Some Faces in the Crowd

  Well, I handed Shapiro some sort of punishment, I forget just what it was now, but if I thought that was the last time I was going to have him in my hair, I was sadly mistaken. After we went to the staging area outside of London—I suppose there’s no point in maintaining security on it any longer, but I just got in the habit of forgetting the name—I must’ve had more trouble with Shapiro than with all my other men put together. Sergeant McCardle was always turning him in. I knew that McCardle had this prejudice of course, the one I referred to before, so I always checked personally to make sure that Shapiro was really guilty of McCardle’s charges. It was never anything big, you understand, just a string of irritating little things, taking his time to fall in, not keeping his weapons clean, going into places in town that were off limits and half a dozen other things I can’t remember at the moment. We made him stand extra guard duty, cut down his passes to town, even had him in the guardhouse for a few days, but nothing seemed to change Shapiro. I’m afraid McCardle, for all his prejudice, had pegged him right. A smart-aleck Jew-boy from Brooklyn.

  One Monday Shapiro failed to appear for morning muster. When he finally showed up, half a day AWOL on his week-end pass to London, I decided to get tough. I had him restricted to camp grounds for the duration of our training in England. We were working hard in those days and the boys counted pretty heavily on that thirty-six to London, but I was sick and tired of fooling with Shapiro.

  One Sunday I came back from London early in the afternoon to write up some reports. There was Shapiro sitting on a bench in front of the CP. It was drizzling a little, you know, English weather, and Shapiro was just sitting there with his hands in his pockets and his neck pulled in, as sad-looking a joker as you ever want to see. When he saw me he stood up and saluted, so it looked like this restriction deal wasn’t doing him any harm. “How are you getting along, Shapiro?” I said. “Lousy, sir,” Shapiro says. “I don’t know what to do with myself.”

  Well that was when I got the idea. As things turned out, it was one of the best ideas I had all the time I was in command of that company. “Why don’t you go out on the range and do a little target practice? It won’t do you any harm.”

  You see, Shapiro’s marksmanship was one of the company’s favorite jokes. He was the most hopeless shot I had ever seen, and believe me, in these days of civilian soldiers, I’ve seen some sad ones. So I told Shapiro that I would see to it that he got all the ammo he wanted if he spent his restricted week-ends out on the range.

  Well, Shapiro had nothing better to do, so he went to work. After a while he got to like it. I saw it myself because a month or so later when I was working on some more reports—that’s the only thing I don’t like about the army, those damn reports—I went out on the range to do a little shooting with my .45 and there was Shapiro banging away. He had improved about 500 per cent. Every Sunday for the next six weeks while the rest of the company were sitting on their tails in their favorite pubs, Shapiro was out there on that range getting better and better. By the end of May, Lieutenant Ainsworth told me Shapiro was high man in his platoon. And he was still practicing every spare minute he had. Damn, when I gave him that ammo, I really started something.

  About that time I could feel D-Day creeping up on us. I didn’t know the date or the hour yet, but I had been in the army too long not to feel something in the wind. So I called Shapiro in to see me and I said, “Shapiro, I’ve decided to lift the restriction on you. This Saturday at 1800, you will receive a thirty-six-hour pass with the other men of your company. But if you are one minute absent over leave, Monday morning, by God, I’m going to throw the book at you with everything I’ve got behind it.”

  Well, Shapiro went down to London and he must’ve had quite a week-end. Ainsworth ran across him in one club that Saturday night, playing the bass fiddle with a limey jazz band. And Sunday night he must have celebrated right on through till Monday morning. But Monday morning there was Shapiro right on the dot. I remarked to his squad leader, Sergeant McCardle, on the improvement in Shapiro’s behavior, as well as his amazing development as a marksman. But Mac still stuck to his guns. “Sir, if you’ll pardon me for saying it,” he said, “I still don’t think you can make a soldier out of a Jew-boy.”

