Before Their Time: A Memoir (11 page)

I actually thought I saw the city for a moment glimmering straight ahead of our convoy, miles in front of us, a vast circular stone mirage set in its river basin, white as the moon. So it seemed to me as the sight of it brought me to my feet in our truck. Those soft urban hills molding the horizon, that dull iron tower rigidly thrusting upward on the banks of the river, the silver river itself gently moving west on our left. It was really Paris. Everybody then stood up to catch a glimpse, falling over themselves. The trucks swayed around a curve, the city came closer, a weak cheer went up.

“We’re all going to get laid!” Willis shouted. “French-style.”

Everybody laughed at this prediction, wistfully, and of course with an edge. In the next minute, the convoy suddenly veered south, rumbling over rustic cobblestones for a couple of miles or so before turning east again, while to the north the elusive white city began to disappear in the late afternoon mist, and we were left with only road signs for consolation. Versailles, Rambouillet, Chartres, St.-Germain, they read, on their neat little military
markers; Sceaux, Vaux-le-Vicomte, Fontainebleau—dozens of arrows, it seemed, crazily pointing in every direction.

There was no question about it, we were heading straight for Lunéville, where the war was waiting for us.

Conversation stopped then; suddenly nobody had the heart for it. Silence set in—the soldiers’ deeply depressed, introverted silence, marked by a kind of low-grade fever that affected everybody. We were even trying to move physically apart from each other—politely, you might say, without giving offense, as a way of protecting ourselves. It was strange, this sudden defensive impulse, the need to withdraw, shared by all. Bern didn’t speak to me, I didn’t speak to him. Fedderman shunned us both, locked into his own one-man universe. We didn’t even look at each other. The rest of the squad acted the same way. All this on behalf of our sanity, collective and individual; all this surfacing from our most profound instincts and fears, long before we had reached the flash-point of actual danger.

We drove on into a calm twilight, past quiet villages and empty town squares. We were sore from the wooden seats we slouched on, and hungry again. Everyone needed sleep. Ten miles passed, fifteen. Finally, after another half-hour of quick stopping and starting (the jolting kind that wrenches the bowels), as the long convoy line tried to put itself in order, we pulled up alongside a vast plain that seemed to be the size of several football fields. We stared at it, impressed. Motors quieted, there was another silence as we sat there waiting. Woods lined the field on both sides of the road, artful Gallic scenery that looked planned and well-regulated, all of it park-like. This was no green American-style wilderness, no informal place to improvise Tarzan or
cowboy-and-Indian games. Someone took care of this, someone cultivated it every day. Someone was responsible.

“Fontainebleau,” the word went out as we de-trucked, moaning with relief as our stiff joints found the earth again. (Fontainebleau, I thought dimly. The name had a vague resonance that I couldn’t quite place. Louis XIV? Napoleon? Josephine? I wasn’t sure.) There was the usual fifteen minutes of milling around as we gathered our equipment, a quick, nervous examination of our imposing new surroundings, and then, at a command that must have come from Gangplank Paul himself, wherever he was, the entire 26th infantry division moved out onto the plain and, in near total silence, pitched tents in straight, orderly lines, forming an immense gridiron, one company after another, down the entire length of the open space. There was hardly a sound, just the clank of shovels against stone and rifle butts hammering wooden poles for our tents into the hard, resisting soil. We barely said a word as we worked. Nobody complained. The setting seemed to call for that.

Then the cooks built their fires, dozens of them, washing up began, and soon we were eating our evening meal as the sun began to disappear. There was the sound of mess gear being readied and the homey smell of coffee everywhere. When total darkness finally came down, thousands of cigarettes lighted the night air like armies of fireflies, a hum of subdued conversation spread from one end of the division to the other as we visited each other, and in another hour or so we began to drift off, in the huge encampment, to our own tents, looking for sleep.

But first our orders: Do not make a mess. Strip all cigarettes. Bury all waste. Leave this place in the morning as
you found it today. This is Fontainebleau. Thus spake Rene Archambault.

As though we understood. As though, if we understood, we would care. But again we did as we were told. Except for Rocky’s brief excursion and mine, as well as Fedderman’s perverse little short-arm rebellion, which had secretly thrilled us all and made him notorious in the entire regiment, when didn’t we?

This is Fontainebleau, Rene Archambault repeated. “Fountainblue. Ecch,” Fedderman said, shaking his head in mock-disgust at Arch’s pronunciation.

