been reading at all, Neary held up the book and showed her the cover. She nodded again and suddenly his hopes soared that she might care to discuss the sleeping-bag scene, and that could lead to a learned discussion on the merits of sleeping-bags and he could ask her if she'd ever-
'Where is Lieutenant Biddle?'
'Upstairs. Ward Two. I think it's that Lieutenant Dawida, the one they hauled in last night.' He smiled indulgently. ' 'Course I told her she needn't go up what with you coming on duty any minute, and besides the guy has been yelling all day, I hear. But you know The Dumpling ... '
'That will do, Neary,' she said.
Well, well, well. Now that had the distinct and unmistakable odour of chickenshit and no two ways about it. That will do, Neary. Hot stuff. That was die way with these nurses-you work your fanny off to show them the ropes and the minute they feel sure of themselves they up and pull rank. Why, when he was in Italy getting shot at she was still back in Iowa necking in rumble-seats.
'You should have gone with Lieutenant Biddle,' she said. 'She shouldn't be going on the ward alone at night. Not so soon."
'Yes, ma'am,' mumbled Neary morosely. Then, because he could not bear even a mild rebuke from a woman, he said: 'I hear that the Provost Marshal wants to interrogate Dawida when he's back to normal."
'Oh? What about?' asked Lieutenant Cramer without interest.
'Something to do with his company breaking under fire. In Strasbourg a while ago. He may get a General Court."
"That's too bad."
'What's too bad?'
'Subjecting the poor man to such humiliation. Whatever he did, he's suffering right now. He has very grave chest wounds."
'But listen, Lieutenant,' said Neary heatedly. 'You can't let the troops turn tail on the line. It's bad for morale. It's contagious. Jeez, when I was with the Third Division at Anzio the Krauts shelled us steady for nine straight days and nights and-'
'I don't care to talk about it, Neary,' said Lieutenant Cramer. Using a chipped pocket mirror she manipulated her hair critically.
Biting on his anger, Neary clutched the book. Well, what the hell. You'd think she was something. What did she know about Anzio, anyway? And she probably thought Dawida was great because he was an infantry officer. Or just an officer. Big deal. It'd serve him right if they threw the book at him.
'I'm going to find Lieutenant Biddle,' said Lieutenant Cramer, seizing a flashlight. 'Coming?'
Without waiting for a reply she left the orderly room. For a moment Neary compared the almost dainty sound of her boots with the clop-clop of The Dumpling. He had a fleeting glimpse of the taunting sway of her hips in the darkness. What a walk. Then, with a reluctant sigh, he shed his blanket, dropped his book and followed her.
No denying that Lieutenant Cramer was a tasty morsel but he seriously doubted that Major Reynolds or anybody else was scoring with her. She was a very cold cookie, without an ounce of feeling for a man as a man. But he was willing to bet The Dumpling was another story altogether-they said that the plump ones were all fire and a yard wide....
Drawn by the narrow yellow ray of her flashlight along damp corridors reeking with two centuries of mildew Eve Cramer heard Corporal Neary's grumpy footsteps behind her, and she permitted herself a blink of triumph. At last she was able to put that tiresome boy in his place; she was fairly sure he had intimidated poor Biddle into going on the ward alone and he had some retribution coming to him. The Dumpling, indeed. It was just as well the darkness masked her small smile. What, for that matter, did the orderlies call her? The Sweater? She was no Lana Turner, but neither had she anything to be ashamed of. The-? Better not pursue that particular line of inquiry any further. She had noticed Neary's leers.
The beam exposed a stairway that laddered up, stone steps worn smooth and deep by how many millions of students' and teachers' feet no one could guess. How queerly appropriate that a school be converted into a hospital; the one existed for the purpose of preparing minds for society, the other, bodies. Students were to patients what teachers were to nurses. She could just hear Harry laughing over that comparison, laughing and then sneering that she was a naive romantic. Far below Neary's boots thumped angrily. The ancient building echoed with his sulk. She hoped that Neary was not contemplating a move in her direction. Yet that was one of the inherent hazards of the occupation, a hazard compounded in these abnormal circumstances. Kids such as Neary were prone to wild fantasies and he might well have imagined she was leading him on, when the reverse was the case.
The worst part would be to have Neary make a pass and get slapped down and then blame it on the unbridgeable gulf between their ranks. That could lead him to denouncing her as undemocratic or whatever term the orderlies used on nurses who incurred their wrath, thus making an already ghastly existence all but intolerable. But regulations did not explain how to deal with men who loved you or thought they loved you or thought you loved them.
Besides, one on her hands was plenty.
A circle of light swung nervously on the second-floor landing.
"Biddle?"
"Is that you, Lieutenant Cramer?"
"Yes. Everything all right?"
"I think so-now. It was Dawida in Two. He'd torn off his dressings. I gave him a sedative and half a dose of Pentothal and put on fresh dressings."
"Any of the others awake?"
"Not that I know of. At least no one is complaining."
"Good."
Lieutenant Biddle's round wide-eyed bovine face wore a stricken frightened expression. Newcomers in field hospitals usually looked seasick for days. The Dumpling.
"Sometimes," whispered Lieutenant Biddle with a shudder, "I see them watching me. They don't speak or anything, but I can't help feeling they resent me...."
"Nonsense. These men have spent so many nights in foxholes or on patrols that their sleeping habits are backwards. Don't let them get you down. As long as their needs are attended to and they get their penicillin, that's all that matters. Anyway, even if they could they wouldn't deliberately scare you."
"Oh, Lieutenant Cramer, I know that, only-"
Corporal Neary was with them now, big and glum. Lieutenant Cramer said: "Corporal-see that Lieutenant Biddle gets back to her quarters all right."
"That ain't my--' Neary started to protest.
"Do as you're told, Neary. It's cold and dark outside. And while you're out why don't you see about those logs for the fire?" That should fix him.
"Yes, ma'am," he snapped.
Knowing he could not see her face, she smiled. Then, feeling like a puppeteer, she touched his sleeve, "Ah, Neary, could I borrow your book when you've finished it?"
His instant glow of pleasure was pathetic to see. But then these moody boys were so easy to control. "Yes, ma'am," he said cheefully. Neary and Lieutenant Biddle went down the stairs together, Neary revealing a hitherto well-hidden solicitude as the plump girl descended at his side. Lieutenant Cramer pushed open the door and stood just inside Ward Two waiting for the pupils of her eyes to expand in the darkness.
In a few moments she was reoriented, sniffing the distinctive smells, getting the feel of the atmosphere in Ward Two. Every Ward in every hospital she had ever known had its own personality even though the individuals in it might be replaced. This Ward has been the school's most spacious classroom. Rectangular in shape, it accommodated twenty-two beds, eleven to a side. Walking up the center aisle she often imagined she was passing between two rows of graves, identical except for the grotesque shapes of the headstones-the pulleys and pipes and supports erected to cope with the infinitely wide variety of physical damage. Arms and legs upraised in permanent, mute defiance of an unseen foe. Canted mattresses kept some of the men in a position that was neither prone nor sitting. The entire scene was as weird and disturbing as a nocturnal tour of a sculptor's workshop, alive with unreal silhouettes and threatening shadows.
Over the single window at the far end of the ward flapped a canvas tarpaulin and she moved towards it with tingling flesh. The school was built at the very edge of a river chasm and this window looked out over a hundred-foot drop to the rocks and rushing water far below. Even by night she sensed the breathless vertigo. She had been at Major Reynolds for two weeks to get that window properly boarded and barred, but he refused to give the job priority. Now she wondered if his adamant stand was just one more manifestation of his mastery over her or if he really didn't think it important. It was annoying to imagine that the window might have been attended to long ago if she hadn't mentioned it to him.
Not pausing too long at any one bed she inspected her patients in the darkness, occasionally flickering on the flashlight to study a chart at the end of a bed. Although she knew many of the men by name she invariably identified them by the nature of their wounds-head injury, arm amputation, internal disorder. And she reacted accordingly. Most wounds did not impress her as one way or the other. Other types of wounds affected her in a strangely personal way.
Lieutenant Cramer was nearly finished with her preliminary round when she stopped next to the bed of a figure swathed in plaster, a mould that embraced the shattered bones of his body and forced his one remaining limb-his left leg-in an unnaturally out-thrust pose. Covering the bulb with her handkerchief, she switched on the flashlight. The boy was sleeping, his clean young shaven face in quiet repose. For a wild moment something tried to burst from her lips, and she did not know if it were a sob or a giggle and she swallowed it. Her heart began to beat more rapidly, her breath came short, her mouth was dry and coppery. Of all the boys in the ward this was the one she wanted to do something for; but she stood there, aware of a monumental helplessness. And she was aware of an illicitly growing need to touch the boy.
Dizzy with desire she moved away and completed her tour on numbed legs. If she had remained there a few seconds longer--
And then, as she had known it would, it began: the curiously exciting scintillation of her loins, the spasmodic quivering of her thighs, the sudden aching firming of her breasts....
She knew that she must see to some of the patients, Dawida in particular, she had duties-but she knew what she must do first....
Downstairs the orderly room was, as she had intended it to be, empty: Neary was foraging for fuel. Slipping into her jacket she opened the heavy oak and iron door, flinching at the iceedged wind, and then ran into the yard. She did not go towards the nurses' quarters but hastened towards a low single-storey structure in the farthest corner of the yard. Above the structure a smudge of smoke wisped out of a stone chimney. As if pursued by phantoms her booted feet fled over the cobbles, and when she reached the bungalow she burst inside without knocking.
Major Harry Reynolds was in bed reading by lantern-light. He wore a thick woolen sweater. Facing the dying fire in the hearth, he peered at her over the top of his rimless spectacles.
"Now there's a very risky thing to do," he said. "Entering a bachelor officer's quarters without knocking." He did not smile; Eve Cramer could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions she had seen him smile. His narrow gaunt face was sheathed in skin that was like old grey leather.
"Harry," she said.
"Yes?"
"I had to come."
"So I see."
"I'm-I'm sorry about yesterday."
"Are you?"
"Yes. You knew I would be."
"Perhaps I did."
As she talked she walked into the orbit of light, tugging her sweater over her head, unbuttoning her khaki skirt. Harry Reynolds watched her without expression. Then she climbed out of the trousers and stood shivering contritely until he shrugged and threw the bed clothes aside. With a small cry she crept in beside him, trembling, and pressed her body nakedly to his sinewed knotty torso.
"Oh God," she breathed. "I had to come, Harry. You see that, don't you?" I see.
"I can't stay long. I'm on duty."
"I know."
Seeking his dry mouth with her lips she said: "You won't tell the CO., will you?"
"Not unless he asks me," said the GO.
"You didn't mean what you just said, did you, Harry?'
"What did I just say?"
"About it being risky for me to enter without knocking. You were only kidding, weren't you, Harry?"
"Of course," he said. "You know what a great kidder I am."
"Harry...."
"Yes?"
"Tell me that-' she began and then she veered away from the question that seared her tongue and said: "Tell me something."
"Like what?"
"Oh-I don't know-tell me that you'll always be here where I want to come, and I'll never have to knock."
Harry Reynolds did not reply. Instead, in a continuous knowing movement he rolled towards her impatient body and covered it. Only then did a sound like laughter escape his compressed lips. Eve Cramer matched the sound with a combined sob and giggle. Her burning body arched supplely and she clutched at him. Through the hot maze of ecstasy she saw with brilliant clarity the grotesque shape of the one-legged boy's plaster cast....
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal december 24TH, 1944
With me elbows resting on the frozen gravel on the rim of the foxhole in which I stood up to my chest I looked out over the still meadow which, in the pale starlight resembled a gigantic bed covered with a thin white sheet. Somewhere beyond the farthest limits of the field perhaps a soldier wearing a chamber-pot helmet was facing me. Instinctively my gloved fingers touched the curved comma of a trigger on the machine gun that squatted with functional loveliness as it stared at the invisible enemy with its single unblinking, unfeeling cyclopic eye. On either side of the perforated barrel of the weapon were stretched rows of the ugliest and most fiendishly effective missiles yet conceived by man's miraculously fertile brain: hand grenades. At least a rifle or( a machine gun, long sleek tubes of carefully machined steel, claimed a symmetrical beauty; but the grenades were designed neither to be caressed or admired-they existed solely to inflict pain, draw blood and induce violent death. The cast-iron casings were fashioned like the nipples of a waffle-maker, thus assuring that detonation would result in innumerable hot chunks of metal being scattered at immense speeds. Hefting one I sensed the inherent destruction slumbering within, as a madman patiently awaits parole so he can creep to the place where he has hidden his axe.
Keller, who was sleeping at the bottom of the hole, rose to his full height and stood next to me and we looked out at the silently hostile night. Keller was the Ferdinand of the platoon-massive but gentle, strong but slow.
He said he was unable to sleep for dreaming about Lieutenant Dawida and the rout in the square in Strasbourg and the tank. I told him that in wars you should not dwell upon the yesterdays, but only upon the tomorrows. I agreed that it was too bad about Strasbourg-a month had passed but some of the men couldn't forget-but as for Dawida, he was obviously marked for elimination and at least that way he would be decorated, whereas had he survived a worse fate might have overtaken him without the compensation of posthumous rewards.
"Then it doesn't bother you about all the killing up in Belgium? The enemy is shooting prisoners." He voice sank to a whisper. "This is Christmas Eve, Bennett."
"Only by the calendar," I said. "Christmas should be suspended for the duration. Or else left for the kids."
"If more of us thought about Christmas," said Keller, "then maybe the shooting would stop. The world has gone mad."
I wished that Keller had not appeared along with his disturbing concept of morality. Not that he preached, but he did have a way of reminding you that you had a conscience.
"Maybe this is the way the world is," I said. "Some scholars have proved that men like war, that it is fundamental to man's nature. Which is why we make heroes of Commando Kelley and Sergeant York and Eddie Rickenbacker. Not a man in the Army would turn down the Medal of Honour or who wouldn't want to march in the victory parade through the Brandenburg Gate."
"The work of evil propagandists," said Keller. "Appealing to base emotions. Treating us like guinea-pigs. Building up our sense of national pride. Well, the Germans have tried to conquer the earth because of national pride, and not for philanthropic reasons but in order to desecrate. They denied God and then denied Christ. And that's what our people are coming to."
"Don't forget," I reminded him, "man used to spend most of his free time fighting holy wars. Christianity was founded in blood and fire. So if it isn't one excuse, it's another. If it weren't wars it'd be something else as bad."
"You don't sound as if you have very much faith in your fellow man," said Keller quietly.
I patted the smooth hard barrel of the machine gun. "I'm not the only sceptic, else this would never have been invented. Faith precludes Hope. I guess I'm more inclined to accept my fellow man as he is-and thus I'm never disappointed. Nor am I taken by surprise." I pulled back the bolt and let it slide forward again into instant firing position.
The night was as cold and still as a dawn of a deer-hunting day in the Adirondacks and I had a sudden antic inspiration that sometime I would try a machine gun. That would make the game-wardens raise their eyebrows all right.
Evidently Keller was thinking nobler thoughts for he said: "Have you no belief? Nothing to hold on to?"
"Yes. I have a belief in myself and my trigger-finger. And I have a belief in the men I march with, the performance in Strasbourg notwithstanding. And I have a belief in The Army and in the cause I am fighting for. I am certain I shall never die."
"It's blasphemous to be so secular, Bennett. You must admit to a higher security than thirty-calibre bullets and one-o-five millimetre howitzers and bare bayonets."
"For me, in this particular era, in this particular place, no higher security is necessary. Or strong enough."
In the icy silence I could hear Keller's breathing and see the pale clouds of vapour as he exhaled. "Tell me," he said, "is it possible, is it barely possible that you actually like the life you are leading now?"
I thought about this question for a minute or so. It had never occurred to me before. Then I said: "Yes, Keller, I confess in all honesty, I do like it."
"Then that must mean you hold out no hope for the human race?"
"I don't know that I would use exactly those words, but if you want to jump to that conclusion I won't quibble."
"And you believe there is no intrinsic good in mankind?"
He was backing me into a corner but I could not recant now or else I'd have to re-examine everything I had said. "I'm afraid so."
I could not hear what Keller said to that because he spoke in an undertone. I had the feeling that his words were not directed to me anyway. The wide deep night enclosed us in its white thin silence. After a while, following what seemed to be an inner debate, Keller took from his pocket an oblong package about six inches long. Tinfoil glinted. He pressed it into my hands and said, "Merry Christmas, Bennett," and then ducked down into the hole and burrowed into his sleeping bag.
Grasping the package I was conscious of a slowly increasing intensity of excitement, an emotion that had its roots in the loamy soil of my childhood. Up through the whirlpool of memories came a vision of a wooden frame-house with fantastic hoar frost designs on the windows and the green scent of balsam needles mingled with the tantalizing odour of turkey roasting in a coal stove oven and yule-cake cooling on the back porch steps in a cushion of melting snow. Shrill children's cries betrayed surprise and delight at the unwrapped gifts and the golden glitter of a Flexible Flyer and the silver gleam of hockey skates....
I carefully peeled away the tin-foil and found inside a fruit-bar, a chunk of D-ration chocolate and a pack of Spud cigarettes. I looked at the three objects and I silently marvelled at Keller's uncanny ability to recognize a lie when he heard one.
CHAPTER TWO
Major Reynolds awoke, as he usually did, at the first whistle blast or reveille sounding in the enlisted men's barracks at six o'clock. And, as usual, he closed his eyes again, still awake, and waited for the discreet tapping of Corporal Neary which came, also as usual, at six-fifteen. Calling out that he was awake, thank you, he listened to Neary's steps receding across the yard. Under the mound of blankets, his face against the pillow strongly scented with Eve Cramer's feminine smell, he idly conjectured that the night orderly must wait outside the door, knuckles poised over the panel, counting down until his watch read precisely six-fifteen, a human Big Ben, and he wondered what Neary would do if one morning there was no response at all, or better yet, if a woman's voice answered.
Bracing himself for the assault of frigid air he leapt from the bed, reaching for his clothes. Ten minutes later Neary was back with a bucket of scalding hot water; he left, due to return in a quarter of an hour with breakfast. Dressing after he'd washed and shaved, it occurred to Major Reynolds that if he could detect Eve Cramer's presence on his pillow, then surely the barracks orderlies, inquisitive as they were, must also smell the scent of crushed violets. Perhaps he should take off the pillowslip-if only to exercise a gentlemanly discretion.
Then the remotest whisper of mirth brushed his leathery face and faded away. No, he would not conceal the tell-tale evidence. Let the orderlies figure out for themselves what nurse belonged to what scent. Soundless laughter shook his frame. Before long half the enlisted men on the base would be surreptitiously sniffing at every nurse and W.A.C. as she passed. It might lead to some equally interesting reactions by the women. Of course in due time a human blood hound would establish the connection between the guilty pillow-slip and Lieutenant Cramer's head, and the word would race along the grapevine?
But suppose another nurse also used the same perfume?
Good God, thought Major Reynolds. Suppose the captain of nurses herself, Gelbecken, wore crushed violets? The idea that any of the men would conclude that he was being clandestine with that bundle of wet wash who was at least five years older than himself, at least in her forties, was too much to endure. There would be snickers and smirks and, inevitably, outright insubordination: an officer is known by the female company he keeps.
Major Reynolds took the offending pillow-slip and thrust it under his shirts in his foot-locker, fastened the padlock and put the key in his pocket.
He was all brushed and buttoned by the time Neary reappeared with the covered tray and placed it on the table by the window that looked out over the yard. The yard was almost like a village square, surrounded as it was by the grey bricks of walls, garages, barracks and the hospital itself. Corporal Neary did not withdraw. He stood at attention, waiting.
Major Reynolds studied the awkward, bony, deliberate corporal whom he knew to be such a shiftless gold-brick but who was valuable because in the past two years of very real experience, from Africa to Sicily to Italy and now France, even his turgid Ozarkian brain had accumulated the kind of priceless know-how about hospital procedures that can neither be taught nor bought.
"Yes, Corporal?"
"Sir, there's a couple of people just arrived at the orderly room. In a jeep."
Major Reynolds peeked under the napkin at the congealing bacon and the orange-coloured mock eyes that awaited his attention. He sipped the hot coffee. "I presume you insisted they give the password, Neary."
"Sir?"
Neary wasn't exactly the most brilliant of orderlies. Major Reynolds smeared the greasy artifical butter on his toast. "Did they identify themselves, Corporal? Or do they not speak English? Could it be Herr Himmler presenting his sword?"
Neary's raw features went red. T-I-sir, they say they're correspondents. From Paris. They want to see you, sir."
"How nice," said Major Reynolds drily. "Ask them to wait. Better still, ask them to have some breakfast-they might get discouraged and go away." He sighed, knowing that Neary did not share his sense of humour this early in the morning. "Tell them I'll be along after my rounds with Captain Gelbecken." That was what Neary seemed to want, for he saluted, executed a clumsy about-face and started to leave. "Wait. Tell you what, Corporal. I expect they'll require the Two-Dollar Tour later on-they always do. Place yourself at their disposal, arrange for them to be billeted in one of the B.O.Q.'s and then-"
"But, sir," protested Neary, "I been up all night on duty."
"Aha, yes, so you have. Well, get them settled and grab some sleep and then report to me at noon." To ward off another objection, he added: "You're the best man to guide them around, Neary. You know where all the bodies are buried, don't you?"
"I beg your pardon, sir--"
"That's all, Corporal," said Major Reynolds impatiently, offering the non-com a meaningful view of his broad flat back.
"Yes, sir," said Neary. Once more he started for the door but this time he came to a halt of his own accord. Major Reynolds glared around at him. Neary was staring at an olive-drab wool sweater flung carelessly over the back of a chair.
"Is there anything else, Corporal?"
"No, sir!"
"Ever see a sweater before?"
"Yes, sir!"
"You're dismissed!"
Neary ducked through the doorway gawkily and was gone.
Major Reynolds shook his short-trimmed head resignedly. Nerhaps Neary was cracking up, perhaps his reflexes were wearing out, perhaps-after all, it was only a sweater, exactly like the one he had on....
Slowly, gingerly, Major Reynolds stood up and went over to the chair and fingered the garment that hung there. He held it to his nose. Crushed violets.
The sweater was Lieutenant Cramer's.
By eleven o'clock, with a whole hour left until Corporal Neary was due to show up, Major Reynolds was weary of half of the reporter-photographer team. The reporter was a garrulous caricature of a war correspondent. He had the physique of a bear and a beard to match. His knowing authoritative professionally cynical voice rumbled up out of a stomach that could-and probably did-conceal a beer cask. It was painfully obvious that he considered himself "a colourful character," for he roared with laughter at his own jokes, ate double rations, slurped cognac from a rusty canteen, slapped the nurses' bottoms, and, contrary to regulations, wore a cartridge-belt and holster for the purpose of sporting a revolver with a black ebony handle. To listen to him you'd think that if it weren't for Jack Kane's personal intervention the troops would still be pinned down on Omaha Beach. But he had told George this and Omar that and Ike the other thing....
The other half of the team was named Berger and she was as observantly quiet as Kane was noisily obnoxious. The leather straps of two German-made cameras crisscrossed over her abundantly curved chest. (X marks the spot, thought Major Reynolds.) Her tailored slacks were stuffed into polished paratrooper boots, a ruthless touch that was successfully calculated to enhance her classically erotic Jewish beauty. She had a habit of wetting her ample lips with the tip of her tongue whenever she thought Major Reynolds was watching her.
After nearly two hours of smoldering unuttered resentment at Kane's boring ebullience, coupled with an acute awareness of Martha Berger's sensuality, Major Reynolds was testy and irritable. Singly he could have dealth with each; together inseparable, they presented a problem in diplomacy, not to say a challenge.
They had insisted on lingering in his office just off the orderly room on the ground floor of the hospital, blissfully oblivious to his hints that he was busy. After attempting to conduct his duties around and over them, Major Reynolds finally surrendered and told his secretary that he was not to be disturbed until Corporal Neary showed up. He swung his chair towards the window that afforded another view of the yard. Snow was falling with slow density, as if it were in no hurry and was prepared to snow for hours and days on end. Major Reyo-olds kept hoping to see Neary appear through the gauzy curtain, a rescuer in ill-fitting fatigues. It would be an achievement not to display his gratitude when the corporal chose to materialize.
He swung back to his visitors. "I still don't know exactly what you'd like to do here," he said, forcing a smile. "We're just an ordinary field hospital, no different from any other in France."
