Articles of War, page 11
Conlee did not reply. Ahead of Obie was a large man who carried a Browning automatic rifle—universally referred to as the BAR man—who commented, “You’d have lost the fat a long time ago.”
“I think all this would be much more difficult, if I were fat,” Obie said, then something cracked in the air and Obie stiffened as if to attention, his legs buckled, and the weight of his radio pulled him over.
Heck stared at the body, then looked around. Others with quicker instincts had already thrown themselves out of sight. A second shot snapped by. Heck scrambled off the trail, chased by a third and a fourth shot. He dropped into the mud of a shallow ditch, where he lay breathing heavily. Conlee crawled into the ditch beside him and whispered, “He’s got to be in that shed we just passed.” Heck peered around cautiously. A couple of the more veteran GIs were creeping away through the trees—they seemed to know what to do without consultation or orders. Conlee followed, and, more slowly, Heck moved after him.
Intent on keeping himself out of the line of sight of anyone in the shed, Heck lost track of the others. On his hands and knees he crawled ahead to one tree, then forward to another. There was a shot and Heck pressed himself flat. A loud furious volley followed. He thought, We’ve been ambushed. But the shooting ceased. Heck peered around his tree. He heard himself breathing as if he had been sprinting. He slowed his breaths and stood, pressing himself hard against the tree. A German had come out of the shed, holding his hands up. Conlee and several others appeared from various points, their weapons trained on the German. The shed was riddled with bullet holes. The German was bleeding from his shoulder. A GI strode up and put his M-1 into the German’s back and prodded him toward the path. The German moved stiffly, staring straight ahead. His lips moved—trembling, Heck thought at first, but then realized that the German was speaking silently and quickly to himself, praying perhaps. Heck glowered at him. He wanted to see the German weep or plead, cower or tear his hair out. The German did not, however, and none of the GIs emerging into the garden spoke. The only sounds were the scuffing of feet and the occasional gentle rattle of a metal buckle or button. The BAR man went into the toolshed and came out with the German’s rifle and a couple of potato-masher grenades. The German reached the path, where he was allowed to stop. Conlee and a few of the other GIs gathered around him. The German gazed up into the branches of the trees, his lips moving rapidly. Heck stood among the others around the German. The BAR man wandered over, inspecting the mechanism of the German rifle. The German, gazing into the trees, intent on his whispers, seemed unaware of the Americans. Heck wanted to hit him. Suddenly, one of the GIs kicked the German in the back of the knees and he fell facedown on the ground, where, with his hands still extended up past his head, he moaned softly, then resumed whispering. Except for the BAR man, everyone had their M-1s trained on him. The German whispered. No one else spoke. There was a shot, a kernel of blood appeared on the German’s back, and rapidly several more shots followed. The German shuddered slightly.
With a foot, someone rolled him onto his back. The front of his shirt was a mess of blood. His eyes gazed dully upward. His mouth gaped and his expression was as if he had eaten something disagreeable. Someone lit a cigarette. Someone muttered, “Fucking bastard kraut.” One by one the men began to move away.
Heck looked at Conlee, and Conlee said, “Don’t look at me like that.”
Heck didn’t know where to move his eyes. They settled on gazing at the German again. He said, “He’s dead.”
Conlee knelt and probed the German’s pockets. He pulled out a few folded papers, which he glanced through, then dropped. He said, “If the kraut had missed Obie, we would have sent him back as a prisoner. But he didn’t miss and Obie is dead and now the fucking kraut is dead and that’s justice as far as I see it.” Conlee cleared his throat and spat on the corpse. “You see it different?”
The German’s eyes were a shade of blue-green that reminded Heck of the sea and made him think of sitting on the cliff with Claire. Blood oozed from the German’s chest and stomach. He looked to be about Heck’s own age, and he might easily have come from some Iowa town, as Heck had, except for the uniform. Conlee’s spit had landed on the dead man’s neck and glistened there. Heck looked away and thought of how Obie had stiffened when he was shot. He said, “No.”
