Suddenly there was a violent gripping and pulling on his arm, which spun him around in the swivel chair – and there was Krupka, soaking wet and black with coal dust, shouting at him.
“What the fuck’s goin’ on, Prentice? Where the fuck’s our relief?”
Then Prentice was on his feet too, shouting back, feeling immensely powerful. “Now, you just hold your water, Krupka. You’ll get your God damn relief when I say so. I’m under specific orders to—”
Only then, with sickening slowness, did he begin to to separate reality from the dream. Krupka was real; the candles and the desk were real, too; so was the fact that his watch read 2:35, and so was the undeniable appearance of Bernstein hurrying forward from the shadows, heavy with sleep, saying: “What the hell’s the trouble?”
And the whole conversation had been false. It had taken place only in Prentice’s head, and he knew now that his head, until the very moment of Krupka’s grabbing him, had been lying on the desk.
For the rest of that night, soaked and freezing on the coal heap, he suffered little spasms of self-loathing that made lumps of coal rattle under his weight.
But that was the last and worst of his humiliations. Whatever mistakes he made after that were mercifully hidden from public exposure; if he remained the worst man in the squad, at least he managed to keep from calling attention to himself. And then one memorable morning, not long after the coal heap, the onus passed from him to Walker.
They had marched all night again. They had followed no road but gone over rough country in the dark, through what Captain Agate grimly told them was enemy territory (“I see one man strike a match, that man’s dead”). And they had done it in absolute silence, each of them wearing a strip of white bandage tied to his right shoulder tab, so that the man behind him could stay in line without calling out. By dawn they had reached the place on Agate’s map that was supposed to be their destination, and most of the Second Platoon found itself in a warm, clean farmhouse where a woman agreed to heat water for their coffee and more water to wash and shave in. But soon they were out in the fields again, with a bright misty morning as sharp as winter on their scrubbed skin. They were on the outskirts of another town, and they had to approach it across a swamp that led into a number of little hummocks so dense with shrubbery that they couldn’t spread out: the squads had to proceed in single file, making crude wet footpaths between the hills. The bright, dripping fog was so heavy that nobody could see more than a few yards, and any object emerging into view as they walked – a tree, a bush, a shed – had a look of ghostly danger. They were on rising ground when a great rectangular shape appeared on their right, and it was just then, when the shape had established itself as a barn, that the silence was shattered by a burst of machine-gun fire on their left.
Everyone hit the ground and wriggled for cover, and there were isolated rifle shots from somewhere ahead. Somebody on the left was shouting, “Fire! Fire!” and Prentice guessed he ought to bring his rifle up and use it; but how could he tell where he was shooting? Bernstein’s squad was hidden in the fog to the left, and so was the third squad. Was he supposed to fire anyway, at the risk of hitting his own men?
“Don’t shoot, you men – hold your fire,” Sam Rand called from close behind him, and that made it all right just to lie there. He looked ahead, where the foreshortened shape of Walker’s boots and buttocks lay just beyond his face.
Then Finn’s voice came back: “Let’s go, my squad – follow me!” And Walker’s boots sprang into action. He was up in a crouching run, heading in a wide circle to the right, past a thick hedge and around to the shelter of the barn. Prentice followed him, with Sam Rand close behind, and they got all the way around the corner of the barn before discovering that there were only the three of them: the rest of the squad had disappeared.
“What the hell?” Rand demanded. “Where’s Finn? Who was you followin’, Walker?”
And Walker’s big, breathless face betrayed his guilt. “I thought that’s what he meant, Sam. I thought he meant get behind the barn.”
“How come?”
“Well, I mean – Jesus, Sam; I don’t know.”
“Shit. Now how the hell we gonna find ’em? They go straight on ahead, or to the left, or what?”
