A Special Providence

  When they came to the corner of an intersection Agate stopped, motioning for his men to stop too and stay close to the wall. Then he beckoned for the Second Platoon to come forward: evidently the platoon would brave it into the new street while the command group held back. Sergeant Brewer held back too, crouched against the wall with Agate, while his rifle squads moved on around the corner. Only after the last of the squads was out of sight – a group that included the portly figure of Sam Rand – only then did he go after them, followed by his radio man and his platoon medic, and this troubled Prentice a little. Weren’t platoon leaders supposed to lead? But then, company commanders were supposed to lead too, and so were battalion commanders, and so were generals; it was too confusing to think about. He lowered his rifle and allowed the butt to rest on the ground, which brought a small relief to the muscles of his right arm, and he looked down at the trampled snow with longing, wishing he could let his knees go slack, slide forward against the wall, and lie down in it.

  From around the corner came a stunning sound straight out of the movies: the B-d-d-rapp! B-d-d-rapp! of a German burp gun. There was silence, then shouting, then the slower, louder, chugging fire of an American B.A.R. and the irregular crack of several rifles. The burp gun opened up again, or maybe it was another one, and an instant later it was impossible to pick out the separate sounds: the whole street had become a solid uproar of gunfire and spanging, whining ricochets.

  Prentice brought his rifle up to a trembling port arms and fixed his eyes on the lieutenant. What the hell was he going to do now? Just stand here? He just stood there, and it wasn’t long before the noise was over. Then he moved on around the corner and led Prentice and the others into the new street, which was lightly filled with smoke and brick dust. Riflemen were crouched in doorways or running in both directions and shouting at each other, their faces pink with excitement; halfway down the block the medic knelt beside a man who sat smiling against the wall with his pants leg torn open to expose a red blotch high on his thigh. And nearer, across the street, three German soldiers were slowly approaching with their hands locked over their bare heads, followed by a B.A.R. man who held his weapon pointed at their backs. One of the prisoners, with very long blond hair that hung against his cheeks, was bleeding from the face.

  Apparently, for all the noise, it had been only a minor skirmish, a token resistance by the Germans before they surrendered; and the man with the leg wound – a “million-dollar wound,” somebody called it – was the platoon’s only casualty.

  “Donkey Oboe,” Logan was chanting, “This is Donkey Dog, Donkey Dog …”

  Riflemen, working in twos, were forcing their way into houses now, smashing doors open with their rifle butts: apparently the idea was to search each house on the block for enemy soldiers. But that was as much of the logic of the morning as Prentice could follow. Agate and the other headquarters men were moving back and around to another block now, evidently to check on the progress of another platoon; and as Prentice swayed in their wake, repeatedly stopping to cough, he grew less and less able to make sense of the sights and sounds around him. Things seemed to happen out of sequence, as in a movie that someone has mindlessly cut and scrambled and spliced together at random. The only continuity was the problem of keeping up, and this soon became a matter of studying Agate’s overshoes as they rose and fell in the snow, sometimes slowly, sometimes flying into a run, sometimes stopping for long, long waits.

  Once, when they stopped for a while in a little courtyard, Prentice let his head sink against the wall to rest, and he didn’t realize he’d gone to sleep on his feet until a distant burst of machine-gun fire made his eyes pop open to see a German soldier coming straight at him, less than five yards away. It took him a second of dodging back and fumbling with his rifle before he saw that the German was unarmed: he was another prisoner, flushed from one of the houses, and behind him came four or five more, under the guard of a rifleman who chuckled in passing at Prentice’s surprise.

  He whirled around to look for Agate and found him still there, but over on the other side of the courtyard now, talking with some of his men. An ambulance was there, too, with its doors open – it must have driven up while he was sleeping – and litter bearers were bringing a wounded man toward it while Agate and the others watched. Prentice went over to join them as they slid the stretcher gently into the ambulance. The man lay very still under a blanket, wide-eyed and white-lipped, his face powdered with brick dust. From the muttered talk around him Prentice gathered that he was an officer, a battalion artillery observer, and that his wound was very severe. But then the whole scene swam and vanished as he went into another of his coughing fits; when it was over he found Agate looking at him in a speculative way.

