Shannon (43 page)
Authors: Frank Delaney
By instinct she had told nobody of the company in her house. Nobody ever came to the front door. Callers would assume she was away, that she had taken a vacation from the hospital— although she did take in the delivered milk can every morning. Sometimes she slipped out to do some essential shopping while Robert slept, but she always left a note on the kitchen table saying where she had gone and specifying her expected time of return; otherwise her garden gate, the access to the rear of the house, already secluded, now remained firmly locked. But by raising the level of privacy, she had intensified the sense of intimacy.
On the way home from the picnic, these feelings— of comfort, passion, and inquiry— melded in her, increasing until she felt ready to burst.
In this— self-generated— passion she had to know something, and she had to find a release, no matter how temporary, from the pressure.
They spoke little that night. Climbing the stairs a step behind Robert, Ellie said to herself that what was to come next would be ordained by powers she knew nothing about, and she would be carried where those powers took her.
On the landing, his door stood nearest and he opened it wide and walked in. She hesitated for a second and walked on to her own room, where she opened her door wide and left it open as he had done.
This is getting comical.
Inside, she put her lighted candle on her night table and walked to her long mirror.
Have I changed in any way? Oh, don't be ridiculous.
She stood there listening, trying to identify Robert's actions from his movements. In a few moments the dancing shadow thrown on the landing wall by his candle disappeared and she heard the click of his door as it shut. Returning to the life she had lived here when alone, she undressed completely before drawing on her nightdress, climbed into bed, blew out the candle, and— to her own surprise next morning— slept all night.
The next day turned unusually warm— hot, even. From time to time, great black thunderclouds came down the track of the river and they heard distant rumbles. No rain or lightning came. The sun shone un-blinkingly down.
They ate lunch indoors to stay cool. Ellie had made egg salad, roasted some chicken thighs, baked some hot soda bread, and had found some more strawberries in the garden. She poured rich cream into a yellow pitcher. When Robert came down to her call— she had not seen him since breakfast— she asked, “How are you?”
He said, “Just fine,” and sat down.
She filled his plate; she filled his glass with milk; she helped herself. Usually they talked all the time— or at least all the time that Robert felt capable of talking. If he didn't, she often chattered on, telling him tales from the hospital or of her parents’ lives or local neighbors; she had an inexhaustible and amusing fund of local comment.
Today she said nothing— and he likewise said not a word. They finished eating; both sat in their chairs, scarcely moving. By now the silence
had grown so obvious it needed to be broken. And still neither person spoke. The dog slept on an armchair. Not a sound could be heard.
A sudden breeze slammed a door and Ellie rose to check. In the hallway, she understood the reason for Robert's withdrawal; a sheaf of pages sat on the hall table with, on top, a page with the single word
FINISHED.
She picked them up and felt their weight. She stroked them but didn't attempt to scan their content. She put them down again and moved objects on the table to make room. She deployed an ivory ornament as a paperweight. She rearranged a framed photograph of her parents to stand near the papers, lending them authority, watching over them.
When she walked away and looked back, the manuscript's presence dominated the hall. Thin and orderly, the document looked as though it might be a short family history or a paper of academic thought. Ellie tapped the pages one more time for luck— and when she returned to the kitchen where Robert sat, she had the means of breaking the silence.
“You've written more than I thought. Have you read it all?”
Robert said, “No.”
“If you wish, I'll sit with you.”
Her attitude offered him no choice. They went into the hall and fetched the sheaf of papers, and she led the way to the most comfortable chairs in the house, in the drawing room, and handed the papers to Robert. Ashen-faced, he began to read his own account of one of warfare's most famous battles, written within, as he admitted later, his own narrow focus. After the second page he raised his head and asked, “Would you— read it at the same time?”
She took the two pages that he handed to her and began to read.
After crossing the ocean, we sat for many days in our uniforms in an anonymous building on the outskirts of a town, waiting for our orders and our transport. The men had nothing to do except smoke cigarettes or play cards, or hunt for the next cup of coffee. Other than at a ball game, I had never seen so many men in one place, except that these fellows became very bored. One or two soldiers talked to me a little, said their wives were frightened, and we wrote letters to their families.
The senior officers seemed exceptionally civil and, although they didn't have to, they included me in all their discussions and briefings. They
reckoned— as they told me— that a man who can keep the secrets of the Confessional isn't a blabbermouth.
At last, on the first day of June, we were told that we were likely to “travel soon but not far. “ A “big opportunity” awaited no more than an hour or two away; they showed me the map. They said some troops had already been there for more than ten days, and others were drifting in.
No casualty reports had yet come through, because no real fighting had yet taken place. Both armies were no more than digging trenches and making shapes as yet, and our colonel said the marines would only go in “when the fur begins to fly. “ I spoke to many of the officers and asked whether they wished me to write letters home for them; they could surely be excused such duties, given their great burden of responsibility. These men, though trained like machines, were gentlemen; it was my privilege to move among them.
I was chafing, because I had no means of viewing the future. For me the greatest advantage of a priest's life was the sweetness of the road ahead, a known journey, though not without challenges, to eternal salvation in the sight of God.
