Company K (Library Alabama Classics) Page 7

  “I can't help it,” said Tietjen. “I know it looks lousy, but Lieutenant Smith said I was to take you along.”

  “That bastard!” I said.—“Why has he got it in for me? Why does he want to ride me all the time?”

  “I don't know,” said Tietjen. “I'm just telling you what he said.”

  I got up again and went with the working party. Coming back I was so tired and sleepy I could scarcely hold my eyes open. I didn't wait for supper. I turned in, like I was, and was asleep before I got on the bunk good. . . . Then, almost immediately, somebody was standing over me, shaking me. I was not entirely awake, but I heard Corporal Brockett's voice coming from a long way off. “Eddie's pretty tired, Mr. Smith. He's been on a working party all day. Maybe you'd better take somebody else. . . . ” And Lieutenant Smith's voice: “He'll be all right when he gets on his feet.”

  I opened my eyes and sat up, and Lieutenant Smith stood before me looking fresh and rested. “You bastard!” I thought. “You dirty bastard! . . . ” I looked down at the floor and covered my face with my hands so that he couldn't see how much I hated him.

  “We start at ten o'clock,” he said. “We'll be out all night.” Then he looked at his watch. “I've just got time to go to Headquarters and write a few letters before we start,” he said. Then he laughed, patted me on the shoulder and went out. . . . “You bastard!” I thought.—“Why do you keep riding me?”

  After he had gone, I sat there for a minute before making up my mind. Then I slipped out of the dugout and ran down the old communication trench which the French had abandoned, and which was partially filled up. I was waiting for him at the supply trench when he passed humming “La Paloma” under his breath. I had taken off my shoes, so as not to make a sound on the duckboards. I followed him for about three hundred yards, still undecided what to do, and then he turned and saw me. He tried to talk me out of it, but I pinned him to the side of the trench and stuck my bayonet in him until he quit breathing. After that I ran back as quickly as I could and was in the dugout, and asleep again, before the guard had completed his round, or before anybody had missed me.

  PRIVATE EMIL AYRES

  AT first I used to listen to Les Yawfitz and that fellow Nallett argue in the bunk house. They'd been to college, and they could talk on any subject that came up. But mostly they talked about war and how it was brought about by moneyed interests for its own selfish ends. They laugh at the idea that idealism or love of country had anything to do with war. It is brutal and degrading, they say, and fools who fight are pawns shoved about to serve the interest of others.

  For a while I listened to them, and tried to argue the thing out in my mind. Then I quit thinking about it. If the things they say are really true, I don't want to know it. I'd go crazy and shoot myself, if I thought those things were true. . . . Unless a man does feel like that, I can't understand how he would be willing—how he would permit himself to—

  So when they start talking now, I get up and leave the bunk house, or turn over to the wall and cover up my ears.

  PRIVATE MARTIN APPLETON

  DID you ever stand alone on a quiet night while the world trembled to the vibration of guns, and watch soundless light touch the horizon in unexpected places? Did you see a moon rise behind poplars and watch it climb upward, limb by laced limb, until it swung clear of the dead branches and into a quiet sky? . . . I have seen these things, and I tell you they are beautiful.

  Then there are rockets, Very lights and flares (white, golden or green) that rise indolently to the air in long curves. Sometimes the rockets puff softly before your eyes into impersonal light that drifts down the wind; and sometimes they become stars of warm and beautiful coloring that burn purely for a moment, and expire before you can mark the instant of their annihilation.

  I never see flares of Very lights floating over the trenches that I do not think of time and infinity, and the Creator of the universe; and that this war, and my despair, are, in His sight, as meaningless, and, no doubt, as remote as are the ascending and falling rockets to my finite mind.

  PRIVATE LESLIE WESTMORE

  SOMETHING kept saying to me, “If your gun should go off by accident and shoot you in the knee, your leg would become stiff, and the war would be over for you.—You would be lucky to get off that lightly.”