Jack Kane gulped cognac and, digging deep into his internals, was rewarded with a resonant belch. "That's just the point, Reynolds," he replied. "No different from any other. What we want is a typical soldier-repair factory. None of that Riviera stuff for us, hey Bergy?"
Martha Berger smiled politely with her lush mouth while her eyes remained fixed on Major Reynolds's right ear-lobe. "Right, Jack. None of that Riviera stuff. And none of that Belgium stuff either."
The man's mountainous features contorted in a theatrical grimace. "Rotten show up there in the Ardennes, Reynolds. Believe me. Now, I've seen war in my day. Lots of war. Abyssinia, Albania, China, Spain-hell, I've written books about war-but I've never seen anything like that mess up there. Deads? Can't count the deads. Not pretty deads either. There's no nobility in dying with the odds fifty to one like it was for those kids of the One Hundred and Sixth. Oops, sorry. I wasn't supposed to mention any division designations. Georgie's Intelligence G-2 swore me to secrecy. Couldn't print it if I wanted to. But, well, you know the score, Reynolds-" His voice trailed off vaguely.
"Anyway, Major," interrupted Martha Berger smoothly, "we knew conditions would be outrageous in the north at this time, so we decided to operate in a quieter sector-didn't you, Jack?"
"Only way a man can get to think and interpret," agreed Kane, squinting crow's-feet around his eyes in the manner of a captain peering over a heavy sea. "You see, Major, Bergy and I teamed up to build a documentary on how the boys are being treated, medically speaking. Of course we know it's first-class treatment compared to the charnel houses I saw in Madrid in 'thirty-seven. But we want the folks back home to know. Not the top brass or those politicians in uniform. Fornicate them, Reynolds, if you'll excuse my French. Care for some cognac?" He proffered the rusty canteen, and when Major Reynolds declined went on: "Not to everyone's taste, but this is good stuff. Liberated it myself in Nancy last month."
Martha Berger's moist red mouth pouted with parental indulgence as Kane tossed off several fingers of brandy. "What Jack is trying to say, sir, is that we would like to do a word-and-picture story on your casualties and then sell it at a nice profit to the magazine and, incidentally, put ourselves in line for some international publicity, the kind that can lead to awards and scrolls and bonuses."
"Now, Bergy," protested Kane. "That's giving it the old knee in the groin. You're ripping off all the meat and leaving the bones. I'm sure the good major is not interested in the sordid professional details. But of course, these articles can cut both ways. What we can do for you, Reynolds, is highlight any shortages you may have and then light a fire under those lard-assed bureaucrats back home. See what I mean?"
Major Reynolds was trying to remember if there was anything in the Articles of War dealing with throwing a punch at a civilian correspondent. Ah, well, he decided, it didn't really matter. Furthermore, Kane was much too big to punch and, besides, he was just the thin-skinned type who's as soon pack up and tear off in his jeep to promote some other hospital and a more hospitable CO. Major Reynolds did not hate him quite that much. Yet. He could endure a good deal more of the man for the sake of that wet pouting mouth and the voluptuous legs Miss Berger kept flashing at him. In any case, he must not forget the value of favourable publicity and bulging scrap-books-he would not be in the Army for ever and when he began to shop around for a suitable post in the States such credentials would be worth more than a chestful of medals.
"Well, I'm sure my people will be delighted to co-operate," he said quietly, wondering where the hell that bastard Neary was.
"Looky here, Reynolds," boomed Kane. "No need to fuss over us. We're used to foraging for ourselves. We're veteran scroungers and squatters, hey, Bergy? Just let us wander around on our own and see what we see?"
The last thing on earth Major Reynolds wanted was for this boob to see what he could see.
"Just the same, I think it wiser for Corporal Neary to accompany you, Mr. Kane." The ghost of a smile flickered over his face. "Some of our sentries are trigger-happy." It was worth telling the lie to see the flash of alarm in those bleary eyes. "For the first few hours Corporal Neary will-"
"Hours! Haw. Major, don't let me scare you but we may be here for daysl When Bergy and I get our fangs into a story we shake it like a terrier shaking a rat. By the time we're finished with your little hospital here the mothers of America will be flooding you with boxes of fruit, knitted pyjamas, prayer-books and home-made fudge-not to mention do-re-mi. And as for the nurses-" Major Reynolds did not hear what the nurses would be like by the time Jack Kane got through with them, for Miss Berger interrupted the fantastic flow again.
"Well be happy to have your corporal, Major," she murmured. "And we'll let the good corporal act as liaison between us and your staff. So as not to frighten any of them."
Major Reynolds looked at her. "You don't frighten me, Miss Berger, if that's any consolation."
"It is," answered Miss Berger in a soft voice. He could feel her eyes burning on his ear.
"I trust your accommodations are adequate."
"Fine, from what I've seen of them," she said. "I'm in with your nurses. I've already met my room-mate, Lieutenant Biddle." Miss Berger hesitated and sucked in her cheeks thoughtfully. "She wouldn't by any chance be any relation to--"
"I don't think so," said Major Reynolds promptly.
"Too bad. The story would be sure-fire then, however."
"Doubtless you'll want to take some photographs of the base," said Major Reynolds. "It does have a certain historical value, I'm told. After I get off duty this afternoon I'll be at your service."
Now the dark luminous pellucid eyes met his frankly. The high olive-hued cheek-bones caught and reflected the whiteness of the falling snow. After a moment she raised the Rolleiflex, a gesture that caused the shirt to stretch dangerously across her bosom, and exposed two shots in quick succession. Caught off guard, Major Reynolds reddened.
"Have to begin somewhere," said Miss Berger huskily.
"Yes," he said, aware of a dry aching thirst of desire at the back of his mouth. "Yes, we have to begin somewhere."
Jack Kane was not paying any attention to them. He was at the window, belching, as he stared boozily out at the falling snow. "Reminds me." he said reminiscently, "reminds me of the day the cavalry galloped right into the teeth of the machine-gun fire. Now where in hell was that again?...."
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal December 31st, 1944
Most of us in the first platoon were disappointed when Lieutenant Kranich passed us over in favour of the third platoon to carry out a special assignment somewhere deep in the heart of the Vosges Mountains. We were already bored blind with the monotonous routine of guard duty and false action alarms and the daily digging of foxholes in earth as hard as cement, none of which we figured ever to have to use. Besides, as MacFarland never tired of pointing out, of all the platoons in Strasbourg ours was the one that had looked best. In the heat of esprit de corps we took the slight as a reflection not only upon MacFarland's leadership but upon our own courage as well.
Thinking it over, though, I doubted if Lieutenant Karnich went that far into the matter. Since it was a case of which platoon was less afraid I guess he didn't have much to choose from, so in the end he decided upon his old platoon because he knew the men in it. Nevertheless MacFarland's men felt offended, and even though no rumours as to the nature of the mission had filtered down most of us were convinced that we were being brazenly cheated out of a nice plush job in a place overflowing with wine and women.
On New Year's Eve the regular third platoon roadblock detail paused at our foxhole to co-ordinate passwords and countersigns and S.O.S. signals. Corporal Clark was in charge of the unit that consisted of Riggs, Bissinger and Riley. Keller and I suffered their lugubrious gibes at having been denied the honour of accompanying Kranich. Riley, a loud-mouth if ever there was one, bragged that he'd heard they were supposed to liberate a girls' school which had been cut off by avalanches. Of course we did not for an instant believe this flagrant lie, but the seed was planted and in due time it would blossom forth with the ripe bitter fruit of jealousy. Girls' school indeed.
They left us in the dark, marching two by two down the feeder road towards the junction with the main highway a mile and a half to the east where their platoon maintained a combination outpost and road-block for the purpose of reporting any enemy movements, particularly mass movements which might be a prelude to a break-through similar to the one up north. Just what the four men were supposed to do if they did sight a column of Tiger tanks thundering down on them from the direction of Colmar was not made clear. Run, I guess. Three times each night one of the four was to walk back to our hole just to let us know they were still alive.
Therefore we were not surprised when, less than two hours later, a hulking figure came ambling towards us on the feeder road. I halted him and asked for the password and gave the countersign and told him to advance and be recognized, although I knew darned well who it was. Riley. A squat swaggerer, Riley was not my idea of the perfect soldier. He was inclined to do more talking than working, which may have accounted for his still being a private after three years in the division. None of us ever believed his boast that he had once been a first sergeant in the Regular Army and had been busted due to a mysterious vendetta between himself and a major-general. Old soldiers, like old sailors, take pleasure in sneering at rank, dismissing it as being beneath a real man, sought after only by brown-nosers and jerks. Yet their interminable references to their former glories tip their hands.
Riley was an inveterate hand-tipper, as he proved a-gain in the next few minutes as he crouched next to my machine gun and told what he intended to do to eight or ten of the virgins he personally would carry down the mountains. When at last he stood up he walked in the direction of the village centre.
An hour later he was back again, this time walking with the exaggerated sobriety of a drunk. He carefully avoided getting too close to my hole and my nose, and hurried along the road to the junction. At least twice I heard him stumble and fall and then curse vilely for a while as he picked himself up to continue his solitary march under the stars that tomorrow would be one year older.
It does not require an especially vivid imagination to reconstruct the events that took place soon afterwards. Let's say it happened like this:
Pausing frequently to refuel from one of the two wine-bottles in his pockets, Riley finally got back to the outpost and found it as still and cold as when he had left. After reporting in to Clark he dropped into the foxhole he shared with Riggs. Taking one last glance at the heap of logs and concrete blocks in the intersection, and with a wave at Clark in the foxhole katy-corner, he curled up next to his partner.
He passed a pleasant interval lying there, sipping from a bottle and gazing up past the edge of the tarp that sheltered half of the hole, probably projecting himself into his gold-encrusted stripe-wealthy past, thinking what a hell of a way for a former top-kick to be spending New Year's Eve. Sic transit gloria.
Riley was engrossed in a dream concerning certain activities of several naked female students in a mountain school-room when the first shots penetrated his sleep. The weight of the wine was heavy on his eyes and he successfully resisted the impulse to sit up. Through slitted lids Riley watched as Riggs scrambled bootless from the hole, firing his rifle from the hip. An explosion, very close, tore the fabric of the night. A man spoke in a language Riley could not understand. Then a burp-gun barked-a short cruel sound-and Rigg's rifle was silenced.
Now wide awake, Riley gained his knees, felt around for his rifle and tipped over his bottles in the process. From across the road came the shrill voice of Corporal Clark swearing in an unbroken stream. Shots volleyed. Another explosion and the stream was damned up sharply. Cautiously Riley raised his head. At that instant flames sprang up from the katy-corner foxhole and with it came a man's scream.
Silhouetted against the flames, giantly, were half a dozen men. Not ten feet from Riley's eyes lay the motionless body of Riggs. Riley sank down again and fuzzily tried to estimate if he could possibly shoot down all six Krauts before they shot him in return.
As he crouched uncertainly he heard the tramp of heavy boots. He shrank against the earthen wall with the muzzle of his rifle pointed upwards, finger ready to pull the trigger. A command cut the air and the boots halted. In the brief silence that followed there was the snap of a grenade's safety mechanism flying off. Riley waited for the murderous thing to fall into his lap. This was it. But the grenade didn't come into the hole. It bounced off the taut canvas and exploded in the bushes beyond. The bushes began to burn, indicating the grenade was a thermite-type, just like the one that was frying Clark and Bissinger across the road. Riley felt its heat on his face.
When next he looked out, the intersection was deserted of living men. Flames crackled and hissed as the logs of the road block burned. Crawling gingerly, Riley found that the burp-gun had stitched Riggs through the middle and nearly cut him into two equal parts. Blood pumped darkly into the snow. He tried to get closer to the other hole, but the heat-and the stench of burning flesh-was too intense.
About that time he heard the men of the first platoon running along the feeder road. For the first time that night Riley used his head. He began firing his rifle as he ran down the barren highway towards Col-mar, uttering wild threats.
"There they go!" he cried. "Bennett. Keller. Hurry, and we can cut them off!"
Keller and I were born recently, but it wasn't yesterday. Riley's version of the episode didn't hold water. Fitting together the jagged pieces we knew that if we wanted to we could tear it all to shreds-and with it the wispy fragile membranes of the Company's newly healed morale. This was Strasbourg all over again, except that now there was no cathedral as an unbribable witness. I even wondered if Riley's had been that voice of authority bravely shouting 'Back!'
Keller and I consulted briefly. That is, I made a suggestion and after a quick tussle with his piety Keller a-greed that it was the only way.
Just before a squad of the first platoon came trotting up to the intersection we all three-me and Keller and Riley-shook hands and vowed to verify the story that would make Riley into something he wasn't: a brave man.
We must have done a good job of it, because the very next day Lieutenant Kranich declared he was putting Riley in for a decoration. He added with a note of regret in his voice that the loss of three third-platoon men meant the third could not go to the mountains: the first would go instead.
I should have got Riley to back me up on my story, because when I informed Pickett and Newman and the others that we were on the way to liberate a school full of man-hungry girls, they were openly sceptical.
A word about the lies-they don't bother me, of course, because I think the truth would have been evil in this case: but I wonder if they compromised Keller. He hasn't said.
CHAPTER THREE
Eve Cramer opened her eyes and focused on the bare beams supporting the ceiling above her bed. Grey daylight filtered through rents in the window curtains. The curiously muffled silence told her that it was snowing again. Burrowed in her blankets she was warm and comfortable. She guessed it was about noon-only six hours since Captain Gelbeckta relieved her-and she wished she could go back to sleep. She knew she wouldn't, because the opening of her eyes had automatically tripped the switch that started her brain racing.
Slowly, so slowly that she was almost unaware of it, the memory of last night's humiliation grew and swelled in the pit of her stomach and she shut her eyes, but that did not close it out or erase. If anything it was worse with her eyes shut. Against the pink backdrop of her eyelids she reviewed the whole ghastly episode for the hundredth time....
Two or three nights a week she was in the habit of leaving the hospital and rushing through the yard to Harry's bungalow, there to make love with him for half or three-quarters of an hour. She went to him as unresistingly as an addict hurries to a rendezvous with a dope-pedlar. And he never failed her. When she returned she was invariably calm and unruffled, refuelled for another forty-eight or seventy-two hours.
The queer part of it was that she didn't particularly like Harry Reynolds as a person. Between them was very little social intercourse; their private encounters were rigidly restricted to those brief shattering collisions in the dark and chill bedroom, when the white of flames of her passion cauterized her loneliness.
So last night, after making an excuse to Corporal Neary, she had trudged through the knee-deep snow of the yard, head bent against the bite and sting of the wind, a small figure in the night, and, without knocking, turned the iron handle of the door of the bungalow. It did not yield to her pressure, so she tried harder. The door was immovable as a wall of stone. It was locked. Almost mechanically she had raised her gloved hand to rap on the oaken panel.
Then she arrested the hand in mid air, poised a few inches away from the door.
Panic exploded soundlessly in her heart. She had been about to knock.
She had been about to knock!
Backing away from the shelter of the eave, stepping into the snow again, she exposed herself to the pitiless wind. Was this a mad dream? A nightmare in which you try to flee from the thing you most fear only to find you are incapable of moving your feet?
The door was locked. It had never been locked before ... perhaps Harry had done it accidentally, casually, as if to keep out the winter. But Harry hardly ever did anythig accidentally or casually; nor did he ever fail to do anything he really wanted to do. If any man were a human machine that man was Harry Reynolds. Some time during the past three years or so he had performed an operation upon himself, skillfully extracting his normal heart and soul, replacing them with reasonably accurate facsimiles made of cobalt.
Once she had been with him in the operating-room when, quite unexpectedly, a youth had died under his knife and Harry had blinked his cold grey eyes above the surgical mask and ordered the corpse taken away and the next patient brought in, as calmly as ordering another drink in a bar. And the magnificent hands never faltered or lost their rhythm, and the second boy lived.
No, Harry didn't go around absent-mindedly locking doors.
The implacable oak slab drew her again and once more she raised her hand to strike it-Perhaps he wasn't in.
Nonsense. Of course he was in-smoke issued from the chimney.
Besides, where else could he be on a night like this?
Harry, she screamed without speaking, Harry, Harry, Harry ... Just one little knock?
She pressed her cheek to the door, trying to extract comfort and warmth, but her flesh merely tingled against the sheathing of sleet.
From the very depths of her being she fished out the ragged banner of her pride and let it fly in the winter wind. She would not knock and give him the pleasure of having forced her to knock. It was just barely possible, of course, that this was his idea of a prank; maybe he was reading in his bed, awaiting her rap in order to tease her about it later....
Harry? Tease? Oh, come on, Cramer.
A test?
Okay, suppose it were a test? But what was it a test of-and, more important, how to pass and how to flunk?
She turned away from the bungalow that had once sent delightful anticipatory shivers coursing down her spine merely by existing; now it was as forbidding as a witch's tomb. Leaning into the wind she retraced her steps across the yard-or as much of her original steps as she could find in the drifting snow. Half-way back to the hospital the old boot-prints vanished, completely oblitered. That was when, understanding at last, she swerved and went to the nurses' quarters.
In the bare hallway she passed by her own room and quietly pushed open the door of the room Lieutenant Biddle was sharing with the photographer, Miss Berger. She quickly picked out The Dumpling's bed and heard the nurse's regular exhausted breathing.
The other bed, Miss Berger's, was empty.
Back in the orderly room Lieutenant Cramer surprised Corporal Neary tippling from a slim bottle of red red wine. Startled, he said: "What! Back so soon?"
And with those four words she knew that Neary knew.
Now she lay stiff with indignity and futile anger, knowing there was nothing she could do about it, unwilling to believe that she had permitted herself to delude herself. In entering into the arrangement with Harry she had gone absolutely certain of her capacity to withstand any of the shocks and cataclysms inherent in such ... affaires. (Much as she loathed the word, it was apropos). She was no child. Indeed, she knew she was one of the few genuinely attractive women available, a circumstance which made her think she would have to chastise Harry from time to time in order to cool off his ardour. She thought.
Rising on her elbow she surveyed the room dispassionately. She knew it so well, every article of Government Issue furniture, every oil-spot on the floor-planks not concealed by the threadbare carpet, the bed itself with its square utilitarian lines and heap of impersonal olive-drab blankets, the cracked mirror on the wall returning wierdly distorted reflections that were more than visual echoes-they were commentaries. The closet door that would never quite shut, revealing her clothing hanging in sad emptiness, the neat row of polished footwear, the mimeographed list of regulations, negatives, nailed to the wall.
That was all.
Not even the intangible, immeasurable quality of life, much less love.
Because she did not live in this room-she lived in herself. In herself and in Ward Two and-fleetingly-in Harry's bed. (With a clinical detachment she noted that the very thought of that bed caused her limbs to quiver and her spine to arch and a thrill of excitation under the flannel bodice of her night-dress).
Later, dressing in the low temperature that brought goose bumps out on her exposed skin, she knew that if her quarters meant a little more to her, if she were able to take an interest in her surroundings and the other nurses, then the Harry thing wouldn't be nearly as elephantine as she'd imagined. Perhaps she had lived in too many cubicle rooms since joining the Corps; perhaps she had moved too many times, hung too many flimsy curtains with their pathetically gay designs, and parted from too many friends....
But how had that boorish correspondent, Kane, described the Army nurses the other night as he quoted aloud from one of his own dispatches?
"Rest assured, Mr. and Mrs. America, your gallant daughters, those military angels of mercy, have magically transformed the lifeless bricks and wood of their foreign billets into charming little islands of home...."
There had been more of the same, but only a few, such as the naive Biddle and the war-horse Gelbecken, had been taken in by Kane's demented sense of the ironic. Eve had stolen a swift glance at Miss Berger's sensuously Semitic features but had seen nothing more there that betrayed her true feelings about Kane, neither condonement nor condemnation. But, for that matter, Miss Berger was as uncommunicative as a statue, saying Tittle, taking her pictures, smiling her thanks for small favours, rendered, volunteering nothing-but seeing everything. Poor Biddle went around in a happy daze, fancying she was sharing her room with an honest-to-goodness celebrity....
Well, she certainly didn't share it last night.
Dressed and brushed, Eve Cramer drew on her smart great-coat, belted it with a vicious gesture and took pigskin gloves from the pockets. Her inner turmoil was gone now. She could face the world with equanimity. But she would not be the same again, nothing would be the same again. Once you inhale the toxic fumes of jealousy even fresh air is suspect.
Crossing the yard to the officers' mess she wondered if she would try the door again tonight.
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 3rd, 1945
Snow began slanting out of the darkening skies as the platoon marched out of the village of Ste Marie, and before the two point-men reached the first uphill curve in the trail no one could see more than ten yards in any direction. We filed up in twin columns, accompanied by the undertone of a hundred boots shuffling through new dry snow. By summer the trail was a real road; now it was only a white scar on the mountain's flank.
Hearing the commonplace sounds of a route-march-rifle steel kissing helmet steel, a cough, a grunt-coming out of the whiteness, endowed the scene with a ghostly quality. And when the men themselves became sheathed in snow all reality disappeared and we were like a single heavy-breathing beast laboriously ascending an endlessly long white tunnel.
The world ceased to exist for me. I was only conscious of the mechanical pumping of my legs, the drag of the rifle on my shoulder, and the sag of the pack on my back. With our bodies bent under our burdens, heads bowed to protect our eyes from the slash of the snow, we must have resembled two processions of novitiate monks on our way, humbly and anonymously, to worship at the base of the true cross.
We had not been told exactly where we were going or what we could expect to find when we got there or how long it would take. Nor did any of us ask. Our mute acceptance was less a sign of disinterest than one more proof of the blind unquestioning faith we had in the Authority who had ordered the march. It did not seem at all unnatural or inhuman that fifty grown men should be subjecting their sacred bodies to such an ordeal under such appalling conditions. This was the way of the world. Our obeying without hesitation-indeed, our applauding of the order-must have given the Authority pause to examine the nature of power. By proceeding according to orders we were instantly assuming that the Authority was good ... one wonders at those men who spring to obey Authority that is wicked. But if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it must follow that so is wickedness. Since it is instinctive for man to obey, he who moulds and harnesses that instinct for his own purposes is invested with the power of life or death, of absolute good or absolute evil. The men themselves are neither good nor evil, but merely instruments of Authority.
That our platoon marched up that mountain on the most brutal night of all time, was a ringing vote of confidence in our Authorities. If any of us had doubted prior to that night that we would ultimately triumph in the war, none of us doubted thereafter. Regardless of what the enemy Authority could expect of its instruments, our Authority could expect-and get-more.
The point-men had bad going because they were first to break trail, necessitating frequent changes in their order: but the hardest marching was reserved for the last half-dozen men in each column, because after fifteen or twenty pairs of boots had trampled the snow the footing became precarious at best. The road was soon a frozen slushy mass. Traction was almost non-existent. I found myself trudging upwards four steps and slipping back two. Gradually the columns stretched thinner until whole groups broke contact.
Then, like furious shepherds, Lieutenant Kranich and Sergeant MacFarland would come tearing down the middle of the trail, laying the men bare with the knouts of their anger, urging them to greater effort. And as we toiled upwards I thought of those tugs of war at Labour Day picnics. Indeed, the two columns were like competitors hauling on invisible hawsers, trying to drag up from the depths of the white night some gruesome species of powerful monster which threatened in turn, if we weakened, to draw us all down to a nameless and hideous fate.
Somehow, a section at a time, we gained altitude. Now and then we traversed exposed plateaux, cringing under the horizontal lashings of the shrieking wind that grabbed greedily at our clothing. Unable to breathe properly, unable to see clearly, simply lurching along with the mass momentum of the entire platoon, we knew that if any one of us who stumbled had failed to rise at once, within minutes the whole unit would have collapsed and our war would have been over.
Then we would be in the woods again, going upwards along the road that was slung back and forth over the face of the mountain like a piece of string idly discarded by a child at play. Any number of us tumbled over the sheer embankments, coming to rest not at the base of a cliff but merely on the lower level of the trail up which we had just marched. After a while the hilarity induced by these falls froze on our lips.
Within two hours and two miles of leaving Ste Marie the road was a wasteland of jettisoned equipment-gasmasks, boots, hand grenades, cigarettes, even rations. The manufactured spoor of a hundred-legged reptile. We are probably history's untidiest soldiers.