But Conlee bore a look of philosophy now, as if he had forgotten Heck. He said, with great equanimity and something like longing, “Fuck.” He shouldered his bag and set off after the others. Heck followed. The bodies were left where they lay for Graves Registration to find.
The BAR man carried the German sniper’s rifle with him for several hundred yards along the trail, then, suddenly, he turned and with a howl and a step toward the trees he hurled the gun like a spear. Somewhere, invisibly, it rattled among the branches.
Heck found himself thinking of his father’s pale hands and veined wrists, the reassuring clatter of his mother in the kitchen in the morning, her popovers, fresh from the oven, puncturing them with a fork and the steam releasing. He felt exhausted and ancient and absurdly young. He thought of how his father tended to look at him sidelong, rarely straight on, unless Heck was in trouble for something—an infrequent occurrence. He thought of Obie’s family back home and felt bad for them. But after some miles his pity drifted toward the German. Obie had died without a moment to understand what had happened. But the German had understood that he was to die. Heck imagined the moment of fear before death to be worse than death itself. And the German, too, likely had a family that would mourn. Yet, simultaneously with these thoughts, Heck wondered if he should have fired his gun into the prisoner with the others.
He wanted out; he wanted to go back; he wanted to wake up.
That evening, as Heck was digging a new foxhole, a recent replacement, a dark-haired boy with freckles, pointed to a nearby log. He said, “Can I take that?”
“Sure,” Heck said.
The boy with the freckles bent and seized the piece of wood, and Heck had a sudden, brief view of the complicated pattern of tree branches against the sky as an explosion threw him.
He next became aware of a loud monotone—his ears ringing. He pushed himself up. The world had an odd, washed-out appearance. The boy who had picked up the log had vanished. A hand lay off to one side. A boot stood nearby. No arm-torso-leg connected these. Heck looked at himself and saw that he was whole. The ground was covered with a thick spray of blood and gristle. One would not have thought a single man could be broken into so many parts. “Booby trap!” someone shouted, absurdly late. Heck lay back and stared upward, seeing nothing.
The next day it snowed for the first time. It came down in fat flakes that flickered against the darkness of the woods and sat in small white piles on the pine boughs. There was something terrible in seeing so familiar and beautiful a thing as snow in a place such as this—it fell in the same color and shapes of snow he had always known, it fell in the same swirling patterns from the same gray clouds, yet everything it fell on was different. In the snow the men plodded like refugees. It fell thick and slantingly, making the world a narrow white-and-gray blur and accumulated rapidly across the ground and atop helmets and weapons. Heck and the others scuffed at it, for in its insubstantiality and pervasiveness it seemed to represent the accumulation of their misery and troubles.
But in a clearing was Pooch, and she was overjoyed by the snow and ran to and fro, tossing it with her nose and jumping to snap at the drifting flakes. The helmeted head before Heck said, “Look at old Pooch. Look at her.” And Heck, though he did not laugh, felt a little less unhappy.
That night the ground was already beginning to freeze and digging into it required an effort of chiseling and scraping with the blade of the entrenching tool. Heck’s fingers were numbing, feet numbing.
Two days later, patches of skin on his hands had begun to blacken. He still did not dare look at his feet. He was filthy and unshaven and he felt a profound hunger beyond any he had known before. They had little proper cold-weather gear; they cut head and arm holes into their sleeping bags so that they could be worn and draped themselves in white sheets for the bare measure of camouflage the cloth provided against the white landscape. The removal of corpses from the snow left distinctive yellow stains. When Heck dreamed he dreamed of white and stains and his dreams were always nightmares.
At one time he had expected that the war would go by like a snake whose tail he would eventually see, and that would be the end. But now he saw it to be more like a river that is always going by and of which one expects no end. One day he watched a GI urinate into the open mouth of a German corpse. The next day he entered a town recently abandoned by the Germans and found the body of an American soldier who had been literally crucified.