In another half-hour, we were asleep. Our drivers, members of a black regiment, slept apart from us, behind their trucks on the other side of the road. This segregation bothered me. It bothered Bern and Fedderman, too. It made us self-conscious, they from New Jersey and New York and me from Baltimore, Maryland. We looked at each other guiltily, exchanged a few sharp words on the subject, smiled sharp, knowing smiles, and turned our backs. But the contradictions and the guilt stayed with us, even as we could hear shouts of laughter and heavy cursing continue into the night from across the road.

“Mu-tha!”

“Fuck-a!”

How we loved that. We couldn’t get enough of it. Mu-tha! Fuck-a! I wanted to be able to talk like that. We all did. The smart kids. Fat chance.

SLEEP was fitful that night. Fedderman’s asthmatic rasps marked the hours, bringing me nervously awake every time they reached a new climax. When they did, I went outside
to pee, where there was always somebody else doing the same. Sharing a pup tent was still problematic for me. It was the old story: my obsessions. There were noises and there were smells, but mostly there were smells. Fedderman’s odor was as unique as a fingerprint, a curious mixture of sweat, oil, and, as I remember, something like burned rubber that seemed to emerge from the very core of his body. It could be overwhelming. Also, Fedderman’s equipment, as always, was thrown everywhere. But so was mine that night. Combat boots, ammo belts, rifles, all mixed together in sloppy piles; there would be no morning inspection by Rocky at Fontainebleau. I awoke feeling edgy and unprepared, a cloud of vague anxiety trailing me as it had since we left Normandy. I crept out of the tent on my hands and knees, trying not to wake Fedderman. He clicked his teeth in his sleep as I went.

It was not quite six. Smoke from our cooking fires already clouded the early morning air; wood burned with its delicious smell. Here and there, along the road, I could see drivers checking out their trucks, part by part, exactly as we checked out our weapons. In one of the tent-lines, somebody from B Company was shaving out of his helmet, a hand-mirror propped in front of him. A couple of tents down, in our own line, Willis was on his feet stretching. I could almost hear him purr. Alongside him, Barney Barnato was brushing his teeth. Stray figures wandered about, looking for latrines. Everyone else was still asleep. There was another half-hour to reveille. I liked the early morning hour before reveille, its clarity, its stillness and sense of solitude. I always had.

Standing there in that near-perfect light, I began to think about home. A terrible idea, as always. Thinking
about home was a self-made trap that I had to avoid. At home, I had discovered on my only furlough that the old familiar grammar of life had become unreadable. They spoke another language there, about things that no longer mattered, using a vocabulary out of another time. Thinking about it would demoralize me. I had been through that before. I tried some calisthenics as a distraction, jumping stuff, clumsy push-ups. Physical activity sometimes helped. After that I brushed my teeth hard, until it hurt, drawing blood and spitting it out on the treasured Fontainebleau soil. Did it make me feel better? I don’t know, nor did it matter, because suddenly there was a disruption that wiped out all nostalgia for the moment.

I heard the sound of hoofbeats nearby, a strange, plodding reverberation that seemed to come from inside the earth itself. I looked up. Willis was pointing toward the road, grinning his sly grin and shaking his head from side to side, as though to say, You guys’ll never believe this.

When I turned, I saw two riders come into view, both of them young girls, barely pubescent, I guessed, cantering along at a deliberate, modest pace. They were looking neither right nor left, not at us nor at our drivers, who were already having their breakfast alongside their trucks. On and on the girls rode, not at all fast, unconscious of us, or seeming to be. I remember asking myself, as I watched them, How could they pretend not to be aware of us?

Their hair, hanging loose down their backs, was held at their necks by black ribbons, which struck me as a strange funereal accent. They wore jodhpurs, gleaming riding-boots, and long-sleeved white blouses that shimmered in the early sun; and they were posting, I thought, in a
slightly exaggerated way (not that I am an expert), rising a little too high in the saddle, pausing a split second, then falling again, slowly. Showing off, I guessed. They were very good at it, very controlled, and kept an exact pace with each other, in the authoritative way of trained riders who know their business. I had to admire them. They looked wonderful. When I glanced at Willis a moment later, he was still grinning.

Then a third rider came into view, a young boy this time, younger than the two girls, following their trail by about fifty feet. Maybe he was ten or eleven. By now, Fedderman and Bern were at my side, Fedderman wearing only his underwear. Perhaps a couple of hundred others were also watching as the three riders, the boy looking as though he was in excruciating pain (you could tell how helpless he felt being part of this trio, how mortified he was to be trailing the two girls), trotted alongside our trucks for another moment or two, and then, with a sudden shout from the girls, rode off at high speed. You could still hear their hoof-beats after they disappeared into the woods.

This is Fontainebleau, I told myself in the ghostly silence that followed. This is the Île-de-France, the very heart of France, heart of its aristocratic heart. Yes. But I hardly knew what I meant by that.

