Before Their Time: A Memoir (20 page)

Sometimes, for these excursions, Charlie and I would trade partners, and I would find myself walking the streets of Nancy with Ray Landis. Ray talked a lot as we wandered around the city—talking was one of the things he was good at—mostly about whores, and whorehouses, and the sexual proclivities (his word, of course) of French women. Ray had quite a range. The strength of a French vagina, for example; the French addiction to oral sex; the French eagerness to experiment; and other matters of equal sophistication. I questioned nothing. What did I know? I believed everything I was told. But Ray never, to my knowledge, made an actual move of his own in that direction. It was all talk, obsessively driven. He finally confessed to me that he had been raised as a Mormon, as though that explained everything. Perhaps it did.

As Ray had said, our situation was not bad, as long as we kept our noses clean. The hot food arrived, as promised, every now and then—stew, it was called. Mail, too, poured in, the first since Normandy, fourteen letters in one delivery for me alone, a dozen of them from my mother, who wrote as though America existed on another planet, in another orbit, in a perpetual springtime. But what a feast for me, reading and re-reading those letters.

Our stove, meanwhile, remained a constant threat. All four of us slept with one eye open as the sparks flew throughout the night. But no real damage was done—one singed sock belonging to Charlie and a burn on Private Goodenough’s thumb, which was his fault. And not a single
black marketeer ever showed up; nobody ever tried to corrupt us.

This peculiar domesticated life went on for several weeks. We got on together, knowing what was needed. I answered all of Ray Landis’s questions about the Jews, and he responded to mine about the Mormons, delicately explaining the history and significance of polygamy, which was what really interested me, and trying hard to clarify the usual misconceptions about his religion. (If it actually was still his religion; I suspected that he was a serious backslider and was still too unsure of himself to talk about it to an outsider.) I finally learned, too, that Charlie Beale was an engineer, out of the artillery; that he was also, once you got beyond his modesty, a kind of expert on baroque music, of which there were very few in 1944; and that he played the organ, sometimes in public recitals, in Dayton, Ohio, his hometown—all news that amazed me. Of Goodenough, I learned little. He was from Philly, as he called it, he pasted up billboard signs for a living, and he had never finished high school. There the information stopped.

We had made an infinitely tiny world of our own, held together by personal consideration and mutual responsibility, which we never failed to honor. That seemed to me a real achievement, given the universe that tiny world was a part of. All we hoped for was that we would be forgotten by the military machine, that the war would pass us by, that we would be left forever in the city of Nancy to guard the duffel bags of the Yankee Division. These shared hopes had caused us to grow cozy together, a folly in wartime. I had learned that lesson several times before.

When a jeep pulled up in front of the depot one morning and an imperious young corporal leapt out and asked
for Private Goodenough, we lost our innocence and our sidekick, all at once. He was gone within a half-hour, back to his unit. Poor Willie, packed into the rear seat of the jeep, refusing to look at us as the jeep pulled away.

“I’m next,” Ray Landis said mournfully, watching his pal go. “It’s a sure thing.”

I didn’t contradict him. It
was
a sure thing that one of us would be next. Which one? Without a word, then, Charlie nervously began to do his laundry for a second time that week, and I decided to take a walk on my own, to worry about the question alone.

The next day, another jeep pulled up, this time bringing Willie’s replacement, a vast swarthy giant, with bones like a dinosaur’s, whose name I can no longer remember (something Slavic, I think, something Rumanian). But it was too late for this stranger. We didn’t have it for him. The energy for a new friendship, or even a companionable collaboration, had been dissipated in the effort we had all made for each other. We were exhausted by it. And Willie Goodenough’s melancholy departure had proved again, in case we had forgotten, just how vulnerable we were. No, the ties were coming loose, that much was clear; events were beginning to take over again, and we were starting to grow uneasy.

THEN, what had to happen finally happened. Orders came through to separate out the duffel bags of the third platoon, C Company, 104th regiment. It was the obvious possibility to which I had blinded myself for weeks while I was sipping cognac in the Place Stanislas in the middle of the day and listening to Charlie Beale talk about baroque
composers I had never heard of. How could I have been surprised?

