“Yeah, once,” I said. “Once.”
St. Lo seemed to be some kind of curse we all had to face. From the first day we had struggled across the beach we were told that our eventual objective would be a dot on a map called St. Lo. They kept giving us estimates on when we would reach it and sending men across the fields and across the hedgerows to get there. And all we did was go back and forth and leave dead men for markers along the way.
I remembered what Mink had said, about how many feet we would make for each death, and tried again to push his words out of my consciousness.
I wanted to think about Coney Island. Not about the march toward St. Lo, not about the Germans waiting for us, or Freihofer, or the prisoner we questioned. I wanted my mind to be a thousand miles away. And I knew it wouldn’t be, probably that it would never be.
I went to Coney Island with a girl I met in art school, Tina Aumack. She was a flirt, with a wide smile, a potty mouth, and a big chest that she liked to rub on any man who got near her. We had tried the bumper cars for an hour and then switched to the merry-go-round, with Tina sitting on my lap. She was hoping to get me excited, I guess.
She had.
I had an hour to go before we were to start out, and I decided to write a letter.
Dear Vernelle,
Things are going well here. We are advancing steadily, but slowly. There is no reason to rush as long as we get the job done, and everybody more or less agrees to that. How are things at home? Sometimes I find myself thinking about home and I can’t seem to remember as much as I want to, even about places I knew very well. I hope the people in town are not fearful for us. It must have been a shock to get news of our landing. We have calmed down since then and are hoping for the best.
Every day I am hoping to hear the news that the Germans have surrendered. It would be a wise thing for them to do, but from my point of view people don’t often do wise things in war.
Again, I am hoping that my writing to you does not put a burden on you. Supporting the home front must be difficult enough as it is. Most of what I know about the war is from the newspapers even though I am in the middle of the whole thing. What I see is that our guys have entered Cherbourg, which is a really big deal because it is the biggest seaport around and the Krauts really wanted to hang on to it. It seems that when we find out what they want we make sure to take it from them.
I am trying to think of what I will do after the war. Do you know what you want to do? Are you going to stay in Bedford? There is so much about you that I would like to know.
Yours truly, Josiah Wedgewood
I already knew that I wouldn’t send the letter. There was nothing in it about what I really wanted to say. If it was in there, I would be saying that I need somebody to care for, and maybe somebody who would be waiting for me when I got home. I hadn’t said any of that. What I thought, maybe what I knew, was that I was going to have to learn to be a civilian one day.
We were moving out. It was still light out and would be until a little after nine.
There was a steady stream of our bombers passing us overhead. I was glad the Germans didn’t have much of an air force left. Their artillery was bad enough. A thought popped into my head, and I tried to ignore it. I checked my ammo, taking out the clips and tapping them against the stock of my rifle as I walked, the way I had seen Stagg do once. My legs were tired, but they would run if they had to, or jump or leap into whatever safety my eyes saw, or thought they saw. My reactions weren’t thought out anymore, they just happened. That was good, I thought. For now. But would I always have the right reaction? What if I needed to think? Could I do it?
Push it away. Think about Helmut working on his farm in Bavaria. Remember the pictures of Bavaria that you’ve seen over the years. Hills in the background, azure skies, sunlight gleaming white against the snow-crested hills, the intense green of the crops. What color would hops be this time of year? Pale green with low plants that don’t yet need support for the fall harvesting.
I forced myself to think of Helmut working with his two brothers. If they were like Americans on a small hops farm, then their mother worked along with the men part of the time and kept the house. What did she think when the Nazis talked about taking the boy? What did she think when all of her sons went off to war?
We were making our way through a small wood because the Germans had the roads zeroed in. Every once in a while a shell hit close by, and we knew that it was meant to keep us guessing. If we walked the roads they would hit us, and then they would send random shells for the areas between the roads. Headquarters Company had sent around a memo that the German artillery was being directed from St. Lo. I didn’t believe it. I thought the Germans were a bunch of superhuman freaks who knew our every movement and a hundred ways of killing us.
As I walked I imagined German plots to trap us, and I was sure that I was completely right. We walked through the forest and it was growing dark. When Milton stopped us, I thought we must’ve been within two miles, perhaps less, of the village.
“Take ten!” Milton called out. “Keep the butts covered. Remember the three-man rule!”
If a Kraut sees a man light up a cigarette, he picks up his rifle. He zeroes in toward the light as the second man lights up. The third man is killed.
Freihofer sat next to me. I wanted him to move, but I didn’t want to say it.
“I don’t want to look at these people as human beings, Wedgewood.” Freihofer ran delicate fingers across his forehead. “I just want to see them as the enemy. That’s it. I don’t mean to give you a hard time, but I’m looking at the best way to be to get myself home in one piece. You get my drift?”
“Yeah, I do,” I answered. “No hard feelings, man.”
“Good,” he said, extending his hand.
We shook hands, and it looked as if he had started to relax a little.
“You worried about St. Lo?” I asked him. Stupid remark, just something to say.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Freihofer asked.
“What?”
