Before Their Time: A Memoir (12 page)

THE TRUCKS rolled on, the morning lightened. I began to hum a little tune to myself—something or other by Irving Berlin, I think—on which I fastened obsessively. I was deliberately trying to lull myself into a kind of oblivion that I hoped would last for the next couple of hours, for the rest of the morning and afternoon, with any luck, trying to quiet my rising blood while I stared over Bern’s shoulder at the passing scene—towns, squares, road signs, churches, farms, an occasional Frenchman staring blankly back at me from the side of the road without acknowledging that I was there. I could never tell what the French thought of us.

And still we didn’t talk.

Rheims, the road signs read.

Verdun.

Hours later, Nancy, Sarrebourg, Lunéville.

“Looney-ville,” as everyone now called it. And Looney-ville it would remain, even though we never got to see it, never even came close.

THIS GUY kept smiling at me—this stranger, actually. He’d been smiling at Johnson and me for fifteen minutes. He couldn’t stop. I could tell that he was helpless. He told us his name was Smith or Smitt or Schmidt, something like that. I couldn’t make it out and Johnson was no help. It was hard to concentrate on what Smith was saying at two o’clock in the morning, in the pitch black of the Alsatian countryside. Every sense seemed to be diminished by the darkness: sight, hearing, touch, even taste; only smell remained intact, in the face of an acrid assault by a concatenation of cordite, cigarette smoke, stale urine, excrement, earth, human sweat, and the chemical excess of our own pungent fear, which, like a dog, I could sniff out and clearly identify. What a stink! Johnson’s was as powerful as mine, with a palpable mountain presence of its own. Nobody in the first squad failed the fear test.

Putting Johnson and me together was Rocky’s idea. By then we knew that he liked to shift us around, mixing it
up: Bern and me, Fedderman and Johnson, Fedderman and me, Johnson and me. (He kept Brewster and Natale together for unexplained reasons of his own; perhaps it was only because they were still new to the unit.) It was supposed to keep us fresh and alert, to help us face change and rethink our responsibilities, and to learn to be resilient. It was supposed to keep us interested, too. Maybe it did. It certainly forced us to think about each other.

Fedderman now belonged to Bern. They shared a hole together maybe fifteen, twenty feet away, the hole sited so that between us we could offer up a neat little crossfire in case of an enemy attack. That is, if we were on the mark. This new arrangement confirmed me as first assistant BAR man. If Johnson was wounded or killed, I was it. That meant two lives I had to pray for now. I tried not to think about it too much; there was a lot I was trying to push away that night when we arrived at the front. Anyway, I never prayed; I only made deals with myself—the usual promises of good behavior if I survived.

This guy, this stranger, told us that enemy attacks were rare, but nighttime probes, on a small scale, were common. He warned us that we had better keep our eyes open, especially after dark. After dark was the sensitive time. He could hardly get the words out fast enough; it was almost a babble. Then he smiled some more, while we took it all in. Could we believe him? Was his advice reliable? Or were enthusiasm and a sense of relief carrying him away? His buddy, with whom he had shared this hole, had already pulled out for the rear, while he remained behind to brief us. They had probably tossed a coin for the honor and he had lost. I thought he was doing an okay job,
except for all the smiling. I could have done without that; it put an edge on every word.

Briefings were going on all along the line in holes just like ours as the Yankee Division slipped nervously into the positions the Fourth Armored Division was leaving with such open joy. They had done a careful job when they dug in, as though they were preparing for a long stay. The holes were deep and self-contained, meant for living and protection; ours had a neat ledge cut into one wall for supplies. The hole itself was shaped like a trapezoid, and there was plenty of room for two men. At the moment, it held three comfortably. I didn’t know whether the trapezoid shape had a purpose or not, and I forgot to ask.

It had rained nearly all the way to Nancy once we were out of the Île-de-France, but the rain had stopped now. After unloading from the trucks in the dark, a couple of miles to the rear, Johnson took a bad spill in the fresh mud on our way on foot up to the front—no real damage done, just muck and wet filth covering him everywhere. An annoyance; another thorn. There was a smell stuck to him, too, that was unidentifiable; probably cow dung, I thought.

