To the End of the War (25 page)

As each officer left, he was replaced by a new man from Second Army, it was evident at once that Dupree had worked with these officers before. They all knew him and slapped him on the back and asked about such and such an old company. The new officers under Dupree were all youngsters, and Johnny found them pretty dumb. Of course, it was possible that he was prejudiced.

Bird beat them under the tape. His orders came in from Washington before he was reassigned. When he got them, he was happy as a child. When he had his last talk with Dupree, he allowed himself the luxury of raising his eyebrow, but, strangely, he was very decent about not rubbing it in. He could have, because Dupree no longer had any jurisdiction over him. Dupree’s face was congested red, but he said little to Bird. There was nothing he could do to supersede or revoke Washington’s orders; Bird was out of his hands then. Bird’s good fortune made Dupree very angry for some reason, it was evident he thought Bird a milksop and a nincompoop, unfit to be an enlisted man in the army, let alone an officer. Second Army thought so, too, apparently.

The Regular Army traveling first sergeant was replaced as soon as Bird left. His job was taken by another old timer who had been in local Second Army headquarters as a personnel sergeant major for a long time. A tall, silent, very competent man; Dupree let him run the company pretty much as he saw fit.

After all the old officers were gone, the company settled down a little into a routine. Johnny continued working at the same furious pace and day by day began to get caught up. The greatest part of the clerical work of activation had been completed before Dupree took over, and after Dupree took over, strangely enough, Second Army relaxed their vigilance. Work that had had to be done over two and three and four times, checked and rechecked, now could he dashed off and sent right in. It saved Johnny a great deal of work, but he was not pleased.

Dupree would congratulate Johnny profusely whenever he did an especially involved job and did it well, and Dupree would give him holy hell whenever he wasn’t just up to what Dupree considered par. Dupree was greatly puzzled by what he regarded as Johnny’s stolidity. He did not become elated when Dupree praised him; he did not become chastened when Dupree gave him hell. Johnny was unaffected by either opinion. This was something Dupree could not grasp. The only time he could ever invoke interest in Johnny was in the explanation of the technical details of some job or other, and usually it was the cryptic first sergeant who did such explaining. Dupree was at a loss to what to do about Johnny’s indifference to approbation. He considered it abnormal and practically insubordinate, but since Johnny was doing fine work, and since Dupree could not actually put his finger on anything, he decided to let it go.

By the end of January, Johnny had the Form 20s, the Service Records, and the Second Army chart in good enough shape to pass an AGO inspection with a marking of satisfactory, which was superior, under the circumstances. He had repeatedly asked for his overdue furlough, and Dupree repeatedly refused it. The company was scheduled for maneuvers at the end of February, and from maneuvers it was scheduled to proceed directly to a POE, provided it passed the maneuvers tests.

Finally, Johnny accosted Dupree and insisted that he be given his furlough. If he didn’t get it, he said, he would quit the office, and Dupree could see how well his office would run. This was an unprecedented thing for any enlisted man to say to Dupree, and Dupree raised hell. If Carter refused to work in the office, he would be court-martialed for malingering. Johnny said he doubted that, because as long as he was willing to work in the ranks, he couldn’t be tried for malingering. Dupree said he could be tried for refusing a direct order, and threatened to have such action taken. Johnny agreed with this, but pointed out, laughing, that Dupree would he cutting off his own nose to spite his face by putting his most, or only, valuable clerk in the stockade. Dupree had had no experience with this type of mental blackmail, and be finally agreed to give Johnny his furlough. From that time on, the association between Dupree and Johnny was that of an armed truce.

Dupree stalled for two weeks, until Johnny threatened to quit, right here and now, unless the furlough papers were made out and signed. He pointed out that his work was all caught up and that the company would not lose any ground if he had his furlough. Dupree made out the papers and signed them, but he withheld them until Johnny had made out the Payroll for the month of February, Johnny worked one whole night and all the next day to get it done, turning the daily work over to his two assistant clerks. He finished it the second night and left camp immediately afterwards. He was tired and had had no sleep the night before, but he felt if he spent ten more minutes around Dupree he would desert and go over the hill for good.

