Articles of War, page 6
The sergeant called, “You okay, kid?”
“I’m fine!”
“That wasn’t pretty.”
“I’m all right.”
“Hold on to your socks. We’ll fetch you out.”
Heck felt embarrassed at the prospect of waiting for a rescue. He peered about. He might be able to climb up to the place where he had fallen in, but it looked precarious and could drop him again. Before him one wall had collapsed against another to form a narrow triangular opening. Possibly there would be some upward access through there. Above, the soldiers were laughing at something. Most likely him.
He began crawling forward, but soon regretted it. The situation reminded him of the cave in the cliff, and he thought of Claire and felt a guilty confusion. He could not see where he was putting his hands, and probing blindly forward he anticipated, again and again, the sensation of his fingers sinking into a dead man’s mortal wound. The scratch on his leg bothered him. Then, however, he saw light ahead, and he moved faster and faster toward it.
As he crawled out into the light, he saw before him a staircase, only half-collapsed, which he could easily climb to the street level. It was a very happy surprise. He stood and straightened his shoulders and marched up to the street. He found himself behind the two soldiers he had been talking to—they were moving cautiously across the rubble toward the place where Heck had fallen in. The sergeant, in the lead, had picked up a long piece of wood that he used to probe the rubble. Heck took a moment to gather himself before calling, “Hey. I’m here.”
The two turned and stared. There was a silence. Heck, discomforted, said, “I crawled out.”
The sergeant laughed. The man with the rifle grimaced. The sergeant threw his stick aside, and they both started back. When they were nearer, Heck saw that they were filthy, arms and faces gray with grime. The one with the rifle had dark hair and a cauliflower ear and he finally slung his weapon over his shoulder. The sergeant had perhaps a week’s beard and light blue eyes that made a striking contrast against the dirty flesh around them. The top of his helmet was blackened as if it had been turned over and used for a pot. Into the front of his belt was tucked a German Luger. His boots were crusted with what looked like dried blood. “So you think you’re lost?” he said. “Who are you with?”
“Twenty-eighth Division, sir. One hundred and ninth Infantry. But I never found them.”
“You’re a replacement?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well, you found your division. We’re Twenty-eighth Division, Hundred and tenth Infantry. Your unit’s ahead, crossed the river last night. You’re a fucking mess, aren’t you. Is that your blood?”
Heck peered down at himself, his arms, hands, stomach. He was dirty, but he didn’t see blood until the sergeant gestured with the toe of his boot at Heck’s shin: oozing through the grime on his pants was a glistening dark redness between the knee and ankle of his left leg. Heck bent and tugged his pant leg up. His leg was split open by a gash some six inches long. He touched the wound with his fingers—it was an inch or an inch and a half deep. The sight seemed unreal to Heck, as though this were somehow someone else’s leg; he had never seen such a leg attached to himself before. He couldn’t think how it had happened, unless he had hit something when he’d fallen a moment before. The cloth of his pants wasn’t even torn, and he still didn’t feel any more pain than he would if he had scratched himself on a thorn.
“Looks like you’ll be headed straight back,” said the sergeant. “Congratulations.”
“Sir?”
“It hurt?” asked the sergeant.
“No, sir, actually.”
“I bet it will soon enough.” He produced a large, stained handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around Heck’s leg. “Come on, let’s get a medic to look at you. Keep your head down as we’re moving. We’re still trying to smoke out a sniper or two down this way.” He put an arm around Heck’s shoulders and led him down the street several blocks and around a corner to where an empty jeep stood parked in a shadowed alley. A sudden explosion caused Heck to flinch. Black smoke curled out of a broken window frame a block down the street. “Grenade,” the sergeant commented. “Hopefully got him.” A moment later a series of rifle shots echoed along the street, and the sergeant nodded in satisfaction. He helped Heck into the jeep’s passenger seat. “Wait here. Find cover if you think it necessary.”
Then he left.