  I didn’t think much about Shapiro those next few days. I had my own worries getting things ready for the move to the point of embarkation. We still hadn’t been given the date, but it didn’t take a West Point grind to know we had one foot on the boat. Then we went down to the coast, waited, got our LCI, and waited again until the fleet finally started forming up. But that is not what I wanted to tell you about. Let me tell you about Shapiro, and about McCardle, because in a way this story is about both of them.

  Our outfit went in at Omaha Beach. If any of you fellows were there you know what that means. If you weren’t there, you probably heard about it. Omaha was—well, it was the toughest thing the old Red One had hit yet, and if you remember the plums they picked for us in Africa and Sicily, you know what that means. The Jerries were all ready for us at Omaha, and they were looking down our throats and for a long long time that beach was so hot that I never will know how we managed to keep from getting pushed right back into the Channel. All we could do was dig in and hang on. The air was rattling with machine-gun fire and the Jerry artillery had us nicely spotted. It looked like we were going to have to sweat it out in those foxholes the rest of the war. All of a sudden I noticed somebody jump up about thirty-five yards in front of me. It was Shapiro. He was doing the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen on a battlefield. There didn’t happen to be any latrines on Omaha at the time, so Shapiro was standing up there making a beautiful target of himself, calmly taking down his pants and attending to nature with bullets and shells cracking all around him. I guess you’d have to see it to believe it. I think it did something to everybody who saw it. Hell, if that kid can squat up there and take his own sweet time about it, they seemed to say, I guess we can take a chance.

  When he was finished, he took off his helmet a moment, produced a ration packet of sanitary paper he had cached in the liner, then adjusted his uniform again, grabbed his M1 and ran forward. Everybody who saw Shapiro that day agreed with me that his work was magnificent.

  Battle conditions didn’t seem to have any effect on his shooting eye, except maybe to sharpen it a little. I was proud of every man in my company, but I don’t think I was prouder of anybody than I was of Shapiro. When we finally weathered that first storm and fought our way up off the beach, I made Shapiro our company sniper. Everybody agreed he was the best man for the job. Everybody except maybe McCardle. McCardle had to agree that Shapiro had become a very talented soldier, but he wasn’t sure how he’d stand up under the constant pressure. You see, McCardle had a prejudice, a set of preconceived notions as to how a fellow like Shapiro would operate, and once you get those notions in your head, it takes a lot of powder to blast them out.

  Anyway, Shapiro fought like a madman all the way across France. I could tell you a hundred things he did, but it would take too long. Well, maybe this will give you some idea. One time late last summer we were dug in for the night in a field near the Meuse in Belgium. About three A.M. Shapiro woke up and looked over the edge of his foxhole. Parked smack in front of him, with the muzzle of its .88 extending right over Shapiro’s foxhole, was an enemy tank, a Tiger. The funniest thing about it is that McCardle saw the whole thing, from his foxhole fifty or sixty feet away. Shapiro kept his head down and waited. He even tried not to breathe too loud, he told us later. It must have been a long wait for Shapiro, but finally the night began to lift. A few minutes later the first Jerry opened the hatch and climbed out. He was quickly followed by the rest of the crew. They were just climbing out for a morning stretch. They weren’t more than thirty feet from Shapiro. In slow motion, the barrel of Shapiro’s rifle inched over the edge of his foxhole. Even from where McCardle was, he could see that Shapiro’s hand was trembling. But when he squeezed the trigger, a German fell. The others wh
eeled in surprise.

  Shapiro had stopped trembling now, McCardle said. Before the tank crew knew what hit them, Shapiro had turned them all into “good Germans.”

  For that morning’s work, Shapiro got the silver star and a boost to buck sergeant. “What do you think of your Jew-boy now?” I asked McCardle. “I don’t know, sir,” said McCardle. “I could be wrong I guess, could be.” McCardle was a very stubborn Irishman.

