Articles of War (7 page)

He took the music box from his pocket and opened it and closed it, thinking vaguely of Claire. He smoked a series of cigarettes. Slowly an understanding of his actions came to him. Evidently he had waited too long after Anthony told him to move out. Probably he should have gone to talk to the Americans who went by with the tanks. Still, not until midafternoon did he feel sufficiently calmed to consider stepping into the open. Even the distant sound of artillery had stopped, although there still erupted, at unpredictable intervals, crackles of gunfire in town. It occurred to Heck, suddenly, that if he did not make an effort to find his unit he might be considered a deserter. This was an appalling thought and it startled him into motion. He closed his pack and settled it on his shoulders and, gripping his rifle tightly, ventured onto the field where the gnats moved.

He did not look carefully into every hole, but it appeared that the only casualty was the man he had stumbled on earlier. Heck maneuvered around him and avoided looking at the body. He could still feel his fingers going into the dead man's side, and he glanced at his hand to be sure it was not wet with blood. He wondered if the screaming he had heard had come from that man. Maybe another man had been wounded and the others had helped him escape. Heck's sense of the events of the preceding night was vague, uneven. Only the memory of fear ran continuously through it, like a thread connecting otherwise discrete beads.

When he stepped out into the cobblestoned streets he found a town that had seemed much larger in the night. The blocks had been longer, the buildings taller. Much of the town was in fact destroyed, reduced to skeletons or simple rubble. Littered along the cobblestones were packs, gas masks, shell casings, a boot, a grenade—evidently a dud, although Heck did not go near enough to examine it. The smell of burning and char was in the air. Wisps of unenthusiastic smoke rose from smoldering buildings.

He progressed vaguely, moving in oblique directions, tacking like a ship into the wind. It was strange to see how a house could stand pristine, even its windows intact, immediately beside a house that had exploded, burned, and collapsed into its own foundation. He passed two burn-scarred tanks, one just behind the other, a naked blackened corpse extending from the turret hatch of the second, locked in a position of dragging itself away. It had a terrible quality of suppressed life, as if it might yet make a last inhuman effort. He left these behind and turned a corner and moved down a street where the houses were close-set and all of them had taken damage. He came to another building that had fallen into its cellar and across the rubble glimpsed someone moving in the next street. He stepped behind a corner. But he thought it might have been an American uniform he had seen. And now he heard American voices. Tears came to his eyes—he was surprised by the intensity of his relief. “Hello,” he called, stepping forward, waving his arms, then more loudly, “Hello!” There were two men, he saw now. They turned to look at him, one leveling a rifle. Heck started gingerly forward across the ruins of the collapsed building between them. “Hi,” he said.

“Who the hell are you?” called the one without the rifle. He had sergeant's stripes. His helmet was scorched black.

“I got lost,” Heck said. “I don't know where the others have gone.”

The one with the rifle muttered something. He lowered his gun but watched Heck skeptically. “All right, come on over,” called the sergeant. “Maybe we can help you find your mama duck.” Heck followed a long, thick wooden beam out across the fallen building, then stepped off the end of it, onto the frame of a fallen doorway, but under his weight the frame turned and there was nothing below. He fell, striking a sequence of hard, unseen objects, and landed on his knees in an ungainly way, twisted to one side. He felt like he had scratched his leg. “Oh, good Christ,” said a voice above, not the sergeant's. Heck gasped to regain his breath. Dislodged debris rattled around him for several seconds. The sun penetrated the rubble in slivers and needles of light that swirled with dust. Heck slumped against the bricks and wood behind him.

The sergeant called, “You okay, kid?”

“I'm fine!”

“That wasn't pretty.”

“I'm all right.”

“Hold on to your socks. We'll fetch you out.”

Heck felt embarrassed at the prospect of waiting for a rescue. He peered about. He might be able to climb up to the place where he had fallen in, but it looked precarious and could drop him again. Before him one wall had collapsed against another to form a narrow triangular opening. Possibly there would be some upward access through there. Above, the soldiers were laughing at something. Most likely him.

He began crawling forward, but soon regretted it. The situation reminded him of the cave in the cliff, and he thought of Claire and felt a guilty confusion. He could not see where he was putting his hands, and probing blindly forward he anticipated, again and again, the sensation of his fingers sinking into a dead man's mortal wound. The scratch on his leg bothered him. Then, however, he saw light ahead, and he moved faster and faster toward it.