By the time he argued Dupree into the furlough and made out the Payroll, he had only six days left before the company would leave to go on maneuvers. Consequently, he only got a four-day furlough with one-day travel, instead of the usual fifteen that Dupree had been handing out so munificently. He suspected that Dupree had deliberately arranged this, but he couldn’t prove it, and if he could have, there was nothing he could do. He did not know why—unless it was just Dupree’s nature to be like that. But it was also probable that Dupree had seen that Johnny’s sympathies were with Weidmann and was exacting payment for it.

Johnny had been writing to Sandy Marion. When he mentioned to Sandy that he was getting a furlough, she had written back and invited him to spend it as hers and Eddie’s guest. He had not declined her offer, but he decided to go to Miami Beach to his brother’s—the only relative he had left now, discounting Erskine. Five days was hardly enough time for the round-trip bus ride to Miami. So he made up his mind to brave Endymion again, a place he had meant never to return to.

He took a camp taxi up to Service Club No 1, which was also the bus station. The bus for Evansville was just loading. After it finished loading, there were at least fifty men left milling around the outside of the bus for whom there was no room until the next bus, in the morning.

The greatest percentage of the camp was shipping out to maneuvers with orders to proceed direct to a POE after the maneuvers were over. It was February of 1944, and there was a heightened activity about the whole camp that left a pall of suspense over everybody. The camp was emptying fast, outfits were shoving off every day. There was the rush and noise of moving out, followed by a sense of emptiness that was like a vacuum; silent empty buildings, unused lightless streets, whole sections of the camp had that sense of desolation that comes to manmade places when the men have gone, almost sinister, like a medieval city from which there had been a great exodus to escape the plague. Trucks rolled every night, leaving behind them a hollow sound like the inside of an empty tank. There were big things in the wind. All the rumours said England—which could mean only one thing; the invasion of France.

Johnny had been through it all once before, and he knew the impending frenzy. It disheartened him and left him a little cold inside. He had seen men throw away valued possessions before, because they had no place for them in their crammed “A” and “B” bags: “What the hell? I won’t need this stuff where I’m goin.” It disheartened him more when he looked at the dejected shoulders and lowered heads of the men who had missed the bus. The next one wasn’t till morning. Twelve hours lost! Many of them turned silently away and started back to their barracks. Many of them walked away cursing loudly in futile voices. Many of them went silently into the PX nearby to expand their stomachs with 3.2 slop; it made him think suddenly of the rumoured Japanese torture where they shoved a garden hose down a man’s throat and turned on the water full force until they ruptured his stomach with water.

A wild unreasoning rage rose up in Johnny. He picked up his little canvas furlough bag and commenced walking on toward the Main Gate. The four-lane highway was dark and far ahead up a gradual rise were the lights of the sentry box at the gate. He trudged along and the rage ate into him like acid. It was too late to catch a ride with anyone driving out, and he walked all the way to the gate, limping along in his low quarter issue oxfords.

When he went out the gate, he walked across the highway and stood waiting in the dark, hoping to catch a ride. To hell with this hanging around for twelve hours, dejectedly waiting for the next bus and maybe then not being able to get on! It was Highway 41, a truck route, and it ran all the way to Florida. There might be some tourists on their way home from Florida who would pick him up. It was strange, but there still seemed to be tourists in this savage insanity of a world. A way of life may crumble, but the individual bricks like tourists always remain undamaged and are fitted and cemented into the new wall.

It was cold and he turned his officer’s topcoat up around his ears. Dupree had warned him that he must get rid of it, send it home or sell it or throw it away. The topcoat collar, tall as it was, was not much protection from this February wind, and Johnny set down his canvas furlough bag and put his gloved hands up over his ears. He stood that way, his hands over his ears, his breath a mist that wafted away on the steady wind, and he looked back into the camp where lights were beginning to wink out.