It was a job I had to do—there was no other way—and of course I chose Charlie to do it with me. We began right after breakfast. I didn’t want to waste time. I wanted the job behind me. We moved fast at first, stumbling over ourselves. The “system” Ray Landis had talked about was that within each unit all the bags were stacked in very rough alphabetical order. As stupidly simple as that.

I was demanding with Charlie, even querulous, as though I was some kind of superior NCO who ruled the roost. As though I owned everything. But I soon settled down, in the face of the reproving look Charlie gave me. He was standing at the top of the pile, calling off the names that were stenciled on each of the bags, before tossing them down to me on the floor below.

So we proceeded, through half a dozen vaguely familiar names, echoes of the second and third squads, remnants of old roll calls. Peters. Schwartz. Juneman. Oliver. Reese. Schiffman. Green. Each time Charlie called a name, he threw a bag to me, and I tried to catch it—all that was left of those who were killed or missing in action at Bézange-la-petite.

“P. Willis,” Charlie called after resting a moment.

I paused. “Here!” I yelled.

Then “Roger Johnson.” There was an echo in the shed, Charlie’s voice bouncing back at us. I looked up at the filthy glass ceiling, checking for bats.

“Yo!” I shouted. The bag fell like a corpse alongside me.

“Barnett Barnato.” Charlie was beginning to acquire a kind of rhythm that carried us along.

“Barnett?”

“Barnett Barnato,” Charlie repeated, pronouncing Barney’s mysterious surname on the first instead of the second syllable. “
Bar
-na-toe,” when it was really “Bar-
nah
-toe.” For some reason, this irritated me. It seemed important, the correct pronunciation of everybody’s name; even Barney’s.

“
Ja!
” I finally yelled. I piled his bag on top of Johnson’s.

“There’s rat shit up here,” Charlie said. I could hear a shudder in his voice. “R. Hubbell,” he called, after a moment.

R. Hubbell, I thought. Capers and beautitudes. “Toss it,” I called up.

The work was getting warm. Charlie and I were both in a sweat. “Want to break for a couple of minutes?” I asked. I was beginning to smell myself, and Charlie, I saw when I looked up, was sniffing shyly at his armpits.

“Let’s keep going while we have some momentum,” Charlie said. That was all right with me. Then, “I. Fedderman.”

I waited a moment.

“I. Fedderman,” Charlie said again.

What was I waiting for?

“Fedderman!” This time Charlie was shouting.

“
Ici!
” I shouted back and felt Fedderman’s bag hit me on the shoulder. It hurt. It was filled with jagged edges, box-like objects, unidentifiable sticks or rods, things that were sharp and strange. What did he have in there, for God’s sake? My shoulder began to ache from the onslaught. I found myself cursing Ira Fedderman. Again. It never seemed to end. What in the hell could his personal effects amount to? What had he collected and stashed in his duffel bag over the many months since we began basic training at Fort Benning? Why hadn’t I written to his mother? When would I?

At last Charlie was growing impatient. I couldn’t blame him. He was tired of searching out duffel bags that belonged to men he didn’t know or had never heard of, and he was weary of tossing them around. They weighed a lot. He began to complain.

I interrupted him. “Is there a Keaton up there?”

A minute passed. “I don’t see one,” Charlie called. But I didn’t think he was trying very hard.

“Look carefully.”

It took him a while but he finally found it. “Yours is here, too,” he said. “And somebody Brewster. Want them?”

“Forget mine. Just toss the others down.”

The bags landed at my feet. I had almost the whole squad now. “Any Natale?” I asked. I had to spell the name for Charlie.

“Nothing,” he finally said.

No duffel bag for Ralph Natale. No personal effects. Was that possible? It made me feel strange, as though I had failed him, as though he was being cheated for a second time. Charlie was moving around on top of the pile again. He sounded restless. I could hear the soft thud as he jumped from one duffel bag to another. “Just one more,” I said.

“Who?”

“Gallagher, Lieutenant.”

Charlie began rummaging around and muttering to himself. “There aren’t any officers up here that I can see,” he said.

“You sure?” I asked.

I waited for him to check it out again. The smell of guano mixed with my own acrid sweat was beginning to get to me. It was a stink.

“They must be in a special section,” Charlie said.

I waved him off. I was too tired and a little sick to my stomach. “Let’s break,” I said. We had done everything we could do. Dozens of duffel bags littered the floor around me, as evidence. Someone else would have to do the ransacking. Not me. Not me, for sure.