Inevitably the platoon's resentment swung from the snow and the mountain to more personalized targets: the eternally goading lieutenant and sergeant. Without so much as a common signal the men concentrated their mute hatred on the two figures of Authority; yet instead of impeding our progress the insane bitterness was a kind of fuel which, as it consumed us, boosted and impelled us ahead. We hated MacFarland's longs legs and his bottomless reservoirs of strength; we hated Kranich's gorilla muscles and the bull-thrust of his great shoulders. We hated them both for making the first platoon come on the mission which by rights belonged to the third platoon. We were sure it was outright favouritism on the part of Kranich in order to leave his own platoon esconced in the luxury of the town.
Alternately sweating and shivering, we brought the mountain to its knees. No. That's not true. The mounfood. I gobbled down a piece of cheese sloshing it with a quick burning gulp of schnapps. Wrapping my blanket around me I found I was still shuddering with freezing sweat. Kranich mildly suggested that we pool our coverings for greater warmth, which sounded logical and humane to me, and I might have stayed there content and sleeping next to Kranich's large bearish body had not I felt, in less than a minute, fingers exploring my right knee.
I do not know what I thought or what Lieutenant Kranich thought, but I was suddenly wide awake and I did not want to stay in there any longer. Without a word I slipped out of the blankets and snaked through the opening. Outside in the tar-black hour before dawn I stood up and wondered what I should do and where I should go. I did not have long to debate because there was a weird swishing and then a cherry-red explosion twenty yards down the slope. Things hissed through the air. A second blast shattered the night up the slope and more things murmured around me, like swarms of inquisitive insects. One of the things fell into the snow at my feet and sent up the pungent stench of burnt iron. To my left was an empty hole and I dived head-first into it and pressed my body to its jagged contour, contracting within myself like a telescope, actually making myself insignificant, and the third shell crashed right on the spot I had vacated.
The mortal storm continued to drench the mountain with its lethal precipitation, popping and exploding as innocently as Roman candles and babies' balloons. I knew them why the company we had relieved was so stunned. Somewhere beyond the fringe of the night was a simply uncanny mortar crew that had our slope perfectly zeroed in. This was the official welcome for us novitiates.
Long after the last shell had dropped I lay where I was, my face in the snow, listening to the echoing silence, still waiting for one more shell, wondering if it were my shell, the one you are not supposed to hear.
Finally I heard voices and I slowly rose up out of the hole that was in the shape of an opened grave. Scorched air hovered among the trees. I stood up and looked around for Lieutenant Kranich. In the snow at the entrance to the command post was a spider-webbish splotch of black. Smoke curled lazily.
Scurrying over on my knees, I called his name. I put my head into the unlighted pit and heard only the mumbled grunts made by a man in restless sleep. Reaching out tentatively, my fingers came in contact with a warm wet sticky substance. My stomach did a little loop. Barely moving, I pulled out my flashlight and pressed the button.
Lieutenant Kranich was sitting precisely where I had left him an hour before. My fingers were touching his face-or what had been his face. The warm wet sticky stuff was an oozing sponge of crimson gore. Ends of splintered bones glistened in stark white obscenity. Where his eyes had been was a rich dark clot that resembled the afterbirth of a sickly ewe. Kranich was trying to talk out of his curiously untouched mouth, but he made only those bubbling grunts.
This was the first time I had even seen a face with its outer layer peeled away.
Then from the wreckage of tissue and gristle came a hollow far-away voice: "Turn on ... the lights ... it's dark in ... here...."
I dropped the lighted flashlight and went back outside and vomited in the snow.
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 4th-5th, 1945
We waited all through the day for Lieutenant Kranich to die. Only he refused to die. The chunk of shrapnel that had chopped his face to shreds had not reached his brain, nor his heart, and he lay bundled in blankets and overcoats, breathing noisly, an inert lump of flesh. When Newman gave him first aid and sank needle after needle of morphine into his arms, Kranich clutched at my hands as a drowning man attempts to drag his rescuer below the waves with him. Out of that intact mouth under the red void that had been his nose and eyes, issued chimera vocal sounds which I expected to stop for ever every minute of the day. After dusting the wound with sulpha powder, Newman suggested I remain in the hole with Kranich in order to periodically staunch the flows of thin blood seeping from under the bandage.
For hours at a time the platoon went about the daily business of survival in the cutting wind that raked our positions, I was alone with Kranich. It was as close as I want to get to being buried alive with a living corpse.
Sergeant MacFarland took command of the platoon and sent out patrols at dusk to probe the defences of the enemy we had yet to see. He told me he had no intention of spending the next fortnight in these holes making human targets for those efficient executioners across the valley. As soon as he possibly could he was going to attack in force and either destroy the enemy or be destroyed by them, platoon and all. My own orders were to take care of Kranich until he died or until he could be taken down the trail safely. After looking in for token visits the rest of the platoon devoted their time to making ready for the attack. MacFarland didn't have to tell me why we had been given only two days' rations when we started up the mountain from Ste Marie: one way or another the platoon wouldn't require any more rations than it had.
I was still nursing Kranich as dawn broke on the second day. During the night I had decided that he was as strong as he would ever be to negotiate the trail and if I waited any longer then the trip would be altogether superfluous. The platoon was supposed to jump off with the first light, but evidently the Krauts smelled a rat because their mortars began shelling us before breakfast and continued to fall intermittently through mid-morning. So MacFarland changed his mind about a daylight assault and said he would go that night and take the enemy by surprise. The Germans, he said, hated night fighting.
Meanwhile I was to take the lieutenant down to Ste Marie. I. Me. Alone.
When I pointed out the impossibility of the task MacFarland said I would have to figure it our myself because he could not spare any men to help. Until that moment I had envisioned a rapid descent with four men sharing the stretcher. Now it was upon me alone, and MacFarland is not the kind of sergeant who welcomes disagreements or arguments. I sensed that rather than jeopardize his attack on the entrenched Germans by weakening his own force, he would let Kranich die. He was therfore placing Kranich's life in my hands, and if I refused to transport him down the trail to the village aid station-well, MacFarland would not blame me. Kranich would die unmourned and unsung and no one would be any the wiser.
Except me. I would be a lot wiser.
So in the end I agreed with MacFarland's "suggestion". MacFarland, as Authority, was forcing me to be my brother's keeper.
Ferreting about in the ruins of the smashed barn I found a single-panel door that had somehow escaped the eyes of the fuel outfit. Out of the garbage heap left behind by the other outfit I salvaged a quantity of Number 10 cans. These I split and bent and then nailed overlapping to the end of the door so as to form a rough prow. Odd lengths of rope and straps I nailed to the sides of the door. To the other end I secured a rein-like rope. Now I had a primitive sled with a prow to breast the snow and provide protection for the rider. Lieutenant Kranich would be the rider.
Keller and Pickett and Newman helped me to load Kranich on the projectile. Then we strapped him so firmly he couldn't move a muscle. Kneeling next to my passenger I studied the red-flecked bandage covering his entire head from the mouth upwards and I was reminded of The Invisible Man. I doubted if H. G. Wells ever saw his creation in these circumstances. Fortunately Kranich was unconscious.
MacFarland shook hands with me and said that if his attack were successful I could expect to see the platoon in Ste Marie in time for breakfast next morning. It not-well, in that case I could gorge on all the food myself. It was the nearest I'd ever seen MacFarland get to a joke.
Letting the sled ease out to the end of my six-foot rein which was looped around my wrist, the tin-can bow carving a path in the snow, I started down the mountain. We started down. It slid with smooth heaviness over the hard-packed snow and its weight pulled me along easily. At the first turning in the road I looked back and waved to the men standing silhouetted against a sky as grey as melted lead. They waved back, and then the sled drew me out of their sight.
Yesterday's rest had restored my strength and I felt strong enough for ten sleds. The thing moved over the surface almost free of friction and I began to calculate that I should reach the village in a couple of hours if I could maintain this nice pace. Kranich lay stiff and still in the shroud-like wrappings of blankets and canvas tarps. A little giddily, I cautiously congratulated myself on being ordered to miss what promised to be a nasty night on the mountain.
The trouble commenced at the third or fourth hairpin turn. Down the straightway the going was good-too good. The slope was steep, so the sled, laden with Kranich's two hundred pounds plus our weapons, became an immense magnet that gathered momentum alarmingly. At first I was inclined to let the sled have its head so I slackened the rein and trotted behind. By sweeping wide and guiding the sled from the rear I managed to conquer two hairpin turns. But by the time the third one loomed ahead I was out of breath and the ponderous thing was skimming over the slick snow, me running as fast as I could possibly go.
Knowing I could not steer it much less stop it this time, I anticipated a brief scoaring flight off the roadway into the upper limbs of the pine trees. Trying and failing to gain purchase with my heels, at the last instant I threw myself to the ground, digging in with knees and elbows, spitting snow and gasping for air.
We came to a halt at the very edge of the road. With my outstretched hand I could touch the nearest stiff green needles.
The next switchback curve was the same story. With every intention of taking it slow and easy, I quickly got jerked off-balance and pulled after the sled that seemed intent on impaling me and Kranich and itself upon the thorny branches. Again I had to fall to earth as an anchor and again I was dragged raggedly on my face until the projectile came to a reluctant halt.
It was not merely a matter of starting and stopping the thing. I also had to make sure that in the maneoeuvring it did not overturn and snuff out what remained of Kranich's tiny flame of life. But the monster seemed to have a cunning brain and will of its own. It tested all my weary strength to keep it in check. Once I tried guiding it by hand but the strain of running at a crouch was too much. Another time I got a head start and ran alongside, racing it and then kicking it around the curve. However, I nearly got my foot crushed so I gave that up.
There was nothing for it but to use myself as an anchor. My gloves, field-jacket and trousers were in tatters, my leather boots were torn at the toes. I had lost a sole. The palms of my hands bled from scraping on the frozen slush, my face was burning from open slashes. From time to time I rested, sucking ice-cold air into my hot lungs, searing my entrails. It was agony just to breathe. I pressed snow into my mouth and then swallowed the liquid, but snow-melt isn't very wet and it did little to alleviate my thirst.
Then, hating it, I forced myself up again, aimed the sled and away we would go, lickety-split down the crazy insane mountain road, my arm being yanked out by the socket, the rein so tight on my wrist I could no longer feel my hand.
The worst was yet to come.
The abrupt shocks of the erratic halts and the continual spray of snow-dust on his chin woke up Kranich. And for the first time since the mortar blast thirty-some hours before, he was coherent. I could have wept.
Kranich yelled something and I bounced around on the ground until our little tandem came to rest. I asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to know who I was, what in hell was going on and to set him free.
Evidently Lieutenant Kranich was not accustomed to riding down a French mountainside strapped to a door, unable to see, scarcely able to hear.
Afraid of unduly disturbing him I explained the situation in a few succinct phrases. Kranich listened dubiously and then said he was thirsty and did I have a cigarette. I answered no. Then he said he had to take a leak and I said I was sorry but that was out of the question at the moment. This brought us back to his original queries and his stubborn insistence that he be freed so's he could deal with me.
It dawned on me that this polite chit-chat was leading nowhere. I set the caravan in motion again and away we went.
At the next bend in the trail as I lay on my belly, too breathless to swear, Lieutenant Kranich strained weakly against his bonds. "Listen, Bennett, this is a direct order: let me out."
"No, sir," I gasped. I staggered to my feet. Like a slinking puma the sled began its deceptively slow descent before springing forward swiftly. Sobbing and yelling, I chased after it. For the twentieth time I let it haul me over the ice. This time a good three feet of door projected beyond the edge of the road. A couple more sprints like that one and we would sail right off into space.
"Goddamn it, man," said Kranich peevishly. "Are you trying to make a fool of me?"
I didn't answer. I lay and looked at the bandaged head and I wondered if anyone would ever know if next time I simply cut the rein and let the sled catapult over the forest top. It would serve the bastard right for getting wounded. I bit back a stream of oaths threatening to burst the dam of obeisance. No, I could not send this creature for his doom. He and I were one now, as we had been one in that stinking dug-out. The leather that ate into my flesh, soaked with my blood, was the tie that bound us together. And besides, Lieutenant Kranich was Authority.
"Bennett," he whispered. "Give me a cigarette."
"Oh, for the love of God, shut up!"
"Please give me a-what was that?" I lurched to my feet dizzily, pointed the sled and off we went. "Stop, Bennett, stop!"
"Shut up, you son of a bitch, or I'll kill you!"
"Are you swearing at me?"
"Yes, you frigging officer, and ther's more where that came from."
"Bennett, I'll see you shot-"
"You won't see anything, you lousy-"
And then without any warning at all, the road was levelling, straightening, and ahead, less than fifty yards away, framed by the arching tunnel of the trees, was the first house of the village of Ste Marie.
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 6th ,1945
Sergeant MacFarland and all the men of the platoon, herding a bag of thirty-three prisoners, joined me for breakfast this morning.
CHAPTER FOUR
Based where they were, so convenient to the front line and yet not of it, Jack Kane and Martha Berger had innumerable opportunities to make quick visits to the Colmar sector, gather their material, take their pictures and still not have to miss a single night's sleep in the comparatively luxurious hospital quarters. A sight familiar to the whole staff was their battered, splattered, creaking jeep showering snow as it wheeled out of the yard after breakfast and vanishing along the highway that led eastward into the heart of the Haut Rhin. Close to five o'clock each afternoon the jeep swung back into the yard like a motion-picture film run in reverse, and Kane would alight while it was still moving-Miss Berger invariably drove home, possibly because the reporter was preoccupied with his latest liberations-ready to spill all he had seen and heard to anyone unwise enough to ask how the day hod gone.
During January they were ideally situated to observe the ponderous massing of men and material for the grand assault on the Pocket. Fortunately, except for a few isolated mountain areas, the front was dormant and the Team was able to dash about behind the lines in relative security. Now and then they were lucky enough to be close to an incident that lent itself to the picture-story treatment. They were, for example, within five minutes of witnessing the destruction of a weapon carrier as it detonated a landmine on the highway near Guemar. Although they did not see the actual eruption they were on the spot before the medics cleaned up and thus accumulated some interesting (unposed) photographs as well as eyewitness accounts. In addition, purely by chance, they happened upon a real live hero who had just been awarded the Silver Star and who, contrary to the customary show of false modesty, willingly described in graphic detail his part in single-handedly repulsing an attack in which three of his buddies were killed.
This was the stuff that sold bonds back in the States, Kane declared as he brandished his notes like captured colours.
Miss Berger did not have much to say-she always let Kane do the talking-but she smiled and carefully stored her rolls of exposed film in a brown leather satchel she kept under her bed in the nurses' quarters. None of it had been developed yet but Kane made no secret of the fact that Bergy's camera-work was absolutely priceless-"works of are"-and it would earn her not only fame and wealth but the humble thanks of "every one of those brave bastards out there."
Following evening chow Kane usually conducted seminars in the recreation room for the benefit of the people who were unable to tour as freely as the Team. The monologues dealt impartially with living conditions ("Resourceful"), tactics ("Incredible") and stategy ("Suicidal"). Any quarrels with his theories were effectively squashed by his liberal dispensing of the great quantities of wine and schnapps he had unearthed with the unerring tenacity of a pig hunting truffles.
And if he seemed to spend a great deal of silent hours alone with Bergy in his private room in the B.O.Q., it was taken for granted that they were working diligently on their documentary; and besides, Bergy belonged to Kane as much as did the jeep and his typewriter and his endearing sloth.
The overall performance was, in any case, a diversion for the hospital staff, and while no one could actually be fond of Jack Kane the majority of the men and the nurses secretly nourished a hope that he would see fit to include their names and faces in his final story.
One bitter night in January, Major Reynolds made one of his rare appearances in the rec room, paid his curt respects to Kane, spoke briefly to a couple of chess-playing surgeons, exchanged greetings with Captain Gelbecken, did not even look at Martha Berger, and, by slightly raising his left eyebrow ordered Corporal Neary to follow him outside.
Standing in the iron darkness in the yard, Major Reynolds said: "You're night orderly tonight, aren't you, Neary?"
"Yes, sir," said Neary hopefully. At last, he was thinking, at last the bugger's going to show me some mercy.
"Good," said Mejor Reynolds crisply. "Do you know Kane very well?"
"Sir?"
"That man in there," said Major Reynolds, jerking his thumb at the nearest blacked-out window. "How well do you know him? Getting along with him?"
"Okay, I guess, sir," answered Neary carefully. "I give him the tours like you told me and let him go through the records on the patients and make sure he gets the names spelled right. He ain't made no complaints so far." Then, panicky: "Has he, sir?"
"No, no," said Major Reynolds impatiently. "What about at night? After he leaves his faithful disciples?"
"Beats me, sir. I go to the orderly room and he goes to bed, I guess."
"Listen to me, Neary. Tonight invite him over to the orderly room."
"Why?"
"Because I say so, that's why. Invite him over and make sure he stays there with you."
"With me?"
"You. If it requires having a few drinks, don't worry, it'll be all right. In fact, if you have to carry him to his room, all the better."
"Me? Carry him?" Corporal Neary shook his head. "I'm sorry, sir, but I think you've got the wrong man-"
"Neary-how long have you been a two-striper?"
"Me? Eighteen, twenty months, I guess. I lost count, but don't get me wrong, I ain't-"
"Like to make sergeant?"
"Why, sure, sir, only the Table of Organization-"
"Forget the T.O. If you do as I say tonight, you'll be a sergeant within twenty-four hours."
The warmth they had taken with them from the crowded stifling rec room had evaporated in the icy air and now they faced one another shivering, hands thrust in pockets. Corporal Neary blinked down at the Major as if seeing a stranger. He knew if he were warm and comfortable indoors he could figure this out and come up with a stall to elude the relentless CO. But he was cold and unhappy and he wanted more than anything to be back inside staring at that black-haired, melon-hipped photographer. Was that why Reynolds had chosen to talk out here?
"But how can I force him to come with me?" asked Neary.
"For God's sake, Neary, use your head. Wait. Don't use your head-he'd see through anything you could dream up. Why not tell him about that lieutenant who's in hot water-what's his name?"
"Dawida?"
"That's the one. Kane won't be able to resist a juicy story like that."
"But, sir," said Neary desperately, "what about Lieutenant Cramer?"
"Well?" snapped Major Reynolds, fixing him with angry eyes. "What about Lieutenant Cramer?"
"Nothing, sir," mumbled Neary, cursing himself and his worthless stupid tongue.
"Very well, then. Good night-Sergeant."
Major Reynolds strode off into the cavernous darkness, boots smacking viciously on the freshly ploughed cobbles. Neary watched him go miserably, thinking that whatever it was the Major wanted he wanted real bad. Going back into the rec room he knew he had learned something significant tonight, but he didn't know exactly what it was.
Inside he found Jack Kane had risen above the surface of the seated personnel, an outsized periscope, already launched into an analysis of the coming battle. There was no sure way of telling if the men and nurses were listening because Kane's barrel-organ voice mesmerized them, or because none of them cared to brave the impenetrable winter night or because their own quarters were so sterile and lonely.
As he talked about manoeuvres, hinting broadly of "absolutely unimpeachable sources," Kane casually defaced a prefabricated wall with a thick soft lead pencil, and before long several square yards of space were swarming with incomprehensible squiggles. With his glazed eyes glinting shrewdly above the shrubbery of his beard, Kane fleetingly resembled an Old Testament prophet predicting dire fates to those earthlings who persisted in their shamefid ways. As far as Neary could determine, Kane's frequent slugs from his rusty canteen in no way affected the clouded crystal clarity of his delivery. Behind him and slightly to the left, sat Miss Berger, full thighs crossed negligently, ample bosom sagging ripely under the tightly tailored shirt. Occasionally her black cherry eyes lingered on one of the men, long enough to make him restive, and then, permitting a shy wise smile, she would again devote her attention to her partner.
Corporal Neary was unable to take his eyes off her.
A few isolated phrases penetrated Neary's consciousness, torn as he was between studying Miss Berger's licentious physiognomy and racking his brain to hit on the right approach to Jack Kane....
... Colmar ... last French city in the hands of the Hun ... orders from Berlin to make it another Stalingrad ... 30,000 enemy troops concentrated in ten square miles, behind three or four main lines of resistance ... every inch taped by machine guns and trench mortars and eighty-eights ... fanatical defenders, a fight to the last man ... the G.I.'s won't have the tank and air support they need ... why, they won't even have the tanks to explode the mines during frontal assaults ... Slaughter ... Goddamned city should be bypassed or besieged ... But General Lattre de Tassigny wants to make a gift of it to de Gaulle ... And one of our generals wants a third star ... Magnificent flower of American youth to be sacrificed on the altar of power politics-again ... No justice ... Hospital staff can expect to work overtime once the signal is given ... It'll be a dog-face's battle because (chuckling ironically) because tanks cost money and the Army can get all the infantry it wants for nothing. Ha ha ... Me? Of course I'll be there. Bergy, too ... Our job ... Filthy profession, but somebody has to deliver the bad news and better somebody who knows and understands the foot soldier ... So don't anticipate anything other than the facts about our boys in action, and how our boys will show the world how grandly they can die ... Jack Kane will be their Boswell, their Virgil, their Homer ... and ten years from now free men all over the globe will bare their heads and say: This was their Finest-day....
The finale rang familiarity in Neary's memory, but he was much too preoccupied to bother to trace its origins. He watched his man. At the conclusion of his oration Kane thrust both tree-trunk arms aloft with such vehemence that Neary would not have been surprised to hear a chorus of "Hallelujah!"
Then Kane lost his balance, swayed perilously from side to side and finally collapsed into the chair Miss Berger had thoughtfully nudged under his posterior with her foot. Her lush lips were curved in a compassionate smile of tolerance and understanding.
Released at last from the prison of his voice and personality, the audience began to slip away. Neary, thinking of how the three stripes would show up on his sleeve, picked his way through the furniture to stand gawkily before the fallen reporter.
Kane squinted up at his suspiciously. "Wha' choo wanna do, boy-sign a separate peace?" Kane flung out his right arm so suddenly that Miss Berger could not escape and was swept into his grizzly embrace. Idly, Neary wondered how that barbed-wire beard felt on Miss Berger's bare satiny skin. One of Kane's enormous hands pawed clumsily. His colleague gently disengaged the fingers from her shirt.
"Uh, Mr. Kane, sir."
"Ah, it's you, Corp'al,' muttered Kane. "How you like my camera-girl, eh? How'd you like Bergy to take your picture, hey?" He let loose a guffaw more obscene than mirthful. The massive head wagged admiringly. "How's that for thinkin' fast, Corp'al? Gotta keep the old left jabbin' in their kissers or else you'll be eating knuckles." He demonstrated an uper-cut and swung himself on to the floor. "You countin' Bergy? You countin' me out? No? Then you count, Corp'al. Go ahead. Count.
Propped against the wall, hands limp on the carpet, leonine head sagging on his chest, he peered up at Neary, one eye gleaming cunningly out of the hairy forest.
Neary, at a sign from Miss Berger, began to count. When he got to seven Kane stirred; at eight he was on his knees and at nine he lurched to his feet warily, tottered at Neary and threw his right as if it were a baseball bat. Before Neary could move or duck, Miss Berger pushed at the flailing arm and the murderous blow glanced harmlessly off Neary's shoulder.
"Jack," said the girl softly. "I think it's time to hit the the hay."
"Sure Bergy. How about lettin' the kid come along to watch?" He laughed. "It'll probably be his first Gruen."
An alarm bell jangled in Neary's brain: he had a premonition that Miss Berger was playing a silent but vital role in Major Reynolds's plans. And if she and Kane left together he might just as well kiss the extra stripe goodbye-to say nothing of the two he had on now.
"Mr. Kane," he said gruffly, ignoring the decolletage in the woman's skirt. "You once asked me if I had any good war stories. Okay, I got one."
"Well," said Kane. "Hurray for Neary."
"Remember that company which bolted under fire in Strasbourg?"
Kane had again enfolded Miss Berger in his arms, wheezing with alcoholic passion. He lifted his head sharply, like a hound finding the scent.
"What about it?"
"Well-an officer who was CO. at the time is a patient on Ward Two." Neary said the words fast, or else he knew he could never get them all out. He was vaguely aware of a distressed expression on Miss Berger's face.
Kane pushed the woman away and lumbered over to Neary. "This on the level?"
"You bet it is."
"It better be. You know-every correspondent in France is beating the bushes trying to get the dope on that story. 'Course Seventh Army Command's dropped a blanket on the whole thing. Censorship black-out." The reporter was soberer than Neary had ever seen him. Kane demanded: "What's his name?"