They were safe as long as they huddled here behind the barn, but Sam Rand didn’t let them huddle for long. First he sent Prentice through the hedge to go back the way they’d come, but the machine gun opened up again and a quick splatter of broken plaster a foot over Prentice’s head made it clear that he was the target. He dropped flat and scrambled back through the hedge in what seemed a single frantic motion, and Rand said, “All right. We’ll try another way, is all.”
He led them around the other corner of the barn, and they were crouched there, wondering whether to risk it into the open, when the noise of fire broke out again: intermittent bursts from the machine gun answered by rifle and B.A.R. fire that seemed to be coming from several directions; and suddenly all the firing stopped after the shock of a single explosion – a hand grenade. Then there was shouting:
“Get the bastard!”
“There he is!”
“Kamarade …”
“Comrade my ass! Get the bastard …”
Sam Rand was pointing the way into the open now, not toward where the shouting was but to a farmhouse that was now plainly in sight and near which they could see the rising, standing figures of Finn and the rest of the squad.
“God damn it,” Finn said, “where you been, Prentice?”
“I – look, Finn, it wasn’t my – we were over behind the—”
But Sam Rand came quickly to his rescue. “It wasn’t his fault, Finn. Walker led us around behind the barn.”
And Finn switched his narrow gaze to Walker. “What the hell d’ja do that for?”
“I – Finn, I thought I saw you going—”
It was a great pleasure for Prentice to watch Walker’s abasement, and the pleasure increased during the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next, as Walker seemed to go from bad to worse.
Then a few days later there occurred what seemed to be a chance for both Walker and Prentice to redeem themselves: Captain Agate wanted volunteers for a special patrol. “I’m going,” Finn announced to his squad. “Anybody else?”
“Shit no,” said Krupka. “Volunteer? When the whole fuckin’ war’s practically over? You oughta get your head examined, Finn, no shit.”
Walker and Prentice were the only two other volunteers; with Finn they joined eight or ten other men at the Company command post, and they solemnly listened to their briefing by the captain.
“All right,” he said, squinting around the group, and there were uneasy glances among the men as they began to realize he was drunk. “Here’s what I want you men to do. I want you to go out through that underpass, turn left, and keep going till you meet the Krauts. We know there’s Krauts out there but we don’t know how many and we don’t know how far. You men are gonna find out. Who’s the ranking non-com?”
“I guess I am, sir,” said a huge, bearded staff sergeant from the First Platoon named Kovarsky.
“All right. Sergeant Kovarsky’ll be in command. Any questions, Kovarsky?”
“Sir, is this a reconnaisance patrol?”
“Hell no, it’s no reconnaisance patrol. Whaddya think we’re on, maneuvers? This is a combat patrol. When you meet those Krauts they’re gonna be shootin’ at you, and you better gonna be damn sure shootin’ back. How the hell else you gonna find out how many they are?”
“Son of a bitch,” somebody muttered, “is this ever gonna be a ball-buster.”
But instead it was an abortion. They had gone scarcely a hundred yards beyond the underpass when Kovarsky halted them and called them together for a briefing of his own.
“I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but personally I never would of volunteered for this deal if I’d known Agate was drunk. I think this here is one patrol we can damn well afford to goof o
ff on. Anybody want to argue with that?”
Nobody did.
“Okay, then. What we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna go on up as far as those trees. We’ll lay down some fire into the woods, and that’s it. Then we take off, whether we get any answering fire or not. I’ll make the report, and everybody else keep their mouth shut. Okay?”
They did exactly that, robbing Prentice and Walker of any chance for heroism; and Captain Agate accepted Kovarsky’s fraudulent report, looking, throughout the brief interview, as though what he really needed now was an hour or two to sleep it off.