From across the highway, Johnny looked past the brightly lighted sentry box with its two shivering MPs, looked down the long hill that met the camp and then rose again, undisturbed, on the other side. The camp with its bleak buildings and abortive amusements lay sprawled along the narrow little valley that ran along the road. It covered an immense amount of ground and the lights ran along, becoming smaller and smaller until they faded into sightlessness on either end. Behind each light lived men, each group in its own little vicinity, its own PX and its own movie, almost unconscious of the other groups beside it. In each group lived men whose lives were being decided every minute. Men like Big Red who had been a staff sergeant then a first sergeant and now was a private in another company, men like Weidmann who were making changes of terrific import every day, men whose lives—infinitesimal but none the less important to
them
—were being affected tremendously; things of great importance were happening to their personal lives. Things that could not be seen from the highway looking down the hill. From where he stood, he could see it whole. He was like a man who has been transported into space to look down upon his planet objectively. He could not see from the moon the wars and murders and things that were important to the people of his planet.

If he did not know what was going on inside this camp, he would not suspect the existence of so many important things. He might be a tourist or a truck driver passing by the camp in several seconds and saying to himself: “Here is a camp with many soldiers inside of it. Many soldiers live inside this camp, sprawled out over the countryside, its lights winking on and off.” But the words would have no meaning, no significance. “This camp has no relation to me. I drive by this camp and I see a camp with many soldiers who are part of my country’s army. Then I drive on, I pass, I do not see this camp, I go about my life which is foreign and unrelated to this camp. Then this camp is gone. I have driven by. But it is still there. I am not gone, because I’m always here. They are only soldiers in a camp, and my here must go on by this camp; it must go about its travel and its living.”

The third truck that passed glimpsed the soldier standing with his hands over his ears in the flickered glare of the passing headlights. The driver applied the air and stopped and picked the soldier up.

“Where you going, Bud?”

“Endymion, Indiana.”

“Going to Evansville, then East.”

“I’ll ride along. To Evansville.”

“You just come from the camp here? You stationed here?” A jerk of the thumb.

“Yeah. Just come. I live here.”

Pause. “Pretty big camp, this one. Ain’t it.”

Pause. “Yeah. Pretty big.”

From Jones’s poem “The Hill They Call the Horse,” the dead pass by:

Set Lechessi—

Belly ripped wide open, still gasping:

Help me. Help me.

Can’tcha see? I’m gonna die!

Memory will not allow Jones to forget the scene of the steady march of the dead.

The poverty-stricken Lechessi family remains in Massachusetts. Johnny cries for them. He cries for Set, for himself, and for humanity.

Sandy tries to console Johnny, but she is rejected. She didn’t see the line of the dead. As Johnny says to her, “You don’t know anything about it. What do you know about it?”

THE MARION HOME, ENDYMION, EARLY FEBRUARY 1944

S
TANDING IN THE CENTER OF
the room, he told her the whole story about Weidmann. Sandy listened sympathetically, nodding every now and then. He stood motionless in the center of the floor and talked and talked.

“There was a guy in my old outfit named Set Lechessi,” he said. “He was a wop. He was a wop and he was from Boston. Cambridge, Mass. He was a curly-headed wop and he had the most magnificent physique I ever saw. He had to have a wonderful body. He needed it. He worked with it all his life. He didn’t go to high school because he had to work. All he ever did was work with his muscles. Railroad gangs. Cement gangs. Stuff like that. That was all the work he ever got a chance to do.”

Johnny’s voice was choked and there were tears threatening to overflow from his eyes. His mouth was open and he worked it spasmodically to keep himself from breaking down and crying.

“I don’t know anything about economics,” he said. “I don’t know the first thing about economics, or philosophy, or psychology, or history. But I know Set Lechessi worked all his goddam life with his hands because he didn’t get a chance to do anything else; he couldn’t get any other kind of work, and he didn’t have an education, he was dumb. He wasn’t one of these examples of the Great American Success Story. He didn’t rise out of the slums to become president or a great financier. He was too honest for that; he was too innocent; he was naive. When people told him things, it never occurred to him to doubt that they were telling him the truth. He was just plain dumb; he believed everybody was as honest as he was. He was dumb, but if he’d had a chance to go to school, even to high school, he might have developed the brains he had so he could have gotten a clerking job. That was his greatest ambition in life: to have a white-collar job as a clerk or an accountant.