But Neary had already got the hook into the gaff-he intended to reel in his prey at leisure. "I'd rather not discuss it in public, Mr. Kane," he replied primly. "This is too big."
"Public!" roared Kane. "Bergy ain't public. She's my folks!"
Neary averted his eyes.
"Okay, okay, you sensitive bastard. Let's go."
Martha Berger grabbed his sleeve. "Jack! You don't mean you're going to dig into that story, are you? Not after what you just said about Homer and our magnificent G.I.'s and power politics?
"Wise up, Bergy," growled Kane. "This is the goods. There ain't been half a dozen cases like this in our whole history. And I aim to get the facts before the brass whitewashes those cowards."
Corporal Neary winced at the term.
"Jack," said Miss Berger. "It won't help anybody to stir it all up. All we heard were rumours. Let's wait until the brass is ready-"
"Oh, sure-I get on to the biggest story of the year, hell, of the War, since Pearl Harbour, and you want me to wait. Sure as Christ made little apples some snoop will find it and he won't wait! Remember Georgie down in Africa? Come on, Corporal," said Kane with impatience. "So the bastard is right here under my nose, is he? Well, we'll just see about yellow-bellies. Maybe it ain't good manners, but there's nothing like a journalistic lynching to clear the air from time to time. Just what the doctor ordered. Hah. That's a pun, man, laugh."
Neary laughed. He felt sick to his stomach. He wanted to go somewhere and hide. Miss Berger, a stricken look on her smooth olive features, watched them as they left. Neary did not meet her gaze. Kane led the way, wide awake and cold sober, and Neary having suddenly lost control of his fish, followed.
Poor Dawida, he thought.
As they moved across the yard, boots thudding with haste, a trim figure detached itself from the inky shadow of the overhanging roof of the rec room. Sparing no more than a glance for the retreating men, he mounted the three steps to the storm door. Before he even touched the handle the door opened inward.
"Hello, Harry," said Miss Berger in a moist mocking voice, "I've been expecting you."
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 20th, 1945
By the third day after the Company occupied the village of Sigolsheim the men were behaving a little like tourists, fingering over the pathetic displays of goods in the shops, idling away hours at either of the two cafes, and some making more or less regular appearances in the church. We had been bathed, issued with clean clothing, revictualled and given fresh supplies of ammunition as well as small-arms so new they were still sticky with the cosmolene preservative.
We walked the narrow cobbled streets in pairs, usually, rifles slung, helmets tilted rakishly, the heels of our boots slapping dully in cadence. I frequently found the villagers staring at our feet and finally came to the conclusion that they were more accustomed to soldiers who wore black leather boots that took a high polish and rang with authority when marched on. Ours were plain drab utilitarian footwear designed to protect our feet from the elements-nothing to fill a peasant heart with terror. Since we Americans are ill-suited to acting after the fashion of conquerors, thus risking the disrespect and disaffection of the oppressed, I respectfully suggest that the Army should equip its occupation units with those black leather boots capable of making villagers cringe as they detour into the gutter to avoid giving offence. A few pairs of such boots in each platoon would be worth any number of whips and fingernail-pullers and sound-proof cellars.
Before long the townspeople were treating us like friendly fellows, an attitude that detracted considerably from our self-struck pose of fearless liberators.
Sometimes we would park at tables outside the cafe and the waiter would bring us fresh white wine which we drank from chipped white coffee-mugs. We paid him in the wrinkled torn dirty currency that filled our pockets like so many scraps of paper. We would sit and drink the wine, squinting into the watery sunlight, trying to feel as worldly as, say, Charles Boyer. Whenever the villagers passed by they nodded or smiled or offered a mock salute-deference to our status as military masters. But we suspected the humility ended there. It was difficult to remember that less than ten days earlier Sigolsheim had been in its fourth year of occupation by the enemy. Most of the public signs were lettered in the enemy language, and the common tongue, too, was German.
Gradually the kids of the town gravitated to the soldiers, making friendly overtures, eager to run errands and otherwise make themselves useful. This led to a great deal of scampering around by the small boys and a prosperous trade in cigarettes, chocolate, wine and cheese. In due time we commandeered the cafe facing the village square, some of us even sitting on the stone benches under the linden trees watching the women of the village scrubbing their laundry in the fountain, using the clear icy water piped in from the snow-deep mountains. Although they had no soap that I could see, and with their arms going a pale shade of blue, the women carried out their chores with much laughter and chatter. Now and then they glanced slyly at us, as if gauging our innocence or virility. But none of the women were young and pretty, so we ignored their looks.
One of the boys who hung around doing things for us was a thin solemn lad with huge grave eyes staring unblinking out of a high bony face. His hair was as stiff and lifeless as straw. His principal garment was a hand-me-down of a vaguely military origin. But he was agile and tireless, and soon he was a permanent fixture among us. As we are inclined to do with those who please us we made of the boy a mascot, and he was privileged in being permitted to sit on the stone benches with us and, now and then, handle our equipment.
The small boy's English was not very good so we had to learn about him from his companions. They told us he was the son of the village cobbler who had been impressed into the enemy's Army four years ago and who was supposed to be somewhere on the eastern front. Oddly enough this made us favour him even more. I fear that American soldiers are incapable of waging total war, if that means to bear the same hatred for son as for father. But can there be such a state of conflict as sub-total war?
One day the small boy began pestering Foxx for the purpose of examining his new forty-five pistol. Foxx laughed and handed over the weapon of which he was so proud. Then he showed how to push off the safety catch and how the finger should be crooked around the trigger. The pistol was so heavy that it took all the boy's strength to hold it up in his thin hands. Foxx pointed at a weathercock on a roof and told the boy to try to hit it. The boy looked up into Foxx's face and then, holding the pistol in both hands, pulled the trigger and shot Foxx in the stomach.
For an eternal moment nothing moved ... except Foxx's lower jaw which dropped in astonishment as a stream of blood jetted from his body and stained the snow with crimson pearls.
The boy dropped the pistol and began to run across the square.
Pickett, still sitting next to me in a cafe chair, unslung his rifle and fired at the fleeing figure. Pickett made expert during training. It was a good shot. The child's torso described a curiously absurd cartwheel, spread-eagled like a clown taking a dive, somersaulted and then crumpled in the snow like a discarded bundle of rags. Trembling, white-faced with outrage, Picket moved across the square, firing at the tiny body until the eight round clip spanged out empty.
After that we did not sit on the stone benches while the women did their wash, nor did we drink wine in the cafes, nor did we have the boys of the town run errands for us. When we evacuated the village a few days later nobody waved goodbye to us.
CHAPTER FIVE
Well, she hadn't knocked.
Maybe Eve Cramer had sunk deep, but not that deep.
Not that she hadn't been tempted, tempted almost beyond endurance. Not that her face wasn't rubbed raw from being pressed against the cruel oaken door with its steel lock. Not that she hadn't behaved worse than the most lovesick novice in nursing-school, wishing there were telephones on the base, and then instantly thanking God there were none, for that would only have intensified the torment. The silent telephone is a greater horror than the absent telephone. And it would have been silent, hour upon hour, day upon day.
Seven successive nights-not that she had counted-but on seven nights she had left Corp-Sergeant Neary in charge of the entire sleeping hospital while she maintained her masochistic vigil in the drifts piled beside the bungalow door, returning within an hour, thoroughly chilled inside and out, but blessedly immune to further punition for the rest of her duty. The first few times she had gone to the trouble of concocting an excuse for the sake of Sergeant Neary's sensibilities, but after a while, much to their mutual relief, she had said nothing, simply going. No questions asked, no answers volunteered. And if Neary knew-as he must-his new-found confidence blooming out of the seed of his third stripe kept him from commenting or even smirking. Amazing how the sense of responsibility can bow one's shoulders literally overnight. If nothing else of lasting value had occurred in this past fortnight, at least Neary had got what he deserved.
But he could not feel even remotely as wonderful as she, Eve Cramer, felt tonight. True, it was her night off, but that was not the reason for her spiritual celebration.
She hadn't knocked!
And tonight was the last night.
She had won....
According to the rumours sweeping the base, tomorrow would be the star of the great attack-and Jack Kane and Martha Berger would be caught up in its headlong helter-skelter rush and would probably never return to the hospital again. In the un-likely event that Miss Berger did return-for a quickie-Harry would be much top busy to pay her any attention. The staff had been alerted for a maximum performance: casualties were expected to be pouring in in an endless flood of pain and misery. But the pain and misery in the soldiers meant, for Eve Cramer, merciful release from the noiseless shrieks that had transformed her nerves into raw soft wires of suffering.
Thus, in the brief interval since hearing the welcome news about the departure of the Team at dawn, she was miraculously cured.
For once she could face the night without that wave of helpless terror that had swamped her for so many weeks.
Head bent in thought she wandered aimlessly, hands thrust into the slash pockets of her greatcoat, pacing over the base that was less a centre of life than a guardless penitentiary. There was no place she could go beyond the walls; the village and its swarm of uniforms did not interest her; nor did the barren nervous small talk of the rec room.
Not knowing what she sought she walked back to her room in the nurses' barracks, but the four bare bleak walls repelled her and she left again in favour of the powerful gusts that racked the yard. A shudder racked her body as she glimpsed the long row of ambulances crouching in the lee of the garage, frighteningly identical with red and white crosses on the green background. Each held a set of stretcher, a quantity of first-aid equipment. Somewhere their drivers were sleeping or, more likely, counting the hours until the inaugural thunder of the artillery announced that it was time for them to move out....
A strange tense hush hung over the base-the eternal wind nothwithstanding-an air of expectancy, and she realized it was not limited to this fly-speck on the military map, but indigenous to the entire countryside over which, in a few hours, an incredibly violent storm was destined to break.
Her aimless steps took her past the entrance to the orderly room where Sergeant Neary was teaching Lieutenant Biddle how to be a nurse. (They had grown very clubby, those two.) She walked along the bare stone face of the high wall and could see the glint of the glass fragments embedded in the concrete, and thought how symbolic the wall was, of her own existence. Here the snow was unmarked by heel or shovel-pure, white, empty-and she remembered how quickly her footprints had vanished that night.
Presently she was standing at the cast-iron railing marking the lip of the ravine. Far below was the angry rushing of the river as it fought to get through the rocky cleft and into the free-flowing lowlands many miles away. Clutching the rail she leaned far out over the abyss, faint with the ecstasy of the breathless fear, brilliantly aware of the nothingness beneath.
She had won.
Oh, sure, Cramer.
But I did not knock!
So far you haven't knocked. What about tonight? What about this very minute? What are they doing together right now? What delights is that nubile flesh giving him? And that mouth? The last night is supposed to be the best-or the worst-depending on how you look at it. A knock-a single knock-on the door would be certain to destroy the mood, make them fearful that the schedule had been changed and the battle was under way ... Oh, bless that cursed battle....
A single knock and then she could stand aside and observe their flushed frustrated faces as they came to the door.
Hands gripping the iron railing, Eve Cramer edged out inch by inch, until she was at the last extremity of her equilibrium: another centimetre would be one centimetre too much....
The roar of the torrent seemed to fill her head and she felt the inexorable magnetism of the very earth....
Up through the darkness she fancied she saw that wry, wise smile on those hateful lips, and she knew that, after all, she had not won. Elation drained from her and left her deflated, limp. She closed her eyes. One more centimetre....
No. No, not yet. Not without at least having savoured the acrid sweetness of revenge. She had earned that much anyhow.
Inch by cautious inch, she slid back from the precipice on to the solid ground. She knew what she must do. She must go to the bungalow again.
With her heart beating wildly she stood before the arrogant oak door, and then, with both gloved hands, she pounded out the dot dot dot dash for Victory. His victory.
But she did not wait for them to come out and investigate (she could not have stood it if they did not come), instead she hurried back to the barracks and entered the sleeping hallway. She walked right into Lieutenant Bid-die's room. No one was there.
Eve Cramer went to Miss Berger's bed, knelt and reached underneath. She pulled out a calf-leather satchel and unzipped it. Inside, in the neat compartments, suitably labelled for easy reference, were all the rolls of film she had used since arriving on the base. A larger pocket held several plates from the Speed Graphic camera. She re-zipped the bag and picked it up. It was heavy.
At the door she stopped.
Then she went back and rummaged among the luggage until she found the briefcase she had often seen Kane stuffing with papers. Inside was a thick sheaf of manuscript, pages of notes, carbon copies. This was the great documentary. With the satchel in one hand and the briefcase in the other she walked out, not bothering to close the door behind her.
The river in the ravine was, if anything, louder and madder than before. The night was darker, but she imagined she could see the hiss and burst of foam in the rapids. She stood motionless for a long time, peering into the forbidding depths.
At last, uttering a kind of sigh, she placed the satchel and the briefcase side by side on the topmost rail. They balanced for a split second before falling forward. Leather gleamed for an instant, a silent cry, and that was all. Nothing remained on the rail.
Eve Cramer gave a sobbing laugh as she turned away from the turbulent crevasse. She walked slowly back to her room, took off her clothes, went to bed and fell into a dreamless exhausted sleep.
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 23rd, 1945 (Morning)
You march out of the village in the darkest hour before the first light of morning, laden with ammo, grenades, rations, dry socks, wool blanket, canteen full of red wine, greasy folds of paper bearing words written in some ancient impossible place called home, and the rifle that is as familiar and as inseparable as a third arm. Streaming out of barns and coops and houses and holes in the earth come other troops, human rivulets flowing into the mainstream of the battalion whose current sucks everybody along in a glutinous tide. Rising over the marching columns is the steady hum of excited whispers, the metronomic shuffling of countless boots on crusty snow, the muffled click-click of metal.
As night dilutes into day you see peasants standing in doorways watching neutrally, as if they had too often witnessed similar parades and are not particularly impressed with this one, as if they no longer believe in the proclamations of transient generals. It is a travesty to think of yourself as a crusader breaking the yoke of the oppressor that bows the backs of those peasants. They are mere spectators who happen to be standing in their doorways; they have no ante at stake in this contest.
Around you are the faces of the men you know. Pickett-frowning lips stretching rhythmically as if trying to dislodge a particle of beef from his unbrushed teeth, looking as distracted as a boy memorizing what he must buy at the grocer's. MacFarland-with his colt's legs, all knees, eyes like pissholes in the snow peeking out under the rim of his helmet, striding straight and tall and fearless. Keller-high and wide, unshaven, eyes narrowed in concentration (is he praying?), the heavy Browning automatic rifle riding as light and proud as a banner on his immense right shoulder. Kranich-no, there is no Kranich; no Dawida, no Sweeney, no Bissinger, no Clark, no Riggs, no Foxx, no Bennett-aha, yes, there is Bennett, see him marching anonymously among all the others. Queer that you should identify everyone but yourself. You have lost yourself, wishing yourself elsewhere.
You try to imagine how you look to the others as you step lithely on snow that squeaks underfoot, exhaling vaporous clouds, and you are still unable to accept that the two lean-thighed legs thrusting under your eyes are you ... You finally comprehend that the only important things about you as an individual, as a sacred human being, are your legs and your trigger-finger and your eyes-plus the killing-machine on your shoulder. Into your grey sodden rag of a brain it sinks that your whole existence has been directed at this very action, this is your raison d'etre ... and you have shrewdly disassociated yourself from yourself in case you will not relish what the next hour holds for you. Beyond the mist and the ranked vineyards must wait, surely, a specially constructed tower of anguish.
Yet your hard dependable sinewy miraculous legs carry you forward unhesitatingly.
Pickett had once said: Wouldn't it be funny if The Army, having transformed us into unfeeling killers, forgot how to change us back into men?
That was, of course, typical Pickett, thinking only of the immediate and measurable. Suppose the theory were raised higher, much much higher--
Wouldn't it be funny if God were omnipotent in only certain ways-if He were all-powerful in the setting of events into motion but was powerless to affect or halt those events ... or, worse, simply disinterested in them? Perhaps that would explain why man was so often left to his own puny devices, forced to invent his own simulated mercy and justice; and why dreadful catastrophic forces were unleashed to mutilate and destroy without guidance or restraint....
Overhead, invisible in the grey leaden sky, was the rustling of a thousand window-shades. Supporting artillery shells, seeming so close you think you can reach up and touch them. Seconds later the rippling reverberations catch up with and pass you, and then, with a certain finality, the explosions return from the unknown ahead.
Another sound creates a counter-harmony-the shrill whines of eighty-eights curving and crashing far to the left, and almost at once, from that direction, following the blasts, like a soprano launching an aria, comes the soaring scream of a man. The scream enters your ears and spirals into your belly and contracts your entrails and a spasm squeezes your sphincter and you have a brief struggle to keep from soiling yourself. You win the struggle but the scream's echo lingers in the cold morning air.
To hide from the omniscient eyes of the defending enemy the troops are waved off the choked farm road by a major standing in a jeep that is speeding from the front, and the men peel off into the vineyards as if the jeep were mounted with a snow-plow. The order is given added weight by being repeated in MacFarland's penetrating nasal tones. The vines are so gnarled and tough that only wire-cutters can rip paths crosswise. The ground begins to climb under your boots. All around men are elbowing against the tangle of vines as anxiously as if to be through them is to find eternal salvation.
Now, so near that you are astonished not to have heard it before, is the thick thud of rapidly firing machine guns-Unlike the crisp metallic clatter of your own guns, theirs make a hoarse belching noise. Another hundred yards and you hear, mingled with the firing, human shouts and cries. Abruptly, very, very close ahead there is the hard crack of Garands, and MacFarland's shrill command: "On the double!" and everyone who is free of the vineyard breaks into a heavy lumbering trot. Your rifle is in your hand. The air burns in your pumping lungs. The tune of "Little Brown Jug" runs over and over in your head, in time with your steps.
The world is condensed into a low wide slope humping out of the vineyards. Snow-dust and mist and smoke shroud its crest. You run at a crouch, rifle heavy and good in your hands, smelling of oil. The hoarse machine gun is very near but you cannot see it. To the melody of the song you sing: It won't get me, it won't get me, ho ho ho, it won't get me. Some men are yelling brokenly for medics and all at once the slope which a moment ago was empty is now swarming with wraith-like figures in white sheets. The sheets are flapping and blow as in an iron wind. Some men fall, others crawl and creep, others stride upright, firing from the hip. Arms cock and throw, grenades blur in the sky and burst soundlessly.
Out of the bare snow ahead rises the thunder-mug shape of the enemy helmet and you take quick aim and squeeze the trigger of the M-l and it plunges solidly into your shoulder. The helmet and the head it was on are gone. Still climbing, more steeply, you can now see the backdrop of sky behind the gently rounded crest. You are conscious of many others, doing an idiotic dance-crouching, slithering, stooping, running.
You pass by the enemy dead, torsos contorted into impossible postures, and seeing them so closely, you are as embarrassed as you were the first time you saw a naked girl. It is somehow illicitly exciting. The face of one enemy is in peaceful repose, eyes closed, lips parted, almost as if he'd tired of it all and had fallen asleep. A few paces ahead is MacFarland, bent nearly double, but still a grotesquely big target.
The machine gun stutters. It stops. The weird hissing also stops. The fatal rain no longer falls. You turn around and in turning see the German of the peaceful face. He has awakened and is on his knees, aiming his Luger at MacFarland's spine. Of its own volition your rifle swings around nonchalantly and it bucks and the man topples over backwards. Now when you look at his face it is a death-mask of agony. As it should be. The dead have no business dying peacefully.
Your legs are no longer toiling uphill.
There is no more hill; the ground levels out and you peer across the lowlands and the snow-layered vineyards and then a road and then a broad white empty field and then some trees through which passes a frozen canal and far beyond the ribbon of the PJiine and then really far beyond, the misty grey mountains of Germany....
You lie on the lovely soft hard ugly earth, sucking air, hearing your heart thump in your shirt-your heart with your blood-and that loud rushing noise you hear, that is not noise at all, but silence. No machine guns, no rifles, no cannons, no shouted commands. You hear only the beat of your heart.
.Aware of a scorching thirst you withdraw your canteen. It is oddly light in weight and you stare dumbly at the two holes, a prim one and a jagged one, made by a single bullet coming and going. And that red wetness staining your left trouser leg in a thin steady stream, that is not blood from a wound-it is the wine you thirst for. The canteen, alas, is ruined. Well, goddamn them anyway.
So you hold powder-blackened snow in your dry mouth and let it melt on your hot tongue, and when you at last swallow you find your throat is sore with the soreness that is the result of a great deal of shouting and yelling.
And you lie there, smiling at nothing ... you, you, YOU!
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal January 23rd, 1945 (Noon)
The sun was a pale empty hole in the grey gruel of the overcast offering little light and less heat. Where we waited in the ditch along the road that was the westernmost boundary of the sinister field, we could gaze back over the land we had covered recently-the vineyards in the foreground, the oddly silent hill, the inverted V of a barn roof partially hidden by a rise in the ground, the undulating foothills in the near distance, and very far away, as far as our keenest eyes could see, the hairline silhouette of a cross naming a wayside shrine.
Fed and content, the men lay quietly on their packs or sat and spat between their knees or endlessly swabbed oily rags through rifle barrels already as shiny as mirrors.
"Five minutes."
The message was passed along from mouth to ear to mouth to ear until by the time the last man heard it only four minutes remained.
I lay and looked up at the sky, not wishing to be drawn into any conversation right at the moment. Major Matthews had already been by to tell us what was in the field and on the other side, and right at the moment I preferred to keep my thoughts to myself. But that did not prevent me from listening.
"Five minutes," repeated Keller tonelessly. He was sitting in the lowest part of the ditch absently caressing his Browning as a doting parent soothes a restless infant. "Five minutes. What can a man do with five minutes except pray?"
"Five minutes?" said Picket, gnawing on a K-ration fruit bar. "Lots can be done. Depends on the man." He gestured with his dessert. "If, for the sake of argument, you are referring to the current five minutes, which may be the last for many people, then it might be a temptation to prolong them." Teeth crunched, met, tore away a chunk of fruit and then masticated with calm deliberation.
"Prolong them?" asked Harmon. He had a face as gnarled as the trunk of an olive tree. "These days five minutes don't mean no more than five cents."
"Screwing," said Picket, chewing.
Harmon barked a surprise laugh. "Sure, boy, but if it was a good lay, five minutes wouldn't proling it, it'd make it go faster. See what I mean?"
Pickett shrugged and bit. "Think of any better thing to be doing when the hammer falls? Anyway, you wouldn't know a good lay if it stared you in the face, Harmon."
"Now there's a pleasant prospect," murmured Harmon.
"I wasn't talking about things like that," said Keller with embarrassment. "I meant making the five minutes worthwhile."
"Dell?" said Pickett with such candour that mirth rippled along the ditch. Other men crawled closer.
Keller said: "Maybe for you fornication would be the best way to spend your last seconds on earth, Pickett, but not everybody feels that way. You'd be doing yourself a favour to communicate with God and seek forgiveness for your sins," he finished soberly.
"Communicate with who?" said Pickett mildly. When he smiled he exposed teeth like broken fence-pickets. "Course I wouldn't blame a man like you, Keller, for praying for a reprieve. That's what prayers are for, ain't they?"
"Hey, I got it," interrupted Newman, the medic. "How about if a guy held his hand over the flame of a candle? Wouldn't that make the five minutes last longer?"
"Waiting for you to tend it would make it seem a hell of a lot longer," said Picket drily.
"Jee-zuz," a voice said in awe. "Fahv minutes in a fahyer!"
"I'd spend 'em gitting mahse'f aroun' a thick T-bone, man."
"Me, jes' pass me a jug o' sour mash."
Now they's a fancy-ass movie actress that'd--"
"If you hung by your thumbs, it'd prolong you."
"Hold your breath under water."
Suggestions came from fifty yards along the ditch. Keller listened to each, nodding or frowning like a moderator. Pickett yawned and scratched his chest.
"How about you, Bennett?" asked Keller.
He caught me off-guard. I was lying there, peering out from under the shelf of my helmet, identifying their voices, matching up their desires with their personalities, astonished at how they all fitted. In the near distance was the continuous thunder of artillery, but it might as well have been the swelling and pounding of my heart. All at once I was engulfed with an inexpressible love for these men.
"Me?" I said. "Me, well, if I had my choice, if I really had my choice, maybe I'd do just what I'm doing now. Wondering if it really is the last five minutes or just another false alarm. Anyhow, I'd sure enough want to know they were my five minutes: I wouldn't want to be drunk or asleep or between a woman's legs or wrapped up in a diversion. I'd want to be awake and watching."