One night the lieutenant broke up his pairing with Conlee, and Heck shared a foxhole with a new replacement, a broad-shouldered boy, a steelworker’s son from Pennsylvania who seemed perfectly content with life in the war—he behaved like a union man nonchalantly going about his tasks among the blast furnaces. He claimed that the C- and K-rations tasted just fine, and when Heck had choked half of his down and prepared to toss the remainder away, the new kid took the stuff and ate it without hesitation. He did not complain about the mud; he did not complain about the cold. He told cheerful little stories about his childhood, about sledding into trees or playing football with a pumpkin or catching very large fish with his father. Then the sergeant came around and told them to be ready to move out at first light the next day, and when the sergeant had gone the new kid said, “Tomorrow, I’m not going. I’m done. I’m staying here. I like it here.”
Heck looked around their hole in the frozen mud. He said, “You can’t stay; they’ll arrest you.”
“Fine.”
“Then you’ll rejoin us?”
“No. I’m done.”
“That’s desertion.”
“I’d rather call it being done.”
“They’ll shoot you.”
“No, they won’t.”
“Deserters are shot.”
“That’s what they tell you, and theoretically they could. But you’ve got to look at it from a historical perspective.”
“You don’t think it will happen.”
“I did my research, before shipping out. No one has been shot or otherwise executed for military desertion since the Civil War. No one. Eighty years. You think no one in the Africa or Italy campaigns deserted? You think not a single American in the entire First World War ever ran away? Of course they did. It happens all the time. The deserter might face court-martial and might be sentenced to be shot, but, historically, the sentence is always commuted. At worst, maybe they’ll put me in prison. For how long? Maybe they’ll keep me there for two or three years after the end of the war before they get tired of me and kick me out into the street.”
“But they could shoot you.”
“But they won’t. This war will be over inside a year. Say I sit in jail for maybe another three years after that, I’ll do four years’ time altogether. That’s a hell of a lot better than losing a leg or meeting a kraut bullet with my forehead, which are the only other ways I’m going to get out of this war. I mean, look around.”
Heck felt unhappy and vaguely insulted. He said, with little conviction, “I should report you.”
The Pennsylvanian laughed hard and said, “Please do. I would enjoy that, really I would. Please report me.”
During the night Heck pondered this option, knowing he could not avail himself of it, uncertain why. He thought of his father in a more concrete way than he had in a long time. He tried to guess the temper of the silence his father would offer if Heck deserted. It was strange to think of his father, in Iowa, still putting together a newspaper every day, to think there were lives unchanged. He touched the silver of the music box.
The next day the Pennsylvanian was gone. The lieutenant asked Heck if he knew what had happened to the man, and Heck shook his head.
When the lieutenant was killed that evening—he was sitting on a tree stump somewhat in front of their position, waiting for an overdue patrol to come back, when a sniper shot him through the heart—everyone said it was a damned shame but why was he sitting out there anyway? There was dark comfort in the remembered foreknowledge that it had been bound to happen, sooner or later.
Unfortunately, positioned as the lieutenant was, no one dared go retrieve his body. The snipers were brutal, the body bait in a trap. So the lieutenant sat there, his hand raised to the top of his head as if rubbing his scalp thoughtfully. In the cold his face hardened with an expression of disdainful surprise, the look of someone attacked with a childish insult. From where Heck peered out of his hole the lieutenant could be seen easily. It was a relief when, the following night, a strong wind came up and the body fell out of sight. A new lieutenant arrived, and word came around, in tones both ironic and incredulous, that the new man didn’t appear nervous at all.
The new lieutenant ordered a nighttime “probe”—which meant, as Conlee explained it, wandering around until shot at, then running away. The noncoms argued against it, explaining that the snipers here had been particularly active. But the lieutenant would not back down. Such was the situation, anyway, that the sergeant described to Heck, Conlee, and Zeem as the four of them set out. They wandered around in the dark for several terrifying hours. Heck’s hand strayed repeatedly to the silver music box in his pocket, always suspecting that this would be his last opportunity to touch it. Yet, incredibly, they encountered no one. As they were returning Conlee observed that their lack of casualties was beyond explanation. He seemed quite aggrieved at the lack of casualties.
