A Special Providence

  The only thing to do was reshape his tragic features into a wince of discomfort and begin scratching his scalp with all ten fingers, as if he were a man bedeviled with dandruff who could sure as hell use a good shampoo.

  “You Prentice?” The boy’s big face was so expressionless that Prentice couldn’t tell if the scalp-scratching ruse had worked or not. “Here’s your mail. It just come over from the C.P.” And he slung a thick, twine-bound sheaf of letters onto Prentice’s bed.

  “Oh,” Prentice said, still scratching and wincing. “Thanks.” Then he smoothed his hair, shook his fingers as extra proof of dandruff, and hooked his thumbs manfully into his belt.

  “My name’s Walker,” the boy said. “I got the other sack in here.”

  “Oh. Glad to meet you.”

  But Walker only mumbled something about being on duty and having to haul ass. He snatched up his web equipment from the bed and buckled it on, exchanged his top hat for a helmet, picked up his rifle, and was gone as quickly as he’d come, leaving an almost visible trail of unfriendliness.

  It was the first mail Prentice had received since coming overseas. The letters were mostly from his mother – she seemed to have written three or four a week – and he sorted out the one with the most recent postmark and opened it first, to make sure she was all right.

  Dearest Bobby:

  I do try so hard not to worry and I know the hospital must be a safe place to be, as long as you say you’re not “very” sick, but even so I am just worried half to death!!! Everybody says the war will soon be over, and I do so hope and pray …

  He let his eyes slide down the lines of her big, impassioned handwriting until they came to rest on another paragraph: …

  Oh, how I loved your description of France!!! You made it all so real for me that I feel almost as if …

  And then he put it back in its envelope. There was a letter from Hugh Burlingame, too, and two others from lesser of his school friends, but he didn’t feel like reading them now. The one letter that claimed all his attention, the one he held and stared at for a long time without opening, had not been intended for him. It was very new-looking, written on Red Cross stationery in his own shamefully familiar hand, addressed to Pfc. John R. Quint, and it bore the company mail clerk’s pink rubber stamp: RETURN TO SENDER.

  Being “on duty” at this position on the Rhine meant walking out across the flatland, twice a day and twice a night, to sit in a foxhole overlooking the mild, surprisingly narrow river. You sat there for two hours on an improvised wooden bench, with a field telephone close at hand, watching for any sign of movement on the opposite shore, until another man came out to relieve you. From half a mile away to the north came the faint, wavering sounds of Engineers at work on a pontoon bridge.

  Prentice welcomed his two-hour sittings because they gave him a chance to be as alone as he felt, and only when he was alone could he savor the full enormity of his guilt.

  It would have been so easy! If only he had said “Okay” when Quint first suggested their going back – and what, after all, would it have cost him to say that? Or later, in the talk they’d had over the window sill in Horbourg, if only he had said he was ready to go back then. Or later still, after he’d fallen on that mattress under Logan’s cursing: how much strength would it have taken, after all, just to have roused himself and gone to find Quint again and said, “Look, I’m ready now; I’m going back.” Why hadn’t he done that one, last, tremendously important thing? Was it really because he’d been too sick to get off the mattress? Or was it – this was the most galling thought of all – was it because of all the God damn wine he had drunk that day?

  Once, walking back to the platoon house at midnight, he began to compose a difficult letter in his mind:

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Quint:

  I want you to know that I feel personally responsible for the death of your son …

  And when he was in bed, huddled with a flashlight under the tent of a blanket so as not to disturb Walker’s sleep, he tried to commit it to paper. But all the sentences had to be crossed out and reworked and crossed out again, until, an hour later, he abandoned the job. What could he hope to accomplish with a letter like that? All he’d get back, if anything, would be some formal, kindly words from the grieving parents.

  He crumpled it up, turned off the flashlight, and tried to sleep. Then half an hour later he was up and writing again, trying a different kind of letter.

  Dear Mr. and Mrs. Quint:

  I want you to know that your son John was the finest man I have ever …

  But he couldn’t finish that one, either.