"Aw," muttered Newman in disappointment. "That's no answer, Bennett."
I realized I had jarred the fun of the game. The men were about to brood again.
"Okay. I think I'd spend it looking at the Mona Lisa. Or on my back studying the Sistine Ceiling. Or maybe listening to Beethoven's last symphony, the part where the chorus and orchestra create a storm of defiance. Or perhaps I'd simply gaze at the bust of Napoleon and try to figure out what went on behind that massive brow."
Harmon cackled. "Speaking of busts, I know one I'd gaze at even though I knew what was behind it. My old woman's. Why, all she gotta do is walk down the sidewalk, natural like, a-jigglin' and a-joggin' and even the babies start hollerin' fer titty."
I laughed with the others, and once again they were playing the game and I actually wondered why I was so lucky as to meet and know and march with such dirty brave smelly magnificent men.
We were still at it when MacFarland cleared his throat and we all waited for his contribution. I had a strong hunch that it would reveal him as it had revealed the others. He unfolded his long body, squinted at his wrist-watch, pushed the safety off his rifle and slipped his bayonet into position.
"Okay, men, on your feet," he said. "We go."
CHAPTER SIX
Jack Kane and Martha Berger spent most of the morning travelling the fifteen miles from the hospital to the assembly area in the rear of the front lines. Only the guidance of the continuously rumbling heavy artillery had staved off the indignity of getting lost. But that was the only indignity they had missed-the chaotic traffic conditions on the narrow slushy farm roads had stopped the jeep for hours at a stretch. Jovian M.P.'s sweated and swore to untangle the insane jam of vehicles attempting to deliver men and supplies to the exploding front. When there were any openings at all, Kane would gun the jeep through like a jockey booting home a mount in the Preakness. Long since accustomed to her partner's fantastic attraction for good luck. Martha Berger sat next to him, a model of unconcern. She paid no attention to the monotonous flow of his obscenities and the vile threats he hurled at the giant Negroes who chuckled down at them as the jeep wheeled past trucks stalled in quagmires. She even took no notice of the dumbfounded stares of the soldiers plodding forward in weary endless columns.
What I don't understand, growled Kane as he threaded recklessly through a motionless convoy, "what beats the living hell out of me, is why you didn't keep that stuff in a safe place."
"It was under my bed," said Miss Berger. "And if my bed is safe enough for me, it's safe enough for my belongings."
"Let's not go into the topic of beds, Bergy. Why didn't you lock the door?"
Miss Berger delayed answering while she snapped a few shots of men toiling with an anti-tank gun overturned in a culvert. "It wasn't my room. I was a guest. Remember?"
Despite the outside temperature that kept the windshield coated with a thin film of ice, Kane was sweating.
Droplets erupted on his immense forehead, streamed in rushets over his temples and trickled into the uncharted tundra of his beard. Wiping at his eyes with his gloves, he said: "Obviously somebody stole the stuff. But who? God knows I've got more than my share of enemies, but I never expected they'd infiltrate this far. Think Reynolds was pulling a cover-up?"
Miss Berger did not reply. She was trying not to think about the fifteen rolls of exposed film and the thirty-five plates from the Speed Graphic-hundreds of pictures-and it required a great effort to be resigned to the loss. The more Kane grumbled the worse she felt.
"It must have been that major," said Kane. "He was funny from the word go. One of those quiet birds. No cojones. Maybe he got one of his stooges to cop the material, figuring we'd dug up some information about his administration that would compromise him." He spat an obscenity. "When I have the time I just might dig a little deeper into that guy."
Miss Berger's expressionless eyes swivelled to the left. About to speak, she changed her mind and remained mute. It would do no good to lift that lid any higher. Jack Kane was not particularly bright, but he sure knew how to be jealous and how to hurt a woman without leaving any marks. She wished he would shut up about it all.
Ahead appeared the first houses of a village-grey and forlorn in the sunless noon, great gaps chewed out of the walls, as though a wandering dragon had paused to sample. Countless machines were parked and empty. Groups of men clustered around bonfires, eating from mess-kits, sipping from tin canteen cups. Reminded, Kane drank some cognac.
"And to think," he mused aloud, "to think I had all the dope on Dawida and his company in that briefcase. Bergy, you have no idea how that guy talked. Admitted, he was half-hysterical, but he gave me line, verse and chapter on his outfit. Listen-I had a case history there! And you know me-I take notes without thinking. I don't have time to absorb the material. God-that stuff was valuable."
"I had some valuable stuff, too," she said softly. "Irreplaceable. You can't fake photographs out of thin air."
"Well, we'll just have to start over again that's all," said Kane as he drew up to a halt in the village square, where, indifferent to the hustle busde of the men and movement and the periodic hissing of shells overhead, the women were washing their laundry in the public fountain. To Kane they seemed sullen.
"Start all over," repeated Miss Berger dully. "Yes. If it were only possible."
"Anything's possible, Bergy," boomed Kane. "We just lost a battle, not the war. You gotta keep punching." The shoulders rose and fell. "So well find ourselves another hospital and make it famous instead." He heaved his bulk out of the jeep and stood with his hands on his hips glaring at the surroundings. "First thing we do is find the boss and get cleared. No sweat there. Then we hunt up the nearest battalion aid station. What the hell, Bergy," he continued, slapping her buttocks as she climbed out. "This is going to be a busy day and the best place to be is where the wounded are. Say, after all that close living with those nurses back there maybe you picked up enough to pitch in here, hey?"
"Don't talk to me about nurses," said Miss Berger. She had her own theory about the satchel and the briefcase.
The Battalion Aid Station was located in a barn on one of the village's secondary streets. It had been shovelled out and scrubbed down, and except for an unextinguishable odour was considered suitable for emergency medical treatment. Behind the barn were three or four ambulances ready to take the casualties farther to the rear. Inside, lying under blankets on stretchers ranged along the walls, were the newly wounded, some of them moaning tunelessly as the doctors moved among them.
A tech-sergeant named Crowley was in command of the enlisted men of the station, the orderlies, the stretcher-bearers and aidmen. The medical officer had assigned Crowley to Kane and Berger, ordering him to give the Team every assistance. The sergeant was helpful and intelligent and seemed to be unperturbed by the number of casualties that poured through the entrance of the barn. His primary concern appeared to be keeping the aisles cleared and the Team happy. Now and then he was called away by an officer who would point out a soldier who was beyond surgical skill, and then he, Crowley, would instruct a couple of his men to move the body outside to be disposed of later. Pretty soon Crowley had a sizeable collection of dog tags taken from the dead men. They jingled with his steps.
"What was it like out there this morning?" asked Kane reverently. He was at his best when things were worst, thought Miss Berger.
The sergeant waved a stubby arm at the scene before them. "That's what it was like. More wounded in less time than I've seen in ten years in the Army. They say it was sheer murder on the Hill. Company A was first to jump off-only twenty men unwounded. Murder."
"But I guess it'll be clear sailing from here on out?" ventured Kane. Miss Berger was dispiritedly taking pictures.
"Clear sailing?" repeated Sergeant Crowley. Out of a face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shone a pair of surprisingly compassionate eyes. "I don't think you ought to use that phrase in your notes, Mr. Kane. Not until later. The barometer's falling."
"How can it get any worse? My information-"
"Well, there are lots of ways it can get worse. I understand there's a canal that's got to be taken by tonight to keep the front stabilized."
"Yeah?" said Kane with new interest.
"Only the canal," said Crowley, "is on the other side of a minefield."
Kane whistled. "They're bastards, those minefields." He used the same tone of voice he'd employed in discussing an impending World Series back home. "Say-not to be macabre about this, Crowley, but purely in the interests of journalism, how about if Miss Berger and I go along with you and your boys when you go to pick up the casualties there? Sounds like a perfect chance to get some gutsy stuff, right on the spot...."
Sergeant Crowley looked up at the mountainous reporter. "Normally, that would be so, Mr. Kane, but not today?"
"You mean we're not going to assault that canal today?"
"Oh, we," said Crowley, "we are going to assault it all right. That is, Easy Company is going to do it. But the M.O. has issued instructions that under no circumstances are any men to go into that minefield-until after the Engineers have cleared it."
Kone's jaw went hard, his eyes narrowed. "Which will be, I presume, after Easy Company has gone through to make it safe for the Engineers to clear it?"
"It works out something like that, Mr. Kane. The M.O. says that the minefield people are expendable. Regiment expects a certain percentage of losses there and that's that. They do not intend to lose any of these men if they can help it. We're short of trained medics as it is. Anyway, I guess we can find enough around here to keep us busy until the mine-detectors show up."
"And the boys who are wounded by the mines?" said Miss Berger in a voice Kane had never heard her use before. "Who helps them tonight? Angels?"
Sergeant Crowley studied the tips of his boots. "Lady, this isn't my show. I just work here."
"That's okay, Sarge," said Kane understandingly. "By God-there's a real human interest story: that company marching into that minefield assuming they'll get the same attention as always. I reckon if they knew the score maybe they wouldn't be too keen on going in. What company did you say it was, Crowley?"
"Easy."
"Easy." Kane closed one eye. "And what regiment is this?"
Sergeant Crowley told him.
Kane closed both eyes. "Ever hear of a Lieutenant Dawida?"
"Hmmm. Maybe. Why?"
A smile glinted in the beard. "Oh-just asking."
"Lieutenant Dawida was wounded a few months back. Sent to the Zone of the Interior."
"Who took over the company after he left?"
"I can't say for sure," said Sergeant Crowley carefully. "I don't keep up on things like that. Men and Officers come and go. Look, Mr. Kane, I'm pretty busy right now--"
"Sure, sure," said Kane jovially, slapping the other's back. "Thanks a million, Crowley." He watched the stunted man hurry into the bloody, moaning nightmare of the crowded barn.
"What are you thinking?" said Miss Berger suspicious-
"The Lord taketh away," said Kane with a grin. "And He also giveth."
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal januaby 23rd, 1945 (Night)
The field is flat and bare and white from the edge of the road to its farthest extremity three hundred yards away where trees and shrubbery grow to conceal the path of a canal. The enemy, we know, is dug in among the trees along the banks of the canal, armed with machine guns, mortars, small-arms and bayonets. The field ... the field we know, is not fallow: it is sown with a strange grain.
It is a minefield.
The battalion commander, a major, pumps his right arm up and down several times and what is left of the battalion flows out of the ditches, inundating the road like a flash flood, spreading into the field. Simultaneously division artillery commences a rolling barrage and the shells whish overhead to complete their brief flights in terrific blasts beyond the trees. They are firing too far to be effective for our purposes. Better that than not far enough. The advance does not appear very tidy or orderly-we are merely a mass of men wearing raggy white camouflage sheets walking slowly through knee-deep snow like beaters cornering a stag. The men of Company E use MacFarland's tall figure as a guide-post.
To the north I can see the black smoke of a buring vehicle staining the pure grey sky. Ahead of me there is no one-the snow is virgin, unbroken: nice snow for a skier. I seem to be slightly above and behind myself and the entire moil of men, something like a great camera, observing the scene, mildly bemused. My own limbs are numb and I am walking in a dream with everything in brilliant focus. I do not have to think, I have only to keep an eye on MacFarland and the major, who are now beginning to edge ahead of the broad advancing front men.
Croooom!
Unseen, to my left, there is an explosion that bends and swells and then evaporates in the riff frigid air. A black column of smoke grows short and thick out of the white earth. A man lies dead under its blossoming umbrella. I do not try to guess who it is; I am pretending that this is indeed a scene for a camera and that the director will not really permit it to get out of control. Somebody is going to yell "Cut!" and we will all stop and turn around and get some hot soup. I am thinking about tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.
Our own artillery has ceased and now the enemy mortars lay in and black flowers burst all over the field. It is difficult to distinguish between a shell-burst and a mine explosion. Medics with red crosses painted on their helmets and on their arm-bands, move back and forth among the wounded, scurrying, kneeling, rising and running, kneeling again, as if doing hasty stations of the cross. If there are any cries or screams they are drowned out by the unending detonations.
At the first sound of the machine guns I drop into the snow as a conditioned reflex. An officer is ordering us up and with another conditioned reflex I start to obey. I am hesitant because I have been warned about the kind of mines that do not go off until you get up. But there is no mine under me. This time. Scattered and confused, the Company still moves forward and I begin to see the orange and pink muzzle-blasts in the trees a hundred and fifty yards ahead. Is it possible that I am invisible?
The concept of time and space is hopelessly shattered. I know men have been wounded and killed and that the air is thick with bullets and shrapnel, but I am filled with neither fear nor horror. Only a burgeoning sense of buoyant ecstasy. Great shocks course up my arm and I discover I have been firing steadily for a long time. As an empty clip pings out of the breach, I swiftly insert another and continue to fire. Some units are close enough to the woods now to hurl grenades and the machine gun fire is not so intense. A blue haze hovers over the entire field.
We are going to make it! I tell myself. Yes, we are going to make it and you are going to--
My right leg is seized in a powerful vice and I am catapulted into the air, writhing and straining, going in three directions at once. Still, in the air, in slow motion, I am not conscious of noise. A sabre-blade is thrust upwards through the sole of my foot far up into the calf of my leg. The snowy earth crashes up to meet me and the pain comes roaring in at the same instant. Through its purple and white hammer-blows I cry out for help.
The faces of a few men are turned towards me with implacable curisosity and I recognize some and cry at them to come and help me. I know there is a huge shaggy shambling beast that is trying to drag me off to its lair where it will devour me alive and I do not want to go. Again and again I call. Although I have just lived through an eternity the rest of the Company has advanced but a few yards. Two of the men-Pickett and Keller?-swerve in my direction and I sob aloud with relief. Then I hear the strident voice of-MacFarland? Keep moving! Keep moving! Anyone who stops will be shot!
My friends veer away and continue to plod towards the wooded banks of the canal.
Swift, efficient hands have torn off my web cartridge-belt, knotted it around my thigh, stuck a shovel handle through the loop twisted it tightly into a tourniquet. Then a hand digs out the first-aid packet and pushes sulpha pills into my mouth and follows them with snow. The single bandage is shaken loose and awkwardly bound around the smoldering monstrosity that once had been my right foot. There is no boot, no rifle, no helmet. I look around to see who has helped me. No one is there. The hands are my hands.
Soon I am wrapped in my blanket, not wanting to think about the scorched steak odour rising from under the far end of the blanket. I am alone. The Company has moved on with amazing speed. Twilight has thickened into night. And for the first time since I have been in the Army I am completely alone. The Army has left me just when I needed it most. My beloved MacFarland's explicit orders deprived me of the aid I required. And he is Authority. I am unthanked, unsung, unaccompanied. This would have been Kranich's fate had Bennett not been there ... now there is no Bennett to help Bennett....
I lie still under the prickly blanket, staring up at the new stars-the Big Dipper is wrong-side up-feeling no pain. I hesitate to move for fear of rousing the shaggy beast again, tempting him to drag me into his dark cave. I no longer tie and untie and re-tie the tourniquet. The blood has long since coagulated. Or is it frozen? Far, far away I hear the sounds of rifle-fire. The stars are winking at me. A drowsiness steals over my senses. My eyelids are heavy as lead. My head jerks on my tired neck ... I sleep....
CHAPTER SEVEN
Jack Kane was about to undress for bed when a staff officer rapped on his bedroom door in the Mayor's house and announced that the order against civilian travel outside Sigolsheim had been rescinded. Kane consulted his pocket watch. After eight-thirty already and he was mentally and physically exhausted due to the outbursts of rage he had indulged in throughout the day when he was told he could not leave the village to follow the battle. He thought of Bergy in the adjoining room, doubtless sound asleep, and he debated waking her to go out for a look-see. Then he looked at the mute welcome breadth of the bed and he knew he should get some shut-eye because tomorrow would really be a big day. Anyhow, he reasoned, he would not be able to see very much in the dark-the guns were silent and H.Q. admitted the troops had no special plans before morning.
And he remebered Easy Company. All his efforts at pin-pointing its whereabouts, its fate, had met with failure, thanks to official censorship.
Was it a conspiracy? he asked himself. Was there collusion on all levels to protect that company from the glare of the searchlight of truth? Why? If a tainted company was on the front line, jeopardizing an entire campaign at a critical juncture of the War, then the American public was entitled to know it, if only out of respect for the brave men who had already given their lives for the Four Freedoms and Democracy. That his priceless notes had been stolen was further proof that something was afoot.
Fortified with another libation, Kane sleeved into a macintosh, jammed a steel helmet on to his head and slung his pistol belt around the immense equator of his waist. Outside, staggered by the paralysing effects of the cold, he paused to get his bearings and then decided his best bet was H.Q. where he would demand to be properly orientated as to the location of Easy Company. Or else.
Kane left his jeep parked on the road and stood looking over the flat white field that reached eastward in the direction of a dark stand of trees perhaps three hundred yards distant. Unless G-2. had misled him, this was the place. Taking a deep breath he plunged forward, walking upright, frequently clearing his throat and humming the national anthem so as not to startle any itchy trigger-fingers.
He would have stumbled over the man on the ground if a voice hadn't floated up out of the snow. "Who's that?"
Kane knelt and brushed away the snow. Underneath, all but buried, was a blanketed figure. Pale wisps of vapour rose out of the man's mouth. "What's the matter boy?" asked Kane in a whisper.
"Nothing. I'm fine."
"Cold?"
"No."
"Hurtin?"
"Not any more. I think the beast went to sleep."
"Can I do anything for you?"
"No. I guess The Army will take-care of me." He exhaled thinly. "Maybe you could take a look and see if my leg is okay."
Kane lifted the corner of the blanket. Then he lowered it.
"The medicos will fix you up, boy. Tell me something-where's Easy Company?"
"Here," said the man. "I'm Easy Company."
"You are?"
"Me and the rest of the guys out here. We're all Easy Company. Unless a few of us made it into the woods-only nobody's come back to look for me. None of my friends. Not even MacFarland. That must mean they're all dead."
Kane stood up. Now that he knew what to look for he picked out six or seven other grave-like mounds of snow in a radius of a hundred yards. The curved lemon slice of the new moon afforded some illumination.
"You mean to say there's others out here, too? Easy Company?"
"That's right," said the man in a voice that flickered and faded like a candle-flame in a high wind.
"Jesus Christ," breathed Kane. "I knew it would be rotten but I had no-"
"When are they coming to get us out of here?" asked the boy. "I can't feel either of my legs any more."
Kane made a quick calculation. This one must have been lying here a good five or six hours. Another hour or two in this below-zero weather and ... well, he remembered what he'd seen at St. Vith in Belgium and last winter in the Apennines and in other winters in other wars.
"Listen to me, kid-stay right here. I'm coming back."
"Don't worry," said the boy, his voice following him across the field towards the road, "I'm not going anywhere. Hey, mister."
Kane paused. "Yes?"
"Tell me something-is it tomorrow yet?"
"Is it what?" asked Kane, wondering if he'd misheard. Then, understanding, he looked at his watch. "Not yet-but it will be soon."
"I hope so," said the voice. "I sure hope it'll be soon . ."
Kane pushed open the barn door and weaved as the warm rush of fetid anaesthetizing air washed over his face. Perhaps fifteen aidmen were grouped around a charcoal brazier playing cards or writing letters or merely staring into space. Most of the stretcher patients were asleep. Sergeant Crowley glanced up at Kane.
"Yes, sir?" he said coolly.
"Sergeant-there's men out in that minefield. Still alive.
But they're freezing to death 'cause they can't walk. And that's no bull. You've got to help them."
Sergeant Crowley ran his tongue over his teeth a couple of times. "Mr. Kane, I thought I explained earlier today. I've got my orders. My men are to stay away from that place."
"You mean you're going to sit here playing poker and just let those men die out there?"
"I mean if you've got any bitching-mister-take it to the brass. The odds are we'd lose more men than we'd save if we went into that field before the Engineers sweep it." He struck a match and held the flame to a cigarette. The flame wobbled. "If the M.O. hadn't given a direct order...."' he finished with a shrug.
Kane stood before them, a ponderous two-legged animal, squinting out of his sea-captain's eyes. Almost as though it were a separate entity his big right fist closed over the black ebony butt of his pistol and smoothly withdrew it from the cold stiff leather holster. He pointed it at the sergeant who stared at the muzzle as the smoke from his cigarette drifted into his eyes.
Kane said: "This is a direct order, too, Sergeant. Tell your men to get their stretchers."
They all watched him now and they all watched Sergeant Crowley. Kane's knuckle went white on the trigger. Crowley took a drag on his cigarette.
"You newspaper guys will do anything for a story, hey?"
"This isn't for a story," snapped Kane angrily. Above his beard his eyes gleamed with a John-Brownish fever.
The sergeant looked at him. "Is that a promise, Mr. Kane?"
If any expression played over Jack Kane's face it was concealed by the hairy mask. For a long time Crowley thought Kane had not heard.
"Yes," said Kane at last. "That's a promise."
Sergeant Crowley grunted, extinguished his cigarette under his boot and turned to his men. "I think we can trust this man when he makes a promise. Anyway, his orders," continued Crowley with a glance at the forty-five, "his orders come from a higher authority. Saddle up, men. We've got a lot to do tonight."
Outside, as the stretcher-bearers piled into his jeep and into the truck behind, Jack Kane stared up at the cold clear blue black sky with its icy stars and frosty moon. The night was deep and immutable.
The Lord giveth, he thought, And the Lord taketh away. Praise be the Lord.
* * *
PART TWO
CHAPTER EIGHT
For two full days after the strong hands had lifted him out of the War and placed him on the litter, Bennett ceased to be a contestant and became a spectator. His life was no longer a challenge to be met daily, it was no longer his sacred charge to see that his body was fed and warmed and cared for, that air was dutifully inhaled and expelled. Through the gauzy twilight haze induced by massive regular doses of narcotics, he observed the untiring efforts of strangers as they grappled with the skulking beast, pitting their brains against the brute's cunning strength. Bennett was glad the burden was not his. He was glad he did not have to move his body on and off litters, in and out of alien smelly buildings. It was perfectly all right with him for others to attend to the transfusions of dark yellow plasma and the puncturing of his flesh with needles and examining the black thing at the far end of his body. Occasionally he was conscious of a ragged chorus of pain, sung by an untrained choir in which he was lead tenor, but soon a needle would prick his bicep and the hymn would fade away.
The intricate mechanism that operated time and space broke down completely in an Einsteinian babble, without meaning, with no beginning or end. An etrenity passed in the blink of an eye; a split second was stretched and stretched and stretched: in one of his rare lucid moments he thought of the sparrow that was said to be filling the Grand Canyon by dropping a pebble into it every thousand years....
On the third day-by the calendar-he was transported by ambulance in the direction of the setting sun. Every turn of the wheels caused the rumble of the guns to diminish in intensity, until at last they could no longer be heard above the hum of the tyres.
By the time his litter was set tenderly on the floor of a corridor outside a closed door lettered librairie, Bennett was bored stupid with his existence. Various parts of him ached, his mouth was rough and dry due to the morphine; he was a little sick of himself and of lying on his back. The corridor was dark and damp and he felt a sense of outrage that he should be in such a dreadful place. His brain seethed with fancied annoyances-evidently the time-machine was getting into motion once more.
And then, from behind the closed door, came a strange unworldly sound: the voice of a woman. Simultaneously there was another sound: the rasp of a cross-cut saw. Concentrating all his mental powers he deduced that the woman was about to lay logs in the library's fireplace. Again that annoyance: that was not woman's work-some of those lazy litter-bearers should help-and he called out in wild incoherence and tears of shame trickled out of the corners of his eyes and into his ears.
Presently his litter was swaying between two men and the door swug wide to reveal a brightly lighted room with not a book or hearth in sight. Removed from the litter on to a white table, he looked up into a circle of eyes peering down at him over the rims of mouth-masks. The eyes betrayed no emotion, did not reflect what the saw. Stainless steel gleamed under the lights.
The woman's voice said: "Bennett. Landmine. Wound of right leg below the knee; frost-bite left foot. Exposure. Pulse normal."
That was all she said, and then a rubber thing was clamped over his nose and mouth and he inhaled and he felt his fingers slip their grip on the cliff edge and he knew he was going to fall into a deep dark bottomless pit. The very last words he heard were spoken phlegma-tically by one of the men.
"Thank you, Lieutenant Cramer," the man intoned. "Now, gentlemen, let's see if we can do something with this mess...."