They had spread out as they neared their holes in the first pallid light of day, and Heck had lost track of the others when he seemed to see a movement very near the company’s position. He stood still a minute, but saw nothing more. He began to inch forward, thinking perhaps it had been nothing, or a movement of the wind, when he saw it again, low to the ground. With his battered heart whacking itself against his ribs, he checked the safety on his rifle and crept forward. It crossed his mind that if he could eliminate one of the snipers he would be something of a hero.
As he came closer he realized he was very close indeed to the position that they had been dug into for several days now—the movement he had seen was approximately where the dead lieutenant’s body had been left.
Then he saw that it was the lieutenant himself moving, rolling slightly side to side and gently rattling the branches around him. Heck crept nearer. A figure was crouched awkwardly over the corpse. A German, Heck thought, looking for souvenirs or maps. After watching for a moment, with great slowness he crept ahead. He was surprised to note that he felt exhilaration. He wanted to kill this German.
But then he could see that it was nothing human at all, just some animal, seemingly headless. “Hey,” he whispered. “Hey.”
The thing backed up to extract itself—its head had been buried in the lieutenant’s gut. It was Pooch. She saw Heck and wagged her tail. She nosed the corpse and looked up as if inviting him to join her. Her muzzle was matted and dark with blood. “Hey, Pooch,” Heck said. “Whatcha doing, Pooch?” And the dog beat her tail about happily until he raised his rifle and fired.
The dog cowered low, tail tucked under her belly, whimpering. He had missed. He walked over and kicked the dog in the ribs. She ran off yowling.
He encountered Conlee peering around a tree with his rifle aimed from the hip. “I nearly killed you,” Conlee said. “Was that you?”
“Pooch was eating the lieutenant.”
“Shit.”
“I just scared her.”
“Fuck.”
Heck went back to his foxhole. He had fired at the dog without thinking. It bothered him that he had missed.
6.
HECK COULD NOT HAVE SAID WITH CERTAINTY WHETHER IT WAS the next day, or the day after that, or perhaps it was the same day that they pulled out and began trekking again. Somewhere, where they stopped to rest and eat, he sat moving his hand vaguely before him, fascinated by it and the movement: it was as if he were able to perceive along some new dimension and he were grasping for something there. Then there was an odd sound, like a passing diesel truck with a badly tuned engine, but overhead. The sky was an unsettling origin for such a sound, and instinctively he cowered a little. He peered into the sky and spotted an odd, fat airplane with stubby wings. Zeem was seated nearby, and Heck asked him, “What is it?”
“Buzz bomb. V-1. Going to London.” They watched it trundle across the sky. “Some fall short. Hear that noise cut out, get under cover. Things make a hell of a bang. Course sometimes they cut out then start up again. You never know.” Zeem shrugged. Slouching in a posture of exhaustion, he rubbed his face and took off his helmet.
“Hey,” said Heck. “What happened to your hair?”
Zeem felt at his head, then peered incredulously into the hollow of his helmet. He took out a fistful of loose hair. “Christ,” he said. “Is this mine?” He pulled more hair from his helmet, gathering it into his hands as though he were cupping water. “Shit,” he said. “Bald. I must look like you.”
Actually it looked worse, because the hair had come free in random clumps from here and there on the head, creating a crude patchwork of exposed pink flesh.
“Think I can get sent home? Pick up a Purple Heart?”
At the next stop, or perhaps it was during the next march on the next day, Heck moved a little away from the others to relieve himself. He stood at the base of a thick pine, devoid of branches to twenty-five or thirty feet up, and his urine steamed against the wood. He swayed side to side a little, watching the sheets of vapor ripple upward, and as he buttoned up he continued swaying, like a tree in a light wind. He closed his eyes and lifted his arms slowly up and down, a sensation familiar from years before, when he was a child and would convince himself of the feeling of flying. He was flying. He remembered his father taking him up by the feet and whirling him around so that the blood went into his head until it seemed his face would burst. He raised and lowered his arms. The cold air moved through his coat and against his skin.