On the morning after I had been wrestling with this thought, I received validation of my chafing. The pattern of sound around us suddenly changed— shouts, engines, noise— and we began to move out to a train station. After some bumpy hours across wide green countryside, we were disembarked from the train and formed up again.
We began to march steadily forward until we soon meshed with other Americans, and I understood that we had come to the rear of our forward lines. I became enjoyably accustomed to the rhythmic beat of boots marching. After each halt I welcomed the restart and marveled at how quickly the rhythm reestablished itself.
In good time, or so we were told, we reached a broad and deep military encampment, where, I learned, we stood almost three miles east of the enemy front line and, after another march, two miles. The officers beside me gestured to a dense line of trees and rocky outcrops in the distance ahead of us. Somewhere to the south, a church bell began to ring.
We turned our flank to the direction of that church bell and marched down a long slope. I took an opportunity to step out of the line and look back at our troops. Thus I saw, for the first time, an army on the move;
that is to say, I viewed an entire military operation. Beige countryside dust rose as lines and lines of men, rows of trucks, and wheeled guns trundled forward; horses toiled as they hauled; some, ridden by officers, pranced.
Our destination soon became known: a village that the men would call Juicy Lucy or Lucy Birdcage, the little hamlet of Lucy-le-Bocage. We halted there with some thought that we might yet have to move ahead to the village of Bouresches, where supplies and medical facilities had already been established. From the tiny square of Lucy-le-Bocage I saw, when I had a moment, my first view of the hill that was known as Belleau Wood, the place that comes back to my mind more than I wish.
I murmur the words
crown of thorns
when I think of Belleau Wood. The grove sat on a high crag, and the ungainly ragged trees looked like the crown of thorns on Christ's pale forehead above a white cliff that represented His face. My impression was further heightened by the contrast between this painful crown and the surrounding countryside, because Belleau Wood sat above a beautiful wide wheat field, which, that day, smiled in the sun.
The bugle called early on Friday morning, and the colonel asked if I would bless the corps. His tone had changed to somber and efficient. What, I asked myself, did the officers know of what lay ahead? We soon found out. The following two days, Saturday and Sunday, told me some of the answers. On Monday, I lowered myself into Hell.
It will not be possible for me to give an account of every hour of any day. I mean, however, to give a general sense of this intensive action. My activities of necessity reached far beyond the spiritual and took place on what I may truly call a battlefield— that is, a field on which a battle was fought.
Before I went to France with the marines, I imagined that
battlefield
had a more general meaning, referring to a county or province in which regiments advanced upon each other. Now I have seen and experienced a place that was, truly, a battlefield.
That golden wheat field was full of standing grain, spreading beneath the height of Belleau Wood like a sea beneath a cliff Never was there such a benign and lovely sea; never was there such a death-dealing cliff
Though I am no expert in such matters, my measurement of that portion of the wheat field which faced us was about four hundred yards long
and not more than eighty yards wide. My measurement of the grim cliff put it at a hundred feet and more, rising sheer above the ears of wheat. I concede that there may be no accuracy in that measurement, because all proportions altered and went out of shape in the smoke of the gunfire.
Our problems arose in the width more than the length. Our marines had to cross this eighty yards of naked wheat in order to silence the guns that fired at us unceasingly from high in the crown of thorns. It became my understanding that more than two hundred enemy machine-gun nests had been concealed in the wood and ringed its edge. In addition, many enemy snipers had taken up positions in the higher branches of the trees on the woodland fringe.
Crossing that field on foot, climbing that crag, and entering that grove of trees— no other means existed by which our men might take Belleau Wood.
The wheat field waved beautifully in the breeze, but sadly, as I would discover, it also bent under the force of fire, the pressure of falling soldiers, and the weight of their blood on the golden ears of grain, because from dawn on that first day's action, men walked in lines into the wheat field and were shot down in great numbers. This continued without cease all day; we suffered appalling casualties.
I remained, as ordered, behind the lines, with nothing to do but await burial orders. None came through; we had no safe means of retrieving our fallen men. Nor could I exercise any spiritual care, because to speak with the men about to go into that wheat field seemed almost an intrusion; I made myself the purveyor of cigarettes and coffee as I walked among them, wondering which of them I should never see again.
The fall of night, however, altered my position. When gunfire ceased, I, out of curiosity, I must admit, went forward to the edge of the wheat field and crouched there in the dark. What was my motive? I am unable to say. It cannot be an attraction to Death, whom I had already seen in his many, mostly regrettable, forms in my pastoral work. Whatever the reason, I huddled there in the dark, alone, trying to see into the golden sea of wheat.
At that moment my role in that war altered. I was changed not by what my eyes saw but by what my ears heard. Here and there in the night came cries, some loud, some faint. At first I thought them night birds, or
the unfamilar animals of France— until I began to discern words. These were the cries of our men, cut down in the field of wheat and unable to move because of their wounds. Sometimes the owls called too, and once or twice— it was an especially warm and balmy night— came the lovely melodic songs of nightingales.