The monotonous slap-slap slap-slap of the canvas at the window awakened Bennett in the dead of night. Sheathed in blankets up to his chin, chained to the bed by a mighty immoveable weight, he was conscious of only his head. He sensed more than saw the window at the foot of his bed; beyond the sound of the canvas he heard the irregular unsettled breathing of other men, a nightmarish murmuring that might have come from the bleak shore of a haunted sea. His was the last bed on the aisle and he had to turn his head to see the rest of the ward with the weird shapes distorting the other beds.
Suddenly, as though a hole were torn in the pitch black coverlet of darkness, a pale yellow beam entered the room. The hand holding the flashlight was not visible and the ray bobbed along the middle aisle like a globe of fruit on a gentle tide. The diffused illumination danced over the beds, revealing that several patients were silently watching the intruder's progress. The light exposed them as developing-fluid exposes film in a pan, recording the fists and the limbs and the heads and the shining eyes for all time.
Slowly, detouring here and there in response to a hoarse whisper or to discharge a duty, the flashlight moved closer and closer to Bennett's bed.
He closed his eyes until, insistently, the slim beam pried the lids open and, for the first time, he saw the face of the night nurse.
The supernaturally divine face, framed in wisps of gold, hovered disembodied in the air, exquisite in its flawless symetry, ethereal in its unearthly beauty ... the face a blind man dreams he will see the instant his sight is restored. Warm red feminine lips curved with tender quizzicality.
If ever love were concentrated in a few square inches of human flesh and bone, condensed into organs of speech, sight and smell, this was the face all lovers would claim as their by right. Such an expression of selfless devotion, thought Bennett, is abject surrender for me alone! Ah, she reaches for my hand; how knowingly my fingers jump into hers-fancy that she has found me here of all places!
The night nurse pushed up his pyjama sleeve, swabbed the arm with alcohol, expertly inserted the needle and injected two hundred thousand c.c. of penicillin. The pinch of pain jerked Bennett wide awake. Then the night nurse turned to attend to the man in the neighbouring bed. Bennett's eyes followed.
The flashlight looked down at what was undoubtedly the foulest, filthiest, most bestial unshaven face that ever was a window in the House of Man. This face was the possession-if not the curse-of a creature whose entire upper torso was swathed in a vast unbroken expanse of plaster. And then an incredible thing happened: the night nurse smiled! At that face which would have caused even a mother to cringe-the night nurse bestowed the beneficence of her smile.
Astonished, stricken dumb, Bennett touched his own face and discovered to his dismay that it was not like a face at all, not his familiar topography, but more like the unswept floor of a waterfront saloon. A laugh began in his chest and bubbled to his dry lips.
"No wonder you smile," he said to the night nurse. "If I had to look at us all night long, I'd be hysterical."
Startled, she turned, as if noticing him for the first time, as if just realizing he was a human being. Something began in her bosom, a tinkling sound, and he didn't know if it would be mirth or sorrow, but it came out laughter. Genuine amused laughter.
When a man has not heard the crystalline laughter of a woman for a long time-a beautiful woman-he forgets what it is really like. Man's vivid imagination, adequate in all aspects of reconstructing the physical woman, is totally inadequate when it comes to remembering the pitch, timbre and tone of her sounds of amusement. The other sights and sounds of his past are readily recalled: the sweet pungency of two cigarettes, the carbon monoxide of an idling automobile engine, the inky odour of the Sunday newspapers, the clatter of a milk-wagon horse's hooves on concrete before dawn, the delicately enervating sigh from the lips of a girl who has just been kissed . .
But the actual sound of her laughter....
It is like trying to whistle the melody of a Puccini aria only to have it come out as meaningless nonsense, frustrating, indecipherable. But suddenly, without warning, it is there, bursting upon you in all its rich dizzy loveliness as brilliant as sun emerging through clouds, and you wonder how you could have ever forgotten.
The night nurse laughed-rich, deep, intimate, feminine, inimitable, as though she had not laughed for a long time.
Bennett said, "Who are you?"
And she said: "I am Lieutenant Cramer."
"Yes," he said. "You would be."
Bennett loved the face of the night nurse, the voice of the night nurse-and the laughter of the night nurse.
CHAPTER NINE
The next day was a waking and sleeping trance and Bennett had not the slightest interest in anyone or anything-he was absent all day long. But that night his senses were keener, sharper, perhaps slightly giddy due to the fever lingering like a warning in his body. And perhaps because he positively ached to see the night nurse again. He was so keyed up and attuned to her that he was not a bit deceived when the plump nurse made the rounds before midnight: the different rhythm of the moving beam of light was sufficient identification.
And when at last she did appear only the pale beam was visible, but he knew it was her and his imagination filled in the details of her vague shadowy silhouette as clearly as if he possessed a million-watt sun and he lay on his back-waiting.
"Bennett," she whispered. "I see you're awake. Do you need a sedative?"
Hair the colour of new honey peeked out from under the neatly folded rim of the wool fatigue-cap, curling poignantly behind her ears. The sweet lips made a curve that he hoped was one of pleasure. The little V of her throat framed by her open shirt collar was pulsing-with unusual vehemence, he thought. With a concealed excitement?
"No," he said. "I don't want a sedative. I've been waiting for you. I wanted to see you again. And I wanted you to see me because they made me cleaner than I was."
A smile brightened the night. She did not laugh but the smile was just as good. "I see you and you look very pretty, but now you must sleep."
"No. Not yet. I've slept all day long. Please stay. Let me look at you."
Her hesitation lasted a fraction of a second and then she said, "I'm on duty," but he knew she had not decided one way or the other yet.
"I'm the last bed," he told her. "Stay."
Then, as if it were acting of its own free will, his hand reached out, and unerringly, found hers. Warm and soft and alive, it could only have been a woman's hand-no other object on earth was remotely like it. She made no protest, she did not attempt to free her fingers. He said: "Turn off the flashlight."
Soft mirth came from her throat. "I thought you wanted us to see each other," she murmured, but she extinguished the light. He knew then she would stay. Next to the bed was a three-legged stool and she sat on it, her hand still imprisoned in his.
"I shouldn't be doing this, you know," said Lieutenant Cramer. "I have a great many things to keep me busy."
"You're a nurse," he said. "You can do nothing wrong."
"If someone saw they would think it wrong. Really . ."
"Tell them you are taking my pulse," said Bennett quickly. "That is your job. Only for a little while." He was not pleading-he had slipped into the role she demanded of him to justify her action. The preliminaries of a hundred meetings had already been disposed of. Elation made his heart beat faster and he wanted to cry out. Their palms were warmly moist and electric tremors shot up and down his arm. When her fingers convulsed he knew she'd felt it too.
"Do you want to know about your leg? I was there and I saw it all. If you're worried--"
"No," he said. "I'm worried. I know The Army will take care of me. Anyway, I don't care too much. All that annoys me about the wound is the idea of it, the idea that some stranger who didn't even know me should want to hurt me. Isn't that ridiculous?"
"Not at all. It's universal. Tolstoy had the same idea in War and Peace. I think most of the men in the ward feel the way you do. The only ridiculous ones here are the unwounded, the doctors and the nurses."
With his free hand he explored her face, tracing her smooth forehead with the tips of his fingers, touching the fragile petals of her eyelids, memorizing the curve of her cheek and the gentle sweep of her chin.
"You feel beautiful," he whispered in awe.
"Now that's ridiculous," she protested softly. "I'm not beautiful. It's your hundred-and-one fever that makes you think so. When you see me by the light of day you'll know the truth."
"I know the truth now," he said. "You are the one who does not know and that makes you even more beautiful."
"You've been up front too long. Any woman would look good to you. If you knew me you'd not be so impressed."
"I know you. I've always known you. How long will they let me stay in this hospital?"
"Let you stay?" said Lieutenant Cramer. "All the others despise it. They think it's horrible. They are counting the hours until they leave on the train for Paris."
"I love it here," he said. "I don't want to go to Paris. I want to hold your hand. Every night."
"The first group of patients will be evacuated in the middle of next week," she said. "But I do not believe many amputees will leave then. Major Reynolds thinks it is not good for amputees to travel too soon after an operation."
"Then the Major is a wise and wonderful man. I'm in no hurry."
"Perhaps it's just as well. Complications could set in."
"Complications have already set in," said Bennett, running his forefinger over her lower lip.
"I'm speaking of your wound," she replied with mock severity. "I really must go now. Sergeant Neary will need me in the orderly room." She stood up and he could see how slim and lovely she was.
"Will you come back?" He was pleading now.
"Not tonight. You must sleep."
"Tomorrow night?"
"Well see."
He squeezed her hand. "Say yes."
She drew in a breath so he knew she was about to make a very important decision. "Yes," she said. "Good. May I touch you?"
Eve Cramer looked down at him. 'This is very strange. I don't understand it." She took a step closer and bent over him.
"You don't have to understand it," he said. Gently, with infinite care, afraid it was a spell about to come to an end, he reached up his hands and closed them over the firm soft swellings of her breasts. Even the coarse material of the shirt failed to obliterate their incridible allure. Her heart pulsed under his right palm.
"Good night, Bennett," she whispered and then, as ghostily as she had come, she was gone.
Bennett listend to her footsteps receding down the aisle and finally out of the door and then down the echoing stairs. He held his hands before his eyes, trying to see them, convinced they had been altered in some manner and made more valuable. He pressed them to his face and inhaled the spring-like fragrance of crushed violets.
He fell asleep that way.
CHAPTER TEN
"I know you."
Bennett turned his head. The face of the man in the next bed had been shaved and washed, exposed with shameless nudity. Its gnarled landscape was twisted in a friendly grin, except that some of the facial muscles were not behaving properly and quivered uncontrollably, transforming the grin into a grotesque grimace. The shape of his chest under the blankets was outsized and made his head seem to small for his torso.
"You're Bennett," said the other. "MacFarland's platoon."
Closing his eyes, Bennett was abruptly thrust back into the ditch at the edge of the minefield and he reheard the cackling laugh that had come from a mouth full of nicotined teeth.
"You must be Sergeant Harmon." he said.
"Yep. What's left of him," and he tried that cackle, but something under the plaster of Paris armour was broken and all that happened was a scratchy noise and saliva dribbled out of the corner of Harmon's mouth and soaked into the pillow-slip.
They were waiting for breakfast and the misleadingly fragrant odours were drifting closer by tediously slow stages. They could hear the hungry clink of silverware and the heavier clank of laden metal plates and cups. Bennett's mouth watered. Kennelled dogs must react like this, he though, as the keeper doles out the daily ration of horse-meat. The good old Army, he thought.
"You been asleep a lot," said Harmon. "I ast you some questions yestiddy but you dint answer." He paused. "But you was awake last night, wasn't you? Saliva drooled.
Bennett looked at him. "How long you been here, Sergeant?"
"Got here the day before they lugged you in." Bennett forced his mind to do some arithmetic. "That's not possible. I'm sure I was wounded before you were."
"You was, boy, I ain't takin' that honour away from you. I only said I was here longer." The grin again but no cackle. "Reckon they figgered I was priority. Us valuable non-coms."
"Then you were with the Company after the minfield?"
"For a ways. Then the Krauts got panicky and decided it was time to get me back to my old woman and whopped me with one of the 'tater-masher grenades. I got a bellyful."
Bennett wasn't sure he wanted to hear the details or not. In the slice of eternity through which he had recently passed, the War had ceased to exist and it now held little meaning for him. Later, he knew, he would care. But not now.
"They's a couple other Easy Company boys here," said Harmon.
Bennett closed his eyes again, his heart beat faster and nausea welled in his stomach. He was afraid to hear the names Harmon was going to utter. He did not want to know which of his friends had been hurt or killed or mutilated. He preferred to think that all of them were invincible, untouchable, beyond pain. Faced with a choice of knowing or not knowing the future, he would always opt for not knowing. But across the thirty-six inches of space separating the two beds he sensed the sergeant's eagerness to bear the tidings: Thermoplae had its messenger of defeat; the Alamo had none. Was this strange ugly man a wingless angel of death?
"Foxx is here," said Harmon, unable to wait to be coaxed. " 'Member how he got it from that kid in the village? You was there, wasn't you, Bennett?"
Bennett nodded, recalling the expression of speechless astonishment on Foxx's face as he saw the red fountain jetting out of his own chest. Could he still be alive?
"Yes," he said. "I was there."
"And Lieutenant Dawida," said Harmon softly. "He's here."
My God, thought Bennett, this man is going back into medieval history. Dawida! That was years ago when he was shot down in front of the cathedral. "I thought you said Dawida."
"I did," replied Harmon, savouring his role. "Only I hear he ain't the same."
Bennett wanted to say: Who is?, but he felt the question would confuse Harmon. "What's the matter with him?"
"According to the orderly, Sergeant Neary I think his name is, the lootenant's been sure acting queer lately." Harmon, unable to use his arms at all, rolled his eyes back into his head in indicate mental disturbance. "Some funny business about that, you know."
"Is that so?" asked Bennett. He was ravenously hungry now and he wished the breakfast-carts would put on some speed. Then maybe Harmon would shut up his grisly roll call.
"Not that I claim to be a fortune-teller," murmured Harmon, "but I alius did figger that Dawida was a little tetched." With a toss of his head, he added: "Shhh. He's in a bed at the other end of the ward. Don't talk too loud." The eyes rolled again. "Fanatical. Anybody loves the Army like he did musta been cuckoo. All that spit 'n' polish and then that crazy business in Strasbourg. Ah, well, Bennett, you was a doggie, you know what I mean."
"Mmmm."
"Anyways, this Neary boy tells me they been keepin' Dawida up near the front here so's he'll remain in the Seventh Army's jurisdiction. The generals don't want to lose track of him, I reckon. Seems they's an investigation of some kind. A few days ago some war correspondent was nosin' around astin' questions, and the way I see it this boy Neary let him talk to Dawida and got him to tell all about the Company and how Captain Roberts broke his leg on purpose and how the whole Company was a pack of cowards and how we high-tailed it in Strasbourg with that there tank." The fierce little face turned its full charm on Bennett. "Now, Boy, you know that was just one damn lie after the other. We done what any company woulda done: we saved our skins to fight another day, and Dawida got hisself riddled-for nothing."
"For nothing?" repeated Bennett so softly Harmon did not hear, and continued.
"So this here correspondent fella-Neary says he's a helluva swell guy-he's got the dope and he's gonna write it all up in a magazine in the States. Nice, eh?"
"Mmmm."
"An' ever since," proceeded Harmon, "Old Dawida's been lying in his sack just starin' up at the ceiling to beat the band. Mutterin' and snarlin' if anybody comes near him. The nurse says that some nights he has nightmares and he yells and gets hysterical and tears off his bandages and kicks up a fuss and they have to put him to sleep. Now you call that normal?"
Reliving the agonizing minutes in the dawn-streaked square of Strasbourg, rehearing Dawida's soulful cry as the Company scattered for cover, Bennett decided that, yes, he would call it normal. But he did not communicate this decision to the man who was extracting every drop of pleasure from this negation of Authority by Authority. You'd almost think he was talking about one of the enemy.
"Me," growled Harmon menacingly. "Me, if I could move outta this crazy cast I just might go down to that shavetail's bed some dark night and beat some sense into him. Jeez, boy, whatTl my old woman say when she reads in some magazine that her old man's outfit was chicken?"
Thinking of Mrs. Harmon jiggling and jogging down the main street of Montgomery, Bennett said: "The Company wasn't chicken."
"Sure! Sure! We know that, but that won't cut no ice back home, boy. Just you wait and see." The food-cart, pushed by a private first class in whites, came towards them in the middle aisle. A sergeant, wearing an unctuous expression on his long bony face, was serving. Harmon said: "There, that's Neary. Ask him, if you don't believe me, Bennett. He knew that correspondent and he heard it all...."
The medical sergeant came to the end of Bennett's bed. "What'll it be soldier? We haven't got all day."
"I'm not hungry, Sergeant," said Bennett, weeping dry tears.
The thread sewn into the three chevrons adorning Sergeant Neary's sleeve gleamed new. Bennett couldn't help staring at the convoluted designs so painstakingly executed. It suggested a woman's deft touch. A nurse's? Lieutenant Cramer's? Suddenly he was trembling.
"Cold, soldier?" inquired the sergeant testily. "Better have some hot chow."
Bennett got a glimpse of the orange-coloured flop of scrambled eggs and the grey viscous cereal and the tepid green coffee.
"I'm not hungry," he repeated.
Sergeant Neary's brows went up. "You will be, soldier. You will be." After spooning the food into Harmon's thin-lipped mouth, Neary and his assistant went away. Bennett twisted his body as far to the right as it could go and pretended to fall asleep. He did not want to talk to Harmon any more, and after a few desultory efforts at attracting his attention the non-com uttered a disgusted grunt and lapsed into sarcastic silence.
Bennett was still staring at the window canvas which at night kept out the wind and by day kept out the light, when Sergeant Neary returned to the ward and called loudly: "Attention, men! Attention!" Several patients, interested in anything that would break up the boring routine, sat up, and when Neary was satisfied that enough of them were listening he proceeded.
"The High Command has just announced," said Neary, "that the enemy forces in Colmar have capitulated." He paused, waiting for a festive reaction, but his words were greeted with quiet stares. "Don't you understand, men?" he went on. "We finally took that goddamned Colmar. How about that? The frigging Krauts have surrendered. We showed 'em. The battle's over-except for a little mopping up, of course. No details on the number of casualties, but they say it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Anyway, the goddamned city is ours."
And still no one responded; there was no sound, and at last, sheepish, Sergeant Neary snorted, gave a falsely cheerful chuckle and retreated into the refuge of the corridor.
Bennett lay quietly, knowing he understood the semantic meanings of the words Neary had spoken, but the deeper definition eluded him. For two solid months he and the others, the thousands of others, had existed solely because Colnar existed. They had closed in in that great contracting semicircle, crawling through bloody snow over lifeless bodies and through shattered hulks of people's homes. Ultimately, although he had not been aware of it at the time, Colmar had come to assume a significance far beyond the basic fact of enemies trying to kill one another. It had become an unclimbed peak to be conquered, an unswum channel to be breasted, an unknown truth to be revealed.
Oh Lord, said Job, Give back my burden....
Bennett lay still, thinking of the men he knew who had died in the semicircle, not thinking of the men he did not yet know. Then he tried to imagine the men of Easy Company striding down the battered smoking streets of the city, wishing, for the very first time since the mine exploded, that he were back with them ... Keller, MacFarland, Pickett, Blythe, Peake, Newman ... all of them except Bennett.
Behind him the silence had grown into a realistic tangible sound, if the thoughts of men could create sound.
Bennett though: O giver of breakfasts, what do you know about the capitulating of cities and about frigging Krauts and about mopping up and about showing 'em? Who are you to rejoice at triumph and defeat and to dance on the tombs of a thousand corpses?
"Say," he said in a high clear voice. "Just who in hell does he think he is-calling Colmar 'goddamned' ?"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The shaggy, lumbering beast of the bloodless snake's eyes remained deep within the labyrinthine recesses of its cave, hardly ever venturing forth into the blinding revelatory light of day where it might be easily seen and slain. Yet it never completely disappeared, and although Bennett had known no pain for many days now he was dimly aware that the ubiquitous beast was roaming somewhere not very far away, laboriously pretending it had forgotten him. From time to time, yielding to the luxurious helplessness of fear, he would ask for a sedative-just in case. This was mostly in the late afternoon as day was swallowed by night leaving an endless chain of hours until Eve Cramer came. (The beast always went a million miles away when she was even in the building.)
Another favourite period for the thing to stir in its lair was while the chief surgeon made his rounds. These morning tours were blessedly brief-he was rarely in the ward longer than half an hour-but to Bennett they sometimes dragged on interminably.
He had no concrete reason for this dread because the doctor presented exactly the same emotionless countenance to him as to every other patient in the room-as neutral as a god-and on all sides he heard praise for the skill of Major Reynolds. Bennett could not recall the doctor ever looking him in the eye-all that seemed to interest was the bandaged stump and the traction weight that gave tension to it and kept it alive. The Major would sniff and bark out a few perfunctory questions, acknowledge the replies with a curt nod of his head, mutter to the captain of nurses, Gelbecken, and before Bennett could muster courage to make a comment, was gone on his way.
This major was a stern, creased unsmiling man, with hands of smooth bulging sinews and a face fashioned of kneaded grey-brown leather. Although he accomplished his rounds swiftly he had the facility of regarding each wound as the most vital thing in the world at that moment. Whether it was the incongruous black toes on the white foot of a frost-bite victim or the incoherent ramb-lings of a man with a hideous head wound or a simple uncomplicated amputation, the Major seemed to care-about the wound as a wound. Between examinations he moved with the cynical efficiency of a firing-squad officer administering the coup de grace to a series of condemneds.
Bennett feared him in a way he had never feared MacFarland, in a way he had never feared the eighty-eights.
He mentioned this concern one night to Eve Cramer as she sat on the three-legged stool, holding his hand, conversing in that low intimate whisper.
"Major Reynolds may not be many things," she said, "but he is an excellent doctor. Possibly a brilliant one. Do not let his appearance deceive or frighten you-that is his veil. Harry believes that an intelligent doctor must remain above personaliites, particularly during wartime, so that his sense of right and wrong will not become contaminated." Her lips made a smile on the back of his hand. "I'm sure that Major Reynolds thinks as well of you-if he thinks of you at all-as he does of every other man in the hospital...."
This was somewhat reassuring, but a long time afterwards, going over the conversation in his mind, as he went over everything she said and did, he realized with a start that Eve Cramer had referred to Major Reynolds by his first name....
One morning, from his post at the end of the ward, Bennett noticed that as Major Reynold's entourage advanced the men became unusually animated. Soon Harmon was telling him that the chief surgeon was giving the word on which patients would be going on the next train to Paris and which would have to wait for a later one. Judging by the gusts of gaiety sweeping the room, Bennett deduced that most of the men were going-and glad of it.
Arrived at Sergeant Harmon's bed, Major Reynolds inquired as to his health, morale and strength. He rapped his knuckles on the plaster cast as if he could determine by the echo the condition of the bones mending themselves beneath. "Harmon goes," said the Major gruffly to Captain Gelbecken, who dutifully noted the fact on her chart.
When the doctor stood over him, gazing down absently, Bennett said nothing. Seeing the steel-grey eyes this close Bennett remembered how they had stabbed into him over the white mouth-mask in the library so long ago. Major Reynolds was nibbling on the inside of his lower lip, an idiosyncrasy that rendered him oddly human and sympathetic. He delayed for nearly a full minute and finally Gelbecken pointedly cleared her throat. The Major grunted.
"Any pains, soldier?"
"No, sir."
"How are your bowel movements?"
"Regular enough, sir."
"How long have you been with us, soldier?" asked the doctor with an almost imperceptible change in his tone of voice.
Bennett looked at the nurse, and she, consulting her chart, told how many days it had been.
Grunting again, Major Reynolds lifted the blankets and sniffed at the yellow-stained bandage over the stump where it protruded from the cast. His nostrils twitched and he sniffed again and murmured something which the nurse wrote down. Rising on his elbows Bennett could see the whole contraption. From mid-thigh to a point a few inches below the knee was the plaster cast. It was designed to stop the knee from bending before the delicate arteries and nerves and tendons were healed. Attached to the bandage itself was a length of clothesline rope which rolled over a pulley at the end of the bed. At the other end of the rope, which Bennett could not see, was a sackful of ball-bearings weighing about fifteen pounds. This dead weight was what exerted the pull on his leg, thus preventing the flesh from shrivelling. The weight was controlled by adding to or taking from the ball-bearings in the sack.
Major Reynolds was hefting the sack in his large capable hands, studying it. He half turned to speak again to the nurse, and as he did his elbow jarred on the bed-frame and the cloth sack slipped from his grip and the fifteen pounds fell twenty-four inches, and at the conclusion of its fall it was weighing nearly forty pounds and the forty pounds jerked unexpectedly on the raw stump and pulled Bennett partway down the bed.
Pain crashed through him like a pistol in a tunnel. Bennett's teeth sank into his upper lip and he had a fight to keep from crying out. He would not cry out.
"Oops, sorry," said the Major absently. To Captain Gelbecken he added: "Bennett stays."
"Hard telling," said the Major distantly. "You've had a very grave wound. But you'll be up and around before too long." With an officious nod of his neatly cropped head Major Reynolds turned on his heel and strode down the aisle, a trim compact bantam of a man, inhumanly flawless in his uniform, not looking back.
