Once There Was a War (11 page)

This story is told in one of those nameless hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.

Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained. She has been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went on, but her voice wouldn’t work any more, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down. The ward was quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can’t get any powdered eggs at all. They’ve got to use the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”

There’s a man for you—there is really a man.

A COZY CASTLE

LONDON,
July 27, 1943
—The jeep turns off the main road and pulls to a stop. The great gate of gray stone arches over the driveway. When it was built America was a wilderness with a few colonies clinging passionately to its edges. From the stone sentry room an American sentry emerges and stands by the jeep. He looks at passes. He salutes and opens a huge iron gate.

The jeep moves on into an ascending driveway overarched with oaks and beeches six feet through the trunks. The road curves and climbs a little hill and ahead you can see a gray tower poking above the enormous trees. Then you come out of the neat, ancient forest and there is a perfect castle against a hill, with lawns in front of it. It is a little castle, only about forty rooms, a cottage for its period. And it was built by a certain English king for a certain English mistress.

It is odd that this ancient scandal must not be identified but it is so. If, for instance, it were known which king and which mistress were involved in the building of the little castle, then it would be known by the enemy which castle it is and if, further, it were known that American troops are quartered in this castle, it would become a target for enemy aircraft. But since a wholesome number of English kings had mistresses and built little castles for them, so much information does not give the enemy a target or rather it gives him a number of targets too great to concentrate on.

On the lawn in front of the castle, where once perhaps gentlemen in heavy armor challenged one another with spears, a platoon of American soldiers, helmeted and with full packs, are doing close-order drill, marching, countermarching, opening and closing ranks, their bayonets gleam-in the summer English sunshine.

In the gardens leading to the pointed door the roses are blooming. Red roses and white roses. Great-grand-children of the bushes from which perhaps the symbols of Lancaster and York were picked and worn as insignia in the Civil War. The stones of the entrance are deeply worn, concave as basins, and beyond is a dark hall, so high and shadow-deep in the midday that you must get your eyes used to it before you can see the carved oaken ceiling from which thousands of little oak faces look out. And in this great hall an American Army sergeant sits behind a pine table and does his work.

Beyond, through an open door, is an even larger room but this one is lighter, for one side of it has large leaded windows, constructed in diamonds and lozenges and circles and moons of glass. And this also looks on the rose garden, the lawn, and finally to the forest.

There is a great fireplace in this room, a fireplace so high that a tall man can walk inside without stooping and could lie down without scrunching. The mantel over the fireplace is deep with heraldic carving. This is the lounge. On chairs procured somewhere the GIs sit and read and listen to the radio. A fine bar has been built against one wall, where Coca-Cola and pop are sold. And overhead, the arching roof of carved oak, chiseled and fitted long before America was born. And a soldier leaning back in his chair is staring fascinated at the ceiling. There is a copy of
Yank
in his lap. He squints his eyes and studies the ceiling. He withdraws his attention and calls, “Hey, Walter, have the Dodgers got twenty-four or twenty-five games?”

Up the broad stairway is a gallery and then the thirty rooms or so in which the guests of the couple were made comfortable, for it is probable that only five or six hundred people knew about this old scandal, including the lady’s husband. The rooms are large, and each one has its carved fireplace and its little leaded, diamond-paned window, looking dimly on the gardens. But the rooms themselves are squad rooms with the cots arranged in a line, the shoes at attention underneath, the lockers with drawn-up blouses and trousers and towels and the helmets squarely on top. The rooms are probably much cleaner than they were when the king’s mistress lived there.

Downstairs in a kind of cave is the kitchen, where an Army cook is baking square apple pies by the quarter-acre. The floor is so deeply worn that he has to step over some of the high places. His coal stove is roaring, and he has arrived at that quiet hopelessness that cooks get on finally realizing that their work is never going to be finished, that there is no way of feeding a man once for all.

The CO of the post is a first lieutenant from Texas and the second in command is a Chicago second lieutenant. They are young and stern and friendly. The job of keeping the castle in order is just a job to them.

There is no point to any of this except the change of pageantry. The place, which was built for heralds and courtiers, for soldiers in body armor, is in no way outraged by the new thing. The jeeps and armored cars, the half-tracks that came in through the gates, the helmeted soldiers on the lawn do not seem out of place. They belong here. They are probably very little different from the earlier inhabitants. Certainly the king in question would have been glad for them, because he had his international troubles too.

THE YANKS ARRIVE

LONDON,
July 28, 1943
—The little gray English station is set in the green, rolling fields where the grass is being cut and, where the mowing machine has gone, the cut grass is wilting and the red poppies are wilting. The double tracks go by the front of the station and a “Y” siding runs in back of the station. At 4:03 the American commandant and four officers drive to the station. A British officer comes out of the signal-man’s room. “The train will be four minutes late,” he says. All the officers look at their watches. On the main line a through train roars through at about seventy miles an hour. The young lieutenant says, “I thought British trains were slow.”

“They used to hold the world’s record for speed,” the commandant says.

On another track a freight train moves rapidly through the station. The flat cars are loaded with tanks, a solid line of tanks the whole length of the train. A hundred yards from the station a clubmobile is parked, a bus converted into a kitchen for the cooking of doughnuts and coffee and run by two Red Cross girls. Their coffee urns are steaming and great baskets of doughnuts are accumulating. They lift out the doughnuts and load the baskets with them. On top of the bus is a loudspeaker connected with a phonograph.

The commandant says, “That big girl is a great one. We got five hundred men at six o’clock this morning. They were pretty tired. That big girl put on a record and did a Highland fling to some hot music. She’s a funny one.” The smell of the cooking doughnuts comes down the breeze.

