Some Came Running
Authors: James Jones
James Jones
“One Book among the rest is dear to me;
As when a man, having tired himself in deed
Against the world, and falling back to write,
Sated with love, or crazed by vanity,
Or drunk with joy, or maimed by Fortune’s spite,
Sets down his Paternoster and his creed.”
—Sir Walter Raleigh
“At last he was free of the damnable books of Romance.”
—
Don Quixote
“And when he was gone forth into the way, there came one running, and kneeled to him, and asked him, Good Master, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life? And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good?
there is
none good but one,
that is,
God. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Defraud not, Honour thy father and mother. And he answered and said unto him, Master, all these have I observed from my youth. Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.”
—Mark 10: 17–22
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave. I know.
But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay,
“Dirge Without Music”
This novel is dedicated to the memory of my sister
Mary Ann Jones
who did not live to finish her own
in the hope that time will not obliterate from human thought
the name used to designate this particular human personality which,
had it lived, would surely have made itself remembered
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
—Edna St. Vincent Millay,
“Dirge Without Music” (second stanza)
Special Note
In this book, which is entirely fiction, the macabre imaginings of a novelist’s mind, whose characters and situations are completely imaginary, and any resemblance to actual persons is accidental, as everyone can see, nobody like that ever lived, the fanciful workings of a perfervid brain—in this book then, the author has taken certain deliberate liberties with time and space and geography, and with certain factual if minor events which did not always occur in the years stated, but were called so in order to gain proper effect. These were done with the author’s full awareness and are not mistakes. So no one need write the author to point them out.
Anyone driving along Route 40 will find there is no town of Parkman on it in Illinois. Nor is there any town of Israel. The river is not the state boundary on Route 40. There is no interstate bridge to Indiana upon Route 40. The interstate bridge, enhanced and modified, might be seen at Hutsonville; but Hutsonville is not Israel. Israel does not exist. Neither does Parkman. Both are composite results, results of the author’s observation of the Illinois landscape and personality, an observation which has lasted some thirty-odd years, with five years off for good behavior, in the Army.
One more thing. There is a character in this novel which may cause surprise, or consternation, or even disbelief, among certain types of readers: that of the lady schoolteacher. In this connection, the author would like to point out that this character is—though changed and modified and personalized to suit the author’s need, of course—the result of the author’s fascination with, and great admiration for, Miss Emily Dickinson. The author would like to, and chooses to, believe that such ladies could exist in 1950 as well as 1850.
And now in fine, the author also wishes to take this opportunity to thank all those kind people who wrote him letters telling him everything that was wrong with his last book. Also to thank those others, who wrote him letters telling him what was good about it. And he sincerely hopes that this book now will wholly and completely please and satisfy everyone in the whole world.
Readers should also remember that the opinions expressed by the characters are not necessarily those of the author.
They came running through the fog across the snow, lumbering, the long rifles held up awkwardly high, the pot helmets they were all so proud of gleaming dully, running fast, but appearing to come slowly, lifting their feet high in the big, thick boots, foreign, alien, brain-chilling. They came that way again and again, and when you thought there could not be any more of them left on earth they came still again. Dave knelt behind the wall at the end of the field, his knees soggy wet and numb cold in the snow, and fired mechanically at them with the carbine he had taken from the dead man whose face he would always see but never be able to recognize as human because the open mouth and the nostrils and eye sockets and ears were all piled with snow. Sometimes when he fired, one of them would fall, but there was no way of knowing whether it was himself who hit him or one of the other men behind the wall firing, too. The other men of the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company. At least, he was quite sure, some of them must be.
At other times, they came with the tanks, riding, or running along behind them, and it was no longer the wall but a road ditch where there was no snow, and where the land sloped away from him, that he fired from behind, and then behind him he could hear the armor and the TDs firing, too. Most of the tanks would stop and disgorge their unhuman contents smoking and running, and finally, the others would turn back. Even so, sometimes the running figures would still come on, lumbering through the fog across the snow, the long rifles held up awkwardly high, the pot helmets they were all so proud of gleaming menacingly, and lifting their feet high in the big thick boots. Sometimes it was snow they came across, and sometimes it was only mud, and at other places it was through the woods, and at one place it was broken buildings that he stood behind and fired at them from, the white Red Cross brassard (because he was the medic of the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company) still on his arm forgotten, though he had meant to take it off. Dave was never just quite sure how he got from one of these places to another. Four days, eight days, ten days, twelve days. And they never stopped coming. They might have been robots; or they might have been little bandy-legged Japanese men; or they might have been strange, alien man-creatures disgorged and dropped by the millions with all their ammunition and vehicles and equipment from giant cigar-shaped space ships hovering in the stratosphere to conquer this foreign planet for their race. The broken rubble of buildings he stood behind as he fired at them was, somebody said, called Malmédy; or was it Stavelot? He was at both, at different times. Most of the time he did not know the faces of any of the men he was with. But sometimes, usually when he least expected it, he would see the face of a man he recognized from the 3615th QM Gas Supply Company. . . .