  I wouldn't listen to the voice whispering to me. “That would be a cowardly thing to do.—I'd never be able to hold my head up again.—I'd never be able to look people in the eyes,” I thought. . . .

  “If you were blind, now,” the voice said again; “surely nobody could blame you if you went blind!—Think! Your uncle Frederick went blind and your grandmother lost her sight before she died. It runs in your family.”

  “That's very true,” I said, “but Uncle Fred had cataracts, which could have been removed, and grandmother had good sight until she was past seventy-five.”

  “All right,” said the voice. “Go ahead, then, if you'd rather be killed. . . . But you're a fool, that's all I can say!”

  “I'd rather be killed than go blind,” I said. “I'll take my chance on getting killed.”

  “You're lying,” the voice said. “You know very well that you're lying. . . . ”

  I turned over on my bunk, thinking how comfortable this rest billet was compared with the dugouts in the line. In a few days we would be back at the front again. . . . “Try it!” said the voice.—“It isn't so bad. Your Uncle Fred was happy afterward, wasn't he? Think what a fuss everybody made over your grandmother, waiting on her hand and foot! . . . Shut your eyes and try it for a while! You'll see it isn't so bad. . . . ”

  “All right,” I said, “but it's just for a minute.”

  I closed my eyes and said to myself: “Now I am blind.” Then I opened them again, but when I did so, I couldn't see anything. . . . “This is ridiculous,” I said. “There's nothing the matter with my eyes.—This is absurd.” . . . “How do you know?” asked the voice. “Remember your grandmother and your Uncle Fred.”

  I jumped up, frightened. Everything was black in front of me as I walked forward and stumbled over some men playing black jack on the floor. “Look where you're going!” said Sergeant Howie. “Where the hell do you think you are?”

  I stood there not moving. Then I felt Walt Rose standing up. I could hear his breathing and I knew he was peering at my face. . . . “Say, come here quick!” he said in an excited voice. I heard the squeak of Carter Atlas’ bunk as he got up quickly. I heard the voices of Walter Landt and Larry Dickson. I felt them closing in around me, but I stood there without saying anything.

  “Can't you see us?” asked Walt Rose. “Can't you see us at all, Les?”

  “No,” I said. . . . “I'm totally blind.” Then a feeling of relief came over me. I felt happier than I had in months. “The war is over for me,” I said.

  PRIVATE SYLVESTER WENDELL

  CAPTAIN MATLOCK was receiving a number of letters from the parents of men killed in action, so he decided to write to the next of kin of each dead man, as shown by his service record book, and he detailed me to gather the facts in each case and to write appropriate letters of condolence.

  I sat there in the company office writing my letters while Steve Waller, the company clerk, made up his payroll. I gave every man a glorious, romantic death with appropriate last words, but after about the thirtieth letter, the lies I was telling began to gag me. I decided I'd tell the truth in at least one of the letters, and this is what I wrote:

  “DEAR MADAM:

  “Your son, Francis, died needlessly in Belleau Wood. You will be interested to hear that at the time of his death he was crawling with vermin and weak from diarrhea. His feet were swollen and rotten and they stank. He lived like a frightened animal, cold and hungry. Then, on June 6th, a piece of shrapnel hit him and he died in agony, slowly. You'd never believe that he could live three hours, but he did. He lived three full hours screaming and cursing by turns. He had nothing to hold on to, you see: He had learned long ago that what h
e had been taught to believe by you, his mother, who loved him, under the meaningless names of honor, courage and patriotism, were all lies . . . ”

  I read that much of the letter to Steve Waller. He listened until I finished, his face without expression. Then he stretched himself a couple of times. “Let's go to the billet and see if we can talk the old woman into frying up a batch of eggs,” he said.

  I didn't say anything. I just sat there at the typewriter. “These frogs can beat the whole world when it comes to frying eggs,” he said. . . . “Christ knows how they do it, but they're the nuts when it comes to cooking.”

  I got up then, and began to laugh, tearing into fragments the letter I had written.