*
By now the days and nights were so full of rumors that one story had as much chance of truth as the next. Almost anything could be believed: nothing in the blur and drift of daily events had the power of surprise. One rumor had the northern salient of the Ninth Army on the outskirts of Berlin; others placed it hundreds of miles further west. And there was still neither corroboration nor denial of a story that had been circulating for days: that President Roosevelt was dead. “All right, hold it up here,” Sergeant Loomis called one warm afternoon, turning against a shrapnel-pocked wall to address the platoon. They had come through a village that day and across a great expanse of open country without any sign of enemy troops, but it had now become clear that there were a good many of them dug into the side of a high, steep hill that rose beyond this larger town. It had begun to seem, in fact, that this afternoon might bring about the first hand-to-hand fighting of the campaign. But Prentice was too tired to feel either excitement or fear, and as he looked around at the other dusty, sweat-streaked, black-lipped faces it appeared that everyone was in the same listless mood.
“This is going to be the real thing, for a change,” Loomis said. “We’ll be making contact with the enemy in force this time.” He was doing his best to instill a sense of emergency, but his own red-rimmed eyes and dust-caked lips showed that he was as tired as anyone else. For once it must have seemed to him, as it did to others, that his words were something out of a movie.
“Now, we’re going to get plenty of artillery support before we go up there, but they’re dug in good and solid and you can be damn sure the worst part of the job’ll be up to us. When we hit that hill it’ll be every man for himself. I don’t want to see anybody laying back and chickening out and afraid to use their weapons. All right, that’s it. Any questions?”
And they continued to make their laborious way up the steep, white-flag-hung streets of the town, looking ahead to where the hill rose bald and brown in the afternoon sunshine. Nothing seemed real.
At the top of the town they were allowed to rest. The artillery barrage was scheduled to start in thirty minutes, and in the meantime there was nothing to do but wait. Finn’s squad sat in a sullen, exhausted row with their backs against a stucco house, looking down over the streets they’d climbed, and there was no talk among them until Sam Rand produced a sleek Luger pistol that he’d taken from the belt of a German prisoner in the previous village.
“Hey-y,” said Walker. “Nice, Sam. Mind if I take a look?” And he leaned forward to reach across the laps of Krupka, Brownlee, and Prentice. Sam leaned forward to hand it over, and it was then, at the instant of the pistol’s changing hands, that all the world stopped dead.
It was an American artillery shell, half an hour too early and five hundred yards too short, and it plowed into the house six feet above their heads. Later some said it had skip-bombed off the sloping street at their feet before hitting the house; others said it hadn’t. At the time all they knew was the overwhelming shock of it, the scorched eyes and stopped eardrums, and the panic that had them instantly up and spinning, colliding with each other, losing their helmets, leaping away in all directions with a blind and breathless urgency.
Prentice ran head on into Walker, caromed away, and made it around the side of the house only to go slamming into a high chicken-wire fence. He spun away from the fence and took off in a sprint down the street after the frantic figure of Krupka, with someone else pounding at his heels. The second shell sent him sprawling on his belly, and he lay wriggling on the pavement as if to burrow down inside it. When he looked up, Krupka was no longer there. Ten yards from where Krupka had been lay a loose heap of green and brown cloth, and only later would he understand that this was all there was left of Krupka. Then the third explosion came, and the fourth. The brief interval of silence that followed was filled with a sobbing falsetto scream that he was now aware of having heard for some seconds, and he raised his head just enough to see who was screaming. It was Lieutenant Coverly, running down the street and waving his arms. Loomis was close behind him, running in a crouch and calling: “Get down, Covey, get down!” Then there was another explosion, and another, and Prentice hid his face in his arm and embraced the gutter for all he was worth, thinking, At least we won’t have to take the hill now; at least we won’t have to take the hill. He lay there grinding his teeth and hiding his face in his arm as the earth was rocked again and again.