. . . The lonely, solitary, unexpected MP carrying a slung rifle had stopped the convoy at the crossroads, and directed them to turn back north away from St Vith toward Spa. Dave was riding in the cab of the second truck, behind Lt Perry.
“They’re comin’ in all through around here,” the MP yelled over the motors. “Nobody knows all just where. Everything’s to circle back north. If you get to Spa, you’ll probably be all right.”
It was the first that any of them had ever heard about the Battle of the Bulge. Which, in fact, was not even called that yet, then.
“But we’re supposed to deliver this gas in St Vith,” Lt Perry yelled back. “We’ve got twelve bays of cans here.”
“Then you better burn it. There probably won’t be anybody in St Vith when you get there except jerry. My orders are to send everything back north to report to V Corps.”
“Well, maybe we can get it through to the dump at Spa,” Lt Perry yelled.
“You better burn it. You’re more liable to get cut off from Spa than not, before you get there. Just try and get it off the road to burn it, that’s all I ask.”
So they had left him there, solitary and incredibly valiant, a lone MP set down from some passing truck to direct traffic at a nameless crossroads during the end of the world, and a mile further on they pulled the carrier trucks off into a field and pulled the distributor caps and sloshed the gasoline around and set fire to it, and then went on in the two personnel trucks. They never did get to Spa. At Stavelot, they were shuttled along into the line by a frantic irate major.
“What outfit?” he yelled.
“3615th QM Gas Supply Company,” Lt Perry answered.
“What?!” the major yelled incredulously. “The 3615th QM Ga— Well, go along north and report to the first line colonel you see.”
“We haven’t got any rifles, except two or three.”
“Pick some up off the dead,” the major had yelled disgustedly. “There’s plenty around. Don’t stand on ceremonies. And don’t forget to get the bandoliers!”
. . . It was that same afternoon, they learned later, that Battery B of the 283rd Field Artillery Observation Battalion, together with the MP who was directing traffic at the crossroads where they stopped, were ambushed and most of them massacred, three miles south of Malmédy. . . .
. . . The strange thing was that you did not really feel anything much at all, after the first two hours. The first two hours of being scared. When the bullet that clipped the big arm muscle below his left shoulder knocked him down and he got back up and found he could still move the arm, he went right on firing the dead man’s carbine without thinking much about it and before very long forgot all about it. At least it took care of that Red Cross brassard. It wasn’t that he was brave, it was just that there wasn’t anywhere really to go it seemed. No place in the world was there anyplace, or anyone, to go to. No one to appeal to. No Supreme Court anymore. No president, no Congress, no FBI, no police. No nothing. And it was important to keep firing at them as they came, and kept on coming, running big-footed in the big thick boots, the pot helmets gleaming cruelly through the fog. They hadn’t wanted him for an Infantryman when they drafted him because he was fat and over thirty. But now he was an Infantryman anyway, in spite of them. Once he saw Lt Perry, somewhere, with blood running all down one side of his head, his big thick glasses lost somewhere evidently, and looking very disbelieving at finding himself a lieutenant of Infantry at last finally, as someone led him away.
It was a strange way to live—without lawyers, and without judges, and without Courts of Appeal. Without mealtimes, and without bedtimes, without a morning crap somewhere, without running water. Strange, very strange. And still they seemed to keep on coming. Where did they all come from? They had told you that there weren’t even that many of them left anymore. That they were all on the run, back to Berlin. That the war was practically over.
Sometimes when they came they got close enough you could see that they were men after all, with the same strained numb, disbelieving, hopefully cruel faces as the faces all around you, and then it was a real satisfaction to shoot them and see their faces as they fell twist with pain you were glad they felt, and know that it was you who definitely hit them.