“Lindell is the center for the Yankees, right? Probably the best center fielder they’ll ever have,” Freihofer said. “But they win more games when he doesn’t hit than when he does. They played the Cleveland Indians the other day. Their whole team — the Indians — is crap except for the shortstop, some clown named Lou Boudreau. You tell me how a shortstop is not 1-A and headed for the infantry — but their whole team is crap and the Yankees beat them 4–0 on the sixth. Lindell doesn’t get one hit and they win. And he’s the cleanup hitter! How do you figure that?”
“Who knows?” I said. The question had come out of nowhere, and I didn’t have an answer. I remembered Stagg saying that Freihofer was trying to prove something. What the hell did Lindell, standing in a patch of green out in center field of Yankee Stadium, have to do with anything?
I thought, What is Freihofer pushing out of his mind?
As we rested I could hear our artillery in the background. The air was growing heavy and little wisps of smoke settled among the trees as the sun set.
I didn’t want to talk to Freihofer anymore. I didn’t want to hear his reasons for acting stupidly, or for hitting the prisoner.
I didn’t want to think about Helmut, either, but the thoughts kept pushing through my head. It was like a headache I was trying to ignore. It was there and it wasn’t going to go away. Had they killed Helmut? Had they always planned to kill him?
I remembered sitting in infantry basic listening to a droning lecture on the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The lecturer, a major, kept up a monotone for over an hour about how serious the Army was about discipline and following the rules of the Geneva Convention.
Freihofer was coping, trying to get by. Helmut had been coping, but he had had the misfortune of being captured. First, in a way, by the Germans. Then by us.
I thought of the farm he had lived on, and of his brothers. What did they look like? In my mind I brought up a pleasant scene, the kind none
of the kids I had met at Cooper Union had seen because New York kids were too sophisticated. In the scene there was a broad sky interrupted by majestic Bavarian hills. Maybe there would be some livestock in the foreground. It would be a bright, sunny scene with little contrast and less meaning unless you found truth in the optimism of simple people doing simple things.
At 2145, less than an hour after sunset, all hell broke loose. The woods behind us lit up with gunfire.
Shooting in the daylight is scary. Some guys aim carefully, picking their targets; others just shoot in the general direction of the enemy. Shooting at night is insane. You can’t see your target; all you see is an occasional silhouette and the sudden light from a muzzle flash. If you see the flash and you’re not hit, you might survive. If someone sees your muzzle flash they have to shoot at it. In the dark, we are all enemies.
“Everybody down!” Captain Milton called out. “Keep your ears open.”
I was on my knees. Alone in the dark and terrified, listening to the sound of my own heartbeat. The quick pop-pop-pop of rifles and the burping noises of the machine guns slowed to an occasional flurry. The night was a beast coughing in the darkness. Nobody knew who was shooting unless they were shooting, and nobody knew who they were shooting at — only the dying knew for sure.
We waited for minutes. Then there was a rustle near me. Frozen, I gripped the stock of my M1 as tightly as I could. The rustle stopped. Was it a breeze?
Voices. American by the cursing. Milton was up and telling us to move forward. I heard him on the radio, trying to find out what the shooting was about.
“A cow got loose,” he said. “It came crashing through the hedgerow.”
“They kill it?” Gomez’s voice seemed higher now that I couldn’t see him.
“Yeah,” Captain Milton said. “I guess they did.”
“Hey, Headquarters Company is looking for an artist! Anybody here know how to draw?” A thin, redheaded corporal stood facing us on the chow line.
“Look how clean this guy is,” Petrocelli said. “We wouldn’t even let him into Hoboken looking like that.”
“What’s up?” Captain Milton asked.
“General Gerhardt wants somebody who can draw a map,” the corporal said.
“Woody, you want to give it a try?” Milton asked. “You went to art school, right? I’ll make sure they save you some food.”
“Draw a path out of here,” Gomez added. “Just in case they forgot where home is.”
“Hey, Woody, I knew a guy who worked for Keuffel and Esser on Hudson Street in Hoboken,” Petrocelli said. “He was in World War I, and they took him out of the trenches to be an artist. This could be your ticket home.”
I followed the corporal over to Headquarters Company. He was clean, as Petrocelli said. And a little stupid. He asked me if I didn’t think the guys could have cleaned up a little.
“We’re waiting for our other suits to come back from the cleaners,” I said. Then said it again in my head but with a few curse words in it.
In the tent I saw Major Johns along with General Gerhardt. Johns asked me if I was a real artist.
“I guess,” I said.
“If you’re not the real McCoy, you’d better go back to your outfit,” he said, smiling.
Gerhardt came over and looked me up and down like he was inspecting me. As far as I was concerned, he was a hard-ass and I didn’t like him.
“I need to show the men what they’ve been fighting for and where they’re going,” he said finally. “I have a small map that contains every small town and village in Normandy. What I need is to blow it up with only the towns I tell you to put in it. You follow that?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes, sir!”
It was an easy job. Gerhardt had a large sheet of white paper I would use to draw on, and all I had to do was put a grid on it to get the proportions right. I took the map to a table they had cleared off for me and sat down. Gerhardt sat next to me and started explaining what I would be doing. He smelled like tobacco.