Heck waited nervously. His hands trembled. He sat on them and put his injured leg up on the dash. He waited half an hour or so before a medic with a red cross on his helmet came and untied the handkerchief and looked at the wound. “You’re lucky you didn’t slice any muscle. How’d you do it?”
“I fell.”
“Cut yourself on something?”
“I guess. I didn’t really notice.”
“That can happen when the adrenaline is up.”
“Still doesn’t feel like much.”
“You’re lucky.” The medic tightly rewrapped the wound with clean bandages, then walked on down the street, lighting a cigarette as he went.
Over the next couple of hours, two more men arrived. One had had his foot run over by a truck. The other had sliced his hand open with a gilt silver-and-gold Nazi dagger while cutting potatoes for lunch. He was nonetheless very pleased with the dagger and showed it around. He said he’d found it strapped to the ankle of a pair of kraut legs—torso, head, and arms nowhere to be seen. “Pays to check everything,” he said.
“Where are we at anyway?” Heck asked.
“Elbeuf. Scenic, fucked-up Elbeuf, on the scenic fucking River Seine.”
The man whose foot had been run over took out a package of Life Savers candies and shared them around.
Dusk was obscuring the sky by the time their driver arrived. He glanced at the three bandaged men with an expression of distant curiosity. “Hang on,” he said.
They jolted through several miles of twilight countryside and scenes alternately serene and war-blasted. With each jolt in the road the man with the crushed foot added a complaint to a long muttered monologue. They passed haltingly down what appeared to be an oxcart path. The sun vanished entirely. Heck had difficulty comprehending that an entire night and day had passed, a night and day in which he had been shelled, shot at, gotten lost, somehow gotten himself wounded, and now was being sent back again. They skirted scattered farms. The moon rose. Heck touched the silver of the music box in his pocket. On a dirt road through a wood they drove at high speed with only glimmers of moonlight to guide the way and ahead they could hear shouting and trucks.
They burst from the woods into a clearing and a scene of pandemonium. The driver braked and said, “This is the medical post. Here we are.” He looked at his wounded passengers as if he expected them to get out, which, dazed, they did.
A house was burning, casting everything in a quavering and uncertain light and sketching long black unsteady shadows over the ground. Someone was shouting about a spy, a saboteur. Trucks and jeeps roared away while others arrived. Men ran around, others limped, and some moved, supporting each other. More than a dozen men lay on the ground, on stretchers; several were screaming. The fire was rapidly consuming a corner of a large farmhouse, and it was spreading. Occasionally someone threw an ineffectual bucket of water at it. More men on stretchers were being passed hurriedly out a window of the house. The shadows of men and trucks and jeeps wobbled and leaped against the faint silver forms of the trees at the edge of the lawn. Smoke spilled upward from the flames, which were now moving over the roof. The heat pressed against Heck in waves. Someone yelled, “Grenade! Grenade!” and there was a general, frantic scattering away, then a muffled explosion. The frenzy renewed and an officer began shouting, “Who the fuck put a grenade in there? What the fuck are you people doing?” A pair of scrawny, bleating sheep wandered among the men lying on the lawn. The screams of the wounded were horrible. Much of the running around seemed to be without purpose, and even the ambulatory wounded hobbled around in senseless agitation, as though no one could bear to be stationary amid the excitement. But they were being slowly gathered into the trucks, and a part of what was going on, Heck now saw, was that a poorly organized bucket brigade was trying to carry water to the fire. People were running forward and back, handing empty and full buckets to one another—many of the buckets were actually upturned helmets. Meanwhile the trucks cut through the lawn, leaving long muddy gouges in the grass, and a stuck jeep spun its wheels, flinging mud over several of the wounded, who screamed invectives. A sudden wind fanned the flames to a roar and swirled a blanket of smoke around Heck that blinded him and set him coughing. When he had blinked his eyes clear, the jeep and the men he had arrived with had vanished.