I did not know what to do, and I spent a night of great anguish. By dawn next morning I had decided. Without asking permission to attach myself to a detail— it did not occur to me that I should— I went with our first advance of that day's marines into the wheat field. They set out on their frightful work by crawling into the wheat; they carried little by way of kit and no more than one weapon each; most did not even carry grenades, in the interest of traveling light.
Without reference to them, as I did not wish to make them responsible for me, an untrained man, I tried as best I could, working my elbows and knees, to keep up with these magnificent soldiers and was assisted in doing so by the ground's roughness, which kept us all at the same pace. At the time I was not wholly certain why I did what I was doing; I believe now I had the hope I might do no more than visit Holy Rites upon those who fell. At one moment I raised my head and saw that we made a long line, one man deep, and the marines carried their rifles at the ready. I was on the extreme right of that line. Though my heart sank and my eyes blurred with fear, I was at war and it was too late for me to turn back.
Noises of war, I discovered, bear no resemblance to any other sounds of life. It is true that, in the absence of defined expectation, any sound will be different; but I had not expected, on that first day, the sharpness of the whistling sounds or the awfulness of the bullet's finishing
thud.
It will at once be understood that I am discussing enemy bullets as, first, they fly through the air and, then, as they find their target. When I saw what such a bullet can wreak, it became at that moment the most infernal sound I had ever heard.
My first casualty came soon as, still crawling on elbows and knees, I found in my pathway what I took to be a crude pile of indeterminable material. It was the body of one of our men who had died the previous day. As I murmured a prayer— he was so shattered that I made no search for anointing points— I heard a fierce cry and raised my head.
Some yards to my left, a young corporal, a fine boy of twenty-two years
from Oklahoma with whom I had spoken the previous day, had just been shot in the throat. He was struck so precisely that it became immediately plain to me that his German assassin— probably another boy of the same age— must have seen him clearly By then many of our men had abandoned concealment and had begun to walk through the waist-high wheat in a steady advance upon the wood. How frightful that was. The enemy gunners merely had to take aim and fire; that was how the Oklahoma boy suffered his fate.
My senior chaplain and I had long agreed that the Last Rites of the Church should be applied liberally owing to the fact that I might not always know whether a fallen comrade shared my religion. In this case, as in so many others to come, I had no opportunity to ask. The Oklahoma boy died as I reached him, with one eye open, one closed. He lay on his side, and a wide globule of blood kept pulsing from his throat.
With my vial of oils in my hand I anointed the five points of seeing, hearing, smell, taste, and touch and spoke the Act of Contrition in his ear.
Then I stood up but immediately threw myself down again beside my dead comrade as two of the chilling whistles came in, one above my head, one beside my ear. The marine directly beside me went down. Almost before I had finished prayers with this first fallen man beside me, I went to the second man. He was also dead; his head had come apart.
This will not be an account of military strategy or battle tactics. I am not a soldier; I do not understand war or the military life; I scarcely knew the name of the brigade to which I had been assigned. My mission in France required that I care for the spiritual welfare of my comrades. I was their chaplain. In the event which I experienced, I believe it was demanded of me, whether I wished or wanted it, to help with their physical needs too.
Nor can I give an account of every day and every hour; I believe I was present for five days; others may have been on that field of battle for up to twenty. My account means to give a general sense of the action at the Bois de Belleau, the wood of Belleau, and I can do no more than meld together my impressions taken from all of my days there.
Matters continued that morning as they had begun. Some yards ahead of me, another large marine went down, his weapon dropped from his hand. I crawled to him and found him lucid. Discovering that he had no
fatal prospects, we stood up and began to move, but my zigzag pattern distressed him and he attempted to stop me, as the effect on his wounded legs was proving unendurable.
In any case, I had no choice; as I began to lower him to the ground, a
thud
of fire, brief and awful, sounded in his body. Now I knew that he was dead, almost by the time I settled his body on the ground. The enemy bullets hit him in the back and passed through into his heart, I presume, and his lungs, because he fell spewing blood. I fell with his body on top of me, and from that position prayed with him and for him. But all his senses had gone. The defeat of this moment was dreadful and immense and remains so.
After that reverse, I edged myself out from beneath my comrade's body and lay low amid the wheat for I know not how long. I saw insects; I even observed a small bird perched and swaying on an ear of wheat. Under the sun the ground grew hot as a baker's tray. I saw blood trickling down a golden stalk of wheat.
As I lay there I determined to try and analyze the rhythm of the battlefield. Soon I wished that I had not. A pattern of sound existed— it comprised a short burst of fire from far away and a shout or a scream nearby. Then came a series of the dreadful stammering metallic sounds and many screams.
This caused me to raise my head, and I saw that some of our men who were still on their feet had now stripped to the waist and were moving steadily forward, advancing on Belleau Wood, firing their weapons and shouting as they went. Most were mown down as I watched; they spun or toppled almost as though playing a game in which they had agreed to abide by the rules. Some few made it to the shelter of the crag's overhang and began to climb.