  “All right, Steve,” I said; “all right; just as you say!”

  PRIVATE RALPH BRUCKER

  IF you boys want the real low-down on Fishmouth Terry, here it is: He's thirty-five years old and before war times he was a floor walker in a department store. His wife weighs two hundred pounds and in the picture I saw, she was wearing a low cut dress and was smelling a rose. Fishmouth calls her “Poochy,” and she calls him “Terry-boy” and they write baby talk to each other in letters.

  But wait, you haven't heard the worst about him. At night back of the line, he sits around in his underwear scratching his feet and eating Fig Newtons, and reads a book called “East Indian Love Lyrics.” . . . But he's not a bad guy, really. Terry means well, but he hasn't got a whole lot of sense and when they begin to ride him at Divisional, it gets him excited and he takes it out on the company. He's always treated me right, and he's not a bad guy, no matter what you fellows think.—I guess I ought to know: I've been his orderly for eight months.

  PRIVATE BYRON LONG

  WE camped near Belleville that night and the next morning we had orders to go through a delousing plant situated in an open field. We took our clothes off outside the building, tied them together in a bundle with our identification cords, and the attendant put them in an oven to bake for an hour or so. Then we went through the plant in groups of fifty. It took all morning to run the battalion through and we had to stand around the field naked during that time, waiting to get our clothes back from the ovens.

  After a while the sides of the field were lined with spectators, mostly women, who sat on the grass and watched, or ate their lunches, completely unconcerned. One old lady had brought a chair and some sewing with her. I walked over to where she was sitting, as naked as the day I entered this world. “They're going to delouse the First Battalion this afternoon,” I said, “but if I were you ladies, I wouldn't wait. When you've seen a thousand naked men you've about seen them all.

  “Comment?” said the old lady, smiling sweetly.

  PRIVATE PHILIP WADSWORTH

  MY chastity was one of the stock jokes in our company: replacement troops heard of it before they learned the names of their platoon commanders. I let them laugh, and minded my own business. It was useless, I knew, to try to make them see my viewpoint. I mention it now, merely because it accentuates the drollery of my ultimate fate.

  Here's the way it came about: We were billeted in a French town to reorganize and replace equipment, and we were allowed considerable liberty during that time. Jesse Bogan, who was in my squad, suggested, one night, that we go to the Café de la Poste and split a bottle of wine. I had some letters to write; I wasn't keen about going; but he made such a point of it, I consented.

  When we reached the café, it was full of soldiers, and there were a number of women sitting at the tables with them. As soon as Jesse and I came in, one of the women left the group she was with and joined us at our table. Sergeant Halligan and Hyman White and one or two others followed her, and tried to make her come back, but she put her arms around my neck and said, “No! No! This is my baby!” (I found out later the whole thing was arranged. Even Jesse Bogan, whom I trusted, was in on the joke.)

  At last the men pretended to be sore with the woman, and went back to their table to enjoy the fun. Then Bogan got up and left, after a time, and the woman and I were alone at the table.

  She asked me to go with her to her room, but I refused as politely as I could. I explained about Lucy Walters and how we had promised to remain pure, for each other, until we were married. The woman sat listening to me sympathetically. She said I was right. She said a girl rarely met a man with such a fine viewpoint. Then she commenced talking about the farm, near Tours, where she had been born, and how happy she had been there. She told me of her sweetheart, a boy from her village; how they, too, had loved each other, and planned marriage, and how he had been killed at the first battle of the Marne. She thought of him constantly, she said: She regretted, always, that he had died before he had consummated their love, or learned how rich and beautiful life could be. . . .

  As she talked, I kept thinking: “My morals are absurd. I may be killed next week. I may never see Lucy again.” The girl took my hand, and tears came into her eyes. “Everything is sad and a little mixed-up,” I thought. “What difference can it make, one way or the other, if I go with this woman?”