Johnson was beginning to show nerves for the first time since I had known him, snorting like a horse as we squatted there in the hole, listening to Smith, or Smitt, or Schmidt talk on. While he talked, I watched a huge moon drift to the west. Scudding clouds veiled it like handmaidens. Beyond Smith’s words, there was a lunar stillness everywhere, except for the strange horsey sounds Johnson was making. I began to count the stars, listening to Smith with one ear, to distract myself—a hopeless job. Smith was still smiling. He was jubilant to be leaving for the rear.
The more jubilant he seemed, the more nervous we became. And he knew it.

“So,” he said, suddenly holding out his right hand, as though we had just struck a deal. “Can’t think of anything else.”

We shook hands, first Johnson, then me. “Good luck,” he said. Then he was gone, rifle slung over his shoulder, heading to the rear in a slouching run. We would all soon become expert at running in that slouch. Down the line, I could hear Fedderman’s voice. He was in one of his states, as we all were. Oh, God, that whine … Bern was telling him to shut up, sounding irritable. In another moment, Rocky was at our hole.

“You guys all right?”

Johnson snorted. I said nothing.

“Speak up,” Rocky said, down on one knee so he could whisper to us. In the moonlight, his bony Texan face looked anxious; all his features were creased together.

“You’re going to get knocked off like that,” I said, meaning the silhouette he made kneeling there.

He crouched lower and hurriedly pointed out his own foxhole, which he told us he shared with Willis and Barnato. Brewster and Natale were on the right somewhere, he said, pointing again, along with Bern and Fedderman. That accounted for everyone in the first squad. In the dark, Rocky then traced the position of the rest of the platoon. The best I could tell from what he said was that together we made a jagged line, a zigzag, with intervals of fifteen to twenty feet between each foxhole. Maybe they were even closer. Taken together, Rocky explained in a rush, the foxholes made a position; and the position was
built to a plan that he didn’t bother to explain. Maybe he didn’t know the plan himself. That would be the way things usually worked with us. Then Rocky left.

I thought I could make out a few hills up ahead, two or three hundred yards in front of us. Maybe “hills” is too strong a word; “rises” is probably more accurate. A few rises then, nothing dramatic, overlooking our own position. Given a choice, of course, I would have preferred to look down at them, rather than up. But it was hard to figure out in the dark, so I let it go; I would worry about it in the morning when everything would be revealed. I checked my watch, to have something to do. Three o’clock. The moon was still bright.

“You all right?” I asked Johnson.

He was lining up some grenades on the ledge, alongside boxes of K rations, placing them in a neat row. Johnson was always very neat. It was how he did everything. I guessed he was okay even though he was still snorting while he worked. Then, far away on our left, a red flare rose slowly in the night sky, arched, sputtered, and hung in the air for a second or two before falling. A real bloom, in the middle of the night. Johnson and I both watched it, the strange light diffusing brightly against the moving clouds. I could see Bern and Fedderman watching, too, and Willis and Barnato—we were all heads up in our foxholes, pale Yankee faces lightly pinked by the red glare hanging above us. The whole division was probably watching.

Ours or theirs? I wondered, meaning the flare. Where were they exactly? Meaning the Germans.

And where were we?

Rocky, like our helpful pal from the Fourth Armored, had forgotten to tell us. Maybe Rocky didn’t know. Maybe
he hadn’t been filled in yet. But I wanted to know. It seemed urgent. Where we were and where they were.

“Face front,” was Johnson’s advice when I asked him, “and you’ll sure as hell see them sooner or later.” For Johnson, that was a mouthful, and it served. I stopped worrying about it.

THE following night, Johnson and I were chosen for outpost duty

We had spent the day quietly acclimating ourselves and trying to catch up on sleep. Everything was quiet as we all settled in—a lucky break for us. Maybe, after all, we had relieved the Fourth without the Germans learning about it. That would mark a real achievement.