  At last he put the flashlight away and lay still, flexing the writer’s cramp out of his fingers, listening to Walker’s heavy snore and to the shallow sound of his own breathing. It was hopeless. The only way he could ever make amends was with action, not words – with whatever action might still be possible on the dangerous land beyond this river – and he put himself to sleep with daydreams of heroic combat and rescue and self-sacrifice.

  In the meantime there was the daily problem of how to fit in with the men of the Second Platoon, and especially with those of his own rifle squad. More than once he was tempted to walk up to Finn and say: “Look, Sergeant: there’s something I want to get straightened out with you. The point is, I think you must have confused me with the kid that took sick in the factory, back in—” But he was never able to do so, and Finn’s narrow gaze seemed never to include him except with mild disdain.

  And Sam Rand wasn’t much of a comfort. With Quint gone, it soon became clear that the two of them had very little in common; besides, it wasn’t easy to talk to Sam now without seeming to be currying favor with the assistant squad leader.

  Only two of the squad were veterans of the Bulge – Finn himself and a noisy, flat-faced little man named Krupka, who looked seventeen but was in fact twenty-three. It was Krupka who made the first friendly overtures; one morning when Prentice was waiting his turn at the platoon’s extra latrine – a straight chair with a knocked-out seat that straddled a slit trench in the back yard (the original latrine, a civilian outhouse, had become too full and foul to use). Krupka was taking his time on the chair, allowing his bowels to move with an unforced animal rhythm, gesturing with a clutched wad of K-ration toilet paper to emphasize the points of his one-way conversation.

  “You was with us down in Colmar, right? Well listen, don’t let nobody shit you – you ain’t missed nothin’ since then. All we done since then was go to Holland in a holdin’ position; then we come up here and since then we just been quiet. Some a these guys’ll try to give you a big line a bullshit; don’t listen to ’em. Part of the States you from, Prentice?”

  He seemed decent and kindly enough, but Prentice was cautioned by an old and trusted rule of his schooldays: Beware of the first friendly one; he’s probably an outcast himself. As it turned out, Krupka was not exactly an outcast – he was apparently too good and reliable a soldier for that – but he was nobody’s favorite: despite his lack of any discernible sense of humor he was a tireless kidder and teaser, a wounder of feelings. Once when one of the other squad leaders came into the kitchen to speak with the lieutenant – a tall, stooped, scholarly-looking man named Bernstein – Krupka greeted him with, “Hey there, Suicide? How’s Suicide today?” Sergeant Bernstein ignored him, though little flecks of pink appeared in his cheeks, and somebody else said, “Ah, blow it out your ass, Krupka.” But Krupka couldn’t leave it alone: he kept it up throughout whatever business it was that Bernstein had with the lieutenant, and the minute Bernstein was gone – “So long, Suicide” – he nudged Prentice heavily in the ribs. “Know why I call him that? Back in the Bulge, when Brewer had the platoon. We hadda go acrost this ridge one time; old Bernstein chickens out and starts yellin’ at Brewer. He says, ‘I won’t take my men acrost there’ ” – and here Krupka rolled his eyes in a cruelly accurate imitation of hysteria – “He says, ‘It’s suicide! It’s suicide!’ Turns out there wasn’t no
thin’ on the other side of the ridge – no Jerries or nothin’. Anyway, that’s why I call him that. Makes him sore as hell; he don’t let on, though.”

  The other five men in the squad (it was a nine-man squad as opposed to the regulation twelve) were all newcomers who had joined the outfit in Holland. All five were Prentice’s age or younger, and the husky, top-hatted Walker, Prentice’s room-mate, was clearly their spokesman. He and two taciturn, squint-eyed country boys, Drake and Brownlee, were inseparable companions, and it was with these three that Sergeant Finn chose to spend most of his time. He accompanied them on foraging trips down the road for eggs and wine, he sat up late to drink and play cards with them, and he continually looked out for their welfare. It was as if he had decided that these three were the only members of the squad worth bothering with. He seemed to have decided that Sam Rand was all right but that Sam was older and could shift for himself, that Krupka was all right but that Krupka was a pain in the ass; as for the others, though it might be his duty to lead them, his every glance and muttering made it clear that as far as he was concerned they were on their own.