Chapter Three
For “A” Company, the end of the war came on the last day of April, when they were taken off the line and sent to spend several meaningless days in foxholes in the rain. Then they were taken in trucks to an undamaged town and billeted in dry, windproof, excellent houses; and it was while they were there that the news of the German surrender broke over Europe. There were several nights of drunken celebration and consorting with German girls in open defiance of the regulation against “fraternizing,” and then they were removed to an even better place – a small, sunny town called Kierspe-Bahnhof, where all they had to do was stand guard over a thousand newly liberated Russian D.P.’s. The Allied Military Government had moved the Russians into what must have been the best residential section of the town, a colony of neat two-story houses on a hill well away from the partially bombed-out plastics factory that had been the town’s only industry. One squad at a time, in shifts around the clock, the men of the Second Platoon would stroll up and down the pleasant streets to be greeted by happy smiles and waves from all the houses, to be surrounded at times by handshaking men and affectionate women, to be pressed into accepting glasses of home-made vodka, and to join in singing Russian songs to the accompaniment of harmonicas. And each night, if they dared to slip away from their rounds and risk being found absent by sergeants in patrolling jeeps, there was every promise of girls to be had for the asking.
Several of the younger divisions in Europe were being processed for shipment halfway around the world to what everyone called the C.B.I., to help finish the war against Japan, but the 57th was not among them: it would remain here. In accordance with the Point System, the older men in the outfit would soon be removed and sent home for discharge; the younger, low-point men could expect to stay in Europe for six months to a year.
In the meantime, everything was nice in Kierspe-Bahnhof. The Company kitchen had been set up in the undamaged part of the plastics factory, and the food became better and more plentiful. Each man received a shot of schnapps before lunch and dinner and a choice of red or white wine with the meal. There were hot showers every day, and to top everything off they were issued fresh uniforms – not new, but clean and sweet-smelling, faded and shrunken from the Quartermaster laundry. Instead of steel helmets they wore only clean helmet-liners now, each emblazoned on one side with the Divisional insignia in enamel paint.
There were irritants in the new life too – “chickenshit” things like Reveille and Retreat formations, like formal inspections and formal five- and ten-mile hikes – but in general the days were slow and rich and lazy.
Everyone seemed happy except Prentice, who felt a nagging sense of unfulfillment. The war had ended too soon. Whatever chance he might have had to atone for Quint’s death had been denied him, and there would be no more chances. The purpose had gone out of his life. There was nothing for him to do now but exist from day to day, enjoying the peace and the luxury that he felt he didn’t deserve. And he was bored and irritated with the tir
eless, rambling, gossiping reminiscences that had come to form the Company’s major pastime.
“… ’member the day Underwood and Gardinella got killed? The day we had to cross that field? …”
“… ’member the night we crossed that canal? And the eighty-eights were zeroed right the hell in on us? …”
The worst time of all, it was generally agreed, was the day their own artillery had fired short rounds – the day Krupka had been killed and Lieutenant Coverly had been evacuated. It was Klein who told, several times, about what had happened to the lieutenant. “He just went to pieces” – a snap of Klein’s fingers – “like that. When the first of those shells came in, we all hit the street and kind of got around the side of this house; then the second one comes in, and the third one – only it was a dud. The damnedest thing: we’re waiting for this explosion and all we hear is this ‘Clunk, a-wunk, wunk, wunk’ – like that, and here’s this God damn shell bouncing around in the street. It looked so small, you know? A one-oh-five’s really kind of a small, skinny shell – and it comes rolling down the street to where we’re at, and it stops about a foot from Covey. He reaches out and touches it, and he says, ‘It’s hot!’ I thought he was laughing. Then he sticks his fingers in his mouth and he says, ‘It’s hot! It’s hot! It’s hot!’ – and then he went to pieces. Just like that.”
Soon a number of Bulge veterans came back to the company, men who’d been hospitalized with wounds or frozen feet. New replacements arrived too – shy boys fresh from the States, or from England – and they made an excellent audience for the reminiscences. But the stories of the Bulge were always so much the best, so much richer and more frightening – “ ’member the night the Jerries came at us in waves? The night Cap’n Summers was killed?” – that the post-Bulge men found it hard to compete. They tended to fall into the same respectful silence as the new replacements, as if they too had missed the war.