“This is the Cotentin Peninsula,” he said. “The Krauts have bottled us up here since we landed. All of our supplies are coming in through Cherbourg, and that’s not easy. But the main thing is that we’re fighting through this damned hedgerow country, which is nothing but defensive terrain. We need to break out into the open country and then we’ll see what the Germans can do. And they’ll see what we can do.
“We take St. Lo, cut off this peninsula, and we’re on our way to the Seine. I need to explain this to the men in clear and certain terms. You need to draw me the map I need to pull it off. Got it?”
“Got it, sir.”
What Gerhardt was saying made sense, but I was shocked to see how close we still were to the beaches we had landed on. The distance from Omaha to where we were was less than the distance between Bedford and Roanoke. My father had driven us down to Roanoke in less than an hour to go shopping.
The map was easy to do, but I took my time and made sure that it was as accurate as possible. Gerhardt watched me closely, sometimes grunting his approval. When I finished he offered me a cigar, which I took even though I didn’t smoke.
Back with the company, I told the guys what I had done.
“How’s it looking?” Gomez asked. “They sound confident up there?”
“They’re not the ones taking the ground,” Captain Milton said before I could answer. “We’re the ants crawling over these damned maps.”
It was a good image: a bunch of tiny ants crawling over a map of Normandy.
It was raining when Mink and I went on patrol. We had to go eighty yards out and along the hedgerow to see if the Germans were trying to sneak up on us during the night. Usually they didn’t come at night, but once in a while they did just to keep us loose.
“Woody, you think you could be an officer?” Mink asked.
“We’ll all be officers by the time this thing is over,” I said. “How many guys do you think will have to die before we take out the Germans?”
“Before we reach the Seine?”
“Gerhardt thinks it’s going to be easy,” I said.
“‘The red fool-fury of the Seine, Should pile her barricades with dead,’” Mink said.
“What the hell did you say that for?” I asked.
“Tennyson, poet laureate of England, wrote it,” Mink said. “It’s about a friend of his who died at twenty-two. Kind of a bitter poem, and strange. He was probably drunk when he wrote it.”
“He drank a lot?”
“I don’t know.” Mink’s face broke out into a wide grin. “But since he’s not here to defend himself …”
I liked Mink a lot. It was nice imagining his head being full of poetry and literature that he could call up at any moment. The thought came to me that the difference between people was not so much what they did but what they carried around in their heads. Whenever Mink opened his mouth something interesting came out, and I could imagine him getting old and people gathering around him just to hear what he had to say.
What was going around in my head wasn’t much. It wasn’t that I didn’t have anything inside; it was just that I was tired of thinking when what we had to keep our minds on was staying alive.
We walked the patrol, up one side of the hedgerow and down the other. One time I thought I heard something.
“What is it?” Mink asked.
“Do you hear anything?”
What it sounded like was somebody snoring. It could have been an animal, or it could have been a German who had fallen asleep on his patrol. Or maybe even an American from a different outfit who was sleeping out in the fields. Either way, if it was a soldier and we scared him, there would probably be some shooting, and someone getting killed.
Mink tapped me on the shoulder and made some motions with his fingers that we should get the hell out of there. We did.
0500. An officers’ briefing. Everyone down to major was called in, and Gerhardt explained our mission t
o them. Then they explained them to us. They had seen my map and ran it down just the way Gerhardt had explained it to me.
“Patton’s going to be in this one!” a colonel said. “He’s got his tanks down from Cherbourg and they’re ready. The Brits and Canadians are getting ready for a big show near Caumont. That’s where the Germans are concentrating their defense. They’ll take on the Krauts there and tie them up while Patton swings around them. It’s going to be great!”
We were to push off toward St. Lo again at 0800.
We had chow, and then about ten Canadians came into camp. They were full of piss and vinegar and wisecracks.
“We heard you boys needed some help over here,” one of them, a big broad-faced guy with a ruddy face, said. “And since a soldier’s duty is to fight and take care of the local ladies, we thought we’d let you fight, and we’ll take care of the lady problem. Keep your heads clear for the job ahead.”
“Did you bring any food with you?” Petrocelli asked.
“Naw, we order out!” said a skinny soldier with a faded uniform who was squatting near the small fire we had built. “We thought you Americans were catering!”
“Tell them about the Yank food truck we found,” a small Canadian with bad teeth said.
“We were coming down from Cherbourg, through the bloody hedgerows, and catching it pretty hard,” the skinny one said. “There was a lull in the fighting, and we were about ready to call it a night when we heard a truck coming down the road as big as you please. We looked and it was a Yank truck, so we relaxed.
“Only it was a Yank truck that the Germans had captured. The guy driving the truck was so happy with himself that he took a wrong turn and drove right up to us. There were two Jerries in the back, and they were back there going through your food like it was Christmas in Berlin. We captured them and your truck. Now the big deal is whether we should take them back to Britain or send them out to get another Yank truck because — to tell you the truth — the food wasn’t half bad!”