As he crawled out into the light, he saw before him a staircase, only half-collapsed, which he could easily climb to the street level. It was a very happy surprise. He stood and straightened his shoulders and marched up to the street. He found himself behind the two soldiers he had been talking to—they were moving cautiously across the rubble toward the place where Heck had fallen in. The sergeant, in the lead, had picked up a long piece of wood that he used to probe the rubble. Heck took a moment to gather himself before calling, “Hey. I'm here.”

The two turned and stared. There was a silence. Heck, discomforted, said, “I crawled out.”

The sergeant laughed. The man with the rifle grimaced. The sergeant threw his stick aside, and they both started back. When they were nearer, Heck saw that they were filthy, arms and faces gray with grime. The one with the rifle had dark hair and a cauliflower ear and he finally slung his weapon over his shoulder. The sergeant had perhaps a week's beard and light blue eyes that made a striking contrast against the dirty flesh around them. The top of his helmet was blackened as if it had been turned over and used for a pot. Into the front of his belt was tucked a German Luger. His boots were crusted with what looked like dried blood. “So you think you're lost?” he said. “Who are you with?”

“Twenty-eighth Division, sir. One hundred and ninth Infantry. But I never found them.”

“You're a replacement?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, you found your division. We're Twenty-eighth Division, Hundred and tenth Infantry. Your unit's ahead, crossed the river last night. You're a fucking mess, aren't you. Is that your blood?”

Heck peered down at himself, his arms, hands, stomach. He was dirty, but he didn't see blood until the sergeant gestured with the toe of his boot at Heck's shin: oozing through the grime on his pants was a glistening dark redness between the knee and ankle of his left leg. Heck bent and tugged his pant leg up. His leg was split open by a gash some six inches long. He touched the wound with his fingers—it was an inch or an inch and a half deep. The sight seemed unreal to Heck, as though this were somehow someone else's leg; he had never seen such a leg attached to himself before. He couldn't think how it had happened, unless he had hit something when he'd fallen a moment before. The cloth of his pants wasn't even torn, and he still didn't feel any more pain than he would if he had scratched himself on a thorn.

“Looks like you'll be headed straight back,” said the sergeant. “Congratulations.”

“Sir?”

“It hurt?” asked the sergeant.

“No, sir, actually.”

“I bet it will soon enough.” He produced a large, stained handkerchief from his pocket and tied it around Heck's leg. “Come on, let's get a medic to look at you. Keep your head down as we're moving. We're still trying to smoke out a sniper or two down this way.” He put an arm around Heck's shoulders and led him down the street several blocks and around a corner to where an empty jeep stood parked in a shadowed alley. A sudden explosion caused Heck to flinch. Black smoke curled out of a broken window frame a block down the street. “Grenade,” the sergeant commented. “Hopefully got him.” A moment later a series of rifle shots echoed along the street, and the sergeant nodded in satisfaction. He helped Heck into the jeep's passenger seat. “Wait here. Find cover if you think it necessary.”

Then he left.

Heck waited nervously. His hands trembled. He sat on them and put his injured leg up on the dash. He waited half an hour or so before a medic with a red cross on his helmet came and untied the handkerchief and looked at the wound. “You're lucky you didn't slice any muscle. How'd you do it?”

“I fell.”

“Cut yourself on something?”

“I guess. I didn't really notice.”

“That can happen when the adrenaline is up.”

“Still doesn't feel like much.”

“You're lucky.” The medic tightly rewrapped the wound with clean bandages, then walked on down the street, lighting a cigarette as he went.

Over the next couple of hours, two more men arrived. One had had his foot run over by a truck. The other had sliced his hand open with a gilt silver-and-gold Nazi dagger while cutting potatoes for lunch. He was nonetheless very pleased with the dagger and showed it around. He said he'd found it strapped to the ankle of a pair of kraut legs—torso, head, and arms nowhere to be seen. “Pays to check everything,” he said.

“Where are we at anyway?” Heck asked.

“Elbeuf. Scenic, fucked-up Elbeuf, on the scenic fucking River Seine.”