  Afterward I was ashamed of myself. I offered her twenty francs (I had no idea what the proper fee was in such cases), but she refused it. She clung to me and kissed me. She said I reminded her of the boy who had been killed at the Marne: he, too, had been very innocent. . . . And all the time she knew that she had diseased me.

  Later I became alarmed and went to the dressing station. The doctor looked me over, laughed, and beckoned to the hospital corpsmen. I was courtmartialed for failing to report for a prophylactic and sent to this labor battalion. I have thought the matter over a thousand times, but I cannot understand, even yet, what there is about male chastity that is humorous, or why it repels and offends. The woman in the café got two hundred francs from my friends for seducing me. She reénacted the entire scene for them when she returned to the café: I was very clumsy and funny, I understand.

  PRIVATE ALEX MARRO

  WE were camped in a wood about ten kilometers from Nancy, and that afternoon Gene Merriam, our regimental runner, dropped by to see his brother, Herb. He had just been to Nancy with a message, and he was telling us all about it. “There's a house running wide open there,” he said; “and you never saw such good-looking girls in your life. They've all got blonde hair, and they sit around on their big, fat cans dressed in lace kimonos, fanning themselves and eating pears. . . . ”

  After he had gone, Nate Mountain, Mart Passy and I kept talking of the various women we had known in our lives and wondering if we could get away with going A.W.O.L. that night. We put our money together, and it came to seventy-eight francs. We figured that should be enough for the three of us, even if it was a first-class house, so after roll-call had been taken, we slipped out.

  Gene Merriam had given us exact directions. We didn't have much trouble in finding the place. Nate went up to the door and rang the bell and presently a big, raw-boned woman with a gray streak in her hair, opened it. But when she got a look at our dirty uniforms, she made motions for us to go away. Then she tried to shut the door again, but Nate was too quick for her. He got his foot in the crack and held it there. The woman began to chatter in a shrill voice, and to curse us in English.

  Then an M.P., attracted by the noise, came up to see what it was all about. At first he said he was going to put us under arrest for being A.W.O.L., but Mart gave him fifty francs, and that put him in a good humor. “Who do you think you are?” he asked. “That house is for officers only: You got to wear captain's bars or better to get in there. . . . ” Then he began to laugh. “Those whores are refined, sensitive girls. They wouldn't even unbutton their drawers for a bunch of grease-balls like you!” Then the M.P. stopped laughing and began to scowl. “Say, you get back to your outfit!” he said.—“You get the hell back before I change my mind and run you all in!”

  PRIVATE JOHN McGILL

  I WENT out on raiding parties time after time where every man except myself was killed or wounded. I have had my rif
le splintered in my hands and twice my helmet was ripped through by shrapnel. I've had the buttons shot off my tunic and one time even the tape holding my identification discs was cut by machine gun bullets. And yet I never received a scratch, although I participated in all action with my company. I could go on citing you innumerable instances to show how lucky I am, but the strangest thing of all happened just after the battle of Soissons.

  We were back in a wood reorganizing and waiting for stragglers to catch up. I needed a new mess-gear, my own having been destroyed with my pack, while strapped to my back during the fighting. (Another close shave, you see!) So I walked to a salvage pile and picked up a new mess-gear at random. When I got back to my tent and looked at it closely, I saw that it had my name, John McGill, cut into the metal with beautiful old English letters. That really was remarkable, wasn't it? . . . You can call it coincidence, if you like, but I know better. There are many things we cannot account for with all our laws of average and rules of chance. There are many strange forces working around us which we cannot understand. . . . The men in my company marveled at my luck. Before going over the top many of them would put their hands on my forehead, hoping thereby to become lucky themselves, but whatever the power that protected me, it never worked for any one else.

  PRIVATE SIDNEY BORGSTEAD

  WHEN Captain Matlock saw from my service record book that I had been a couturier, he, with his penchant for doing the inappropriate thing superbly, decided to transfer me to the galley and make a cook out of me. To him it seemed entirely logical that a man who had handled chiffons and lovely taffetas would be equally deft in the medium of beef carcasses and dehydrated potatoes.