Within all the confusion he noticed one man, small and prim-looking, who seemed relatively calm. He was a medical officer, moving methodically between the men on the ground, talking with them, checking pulses, examining wounds. Heck limped over and caught his arm. The medical officer shook Heck away irritably and moved to another stretcher. “What’s happening?” Heck asked, trailing after him.
The officer crouched over a man with his feet wrapped in so many bandages that he appeared to have volleyballs at the ends of his legs. Without looking up the officer said, “It wasn’t any Goddamn saboteur. I’ll tell you that. Overheated stove. I warned them.”
“What should I do?”
“You’re wounded?”
“I guess so. Yes.”
“Get on that truck over there.” The medical officer gestured vaguely and turned back to the man with the bandaged feet.
There were several trucks, arriving, leaving, parked. Heck started toward a pair of trucks stopped side by side that appeared to be taking on wounded soldiers. But before he got there a man with wild hair and smudges of soot on his face handed him a bucket and ran off. Heck, in surprise, looked into the bucket. It was empty. He trotted with it to the hand pump and gave it to someone there, who exchanged it for a helmet full of water, which Heck carried over toward the fire and handed to someone, who gave him an empty one in return, and so this went on. Heck soon lost track of how many helmets and buckets he had carried forward and back. His injured leg began to throb painfully with each step, but the pain seemed of little consequence and he continued carrying water despite the fact that the bucket brigade was obviously having a negligible effect on the fire and it seemed that everyone in the house had now been evacuated.
Suddenly someone gripped Heck by the shoulder and spun him around. It was the thin little medical officer he had spoken to earlier, and Heck sloshed half a bucket of water over him. The officer yelled, “The hell are you doing?” He took the bucket from Heck’s hands. “Let it burn. That’s the last truck. Get out of here.”
In the dark in the back of the truck Heck could see little of his companions. A pair of men on stretchers were slung up along one side. Others sat on the floor or on a bench along the opposite side. Heck pressed himself into a place between two warm, stinking bodies on the floor. The truck lurched forward, back, then forward again. Cold notes of wind hissed through the seams of the canvas shell around them.
The remainder of the night passed in a discomfort of bumping and pitching. Groans surrounded him, but quieted over time. Eventually Heck sensed more light, and peering out the back of the truck he saw a red sun coming up behind them. How the others could doze and sleep through the violence of the ride Heck did not understand. They were a filthy, mangled lot, and Heck had to suppose he looked no better himself. But they were moving away from the fighting, and recalling this created an irrepressible, lifting relief.
3.
A PRETTY NURSE WITH BLOODSHOT EYES ESCORTED HECK INTO a large brick warehouse. Its great open space had been converted into a hospital with rooms separated by curtains and crude wooden walls. In each room eight to a dozen men rested on narrow beds arranged with just enough passage between them for doctors and nurses to perform their duties. From where Heck was placed he could reach in either direction and touch the shoulder of a neighbor. The warehouse ceiling soared high over the makeshift walls of the hospital, so every sound echoed in that high open dim space and the disquiet of suffering resonated as if in a cathedral. Nonetheless, Heck had hardly slept in the past two nights and now he slept.
He was woken by a doctor with an enormous, block-shaped head. He gave Heck’s leg a cursory inspection, talked through a drooping, unruly mustache. “Who sent you here? This should have been taken care of at the unit aid station. They should have put a few sutures in this and bandaged it and kicked you back toward the krauts. I don’t want you here taking up a bed with a scrape like that.”
“Yes sir,” Heck said. “The station was on fire, sir.”
“Nothing else wrong with you? No trench foot? No pain in your kidneys? Headaches? No combat fatigue?”
“No sir.”
The doctor snorted, horselike, and made a note on his clipboard.
Again Heck slept. He was woken by an orderly peeling the bandage off his leg. Seeing him awake, the orderly said, “How’d you do this?”
“I don’t know. I think I just fell down.”