Meanwhile, Johnson, always fastidious, had placed his shaving equipment on the ledge in our hole, alongside his grenades and boxes of K rations, leaving an equal amount of space for me. To the inch, exactly; I watched him measure it. I liked that, after the mess I had lived with and grown used to with Ira Fedderman. I had a pretty good idea what Fedderman’s foxhole looked like this morning. I glanced over our parapet—the Fourth had really constructed their defenses—but could see nothing, neither Bern nor Fedderman. Yet there was a sense of activity out there, a settling-in everywhere down the line. Metallic noises, the sound of a shovel somewhere, mutterings, whispers. Even, briefly, the hollow echo of artillery fire to the east that made everything seem real for the moment.

In the morning light, the rises I had seen the night before now appeared as dun-colored ridges, not steep, not long, but humped in camel-like folds here and there, as
though they were hiding something. Undoubtedly they were. But they didn’t look forbidding or menacing. They looked innocent. It was raining again, a light drizzle that created a floating mist all around us. This gave me an illusion of protection and invisibility, as rain often did. If I couldn’t see the Germans, my theory went, they couldn’t see me.

Rocky checked us out every couple of hours. We knew that he was trying to keep busy in a responsible way, making sure that we felt his presence and authority as the perfect squad leader. At first, that morning, Rocky crawled from hole to hole on his knees and elbows, carbine cradled in his arms, just as the books said. Later, probably feeling safer when the day wore on without incident, he rose to a crouch as he made his connections among us. (He was accompanied once or twice, as I remember, by Arch, who seemed to appear out of nowhere, asking a lot of edgy questions; Arch’s questions were always edgy, wherever we were.) Everything was still calm, still quiet. Wet, too. We might have been on bivouac at Camp Jackson or maneuvering in the Tennessee foothills in the spring rains. By mid-afternoon of the first day, I began to feel a little giddy. It was a touch of overconfidence, accompanied perhaps by a rise in blood pressure. Excitement, I knew, could do that to me. I had survived, without a serious scare, for sixteen hours. We were on the line, in position, and we were intact.

At four o’clock, Rocky arrived for the third visit of the day. Flat on his belly this time and without looking at us, he told Johnson and me that we were to go on outpost duty from midnight until dawn—or rather, the moment before dawn, the few seconds just before the first light rises. (He
found several ways of saying this, to emphasize how important it was.) He told us that on outpost we were to be alert to all strange sounds, all movement, to anything that felt like a threat. Our real job was to warn C Company of any impending dawn attack that would most likely come from those folded hills that rose in front of us. (I eyed them as Rocky talked on, trying to remember their outlines and imagine the Germans hidden inside them.) We were to sit in the outpost trench face-to-face, feet touching. The pressure of our feet against each other, which we would regulate as needed, would make sure that we stayed awake. He paused at this before going on, so that we would remember it. One of us, he then added, would face in the direction of the enemy lines, the other would face ours. That seemed obvious. At three o’clock, approximately the midway point, we would change positions.

“Any questions?” He waited a moment. “You better get some sleep,” he said then, appearing reluctant to leave us. “You got all that now?” he asked.

Poor bastard. I could tell how worried he was. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing myself. I suppose he was feeling guilty, too.

“And where the hell is the outpost?” I finally asked. I was already shaking a little, my usual way.

“What an asshole,” Rocky said, meaning himself. (We always seemed to be forgetting to exchange essential information in the first squad.) He pointed straight ahead. “That’s it out there,” he said. “Maybe a hundred yards, a little to the left of that pile of shit. See it?”

Yes, I saw it.

•   •   •

DUSK came soon enough. Johnson and I began to open some of my C rations. I preferred C to K rations; they really filled you up, even had a taste, but you had to try to forget that they looked like dog food. I could tell that Johnson was as abstracted as I was, that he was beginning to lose his focus little by little. He spat a lot of thick, phlegmy stuff, and chewed on some hangnails, but the snorting had stopped. I was even worse, almost out of control, and trying desperately to hide it. I couldn’t even open my can of C rations properly. It was a simple, familiar task, repeated a thousand times during my infantry training, yet I sliced my thumb open, deep in the fleshy part, with the jagged edge of the half-open can, cursing myself when I saw the blood. It was a piece of childish clumsiness worthy of Ira Fedderman. It took me half a minute to get my self-possession back, to try to smile as I felt my thumb begin to throb.

“You’re really bleeding,” Johnson said.

“It’s nothing.” I spoke with all the piety of the professional stoic. “Where’s the first-aid stuff?”