  “Why don’t you get in there too, kid?” he said. “Go ahead, if you want to.” And one of the medics was tentatively holding open the ambulance doors.

  “No, sir, that’s okay. I’ll stay.” As soon as the squeaking words were out he began to regret them. If only Quint had been there, to say it was all right and to go with him, he would have gone.

  “Okay, it’s up to you,” Agate said as the ambulance doors slammed shut. “Let’s get going.”

  Some time later – or was it earlier? – he followed Agate’s cautious back around a corner into some kind of public square and saw him fall flat on his face. Another man fell with him, and it wasn’t until Prentice had instinctively fallen too that he realized they were under fire: the ricochets were among them like hornets. In no time at all he was back safe around the corner, having somehow scrambled up and run with the others. Agate, coming last, was the only one who seemed to know what had happened – there were snipers somewhere high above them – and the only one who’d thought fast enough to return their fire. He came crouching and walking backwards, managing to get off two or three rounds from his carbine.

  “Fucking church steeple,” he said, and Prentice wasn’t even aware of having seen a church steeple. “Some crazy bastards up there tryna pick us off.”

  Much later, Prentice was able to figure out what the lieutenant chose to do about it – to call for several riflemen to divert the snipers’ fire to another part of the square, and then to call up the Bazooka man to do the job from here – but at the time, all he could concentrate on was that the Bazooka man’s name was Magill, that Magill looked very dirty and awkward as he knelt at the corner, and that his weapon made an ear-stopping roar when it went off. Then he was following the others around the corner again, and he saw that there was indeed a church with a brutally amputated steeple: the whole rising structure ended in a blunt mass of naked plaster and carpentry from which wisps of smoke were still curling.

  And it must have been in the same square that he watched two litter bearers come trotting in perfect rhythmic unison through the rubble, using their legs with the skill and delicacy of dancers so that their upper bodies wouldn’t jog the load: from the waist up they could have been men on bicycles. The man on their stretcher rode as smoothly as if he were in a hospital bed, and Prentice thought with envy of how dreamlike and sweet it must be to be borne that way, floating horizontally away to rest and peace and care. In the middle of the square the bearers came to a halt and eased the stretcher gently to the ground. They rested for a few seconds, standing wide-legged with their hands on their knees, like winded athletes. Then, still moving as one, they squatted to take up their load again; but almost as soon as they’d raised it they set it carefully down, and both of them crouched over the wounded man, tenderly lifting his blanket to feel and scrutinize him. And then, with a terrible abruptness, they tore off the blanket, tipped the stretcher high on its side, and sent the man rolling hideously out into the slush. They didn’t even look down at him as they turned and ran, heading back to wherever they’d come from, one of them hauling the collapsed stretcher on his shoulder and the other humping along at his side. All their unanimity and grace was gone: they ran with the heavy-footed clumsiness of exhausted laborers.

/>   By noon the day had turned mild and almost warm. The snow was melting rapidly, there was a continual dripping from the roofs, and there were spoors of sweat on Agate’s dirty face. Little clusters of civilians had begun to appear on the streets, looking oddly out of place. They would venture bashfully up to the sidewalks and try to speak with the soldiers, apparently trying to explain that all the Germans had left town, until they were shouted and gestured back into their cellars.