  And these others, in addition to Prentice, were two: a small, sad-eyed, homesick boy named Gardinella who constantly tried to ingratiate himself with Finn and constantly failed, and another very young-looking soldier named Mueller, who was so quiet and so rarely in evidence that Prentice at first thought he must belong to another squad. He was middle-sized and stocky, though his weight was more baby fat than brawn, and he had small, tapered, weak-looking hands with dimpled fingers. The surprising thing about Mueller was that he was the B.A.R. man – he would theoretically control the major firepower of the squad – but Prentice hadn’t been in the house more than three days before hearing the story of how Mueller had come to be assigned to that job. In Holland, there had been some kind of battalion lecture or briefing after which, in the confusion of reforming ranks and getting back into trucks, Mueller had left his rifle behind. And Finn, after chewing him out – “You mean you lost your rifle?” – had said: “Okay, Buster. From now on you’re the B.A.R. man.” It was a punishment: the B.A.R. weighed twice as much as an ordinary rifle and required the wearing of a special belt heavy with sagging ammunition magazines. It was generally assumed that when the squad went into action Finn would assign the B.A.R. to some more competent man – Walker, for instance – but in the meantime Krupka gave Mueller a merciless kidding about it. “Hey, you gonna get yourself a buncha Jerries with that B.A.R., Mueller? You gonna stop a coupla Tiger tanks? Hey fellas, let’s get Mueller some armor-piercing ammo, so he can stop a coupla Tiger tanks – okay, Mueller?” The carrying of the B.A.R. was Mueller’s cross, and he bore it with a fortitude that Prentice could only admire.

  But there seemed to be no way for Prentice to relax among these men – even with Gardinella and Mueller. He kept to himself, and he looked forward to his two-hour sittings in the riverbank foxhole. And it was there, late one afternoon, that he decided to do the thing he had put off for too many days: make a visit to Weapons Platoon. He walked there as soon as he was free.

  The first few men he spoke to were of no help – they were new replacements – but then he found a haggard-looking staff sergeant with the dimly remembered name of Rolls who had been with the outfit all along.

  “Quint?” said Rolls. “Short fella? Wore glasses? Yeah, I remember him, only I’d forgotten his name.” He looked up, squinting in the fumes of cleaning fluid that rose from the stripped-down pistol he was swabbing on an ornate dining room table. “I was there, all right. I was walkin’ along right behind him.”

  “Can you tell me about it? I mean can you tell me exactly what happened?”

  The sergeant put down his cleaning rag and applied a match to a flattened cigarette. “Well,” he said, “this mine went off Not exactly up in his face; kinda off to one side; didn’t kill him. Then Dave – that was our medic, best damn medic in the company – Dave goes over to help him. And then this other medic – I don’t know who the hell he was, never saw him before in my life – this other damn fool medic comes chargin’ over outa nowhere. Sumbitch wasn’t even needed, that’s the funny part; just some eager-beaver bastard couldn’t mind his own business. Anyway, this other damn fool medic comes over without watchin’ his step, and Wham! another mine.”

  “I know,” Prentice said. “I mean I’ve heard that part of it. What I mean is, there’s no question but that all three of them were killed? I mean you’re absolutely sure Quint was dead?”

  Sergeant Rolls removed the cigarette from his mouth and picked a fleck of paper from his lower lip. “Buddy,” he said, “the last time I saw him he was layin’ there.” One nicotine-stained forefinger pointed to a place on the dining room carpet, while Prentice nodded; then the finger drew a slow arc in the air and pointed to another part of the floor, five or six feet away: “And his head was layin’ over there.”

  On the way back to his own house, Prentice felt his toes curling as if to grip the earth like talons with every step, and he moved as heavily as if he were nearing the end of a ten-mile hike.

  When he was still some distance away from the house he heard the noise of laughter and clattering dishware, and only then did he remember what evening this was: the Second Platoon was having a party they’d been planning for days.