I thought I heard a scurrying sound then, coming from a corner of the shed. It was the click of rats’ feet. It was a sound that I sometimes heard at night, while the four of us lay sprawled on our straw pallet. It always made me shudder. Willie Goodenough had claimed that the rats liked to gnaw their way through our duffel bags in search of food. Candy Whiskey. Cigarettes. Even soap. They ate anything. Paul Willis’s bag, in fact, had holes in it, jagged bites, all up and down one side. While I listened, I held on to Bern’s duffel bag. I knew everything he had in there. Books. Extra fatigues. Tobacco. One blanket. A religious object or two. I had seen him pack it in the States, item by item, back at Camp Jackson, just before we headed overseas. It suddenly felt very heavy. I put it down and sat on it and watched Charlie slide down from the top of the pile. He had two huge sweat marks under his arms. I think I remembered to thank him. I hope I did, but I can’t be sure. I was at absolute zero. There seemed to be nothing left except the sharp hallucinatory clicking of rats’ feet and the sound of Charlie Beale’s heavy breathing as he lighted a cigarette, against Ray Landis’s strict warnings. I hated those foraging rats. They scared me. They gave me the
Schreck
. They gave Charlie Beale the
Schreck
, too. They made him crazy.

I had to get out of there.

I WAS transferred a few weeks later, through the collaboration of the division’s Psych., from the warehouse in Nancy to an intelligence outfit that did research on captured enemy weapons. Maybe I should have been there all along, helping the outfit do its work; it seemed to suit me. I found the research interesting, serious, too, and remote from the infantry, as everything that is not the infantry is remote from it. And that was what I needed—some distance that could not be easily violated. I was grateful for the move. In a sense, you could say that my real war stopped on a shattered rise in the Moncourt Woods, at Bézange. The rest of the war, for me, was mere footnotes and asides—important, perhaps, but still a subtext made up of subsidiary themes.

I never saw Charlie Beale or Ray Landis again, and never heard from them, nor they from me. Something ended in that blighted warehouse in Nancy; something was concluded, once and for all.

•   •   •

THE REST of the story, the Yankee Division’s story, was far from finished. There was more to come—there always is in wartime—a continuing zigzag journey, an often bitter march through the heart of Europe that carried the veteran division to the Ardennes, and the Battle of the Bulge and on into Germany and ultimately Czechoslovakia, at the war’s end, when the 26th came face-to-face with the Russians outside the town of Budweis. The next day, they both officially met in the middle of the town square and enthusiastically shook hands, grinning mightily as though they had just accidentally run into each other—then did it all over again, still grinning, for the news cameras.

There had been major engagements everywhere, in France and Germany and the Ardennes during the Bulge, small skirmishes as well, ambushes, tank traps, passing firefights, full-scale onslaughts that involved the whole division … and many casualties. In the 104th alone, 666 men died and 2,575 were wounded; 35 remained missing in action. And once again, as in World War I, the 104th was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French, alone among the YD regiments.

The official Yankee Division history, for which I was a presumed source, barely mentions Bézange-la-petite, glossing over the episode in a way that makes it impossible to discover what actually happened or whether, in fact, anything happened at all. It’s both empty and evasive. (I wonder if the division’s historian considered that a “victory”—over me, that is.) Of course, the careless loss of almost an entire platoon—and more—is not necessarily what divisional histories are designed to commemorate.
The inflated smell of distant glory is more their style. So I had learned back at the base hospital, and so, I think, I had always known. All of us had, probably to the last man.

The same is true of the official
U.S. Army History of World War II
. The volume called
The Lorraine Campaign
, in the course of nearly seven hundred densely packed pages, never refers to C Company’s catastrophic loss at Bézange, even though there are at least a half-dozen listings of Bézange in the volume’s index. Heavily detailed with numbers, citations, maps, and dates,
The Lorraine Campaign
, while keeping the chronology and statistics in order, nevertheless manages to give the impression that the war in Alsace-Lorraine was fought by an agglomeration of trucks, half-tracks, tanks, and humanoids in uniform, who may have resembled real men, in a physical sense, but who pretty much went through the motions of fighting without having to carry the burden of either names or authentic faces.