  Some time in the afternoon, while Agate’s overshoes plodded along some other street, a brief barrage of enemy mortar shells sent everyone clambering and tumbling into the cellar of the nearest house. Prentice, almost fainting from the effort of it, heard somebody yell “Yeeow!” and thought at first that the man was hit, but it turned out to be a cry of joy: the far wall of the cellar was packed to the ceiling with bottles of wine. And for what seemed a disgracefully long time after that, long after the mortars had stopped, Lieutenant Agate and his men sat guzzling on the floor with all the furtive pleasure of boys playing hooky from school. Someone had handed Prentice a bottle and he gulped it as if it were the only medicine in the world that could save him. It made him shudder but it sent a wonderful strengthening warmth through his chest and back, and he knew that if Agate didn’t get him out of here soon he would drink and drink until he lay insensible on the floor. But just when he’d begun to wish for this very thing to happen – when he’d begun fervently to hope that maybe, somehow, this might mean the whole “attack” was over and they could stay here celebrating for the rest of the day – Agate was up and leading them out into the sunshine again, and Logan was babbling more of his gibberish about Donkey Dog and Donkey Oboe and Donkey Nan.

  It must have been soon after that, when he was still enriched by the wine, that Prentice was put to use as a runner for the first time all day; and he thanked God that his reeling memory had retained, as if by chance, a dim knowledge of where Brewer’s Second Platoon was likely to be. The trip involved a long dogtrot, alternating with a fast walk, down a street on the perimeter of the town that he guessed was supposed to be the main line of defense against the possibility of a counterattack: it was the place where the company’s machine-gun positions were set up. And he was walking weakly back along the same street, having delivered his message, before it occurred to him that this must be where Quint was. The first gun emplacement he passed was manned by strangers; but then he saw him, standing alone in a ground-floor window with the snout of his gun protruding over the sill. He was wearing a maroon bed quilt wrapped around him, like an Indian, and he was smiling.

  “Hey there, runner!” he called in a hoarse voice.

  Prentice went over close to the window and stopped, looking up at him. “How you feeling?” he said.

  “I don’t know; about the same, I guess. You?”

  “Little better maybe; I don’t know.”

  “I saw you barrel-assing past out there,” Quint said. “I’m glad as hell they let me stay in one place, anyway.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I hear the artillery spotter was killed.”

  “No, he wasn’t killed; I saw him.” It gave Prentice a small thrill of pride to be able to give this information. “He was pretty badly hit, though.” Then, after a pause, he said, “Listen, what do you think? You think there’s going to be a counterattack, or not?” He knew at once it was the kind of question that might exasperate Quint (“How the Christ should I know, Prentice? Will you quit asking questions?”) but instead, surprisingly, he got a straight answer.

  “Hard to say. I doubt it, somehow. I know I sure as hell wouldn’t try it, if I were them.”

  “Me neither. Well; I better get back.”

  “Look, Prentice.” Quint reached down behind the window sill and brought up a clean strip of G.I. blanket. “I got hold of an extra blanket and I cut it into thirds, to use for mufflers. You fold it this way, you see, and then you put it around and cross it over your chest. That’s what I’m doing with mine, anyway. Or you could wear it over your head, if you’d rather. I know it’s not very cold now, but it might get cold again.”

  “Well, thanks. That’s – that’s very good.” Prentice took the scarf and arranged it around his neck. “Thanks a lot,” he said.

  “Then I thought I’d give the third piece to Sam, if I can find him.”

  “Good. That’s a good idea. Well.” He lingered there, looking down at his feet. He felt a great rising temptation to say, “Look, Quint. I’m ready now. If you still want to go back to the aid station, I’ll go too.” But the unfamiliar wealth of Quint’s respect for him was still too new and too valuable to risk losing. All he said was, “Well. I’ll see you around. Take care of yourself.”

  “You too,” Quint said.

  And Prentice did his best to put an easy, old-combat-man swing into his walk as he moved away down the street, very much aware that Quint would stand there watching him until he was out of sight. Once he turned back to make sure of this, and it was true. He waved and Quint waved back, letting the maroon quilt fall away from one shoulder.