The British officer comes out of the signalman’s house again. “It will be here in three minutes,” he says. And again the officers look at their watches. The little train comes around the bend. It passes the station, puts its tail into the “Y,” and backs into the siding. The compartments are solid with helmeted men and their equipment is piled in front of them to the knees. Their faces are almost as brown as their uniforms. They are sitting with their packs on. It is a hot afternoon, one of the few of the summer.

As the train pulls in, the phonograph in the clubmobile howls, “Mr. Five by Five.” The sound carries a long way. The soldiers turn their heads slowly and look toward the music. Now a sergeant runs down the side of the train and opens the doors of the compartments but the men do not move. A stout captain, with a very black mustache, shouts, “All right, men. Pile out of it.” And the little compartments disgorge the men. They stand helplessly on the platform, their shoulders damp with sweat under the pack straps and their backs wet under the packs. They carry their barracks bags too and the things which won’t go in, a guitar here, and a mandolin, a pair of shoes. One man has a mongrel fox terrier on a string and it stands beside him panting with excitement.

The stout, worried captain gets the men lined up and marches them to the clubmobile. Swing music is still shrieking from the loudspeaker on the roof. A single file of men passes a little counter on a side of the truck and each one gets a big cup of coffee and two doughnuts. Then they break their ranks and stand about drinking the coffee and looking lost. The big girl comes out of the truck and works on them.

“Where you from, boy?”

“Michigan.”

“Why, we’re neighbors. I come from Illinois.”

A local wolf, a slicker at home, a dark boy with sideburns, says wearily and just from a sense of duty, “What you doing tonight, baby?”

“What are you doing?” the big girl asks, and the men about laugh loudly as if it were very funny.

The tired wolf puts an arm about her waist. “Plant me,” he says, and the two do a grotesque shag, a kind of slow-motion jitterbug.

A blond boy with a sunburned nose and red eyelids shyly approaches a lieutenant. He has his coffee in one hand and his two doughnuts in the other. Too late he realizes that he is in trouble. He balances the two doughnuts on the edge of his cup and they promptly fall into the coffee. He salutes and the lieutenant returns it gravely.

“Excuse me, sir,” the boy says. “Aren’t you a movie star?”

“I used to be,” the lieutenant says. “I used to be.”

“I knew I’d seen you in pictures,” the boy says. “I’ll write home about seeing you here. Say,” he says with excitement, “would you write your name here on something and I could send it home and then they’d have to believe me and they could keep it for me.”

“Sure,” the lieutenant says, and he signs his name with a pencil on the back of a grubby envelope from the soldier’s pocket. The boy regards it for a moment.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks.

“Why, I’m just in the Army, the same as you are.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see you are. Well, they’ll have to believe I saw you now.”

“How long have you been over?” the lieutenant asks.

“We’re not supposed to say anything about stuff like that.”

“Sure, I forgot. Good boy to remember it.”

The doughnuts in the coffee have become semi-liquid by now. The boy drinks the coffee and the doughnuts without noticing.

“Do you suppose we’ll ever be let to go to London?” he asks.

“Sure. When you get a pass.”

“Well, that’s a long way off, isn’t it?”

“Not so far. You could make it on a forty-eight hour pass easy and have lots of time.”

“Well. Are there lots of girls there?”

“Sure. Plenty.”

“And will they, will they talk to a guy?”

“Sure they will.”

“Hot damn!” says the boy. “Oh, hot damn!”

“Fall in,” the stout, worried captain shouts, and, “Fall in,” the sergeants shout. The blond boy gets in line, still holding his cup. The big girl yells at him over the music, “Hey, sonny. We need those cups.”

She rushes fiercely up to him and grabs the cup and then quickly pats him once on the shoulder. The men on both sides of him laugh loudly, as if it were very funny.

A HAND

LONDON,
July 29, 1943
—The soldier wears a maroon bathrobe and pajamas and slippers, the uniform of the Army hospital. He is a little pale and shaky, the way convalescents are. His left arm he carries crooked and high, and the fingers of his left hand hook over helplessly. In front of him on a table is a half-built model of a Liberator. Not covered yet, but a mass of tiny struts and ribs and braces. And he has a sheet of balsa wood, stamped with the patterns, and he has a razor blade and a little bowl of glue, with a match sticking out of it.

“I got hurt in Africa,” he says. “Got hit in the stomach, but they fixed that up pretty good.” He holds up his left arm. “This is what bothers me,” he says. “That was broke awful bad. I haven’t been out of a cast long.” He moves the fingers slightly. “Not much feeling in them,” he says. “I can’t make a fist. I can’t grab hold of anything. At least, I couldn’t. It’s kind of numb.

“I got hold of this model,” he says. “I can hold things down with my hand, like this.” He puts the side of his hand down on the sheet of balsa. “I did all of that with my right hand. I guess it’s lucky I’m right-handed.” He regards his left hand and moves the fingers. “The doctor says I’ll be able to use it to grab hold of things if I just exercise it. But it’s hard to exercise it when you can just barely feel it’s there.

“A funny thing happened yesterday,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you the exact place.” He takes a pencil and sticks it into the maze of tiny braces. “There, you see that piece in there? The one with the little pencil mark on it? I marked it so I’d remember which one it was.

“Yesterday I was trying to get that set in right, and you can see it’s a hard place to get at. You’ve got to hold it here and work it up under. Well, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I came to, and I was holding that little piece in my left hand.” He regards the wizened finger with amazement. “I told the doctor about it and he said that was all right and I should try to use it every bit I could. Well, sir, when I think about it I can’t do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I can later, a little bit at a time. I roll a pencil under my fingers. They say that’s a good thing to do. I can feel it some, too.”