“Holy shit,” Willis said, still shaking his head.

“Cunts.” This from Barney Barnato.

Bern made a face. Certain words profoundly offended him.

“Noblesse oblige,” Fedderman said, beginning one of his lectures. “French variety,” he added. Then, after turning back to our tent: “They probably own the joint. All of it.
Upper upper. And all that.” He spoke with a fake Brit accent, to make sure we got all the implications of what he was saying.

A creaky bugle began to blow reveille. This broke the spell. We made a rush for our mess gear. A huge clamor rose in the morning sky, the noise of fourteen thousand men suddenly resurrected from sleep. We were getting ready for another move. In our rush, Arch reminded us, we would not make a litter. We would be especially careful today. We would leave this place exactly as we found it: perfect.

But I was still thinking about what Fedderman had said. I knew he was right. Fedderman was smart about things like that. What he didn’t know he figured out, and unlike many smart people, he almost always came to the right conclusions. No brilliant fool, he. Noblesse oblige, he had said. French variety. I was sure those girls owned the joint, that we were camped—by very special permission—on their family’s ancient estate grounds. (And their suffering little brother? their slave? their young protector? What about him?) Maybe they deserved their little joke, I decided, to pretend that we didn’t exist, that we were invisible, while their own lives continued on a normal course, under normal assumptions, in their own front yard. It was a sure way to remind us of who we really were, in a style we wouldn’t forget.

But it was a nasty business, to my mind.

THERE was a brisk trade in books before we left. Most of the readers in the battalion knew each other by now, and we ran along the adjoining tent-lines calling out titles, as
though we were street peddlers. I got Eric Ambler’s
Journey Into Fear
(a title in which I read no ironies) for Michael Innes’s
Hamlet, Revenge!
—the heavy scent of Levantine musk for the clear taste of high tea, a fair exchange in my view. Bern brought away
Tortilla Flat
, heavily dog-eared, and Fedderman traded Will James’s
Cowboy
for
The Late George Apley
, feeling that it was time “to finally take a sounding,” in his words, of John P. Marquand, whom he had never read. Even Brewster, I discovered, was at it; that was good news about Brewster, I thought. This business of swapping books was very satisfying. We felt that we got true value and more. I had also been offered A. J. Cronin’s
The Citadel
, Howard Spring’s
My Son, My Son
, and James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
, and rejected all three—for snob reasons, probably, because they were too popular. Fedderman, I’m sorry to say, shared that attitude.

But none of us would be without something to read. We were stocked for the future, books packed into each fatigue pocket. A book marked the shortest, straightest, and most invigorating lifeline to the real world—the world outside that would continue on its way, in its own orbit, no matter what might happen to us. That’s what I believed. That’s what most of the readers in the Yankee Division believed.

WE BOARDED the trucks, cracking gallows jokes with the drivers, who laughed at everything we said. They knew that as soon as they dumped us in Al-sotz they would be able to turn around and instantly head back for Normandy, leaving us deserted. We tried to settle back on our hard
wooden benches, our buttocks becoming slatted as we faced each other in the truck in two straight lines. Our equipment was piled between us in a mound of canvas, metal, and K and C rations. Paul Willis, too, had spread himself out between us on the floor of the truck, amid the junk, as though he was going on a hayride, while Rocky, who made no objections to the mess, sat at the open end like the perfect squad leader, his foot hoisted up onto a metal brace, scribbling intently in a tiny pad he always carried with him. Each truck began to rev up along the endless jittery line of machines, making a swelling gravelly noise that choked all conversation; all this and more—shouting officers, resentful NCOs, blasé GIs—combined, almost simultaneously, into a single human and mechanical roar. Thus the division began to move east and north again, past the great Fontainebleau plain that we had camped on for the night, now stripped of all Yankee Division litter, latrine holes filled in, fires out, ashes damped and spread—if not pristine, then damn near—almost the way we had found it the day before, almost. Then I caught Bern Keaton staring blankly at me from the other side of the truck. He seemed wholly abstracted by reverie and what I read as a kind of silent dread that we all knew. As I stared back, Fedderman, alongside me, always alongside me, began to snore lightly in his second sleep of the morning. I couldn’t help myself then. I was again smothered by the cataclysmic idea of home—the agonized figures of mother, father, and sister saying good-bye on our front porch, the pink blooms of our rose garden, the aging blue Chevy (a fading piece of used metal from the late thirties), our talismanic Chickering piano, standing in a corner of the immaculate living room, with my music resting on it—
Beethoven, Chopin, Czerny. Home had not yet finished with me. It was always there, as inevitable as gravity. I was trapped, along with my buddies, and familiar clusters of hives began to form on the back of my neck.