  We crossed the German border and moved up to Aachen. How those Jerries hung onto Aachen! The weather was bad and we had to sleep out in the rain and the mud night after night, waiting for the Jerries to break. But they didn’t break. We figured we’d be in Aachen in a week, but a month went by and we hadn’t moved. The outfit was taking a terrible shellacking. Night and day. Never any rest. The casualties were bad, very bad, every day. It was beginning to look as if none of us would ever get into Aachen alive. Except for the patrols that sneaked in at night, of course. Shapiro was in on a lot of them and always did a good job. On one of his missions he was nicked in the leg, but went on to carry out his assignment. Another time he brought in a man who stepped on a mine on the way back. I don’t know how he managed it, the size of him, he just had it in him to be a very good soldier.

  One evening I called McCardle and told him I wanted him to lead a patrol in force, not just reconnaissance, but to try and knock out some Jerry machine-gun positions that were guarding the approaches to the city. McCardle was a second lieutenant now, filling the shoes of an officer we lost three or four weeks before. “You can pick your own men,” I told him. “Except for Shapiro. I want you to take Shapiro. He’s the best man we’ve got.”

  Twenty minutes later, McCardle returned. “I can’t take Shapiro, sir,” he said. He had a handkerchief tied around his fingers and blood was beginning to spread through. “Why not Shapiro?” I said. Everybody’s nerves were pulled pretty tight and I was a little sore. I thought maybe McCardle had fixed it so he wouldn’t have to take Shapiro.

  Then I found out what happened.

  McCardle had called Shapiro in to the company CP, a half-destroyed farmhouse, and given him the order. As soon as Shapiro heard what he had to do, he ran out of the house. McCardle followed him. Shapiro ran around the farmhouse into the barn, where some of the boys were bunking, scrambled up into the hayloft and pulled a blanket over his head. McCardle could see his shoulders shaking underneath it, could hear him sobbing. McCardle went into the loft after him and put his hand on Shapiro’s shoulder. Shapiro growled, like a wild animal, McCardle said, just like a wild animal, and shook his hand off. Then McCardle reached under the blanket for him. Shapiro made a horrible sound and bit McCardle’s fingers. That’s what the blood on the handkerchief was from.

  I went out to the barn to see if I could do anything with Shapiro, but he wouldn’t let me near him. Shapiro had had enough. He fought almost as hard against the medics as he had against the Jerries, but they finally got him down from the hayloft. That’s a hell of a way for a good man to have to leave his outfit, but that’s the way it is sometimes. Shapiro was a good man, but he had had enough.

  McCardle and I walked back to the house and I briefed him on his mission. We didn’t say anything more about what had happened until after he reported back early next morning. “Too bad about Shapiro,” I said. “Yeah,” he agreed. “No matter how good those Jew-boys are, guess they’re too high-strung for this business.”

  The battle for Aachen dragged on. All of us saw our buddies getting killed, the best officers gone, more men getting it every day. That’s when my platoon leaders came and told me they were afraid their men had had about enough. I knew from division G2 if we held out another week, two weeks, we were all right, because Aachen was too hot for the Jerries to hold forever. In fact, there were signs that some of the supermen were beginning to pull out. I decided to send another patrol down into town to find out just what was going on. I asked Lieutenant Ainsworth to send McCardle to me. In a few minutes Ainsworth came back with a funny look on his face. “I think you better come and talk to McCardle yourself, sir,” he said.

  I followed him down the steep wooden steps to the cellar. There was McCardle sprawled full length on the ground, stuffing his fingers into his mouth and sobbing like a baby. I put my hand on his arm and tried to reach him, but it wasn’t any good. He couldn’t stop crying. “I want Shapiro,” he was sobbing. “I want Shapiro, that poor little son-of-a-bitch Shapiro.”

  McCardle had had enough. It was a terrible thing to see this big tough Irishman gnawing on his fingers and crying as if his heart would break, but there was nothing you could do about it. He had had enough. We had to send him back next morning with some other Section 8’s.

  We finally got into Aachen, or what was left of Aachen, a couple of days later. But I was sorry to have to get there without McCardle and Shapiro. They were two of the best men I ever soldiered with.