  But that one welling of strength, that one brief time of lucidity was the first and last of the day for Prentice. For the rest of the oddly warm, wet afternoon he would hear bursts of machine-gun fire and feel no curiosity or interest in where they came from; he would watch Agate’s talking face with no idea of what he was saying, as if all words had become as meaningless as Logan’s droning donkey talk. At one point, following Agate up an alley and out across an empty lot filled with rubble, he discovered that Agate was drunk. A bottle of Hennessy cognac hung from his hand as he walked, and he was singing, to the tune of “One O’Clock Jump”:

  “Spread your legs

  You’re breakin’ my glasses,

  Baby, won’t you please lay still …”

  He sang it over and over, until the song became the only thing Prentice was truly aware of, the only thread of coherence among turning, shifting images of broken houses and running men and brick dust and smoke and dripping water. Once he saw a vivid close-up of Logan’s face shouting at him – apparently scolding him, as he’d done last night on the road – but he could make no sense of the words.

  “Spread your legs

  You’re breakin’ my …”

  He awoke as if from a dream to find himself standing up against a chest-high plaster wall, flanked by two riflemen he had never seen before, looking out over an expanse of gray fields and black trees; and he had no knowledge of how he’d gotten there or what he was supposed to be doing. “Spread your legs” still rang in his head, but Agate and the others were nowhere within sight or hearing. Through a slow, fuddled process of deduction he figured out that this must be part of the defense perimeter: someone must have posted him here with these two men, either to give him a rest or because every available man was needed on the line. But had he been told to report back to his runner’s job at some specific time? Or would someone come and relieve him here? And where the hell was company headquarters now? Was he supposed to know?

  He glanced sideways at each of the two men, who were staring out at the horizon, one of them chewing gum. Was he supposed to know them? He did his best to concentrate on the horizon too, but he had to blink again and again to keep the landscape from swimming in his vision.

  And he guessed he must have fallen asleep at the wall, because he had a dream in which he and the whole company command group were seated in class, in some brown and chalky schoolroom of his childhood. Agate was at the teacher’s desk, sweeping all the books and papers onto the floor to make room for his helmet, his carbine, and his bottle of cognac. Prentice was squeezed into one of the child-size pupil’s desks on which a number of hearts and initials had been carved, and Magill was slumped in the desk beside him with his big, ungainly Bazooka balanced across its top. Logan, in another desk across the aisle, was saying something about Donkey Oboe into his radio.

  “Will the class please come to order?” Agate called out in a mincing, womanish voice. “Will th
e class please come to order? The first lesson today will be – oh, let’s see, now. Spelling.” He leaned back against the cloudy blackboard, picked a piece of chalk from its shelf, and threw it at Magill’s head. “All right for you, Billy Magill,” he cried. “You stay after school!” And he broke up in a spasm of giggling laughter.

  Then Prentice saw a couple of men hanging up blankets to black out the windows, and he began to understand that it wasn’t a dream: this schoolhouse was to be the company’s command post for the night.

  Agate seemed to tire of his teacher impersonation. He took a swig of his brandy and began to stalk moodily around the classroom, studying his field map, only a little unsteady on his feet as he got down, at last, to business. Sitting on the top of Logan’s desk he talked soberly with battalion headquarters on the radio, and then with someone else, and the monotone of his voice put Prentice to sleep for what seemed many hours.

  “… hey, kid!”

  His eyes came open to see that Agate, still hunched on Logan’s desk, had turned away from the radio to call to him across the room.

  “Wilson’s bringing up the bedrolls. You want to ride on back with him? Let him drop you at the aid station?”

  He tried to speak but no voice came, so he shook his head to mean No, and Agate went back to the radio.

  “Okay, Prentice,” said Logan, who had turned around in his seat to look contemptuously back at him, exactly like the brightest boy in class addressing the dunce. “It’s your funeral. But if you want to stay you’re going to damn sure have to get on the ball.”

  Then he was asleep again, dreaming that his bandolier straps were caught in some kind of machine that painfully pulled and pushed, pulled and pushed …