The man whose foot had been run over took out a package of Life Savers candies and shared them around.

Dusk was obscuring the sky by the time their driver arrived. He glanced at the three bandaged men with an expression of distant curiosity. “Hang on,” he said.

They jolted through several miles of twilight countryside and scenes alternately serene and war-blasted. With each jolt in the road the man with the crushed foot added a complaint to a long muttered monologue. They passed haltingly down what appeared to be an oxcart path. The sun vanished entirely. Heck had difficulty comprehending that an entire night and day had passed, a night and day in which he had been shelled, shot at, gotten lost, somehow gotten himself wounded, and now was being sent back again. They skirted scattered farms. The moon rose. Heck touched the silver of the music box in his pocket. On a dirt road through a wood they drove at high speed with only glimmers of moonlight to guide the way and ahead they could hear shouting and trucks.

They burst from the woods into a clearing and a scene of pandemonium. The driver braked and said, “This is the medical post. Here we are.” He looked at his wounded passengers as if he expected them to get out, which, dazed, they did.

A house was burning, casting everything in a quavering and uncertain light and sketching long black unsteady shadows over the ground. Someone was shouting about
a spy, a saboteur.
Trucks and jeeps roared away while others arrived. Men ran around, others limped, and some moved, supporting each other. More than a dozen men lay on the ground, on stretchers; several were screaming. The fire was rapidly consuming a corner of a large farmhouse, and it was spreading. Occasionally someone threw an ineffectual bucket of water at it. More men on stretchers were being passed hurriedly out a window of the house. The shadows of men and trucks and jeeps wobbled and leaped against the faint silver forms of the trees at the edge of the lawn. Smoke spilled upward from the flames, which were now moving over the roof. The heat pressed against Heck in waves. Someone yelled, “Grenade! Grenade!” and there was a general, frantic scattering away, then a muffled explosion. The frenzy renewed and an officer began shouting, “Who the fuck put a grenade in there? What the fuck are you people doing?” A pair of scrawny, bleating sheep wandered among the men lying on the lawn. The screams of the wounded were horrible. Much of the running around seemed to be without purpose, and even the ambulatory wounded hobbled around in senseless agitation, as though no one could bear to be stationary amid the excitement. But they were being slowly gathered into the trucks, and a part of what was going on, Heck now saw, was that a poorly organized bucket brigade was trying to carry water to the fire. People were running forward and back, handing empty and full buckets to one another—many of the buckets were actually upturned helmets. Meanwhile the trucks cut through the lawn, leaving long muddy gouges in the grass, and a stuck jeep spun its wheels, flinging mud over several of the wounded, who screamed invectives. A sudden wind fanned the flames to a roar and swirled a blanket of smoke around Heck that blinded him and set him coughing. When he had blinked his eyes clear, the jeep and the men he had arrived with had vanished.

Within all the confusion he noticed one man, small and prim-looking, who seemed relatively calm. He was a medical officer, moving methodically between the men on the ground, talking with them, checking pulses, examining wounds. Heck limped over and caught his arm. The medical officer shook Heck away irritably and moved to another stretcher. “What's happening?” Heck asked, trailing after him.

The officer crouched over a man with his feet wrapped in so many bandages that he appeared to have volleyballs at the ends of his legs. Without looking up the officer said, “It wasn't any Goddamn saboteur. I'll tell you that. Overheated stove. I warned them.”

“What should I do?”

“You're wounded?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Get on that truck over there.” The medical officer gestured vaguely and turned back to the man with the bandaged feet.

There were several trucks, arriving, leaving, parked. Heck started toward a pair of trucks stopped side by side that appeared to be taking on wounded soldiers. But before he got there a man with wild hair and smudges of soot on his face handed him a bucket and ran off. Heck, in surprise, looked into the bucket. It was empty. He trotted with it to the hand pump and gave it to someone there, who exchanged it for a helmet full of water, which Heck carried over toward the fire and handed to someone, who gave him an empty one in return, and so this went on. Heck soon lost track of how many helmets and buckets he had carried forward and back. His injured leg began to throb painfully with each step, but the pain seemed of little consequence and he continued carrying water despite the fact that the bucket brigade was obviously having a negligible effect on the fire and it seemed that everyone in the house had now been evacuated.