  A number of chickens had been killed and butchered, many bottles of schnapps and wine had been saved for the occasion, and now the feast was at its height. All the tables in the house had been crowded into the kitchen to form a long, intricate banquet surface. Lieutenant Coverly sat in the place of honor, dwarfed by the hulking presence of Sergeant Loomis on his right, and the rest of the hunched, eating men filled every available inch of table space. As Prentice stood awkwardly in the doorway it was clear that he had nowhere to sit.

  “We don’t wait for anybody here, Prentice,” Loomis called out, his mouth and cheeks shining with chicken grease. “I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”

  “That’s okay,” he said, and as one chewing face after another turned to look at him, he wished he could dissolve into the wall.

  But Ted the medic was on his feet, loading up a plate of food for him. Several of the men had to pull in their chairs to let Prentice sidle past them along the wall toward the stove, and then they had to pull in again to let him make his way back. He ate squatting on the floor, trying to hold his plate steady on one thigh. The elbows and backs and turning heads of the men were high above him, far too high to let him be included in their talk, and he could scarcely taste the food for his embarrassment. The scene was almost too pat, too ludicrous an illustration of his role in this platoon: the one man bound to be late for everything, left out of everything, and finally consigned to a place too low for notice.

  At last several men left the table to go belching upstairs, and Prentice slipped into one of their chairs as unobtrusively as possible, nursing his glass of wine. And after a minute or two it no longer mattered that nobody was talking to him, for all the conversations had died away and the talkers had become listeners: Lieutenant Coverly had the floor.

  “… but I mean it isn’t an infantry war any more,” he was saying. “From now on it’s going to be one big artillery fight all the way. And I mean maybe their infantry is shot to hell, but you know damn well there’s nothing the matter with their artillery. And I mean how much chance does a man have against an eighty-eight? You figure it out.”

  And the nods and murmurs around the table conveyed agreement and sympathy, if something less than respect. Even Prentice had come to know by now, as well as anyone, that the lieutenant was wholly unsure of his command and of himself. His nail-biting, his shyly darting eyes and breathless, almost whispering voice all betrayed him, and so did his insistence that the men call him “Covey,” instead of “Lieutenant” or “Sir,” as if informality might relieve him of his obligation to lead. His talk was always full of his having been trained as an administrative Signal Corps officer, and of the unhappy transfer and shockingly brie
f retraining that had brought him to this platoon in Holland; there was a rumor too that he’d recently received a Dear John letter from his wife. Please, his gentle Southern voice seemed always to be saying, please don’t expect very much of me. And nobody did, though nobody seemed to dislike him. The men did call him “Covey” without embarrassment, and for the most part they seemed tactfully determined to do whatever they could to help him through his ordeal.

  “… Hell,” he was saying now, and his drink-enriched voice was taking on an uncommon authority. “Hell, when you’re up against infantry at least it’s a fair fight, right? I mean then it’s essentially one man against another, kill or be killed. And hell, I’ll take my chances in that kind of a situation any day.”

  Prentice couldn’t help doubting this, and looked furtively around the table to see if there were any other doubting faces. Would Coverly really rather take his chances in that kind of a situation any day? It didn’t matter: foolish statement or not, he was getting away with it.

  “I’ll make you a little bet,” he was saying now. “I’ll bet you not one man in ten of us gets to fire his weapon from now on. Nothing to shoot at. No way to fight back. Hell, we might as well be going in unarmed, for all the good our weapons’ll do us.” His eyes were glittering defiantly around the table. “We’ll be sitting ducks for their eighty-eights all the way; that’s what scares me – and I don’t mind telling you men, it scares the piss out of me.”

  Sergeant Loomis elaborately cleared his throat, and when he began to speak Prentice could understand what it was about Loomis – despite his fine record and despite his being the real leader of the platoon – that made most of the men detest him. It was that he was such a God damn actor: everything he said came out with the ponderous fraudulence of something in the movies; it was as if he had learned how to be a platoon sergeant by watching every Hollywood war picture ever made. “Well, I don’t know, Covey,” he was saying now, staring at the schnapps he rolled in the bottom of his glass, “at least we’re winning the damn war. I’d a hell of a lot rather be winning a war than losing one. For a while back there in the Bulge it looked like we might be losing – that’s when you find you really got some trouble on your hands.”