The beast was out of the deep darkness of the cave now and was plodding towards the light, an immense moving shadow. Pain rode up Bennett's thigh, ballooning, and becoming a thin grey taste in his mouth. It hurt so much he couldn't even sob, and he stared up at the stout captain of nurses with glassy eyes and she returned him a sad, impersonal smile, snapped shut her notebook and hurried after the Major, like a sloop under sail.
Bennett lay on his back, biting away the protest of agony, wondering if he could hold off the beast, wondering if he would be alive by the time, an aeon hence, Eve was due to come on duty. If she came. If not-if she failed to come he was sure he would die.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Waiting with his jaws clamped so hard his teeth ached, he saw her flashlight moving at a snail's pace through the ward and he thought she was deliberately lingering at other beds. Once she paused so long, making no sound, he was sure she was holding another hand, sure that someone else was caressing....
Then she was giving Harmon a shot of penicillin in his lean knotted flank and when she turned to Bennett's bed he closed his eyes in simulated sleep. Accurately, impersonally, she pushed up his sleeve, swabbed his arm with cotton soaked in alcohol and thrust in the needle. Bennett opened his eyes. She was standing there, slim and white, gazing down. They did not speak and after a few seconds she made as if to leave. He reached out and seized her wrist.
"Yes?" she said coolly.
"Are you leaving?"
"Does it matter? You're asleep."
"I'm not asleep. I'm awake. I thought you weren't coming. He hesitated. "Is someone else waiting for you?"
The pale glow of the flashlight was reflected by her teeth. Was she smiling or gritting?
"No one's waiting," she said stiffly, still not releasing his grip on her wrist. He felt if she so much as uncurled his fingers then it was all finished.
"You took so long getting here-" he began.
"It so happens I'm forty minutes earlier than I was last night. I relieved Lieutenant Biddle ahead of time"
Bennett began to breathe again. "Oh, my God, I was so afraid. Don't go. Don't go." In that brief exchange he'd had a fleeting, lasting impression of his physical in-efficacy-he couldn't even chase her down the aisle to show how much he cared.
She seemed to give his request solemn consideration, earnestly weighing the pros and cons, making a big thing of glancing at the luminous dial of her wrist-watch.
"Well," said Eve Cramer at last, "just for a little while."
She found and moved the three-legged stool and sat on it, as close to the bed as she could possibly get without being in it. And something in her manner, the curious tension of her fingers, told him that it would not be for just a little while, that there would be no time-limit for tonight. The knowledge heightened the intimacy of their clasped hands and he nearly bellowed out his exaltation.
Now she was so near he saw why she looked so different, why she was more glorious than ever.
"Your uniform," he whispered. "It's white."
"We changed today. No more combat clothes. There's no more fighting in France. Do you mind the dress?"
"Mind? I've always suspected you were a beautiful woman-now I know. I wish I could see you in the day-light."
"Perhaps one of these days I'll drop in and show you what I really look like. You'll probably beg to be put on the train."
If she came by and talked to him, what would the other patients say? Would they be pleased for his good fortune or annoyed at their ill fortune? In military hospitals, as well as in all military establishments, the men were notoriously jealous of their equality and notoriously possessive of their communal women-so long as the affection was never individualized. Once that happened the offending woman was given the pariah treatment. He would have to be diplomatic.
"Please come by," he said. "I want to see you walking towards me and then walking away. You have a lovely walk."
"But you've never seen it," said Eve, laughing.
"I've heard it-and I know. On the line you learn a lot by listening in the night."
They sat hand in hand, smiling in the darkness. It was so sweet, so cryingly sweet, he simply lay still and let the ocean waves of affection break over him and bathe him and cleanse him.
"The chief surgeon was right," said Eve presently.
Mention of the chief surgeon brought an intruder between them and it fractured his mood. Yet he was sure it was not an intentional act on her part, for her voice was husky with emotion.
"Right about what?"
"About not getting involved with the patients. He used to say it was dangerous." She paused, breathing. "He was right."
"Are you in danger?" he saked.
"Yes," she said. "In great danger."
"It's not too late to run for safety."
"Yes," she said. "It is too late. Besides, I don't want to run for safety.' Her hand contracted on his with surprising ferocity. "I'll hate to have you leave."
"Me too," he said. "I'll hate having to leave. When will I go?"
"I don't know for certain. Not on this train, but you may go on the next-in about ten days. By then your wound will be sufficiently healed to permit you to travel in comfort."
"Ten days," he said, "can be a long time."
"Or a short time," said Eve, not smiling now.
"Listen-I was just thinking." He raised up on his elbows and came very close to her face. Their lips were nearly touching.
"You ... were thinking?" she wishpered.
"About-aw, nothing important. You'd think it was silly."
A sheet of paper could not have passed edgewise between their mouths and yet they were not kissing. "No, I wouldn't. Tell me." Her uttered syllables vibrated on his lips.
"Well, I was thinking about Paris, about being in a hospital there."
"Yes," she breathed.
"I'll probably stay there quite a while. I won't have any air priority for the States. I may have to remain for months...."
"That's possible. You'll be in Paris in the spring. It sounds like a song. To me, winter is death and dying and spring is rebirth and living. Paris should be wonderful this spring."
"We can see it together," said Bennett quickly. "You can get a leave, can't you?"
He had been thinking about this during the day and had intended to say it more casually, with more sophistication, as if he were in the habit of inviting beautiful nurses to visit him in Paris.
Their hands were warm and moist together; he knew she was watching him with that smile on her lips.
"Well-" she said and then, so suddenly that Bennett was jolted with fear, a figure loomed behind her, menacing, and he thought at once of the Major. Lieutenant Cramer stood up and said: "Yes, Neary?"
The medical sergeant murmured in an undertone and she excused herself and withdrew into the aisle with him, head inclined in an attitude of listening. Bennett stared, numb, positive that she was going to go off with Sergeant Neary (to do what?) and not come back. But she did return as Neary strode off in the darkness.
"Forgive me," she said, resuming her seat on the stool. "It was just Neary wanting to know how to do some records I left for him in the orderly room."
"How did he know where to find you?"
"I told him, of course," she answered. "He's known all along-in case of an emergency." She smoothed her white uniform, patted her hair, crossed her splendid slim-thighed legs, just as if she'd come back to their table at Maxim's.
"You aren't going away?" he asked with sick dread. "Of course not," she laughed. "Now-where were we? In Paris?"
"In Paris," he said eagerly. "In the spring. And you-"
"-And I was about to apply for a week's leave in order to study new nursing methods at Supreme Headquarters under General Nightingale."
"Yes," he said and he knew it was all right again.
"There is always the possibility," she said, "that you'll be too busy to see visitors. Paris is full of pretty girls, such as nurses and Red Cross workers and mannequins. It will be warm and sunny and they'll be wearing the latest frocks-"
Benett touched her incomparable lips with his fingers. "No. Don't talk like that. Even in kidding. I wouldn't want to go to Paris unless I were sure you could come too. Who knows, maybe some of the Company will be able to get passes-we could have a reunion!"
"A reunion is no place for women. The men would resent me."
"No. They would love you." It was the first time he'd uttered the word in her presence and it left a burning spot on his tongue.
"Well, well see."
"We could go places together. The restaurants. The Louvre. The Opera. We would drink champagne. We could see Napoleon's Tomb and pretend we were the centuries looking down on him. Then a harsh thought intruded. "I guess I'd have to have a wheel-chair."
"Nonsense," she protested gaily. "Well requisition a jeep, no less. I'll be your private chauffeur-or is it chauffeuress?-and everyone would see your crutches and know how brave you were."
"And they'll see you and know how lucky I am, and they'd say: "Let's do away with him and make her Empress of all the French!"
"I would not accept unless they made you Emperor." Excitement danced in her voice.
"Then you'll come?" he asked. "You're not just saying it?"
"I'll come," she replied simply and he kissed her hand.
Bennett began to do some figuring in his head. "Let me see. This is the fifth of February. Say I go in about two weeks' time and it takes a few days to get settled down and all. Mmmm. Let's make it for the fifth of March. That has a nice ring to it."
Eve frowned slightly. "Isn't that the Ides of March?"
He laughed. "You're thinking about the fifteenth. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's. After all, you are above reproach, you know."
"I wish I were."
"As Emperor of the French," he intoned, "I hereby make you so. There-see how easy it is when you have Authority."
"And you have Authority?"
"Now," he said. "Now that I know you I have Authority. You have given it to me."
He wasn't sure but he thought he felt the warm wetness of a tear on the back of his hand as she held it to her face.
"The fifth of March," she said. "A month from today. I'll have to put in for the leave soon. Everyone wants to go. Of course you'll have to write me to let me know where you are."
"Oh, I'll write-every day. I'll write so often you could build a glider out of the letters and fly there!"
Trembling, Bennett sank back into his pillow, gazing up into the night that glowed with her beautiful presence. He wondered if he could possibly survive an entire month until she was with him in Paris on the fifth of March.
He said: "I'll be terribly afraid, you know, waiting for you. You may change your mind; you'll be taking care of others wounded--"
"Do not be afraid," she said gently. "Do not be jealous. It is I who should worry and be jealous. There is so much about you that I cannot know or share. Your company. You speak of the men-of Keller and Pickett and MacFarland. To you they are real, living beings-they were with you for so long and they are so large. I've only had you for a little while. Sometimes I think my greatest competition is the Company-the entire Army. How can I cope?"
"You are the Army also," he said. "Listen-I'll tell you about the Company and then you'll know, and once you know there'll be nothing to fret about."
So he told her about the Company and the marching and the guns and the foxholes and the snow and the fear and "The Minstrel Boy" and "Little Brown Jug" and C rations and rusty spoons and dry socks and home-made sleds and the smells and sounds and tastes....
His voice faded in the darkness. Eve Cramer pressed his hand to her lips once more and then disengeged their fingers and stood up. She gazed at his face and into the dark shadows in which his eyes were closed against the world, dreaming.
When at last she moved away from Bennett's bed, Lieutenant Cramer walked on tiptoe so as not to awaken the sleeping soldiers with her footsteps.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
It was much later the same night when Bennett was jarred out of his slumber by an insistent hand shaking his shoulder. The face above was not instantly recognizable and if he had not remembered Tarmon telling him that Lieutenant Dawida was in the hospital he would never have guessed. It was the officer, the Slavic breadth of feature more pronounced than ever, dominated by his sharp, angry eyes. His black hair had grown out and was now untidily combed over his eagle-like skull.
"Bennett? Is that you, Bennett?" whispered Lieutenant Dawida hoarsely.
"Yes, sir, Lieutenant." The officer's fingers dug cruelly into his collar-bone. Bennett couldn't move against the grip.
"I heard you were here. I haven't had a chance to see you until now." Muscles jumped in the gauntly classic face. "They've been watching me."
"Yes, sir," said Bennett.
"I had to talk to somebody from the Company. Somebody who understands. They-" he gestured vaguely with his other hand-"they think I'm a Section Eight. They don't know."
"Is there anything I can do, sir?"
"Hear me out, Bennett, that's all I ask. Hear me out and then judge for yourself. They've had lawyers talking to me and then a reporter who said he was going to tell the world that I led a company of cowards unless I gave him some dirt on the hospital staff, so I told him to go to hell." A wind flapped at the canvas over the window and Dawida shivered. He was wearing only pyjamas, the jacket of which was unbuttoned to expose overlapping strips of bandage. He eased his grip on Bennett's shoulder and sat on the bed. "I don't know what to do."
"Well, sir, I don't know what it's all about but I'm sure it's not so bad. The Army plays fair." He was about to add that the Company didn't do too badly after Dawida left but he was afraid it might leave the wrong impression, so he merely punched his pillow plump.
"The Army," repeated Lieutenant Dawida bitterly. "Listen, Bennett-I was going to go Regular when the War was over. I don't mind even the getting wounded. It helps in the record. But at least I expected to get treated well, only it's all a mess. I can't go back to the line and I can't go to Paris. What kind of purgatory or limbo is this? All I tried to do was a decent job-the Company knows that. I don't blame the men. It was one of those crazy things. There was nothing in the book about how to handle men scared by an advancing Tiger tank. But now the brass keep at me, asking me the same questions over and over, as if the War was lost and I lost it. Me, personally." He sank his face into his hands.
Bennett knew that Lieutenant Dawida's bed was at the far end of the ward and he could not recall any lawyers or anyone else coming in and badgering the officer with questions. In fact, he never had any visitors and for the better part of a week had lain on his back staring up into space, never consorting with his neighbours.
"Bennett," said Dawida. "I have been betrayed."
"I wouldn't say that, sir."
"I would. That newspaper man. He wormed the whole story out of me and I know hell make it sound worse than it was. At first I thought he was on my side, but he kept stressing the part about the men running and I kept trying to minimize it and then I began to justify it and it was too late to he. Even if the Army doesn't kick me out, that guy's story will ruin me."
"Once the Army checks with the Company," said Bennett, "once they talk to MacFarland and Lieutenant Kranich, it'll be cleared up. They'll tell what really happened. For that matter, so will I if they ask me." Bennett ventured to soothe the officer by placing his hand on his sloping spine. It trembled under his touch. "You've got to have faith and patience, sir."
Bennett wondered if in the circumstances he would have faith and patience. Back in the States he'd once asked an officer why so many courts martial ended in conviction, and the officer, who had sat on hundreds of courts, had replied by saying that the judges usually commenced the proceedings by telling themselves that the accused wouldn't be before them if he were really innocent.
In a voice that shook with emotion Dawida said: "All I wanted to do was to be a good officer and end up a colonel or a general. And all I get is-Franced. That's what it amounts to-being Franced. This wretched country is nothing but a vast graveyard for soldiers; no wonder its soil is so fertile: it's rich with our decomposing flesh. No wonder its wine is so red: it's the colour of our blood. Someday instead of reporting that a soldier is W.I.A. or K.I.A., they'll merely say he was Franced and everyone will know what is meant. Any other theatre of war and I would have had it made by now-but this is a doomed land. There are no heroes here, Bennett, only statistics."
The conversation had taken an unexpected turn and it was a few moments before Bennett realized that Dawida's voice had risen an octave in pitch and that his limbs were trembling violently.
"Listen, Lieutenant--"
"They're after me, I know it. I have to be a sacrifice. At least one brave officer should be shot per war and I'm it for this war. That's why they sent that correspondent. For a scoop." He spoke with low cunning, as if to himself. 'They probably had me marked from the very beginning, away back in Fort Dix, New Jersey. The French probably have the grave already yawning for me." He laughed softly. "Who knows-I may be this war's Unknown Soldier...."
His hands were tearing at the wrappings around his chest, stripping away the bloody gauze and cotton. A putrid stench assailed Bennett's nostrils. "Now wait a minute, sir," said Bennett, fumbling ineffectually at the other's arms.
"You'll tell them the truth, won't you, Bennett?" asked Lieutenant Dawida in a highly-pitched voice.
"Of course I will, sir, only you'd better get back to bed and get taken care of. It's cold out here." Bennett was really afraid and worried now.
"Good man," said Dawida hoarsely. "I'm glad there's someone who'll speak up for me. Well-" Lieutenant Dawida stood up unsteady, the bandages trailing whitely around him. "Well-I've got to be going."
Supporting himself with one hand on the mattress he lurched to the middle aisle, but instead of turning left back towards his bed he turned right. He reached for the canvas at the window and tore it loose from the nails. A blast of snowy wind whistled into the room. Lieutenant Dawida stretched out his arms and stood straight and grinned into the gale.
"Hey, Lieutenant," cried Bernett. "Better come back here."
Dawida got one knee on to the window sill. Mingled with the shriek of the wind was the wet roar of the river in the ravine below.
In the next bed, awakened by the commotion, Harmon sat up. Seeing the figure at the window he tottered into the aisle-but his arms were pinioned in an immovable embrace by the plaster cast. "Now, just a minute there, Lootenant, sir," said Sergeant Harmon politely.
Dawida heaved himself up and braced both hands on the vertical frames, swaying before the slash of the snow.
"Silence!" bellowed Lieutenant Dawida in his best parade-ground voice. Two men were running up the ward. Dawida said: "Bennett-remember your promise." Then, to no one in particular, to everyone, he added: "Gentlemen, I am resigning my commission."
The man in the window released his hold on the frames and took one step forward. Standing by helplessly, Harmon was shouting incomprehensible orders. One of the two runner sprang and grabbed. Cloth ripped harshly; from a great distance came a dwindling cry.
The three men were at the window, frozen in a tableau, peering in shocked silence over the sill into the impenetrable thundering blackness below. From the hands of one of the men flapped a stained strip of bandage; it fluttered like a white flag in the chill winter wind.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The iron gauntlet of winter, as if controlled by the events in Colmar, relaxed its tenacious grip on the land; the cold weather broke, the temperature rose, fissures in the pereptual cloud cover were more frequent, ice and snow softened in a mid-February thaw. The pessimists predicted that the worst was yet to come; the optimists claimed that spring would come early this year. The somnolence of peace lay over all of France and Alsace like a vast sheet of silk.
In the north the armies regrouped, took deep breaths, girded on their swords, peered across the swollen surface of the Rhine and began to march towards the bridge at Remagen.
Melting snows streamed out of the Vosges, the countryside was awash with the thaw. In the yard of the hospital the orderlies had constructed slatted catwalks to span the wettest places, restricting pedestrian traffic to their limits. One of these catwalks was laid from the middle of the yard, conforming with the dipping contours, to the entrance of the hospital's orderly room. It passed within a few feet of an angled niche in the old stone building. In this windbreak, an observer could see without being seen, for the normal passer-by clattered over the slats without tarrying to sightsee.
It was here that Major Reynolds waited on the eve of the departure of the first hospital train for Paris. Standing next to the wall he blended with his background, almost invisible in the night. He listened to the footfalls on the wood, identifying the walkers instantaneously. But he did not greet any of them, nor reveal his watchful presence.
And then, shortly before midnight, he heard another pair of boots advancing from the direction of the yard. A slim hunched figure tripped past and Major Reynolds had to move swiftly to seize the arm of Lieutenant Cramer and draw her into the windbreak.
"It's me," he said into her ear so that she would not cry out.
"Yes," she said quietly. "I know it's you, Major."
They were so close he felt the moist warm vapour of her breath on his jaw. He smelled her familiar smell and automatically his hands began to seek the familiar curves of her body, bulkily disguised in the macintosh.
"I left a note for you," he told her. "In your room."
"I've been busy," said Lieutenant Cramer. "I'm the only nurse on night duty. And I must sleep during the day."
"I can change that."
"I don't want it changed."
Exasperated by her calm detachment, he said: "Eve-look. Why have you avoided me this past week?"
"Please let me go. You're hurting my arm."
"Not until I find out what's wrong."
"Nothing's wrong," she said sincerely.
"Dammit, Eve, do you think I'm stupid? Good Lord, I've been around."
"If you've been around," she said, drawing away and thus eluding the greedy fingers that were creeping down the open neck of her bodice, "if you've been around, then there is nothing to explain." As if possessed of eyes, his fingers seemed to gape at the tantalizing expanse of bulging breast they had touched.
"I won't have it," said Major Reynolds bitterly. "Do you think this is some kind of sorority game? Don't cuckold me.
Lieutenant Cramer did not answer. She let his hands drag her by the lapels against him as he swayed in his tracks. "Oh, goddammit, Eve, you don't know what I've been through." The sound of his voice resembled the tearing of tissues.
"Please let me go," she said. "I'm on duty in ten minutes."
"Duty will wait," he rasped. "This is more important than a hundred duties."
A wet wind had risen and was laving across the cobblestones, ripe, forlorn and fetid at once. Lieutenant Cramer did not speak. She remained in his awkward embrace as limp and unresisting as a rag doll.
"It was that Berger dame, wasn't it?" he said, attempting to be sardonic. "My God, do you think she meant anything to me? Why, that wh-I mean bitch. You do me an injustice, Eve. You know those correspondents require a certain amount of mollycoddling." As he talked in increasingly confident tones his hand snaked into her bodice again. A button popped. He chuckled thickly. "The Old Army Game. Why, I thought you were having a laugh behind her back, otherwise I would have spelled it out for you. After all, nothing of any consequence took place. When you didn't ask any questions--"
"This isn't necessary, Harry," she said, half turning away from him. "I don't care about the correspondents."
"Then what is it?" he demanded, and suddenly he lost control of his fingers and they convulsed and squeezed her cruelly and she uttered a little sob of physical torment. "Why must you destroy what little we had?"
"Because it was so little," she said.
It seemed his head must explode. "I know who it is," he hissed. "It's that enlisted man on Ward Two. The amputee." He tried to glare ridicule into her eyes but the darkness was a shield against him. "You've been seen."
"Seen?" she repeated curiously. "What do you mean 'seen'?"
"Never mind. I happen to know you've been spending excessive time with him."
She did not reply but her lithe body stiffened and he sensed an upsurge of hostility. Her mouth noiselessly formed the word Neary.
He said: "Now, I'm not accusing you of anything, Eve-but I want these clandestine meetings to cease as of at once. Is that clear?"
But he knew she had withdrawn from him, she was further away than ever. That his hand was doing things inside her clothing meant absolutely nothing to her and the knowledge increased his fury. He wanted to get at her, to hurt her, to penetrate the steel of her will.
"Harry," she said. "I don't know what your spies have been telling you but I know it can't have been very much. There is nothing I must apologize for, nothing to be ashamed of. Unless one should be ashamed of love."
"Love!" he said.
"You sound as if you'd never heard the word. Well, perhaps you haven't."
"But he's just an en-, just a kid!"
"Is he?" she said. "I honestly hadn't noticed."
"You're out of your mind."
"I've thought of that, but I love him and I want to make him happy if I can. This little bit."
His hands clamped on her small-boned face like a vise. "Good God, Eve-I assumed you knew your job well enough to recognize pity. Sympathetic pity. The kind that makes people reach for coins when they see a crippled beggar in an alley. Don't degrade yourself. Don't degrade me."
"I have no obligation to you. My love and degradation do not depend upon you, nor yours upon me. Any more. Take your hand away."
He obeyed and tried to make of it a gesture of finality, but she merely refastened her macintosh and burrowed into the upturned collar.
"All right," he said. "All right. This time. I'll tolerate your schoolgirl's whim this time. But once this kid is shipped out, no more crushes. Understand?"
"Is that all?"
"Just this-just a reminder that I'm still the boss around here, and my first concern is for the welfare of those patients in there. And if I ever hear of you trying anything with that kid--" But the enormity of his thought was too much for mere words and it stuttered to a halt, as though it had come to an unspannable gap. "Can you imagine what would happen to that boy's wound if he got overexcited or over-exerted himself? Why, his arteries would snap like threads: he'd be empty of blood in a quarter of an hour."
His fists clenched in frustration, the inside of his mouth was chewed raw and he tasted the blood trickling down his tongue.
"Watch yourself, Eve," he said. "Don't push me too far."
She'd been about to leave but now she turned to him again. "How dare you speak to me as you'd speak to a P.W. You and your threats. Whatever gave you the impression you owned me? Did you think that in giving you my body I also gave me? My self. All we had was the lust of dogs coupling in a vacant lot. There was nothing personal in it, Harry, so stop beating your breast."
Major Reynolds uttered strange noises and he seized her and kissed her mouth until their teeth ground together and his tongue tasted new blood. "There! That's what I can give you those lads can't."
Wiping her mouth with her handkerchief, she said: "You can't quite accept it, can you, that I might send my body to you while I remain elsewhere, engaged in finer things. Listen to me," she went on, her voice tight with an anger she had somthered until now. "Listen-you were used. I should have paid you! You didn't have me, you didn't even know me." She paused. "But he knows me. No, that is not quite accurate. He has made me. Because of him I am larger than life-and I am beyond your petty threats and your foulness."
"Are you?" he whispered hoarsely. "Are you?"
"I soon will be completely," she said. "I've applied to Headquarters for a transfer and if you attempt to block it I shall tell them why I want it. Good night, Major Reynolds."
Lieutenant Cramer left the stone niche and stepped on to the catwalk, lifting a shoulder to the freshened night wind, and presently the door to the orderly room creaked open and slammed shut.
Major Reynolds stayed where he was, leaning against the centuries-old wall, scarcely breathing, scarcely aware of the cool air moving on his hot face. His large sinewy priceless hands beat a rhythmic tattoo on the unyielding ageless stone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
MacFarland came into the ward while the patients scheduled to leave on the train were making their noisy preparations, and Bennett, seeing him from a distance, felt that faint stab of apprehension that used to come over him in the sergeant's unsmiling presence. It was something akin to guilt, as though he should be busy at some task in order to escape the thin-lipped wrath for which MacFarland was legendary in the Company. He even had a wild imbecilic perception that the sergeant had come to take him back to the line.