The orderly laughed. “Well, you’re a lucky one. Put a few stitches in there, watch you a little while to make sure there’s no infection, and get you back into the Grand Tour. How’s that sound?”
“All right,” Heck said, although he felt small desire to be in fighting shape again. The shots of anesthetic put in before the stitches turned out to be the most painful aspect of his wounding. The stitches were sewn in where he lay.
He remained for two nights in the hospital ward, and he observed that most surgeries were conducted in a separate, curtained room, and the sallow-eyed men around him who were carried there returned bearing long swaths of sutures across purpled flesh or returned without a part of themselves or returned not at all. Heck soon felt absurd and embarrassed to be lying on his bed with his meager, nearly painless injury while here and in the thinly walled spaces around him lay men who had lost limbs, whose several orifices would not stop bleeding, who ground their teeth as if eager to be rid of them, or who lay so still and pale that Heck would have thought they were dead if the nurses and doctors had not continued to come by and tend to them.
He contemplated his behavior in Elbeuf with unhappiness. Even now he could not allow himself to think directly of the time spent in that foxhole under the bombardment because the fear began to return over him and his muscles began to tremble. In angry moments he did not feel responsible for his own actions: he had hoped to do the right thing, but his efforts had been superseded by forces beyond his control. And yet he was often overwhelmed by a sense of shame at his cowardice, and he could only lie suffering beneath this feeling like piled stones.
It was a relief when he was ordered out of the hospital, into an arrangement of tents nearby holding those deemed ready for reassignment. The tents were drafty and set in ankle-deep mud that one traversed on wooden planks laid out in somewhat haphazard paths, but still Heck preferred this to the warehouse with its inventory of the dying and the maimed. Here at last he could see sunlight again. Here, although he shared his tent with seven others, he could at least sleep without the regular interruption of screams. He walked already with only a very slight limp and hardly any discomfort. And again he found himself with long openings of unsupervised hours.
Whenever someone asked how he had received the wound he said, “I don’t know” and left it at that. He found that the other soldiers did not press him. He supposed they imagined some horrible, unspeakable experience, and he did not mind such a misunderstanding so long as it caused the questioning to end.
There really did not seem to be any reason why he could not go back to the front. His stitches had closed the wound and it had scabbed over and he had regained complete mobility, more or less. But he received no orders, and Heck was reluctant to seek an explanation or to remind anyone of his presence, although he felt he should and at times even decided he would but then put it off. Within him, the desire on the one hand to redeem his sense of honor conflicted with the still dense memory of his fear. Between these he was suspended in a state that looked like passivity. Also, his thoughts often returned to Claire and the events in the cave. He experienced the physical sensations again and ventured toward how it would have been if they had gone on to consummation. He created entanglements of memory and fantasy so vivid that an outside noise would startle him, breathless, from the reverie.
He considered scenarios by which he might meet Claire again one day. He might marry her, teach her English, move with her back to the States. He entertained the idea that he was in love with her. Then the tragic fact that he would likely never see again the girl that he was in love with consumed him and he imagined that once the war ended he might spend the rest of his days wandering up and down France, searching with only the faintest sense of hope, the loss of his great love heavy in him.
What came back most vividly and often was the feel of her skin under his fingers, that smooth warmth, but occasionally now that memory shifted terrifyingly, especially when he lay nearly asleep, to the feel of the dead man in Elbeuf. In the horrible moment of that shift he could believe he had found her wounded, that she was dead, that he had killed her.
Even more quiet than Heck was the boy on the cot beside him.
One of the others mentioned in passing that the boy’s name was Quentin. Quentin could not have been more than eighteen years old, and if someone had told Heck that Quentin was fifteen, Heck would have believed it. Thin and small, with pale blond hair and smooth translucent skin that showed all the blue veins beneath, Quentin spent most of his time writing letters and nursing between his long thin fingers a cigarette, rarely drawing on it. Often the cigarette would burn all the way down before he inhaled once off the stub, then ground it out and lit another.