  CROWD PLEASER

  THE GUY ON MY left was a regular. Every Friday night since I could remember, he had sat in that same seat on the aisle. He was broad and beefy-faced, with a high-blood-pressure complexion and a big mouth. He was powerfully built, despite the pot belly and spreading rump of middle age. The first night he sat next to me he bought me a beer, told me to keep him in mind next time I bought a new car, and handed me his card. Name was Dempsey. “Edward J. (Champ) Dempsey,” it said on the card. “No, no relation to Jack,” he chuckled. “We went to different schools together.”

  His voice, deep in his throat, always sounded as if he had a cold. The laughter with which he punctuated everything he said was open-mouthed and prolonged, loud and unmusical. He had a ridiculous pride in his ability to keep up a running patter of public speech throughout any fight.

  Years before he had appointed himself a sort of one-man claque to urge the fighters on to bloodier efforts, and whenever the boys in the ring decided to take it a little easy, coasting a round or feeling each other out, his throaty witticisms would pierce the dark and smoky silence: “Turn out the lights, they want to be alone!” or “Hey, girls, can I have the next dance?” Or if one of the boxers happened to be Jewish, he was quick to show what a linguist he was by yelling, “Hit him in the kishges,” or display his knowledge of geography by shouting, “Send him back to Jerusalem!”

  The fellow who always sat on my right was George Rogers, a big-money lawyer, but his seat was empty tonight. “Well, looks like our old friend George is playing hooky tonight, ha ha ha,” Dempsey said. Rogers was a white-haired old-timer who hardly ever said a word to either of us. Dempsey had been trying to sell him a car since early last summer.

  Just before the first preliminary boys climbed through the ropes, the usher led to Rogers’ seat a fellow I had never seen before. He was short, thin, nervous, somewhere in his middle thirties, but already beginning to stoop from the waist like a much older man. His skin was pallid, he wore glasses, and he needed only the green eyeshade to become my stereotype of a bookkeeper.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said as he squeezed by. “I am sorry to disturb you.”

  That wasn’t what they usually said when they shoved past you at the Arena. Dempsey looked at him the way a gang leader eyes a new kid who has just moved into the block.

  “Where’s my old pal George tonight?” he wanted to know.

  The man was shy and his answer came in a thin voice. “Mr. Rogers is out of town on business, sir. He was good enough to give me his ticket.”

  “You in Rogers’ office?” Dempsey appraised him with salesman’s eyes.

  The newcomer said yes, not too encouragingly, but it was enough for Dempsey to lean across me and display his professional smile. “Dempsey’s the name. What’s yours, fella?”

  “Glover,” the fellow said, but he did not seem very happy about it.

  “Glover!” Dempsey shuffled quickly through thousands of calling cards in his mind. “Used to know a Charley Glover back in K.C. fifteen years ago. Any relation to old Charley?”

  “I’ve never ha
d any relatives in the Middle West,” Glover answered.

  “Well, I won’t hold it against you, ha ha ha,” Dempsey said. “Here, have a cigar.”

  Dempsey leaned across me to hand it to him. He hadn’t offered me a cigar since the night I told him to stop trying to sell me a car, and let him know why.

  Glover said he didn’t smoke cigars, and Dempsey lit his, igniting the match with a flick of his thumbnail. “So you work for Rogers, huh,” he went on. “Well, George is a very, very good friend of mine. What are you, a junior partner?”

  “Oh, no,” Glover said, and something that was almost a smile lit his face for a moment, as if at the impossibility of such a suggestion. “I am a stenographer.”

  Dempsey’s smile, or rather, his clever imitation of a smile, wiped from his face mechanically, like a lantern slide. When he abandoned it suddenly like that, his face looked even more bloated and aggressive than usual.

  “A stenographer! Ha ha ha. Are you kidding?”

  “Mr. Rogers has employed nothing but male stenographers for over thirty years.”

  Dempsey looked disgusted and turned away.

  The boys in the curtain raiser were entering the ring.

  There was scattered applause for Sailor Gibbons, a rugged, battle-scarred veteran who had never graduated from the preliminary ranks. He bounded through the ropes with showy vigor and winked at a friend in the working press as he shuffled his feet in the rosin box. He was an old-timer getting ready to go to work, easy to hit but hard to stop, what the tub thumpers like to call a “crowd pleaser.”