MacFarland stood tall and straight, raking the room with his eyes, shoulders stiff in the new-pressed uniform as if an upside-down coat-hanger were concealed inside. A forty-five pistol was holstered in a web belt locked around his lean waist, and as he strode farther into the ward Bennett half expected him to draw swiftly and fire. He marched directly to Bennett's bed, his long stork legs making the room small. Most of the patients were staring at him and Bennett wondered why, until he realized what made MacFarland different: he was all of a piece. He wore a pistol. A blue and white combat infantryman's badge clung to his tunic just over the left pocket flap. MacFarland was the first completely whole, unharmed soldier they had seen in weeks. The hospital staff didn't count.
"Hiya, boy," said MacFarland from his great height.
"Hello, Sergeant." Bennett swallowed a lump in his throat.
The narrow overseas cap was knotted in MacFarland's calloused hands, the only outward evidence of his uncertainty. He glanced at the other bed. "Where's Harmon? They told me you two was together."
"The orderlies took him away to do what they have to do for him to make the trip today."
The tall man sat gingerly on the edge of Harmon's bed. He made a smile by drawing his lower lip a little to the left. Apparently Sergeant MacFarland was not accustomed to making sickroom visits.
"How're you doing boy?" he asked.
"All right. How about you?"
"Fine."
"I'm surprised to see you, Sergeant. Somebody said the outfit was shipped up north."
"They was. I'm not with the Company any more." He studied the backs of his blue-veined hands. He looked as uncomfortable as a cowboy in church.
"Is that so," said Bennett.
"Yep." Then in an obvious attempt at levity, he added: "Now don't you laugh, Bennett, but they're giving me a commission."
The last thing Bennett intended to do at MacFarland was laugh. Perhaps he was officially and legally out of his visitor's reach, but he did not care to test his immunity. He solemnly congratulated MacFarland on his promotion: a battlefield commission was about the best kind of medal a soldier could get-it meant an increase in salary that few of the other decorations provided for.
He said: "Then I guess you'll be joining the Company after you get your bars?" Of all the men Bennett had encountered in his army career, Sergeant MacFarland was nearest to his ideal of what a soldier should be. In fact he symbolized-epitomized-the whole military organization.
"Well, I don't reckon so, right away. They're talking of sending me to one of the ports, LeHavre or Cherbourg, to work in one of the replacement depots."
"Say, that's a break." Immediately Bennett regretted the words. He recalled the other's eagerness for combat. "I guess that lets you out of front-line duty. Tough."
MacFarland squirmed. "Well, maybe not so tough. To tell the truth, it won't matter none to me if I miss the rest of the War, Bennett. I figure the Army can get along without me from here on out. They can't sound the last bugle too soon for me."
"Oh."
The small black eyes set deep in the high-domed skull blinked several times. "I had a gutful at Colmar, boy. No stuff. Well, you was there for a bit of it. You know what it was like. That's why I can tell you. A man who has a chance to skip all that is crazy not to." He seemed to be pleading for Bennett's-benediction?
"Say," said Bennett, "how about the rest of the guys? Old Keller and Pickett. They must have armfuls of stripes by now."
Clearing his throat, MacFarland made a thin fluty sound. "Guess you don't get much news back here, hey. Keller got it the same night you were hit."
Bennett closed his eyes, but the world spun dizzily so he opened them again. "Got it?"
"Now don't get me wrong, Bennett, I know he was your buddy and all, but old Keller disobeyed orders."
"What happened?"
"There was this aidman, Newman, who crawled on to one of those mines at the edge of the woods." He glanced at the cast and traction apparatus. "You stepped on your mine, so it got only your foot. Well, Newman's knee hit his and the blast went-well, I don't have to tell you all that. Anyway, he couldn't navigate and we couldn't do anything 'cause we had to launch this bayonet attack in the middle of the night there, with the Krauts dug in all around and guys falling into the canal right through the ice. It was like a moat, that canal, until Fourth Platoon got some logs across, and what with one thing and another thing didn't settle down for hours. As it was you didn't know if the fellas in the next hole were Krauts or doggies-and nobody else knew, so we figgered to wait until dawn and blow a whistle and start all over again.
"'Course we had strict orders not to get out of the holes all night. If you had to take a leak, use your helmet. And just assume anybody messin' around was a Kraut stirring up trouble or trying to escape. Along about two o'clock in the morning this calling starts. A guy calling for help. Crying. Yelling he's hurt and can't move. It's dark and hard to tell where it's coming from or who's doing it. Like a ghost or something.
"Then this guy yells: "It's me, Newman, I ain't a German. I'm right here. Look, you can see my arm." Sure enough if you look hard you can see a little black thing waving against the white snow about fifteen yards out from the edge of the trees. But the orders is for the Company's own good. Like I say, we don't know who's watching who. Look, Bennett, we don't even know if it is Newman. Sure, we think it's him and some of us saw him hit that mine-but in that crazy place we don't know nothing. We don't know if he's being covered by Kraut machine guns or if it's a trap. Why did he wait so long before he called for help? Anyway, the new CO. passes the word that the orders stay. He says we can't risk a rifleman to go out and help a guy who don't carry a gun.
"After a bit the cries grow weaker and the arm don't wave so much in the snow and some of us go to sleep. The next day was going to be a doozer, so I went to sleep. So I don't even know what happens. All I hear is one shot, but I don't pay any attention. One shot on the line is okay-it's lots of shots I worry about. In the morning, after we clean the Krauts out of the woods we find that one of our guys did go out after Newman. Old Keller. Matter of fact, he got to within ten feet of Newman when he was hit. We won't know if it was a Mauser slug hit him or a Garand, but either way he was just as dead as Newman...."
The large horny hands kneaded the cap again. "But he shouldn't've gone out there. Orders, Old Keller, he was in the Army long enough to know how to obey. Don't you think so, Bennett?"
"Yes," said Bennett, "he was in a long time. He should known the Army by then." This time he kept his eyes closed and let the bed and the room and the world spin.
Behind MacFarland the ward had resumed its preparations for the mass exodus. Bennett saw them through a gauzy veil, as in a trance. He sensed that MacFarland was anxious to be away.
"Pickett?" he said.
"I don't think they'll prosecute."
"You don't think they'll what?"
"Pickett. The facts are kind of hazy, but Pickett was a hell of a good man and I'll stick up for him. See, one morning he didn't come out of his hole and the guys who found him claimed he deliberately shot off the toes of his left foot. Pickett's story is that he was cleaning his rifle and it went off accidentally."
"Pickett?"
MacFarland made a short incisive gesture with his hand. "See-you can't believe it either. You wouldn't figure Pickett to pull a corny stunt like that. Me neither. Accidents happen. 'Course the Army's got to investigate all those self-inflicted wounds. That's why they shipped him stragiht to that hospital near Marseilles. It's a special hospital for guys who accidentally shoot themselves. They got to sort out the men from the ... boys."
Pickett? Bennett repeated the name to himself and suddenly it was alien and rancid on his tongue.
MacFarland rose at last, tugging at his tunic, tightening the knot in his tie, smoothing his cap. His thin white face was as expressionless as a doll's. "Look, boy, I better be getting back to the barracks. On the other side of the town. I'm in an officer's training school and we have classes all the time." He grinned sheepishly. "How long do you expect to be here?"
"A week more," said Bennett. "Maybe ten days. Then I go to Paris."
"Good deal, fella. I'll be coming back to say hello now and then when I get the chance." He reached one long leg out towards the aisle. "Say, maybe well be able to get together in Paris sometime. I reckon I'll have a furlough or a pass. Well, we can work that out when I come back day after tomorrow. Okay?"
"Okay, Sergeant," said Bennett flatly, just as if he didn't know that MacFarland would never come back.
MacFarland's gaze slid over the end of the bed and his hand made a kind of arc in the air and his lower lip drew farther to the left. As he stood there he seemed to recede behind a glassy filmy curtain and Bennett quickly turned his face to the wall.
"So long boy," said MacFarland, gently touching his shin under the sheet. "And say, when we get together again, how about forgetting that "sergeant" stuff. Call me Mac. All my friends do."
For a long time Bennett lay facing the wall without moving until finally the film dried and the wall was in clear focus. His mind was attempting to hook something solid, but everything was soft and mushy and his thoughts floated aimlessly. His imagination danced and wavered like jelly. Something substantial had been withdrawn from him but he did not know what it was or where to look for a replacement.
He was still lying there, oblivious to the other sights and sounds of the ward as the footsteps approached. He looked up. Standing at the end of the bed were Major Reynolds, Captain Gelbecken and the nurse the boys referred to as The Dumpling. He didn't know why she was called that because she wasn't particularly plump or pasty, nor was she soft. But he did not know that Sergeant Neary bawled out any lower ranks he heard using that term. Some of the men considered her one of the toughest nurses on the ward. She glared disapprovingly at Bennett.
Major Reynolds lifted the chart that swung from the frame and examined it thoughtfully, a quizzical look in his grey eyes. Then he glanced at Captain Gelbecken's notebook and grunted.
"This man goes," he said.
Captain Gelbecken's eyebrows arched. "But, sir, the other day-"
"I said," murmured Major Reynolds softly, "this man goes."
The two of them stared at one another until at last the nurse averted her gaze. "Yes, sir."
"Fine," said the Major. Turning to the other nurse he said: "Lieutenant Biddle, see that man is processed as soon as possible."
"Yes, sir," snapped Lieutenant Biddle briskly.
Major Reynolds did not, in the entire exchange, meet Bennett's searching eyes. He merely turned away, studying the stout nurse's notebook, muttering half aloud in the manner of a lovable and charming absent-minded professor
"Very well, Bennett," said Lieutenant Biddle cheerfully. IVe might as well get started. The train leaves at three. No time to lose."
Watching her, Bennett thought she seemed unusually animated at the prospect of preparing him for the journey. She rubbed her hands together.
"Yes," he said. "Let's get started. When do they shave my head and slit my trouser legs?"
Lieutenant Biddle's smile vanished and she eyed him warily as she assembled his toilet articles.
He guessed she did not have much of a sense of humor.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The litter-bearers began to take the patients away after lunch. Most of the bearers were civilians, natives of the village. They were old men, over-age for military ser-ice, but they were strong with the ageless leathery strength of mountain men. Two of them could transport a stretcher between them, negotiating the steep winding stairs without so much as jarring the man they carried. Their shapeless blue denim suits were very nearly uniforms and they shuffled tirelessly from bed to ambulance and back; one by one the men of Ward Two departed to the farewells of those who were to remain behind.
Because his bed was at the very end of the room, Bennett was collected last. With Sergeant Neary supervising the movement two of the bent old Frenchmen came and gently lifted Bennett and placed him on the blanketed stretcher. Then Neary handed him his cloth bag of personal possessions. It was not a very big bag. It held his safety razor and brush, both issued by the Red Cross, his toothbrush, a used bar of soap, a damp facecloth, a cracked leather wallet-empty-and a few tarnished coins. Around his neck dangled his twin metal dog tags. That was the complete inventory, and even though Bennett knew there was nothing else to go into the bag he looked around carefully, certain he had forgotten or lost something in the bed; but under the quiet smiling urging of the medical sergeant he smiled faintly and said: "That's all, I guess." geant he smiled faintly and said: "That's all, I guess."
Swaying in rhythm with the steps of the bearers, Bennett lay on the litter gazing up at the mouldy ceiling with its peeling paint, not looking to either side of the few patients who were not leaving. The antiseptic smell of the ward was pungent, memorable, in his nostrils, familiar and yet foreign, comforting and terrifying: the smell of pain.
On the ground floor the bearers marched stoically towards the opening at the end of the corridor where an ambulance was backed up to the steps, its rear doors yawning wide. Half-way along, Sergeant Neary stooped without breaking step, touched Bennett's shoulder and murmured, "Good luck, fellow," and then he swerved off and vanished through a side door marked ORDERLY ROOM.
Bennett wished the sergeant hadn't done that. He didn't like people wishing him luck-he didn't want people thinking his future or his fortune depended upon luck ... and upon their bestowing it upon him like a blessing. He was so disturbed he hardly noticed when the Frenchmen set the litter down on the topmost step and awaited instructions of the driver. Outside the afternoon sun made the sky a pale blue sheet. Bennett closed his eyes to the glare.
When he opened them Lieutenant Cramer was standing there next to the ambulance door. She was breathing heavily, with effort, as though she had run fast and hard. "Bennett," she said.
An object the size and consistency of a golf-ball was stuck in his throat and he couldn't reply. Lieutenant Cramer knelt next to the litter and framed his face with her hands.
"Biddle just told me," she said in a strangled voice. "There's been a mistake. I'm going to see Major Reynolds. You aren't ready to travel." There was more, but her vocal chords got too thick and the words became nonsensical.
"No," he said. "Don't see anybody. I'm all right. This is just the way The Army does things." Her chin started to tremble and he had to speak through clenched teeth to maintain his calm. "This means I'll have that much longer to anticipate your coming to Paris. The fifth of March. I'm a great Anticipator."
"Bennett," she said. "Bennett. No, listen. He said you couldn't go and now he's sending you. This isn't the Army or anything like that. It isn't even a mistake. I'm going to find him."
He seized her slender wrist. "No. You'll get into trouble. He's the CO. Anyway, I don't want you to have to go asking favours of majors."
A pair of matching tears glistened down her cheeks. She gasped as though respiration were very difficult. "Oh, God. Bennett. I won't let the ambulance take you. If you don't get to the train you can't leave on it." She threw herself upon him and clung to the wooden frames of the stretcher. Looking over her prostrate form, Bennett nodded at the litter-bearers and they gently exerted their old men's strength and lifted her away.
"Eve," he said, speaking her name for the first time. "Eve," saying it as he would say a prayer, "I have to go sometime and what's the difference if it's a little earlier?"
"Because it is earlier," she said. "Because it's wrong. All I wanted was one more week. I was counting on it. I was living for it. And he-" but again her voice broke and only noises issued from her tortured mouth.
The driver, who had been standing to one side nervously consulting his wrist-watch, stepped forward. "Sorry, ma'm," he said. "But the train goes at three. And this is the last man. My orders are--"
"Oh," she screamed thinly, "-your orders!"
The driver glanced helplessly at Bennett.
Bennett said: "He's only doing what he has to do, my dearest." He signalled the Frenchmen and they lifted the litter and began to slide it into the ambulace's maw.
"Yes, said Eve Cramer-wildly. "Yes, everybody's only doing what they have to do or are told to do! We must and we have to and we will! And it all leads only to death and agony and degeneration. Stop it, stop it, stop it!" she cried at all the men. "This is your Army at work, Bennett. It wasn't enough you gave it your blood and flesh-now it wants your heart and your soul."
Bennett was entirely inside the ambulance now with his head at the open end, near the door, and he looked up at her face upside down. His hands clenched hers so fiercely it jerked with cramps.
"Write to me," she whispered. "As soon as you get there."
"Yes," he said.
"And on the train," she said. "Be careful. If you want anything let somebody get it for you. Don't move around unnecessarily."
The driver cleared his throat. "Lieutenant Cramer, ma'am-"
"And be sure to have the doctors examine you often. The stitches in the stump are-oh dear dear dear God, don't let him go."
The driver was trying to get the doors closed.
"I want to come to the station with you," said Eve Cramer, pushing the driver away.
"No," said Bennett. To the old men he said, "Ferme le port," and they smiled at his accent but they gently moved her away and shut the doors and secured the bolt. The driver ran around to the front and started the engine.
"Bennett!"
The ambulance began to move through the yard, slowly at first, and then, as the gears bit, a little faster. "Bennett!"
After the ambulance passed through the great wrought-iron gate and swung around the high concrete wall and on to the road leading to the station Bennett could no longer hear her voice.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The ambulance, behind schedule, raced through the streets of the village, and looking out of the porthole in the rear door Bennett saw the houses and people slip past. The snow that lay on the paths and the roofs of the buildings was greyer than the snow in the square of Sigolsheim. Or perhaps it just seemed greyer. Blood makes such a brilliant vivid contrast that the snow it stains just appears to be white. Once he glimpsed a red diamond-shaped sign over a shop that sold tabac and it reminded him of the shoulder patch of the Fifth Division. The Fifth. The fifth of March.
Military vehicles rattled by-jeeps, a six-by-six, similar to the one that had carried the Company down the Rhine road that night. His mind was very clear, very clean. The fresh air had washed it of all the cottony fuzz left behind by the narcotics. It was as clear and clean as a mountain stream tumbling madly over a bed of smooth white pebbles in the Adirondacks on a deer-hunting day.
Swerving into the station yard the ambulance was greeted by a chorus of yells from the soldiers who were responsible for the movement of the train. A captain was shouting: "On the double, goddammit, on the double!" Even before the ambulance came to a full stop the bolt was pushed and the doors yanked open. Swift hands reached in and drew the stretcher from the dimness and suddenly Bennett was out in the sun again, blinking into its glare.
"Move!" bellowed the captain in a voice of authority. A large Red Cross insignia was painted on the front of his helmet. It was a miniature of the insignia on the sides and roofs of the Pullman cars. The colours were the colours of blood and snow. A short distance down the track the steam engine hissed impatiently.
Two soldiers seized the handles of Bennett's litter and, anxious to avoid the captain's anger, hurried up the ramp that had been constructed to facilitate the loading of the patients. Bennett hung on. The first man, wearing leath-ther gloves, reached the top of the ramp and almost at once skidded on a patch of ice.
He struggled to maintain his balance, but the dead weight of the stretcher tore it from the slippery leather grip and Bennett felt himself go. The blue sky whirled crazily. The soldier clawed at the air, looming above Bennett, and then he fell, heavily, ponderously, and all of them went sprawling in a tangle on the platform.
Bennett did not feel anything at first. Then, so suddenly he lost his breath, a hammer-blow of pain clanged through his leg. A tremendous invisible weight crushed the air out of him.
Towering far above, the captain squinted down at him.
"You okay, boy?" he demanded. "Are you all right?"
Bennett looked up at him, trying to suck air into his flattened lungs so that he could speak. His whole lower body was expanding in a massive agony.
The captain patted his arm. "Good boy." Then he stood up, red in the face, and cursed the litter-bearers. "Fools! Watch it! You could have injured this man." In a crackling voice of authority he shouted: "Now move!"
Scurrying, the two men raised the stretcher again and moved into the waiting Pullman car.
Air seared into Bennett's lungs once more and when he had enough to scream he screamed.
At the same instant, down the track, the restless impatient engineer pulled the warning whistle and a deafening high-pitched shriek filled the station yard. It sounded remarkably like a scream.
Bennett's cry was lost. The air went out of him and with it went his strength and his consciousness.
And the beast lumbered out oi the cave and dragged him unresisting into the terrible darkness within.
* * *
An excerpt from Private Bennett's Unwritten Journal February?, 1945
The metronomic click-clack click-clack of steel wheels hitting the joints of steel rails awakened me at dusk. I could tell I was in a lower because above me by an arm's length was the curved tautness made by the weight of another patient's stretcher. I knew it was dusk because a kind of haze filled the car and I was unable to see anything or anyone with clarity. Certain objects and faces seemed to swim in and out of my range of vision. Evidently they had not got around to switching on the lights.
Below my waist was a solid monumental block of pain.
To get my mind off it I attempted to build some thoughts out of the raw material scattered throughout myself. I projected myself miles and months into the future and I wondered what I would say to the families of the men I would visit. For I was sure I would visit them. It is classic and traditional for the returning soldier to pay his respects to the survivors and relatives of his companions and tell how gallantly and well they had died and how they had spoken of their mothers or sweethearts or wives with their last breaths.
There were so many to see-I could not think of their names at the moment but I would note them down when I had the opportunity. But that did not prevent me from recognizing that I was the living link between their names on the rolls of Graves Registration and the homes that had nourished them and made them strong enough to bear arms and march with me and share my holes in the earth.
What had Eve Cramer said about this being my Army, that my Army had done this to me? Why that sounded as though the Army had tied me to the mouth of the cannon and then jerked the lanyard. The Army do that to me? But here I was alive, willing to be the Army's messenger so that I could be living evidence that the war we had fought we had also won. At least those of us alive could say we won. The others-Keller and Dawida and Newman-they had lost. It did not matter what uniforms they wore in their graves: they were just as dead as the dead enemy. In their common grave what did it matter if they were killed by the Mauser or the Garand? Did that mean, then, that the War was fundamentally a matter of life and death, all other trappings and motivations aside. Life the winner, Death the loser-aha, but Death had gained many: the war had been a close one.
Nevertheless, I could go the families to supplement the terse economical telegrams, that was the least I could do for The Army. I could describe how they had gone without bathing and shaving for weeks on end and how we all stank in that boxcar and how some of us fouled our pants that first night in Strasbourg and how some of us used to double up with dysentery cramps for hours in the bottoms of foxholes and how a man smells and sounds when he is burning and how a face is with the outer layer stripped away.
It was the least I could do.
I owed The Army that much.
And I could point with pride to the towers of strength who had moved so nobly through this epoch in history: to MarFarland, the Invincible; to Pickett, the Brave; to Keller, the Believer; to Foxx, the Father; to Kranich, the Man; to Dawida, the Soldier....
Good night, sweet princes; may flights of eighty-eights sing thee to thy rest ... Go, bid the soldiers shoot....
And Eve Cramer?
She had been right, of course, but how could I have admitted it?
A curious weightlessness has seized me, a not unpleasant sensation, and I study the movements of the men in the-car with a certain idle bemusement, with the shrewd objectivity of a drunken man. There is, in the pattern of their movements, a profound truth which I know I can fathom if only I have the time....
A corporal in a freshly pressed uniform and smelling of after-shave lotion stops by my stretcher and squats.
"Bennett?"
My jaw is too heavy to open so I merely incline my head slightly.
"Finally woke up," says the corporal. "Good. Chow will be along in a few minutes." He has a calm friendly voice and his eyes crinkle when he smiles. "Got a letter for you, Bennett."
I must look startled for he adds: "The train was delayed a couple of hours so we had time to collect a load of mail."
He hands me a brown envelope and then, before I can stop him, he walks away. He is probably very busy.
Using both hands I hold the envelope high enough to see it. Amazing how heavy it is. There is writing on it but it has been smudged and I cannot make out my name. From the envelope comes a sweet fragrance and I press it to my face. It is her fragrance, the violets, and when I rub the envelope on my skin it is like the palm of her hand.
I try to open the envelope but my fingers are made of rubber ... they cannot co-ordinate ... they fumble and the delicate paper tears in half ... when I attempt to fit the onionskin stationery together it all becomes balled-up in my hands and I sob a little with frustration ... but I make out one word: March ... I sense that I must wait until the corporal returns so that he can read it all for me ... my eyelids are heavy and thick ... much heavier than my limbs which seem almost to float ... my whole body is buoyant ... I must sleep ... tomorrow I can attend to the letter and all the other things I have left undone ... Tomorrow....
... The pain has left me, slipping away silently, leaving me empty and hollow ... March ... yes, I must march ... Far away I can hear the bugle sounding Assembly ... I must hurry ... The Company is waiting for me....
Two medical orderlies in white smocks halted the foodcart next to the stretchers and one of them handed up a tray to the patient in the upper. The other, with a steaming tray, knelt and said: "Here you go soldier, hot stuff!"
The second orderly squatted beside him. "Say," he said. "His face-look how white it is."
"Yeah," said the first orderly. "White as snow."
The second orderly was gazing at the floor. 'What's that?"
"Something's spilled." The first orderly dipped his fingers into the dark fluid. "Hey-this is blood."
"Well, what the hell," said the second orderly. He lifted the blanket. "My God," he said. "Call the doctor."
The first orderly, who was wise in such matters, shook his head, "No. The doc can't help this one." He withdrew the mesh chain from within the pyjama jacket and examined the metal identification tags. "Name's Bennett," he said. "Go tell the Car Commander."
At that moment the speeding train roared into a curve and the two orderlies braced themselves against the sudden sway. Below them the pool spread like warm molasses in half a dozen tributaries, reaching out splay-fingered for a nameless goal. Then the train roared out of the curve on to the straight-away and the blood folwed back, leaving only the dark crimson stain, in the shape of a clutching hand, on the floor of the car.
