Company K (Library Alabama Classics) Page 9

  We picked our way through the wrecked wood, lifting aside the trailing branches, kicking with our boots the leaves that had rained down and made a green carpet. When we reached the entrance to the ravine, the prisoners drew back, frightened, and began to talk excitedly amongst themselves, then, glancing apprehensively over their shoulders, they entered, one by one, and huddled against the far bank.

  One of the prisoners had very blue eyes and didn't seem frightened at all. He began to talk to his comrades, smiling and shaking his head. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I had an idea he was telling them not to worry because there was nothing to fear. . . . “These men are wearing different uniforms and they speak a different language, but they are made out of the same flesh and blood that we are,” I imagined him saying. “There's nothing to fear. They aren't going to hurt us.”

  Suddenly the blue-eyed man looked at me and smiled, and before I knew what I was doing, I smiled back at him. Then Sergeant Pelton gave the signal to fire and the rifles began cracking and spraying bullets from side to side. I took steady aim at the blue-eyed man. For some reason I wanted him to be killed instantly. He bent double, clutched his belly with his hands and said, “Oh! . . . Oh!” like a boy who has eaten green plums. Then he raised his hands in the air, and I saw that most of his fingers were shot away and were dripping blood like water running out of a leaky fawcet. “Oh! . . . Oh!” he kept saying in an amazed voice. . . . “Oh! Oh! Oh!” Then he turned around three times and fell on his back, his head lower than his feet, blood flowing from his belly, insistently, like a tide, across his mud-caked tunic: staining his throat and his face. Twice more he jerked his hands upward and twice he made that soft, shocked sound. Then his hands and his eyelids quit twitching.

  I stood there spraying the bullets from side to side in accordance with instructions. . . . “Everything I was ever taught to believe about mercy, justice and virtue is a lie,” I thought. . . . “But the biggest lie of all are the words ‘God is Love.’ That is really the most terrible lie that man ever thought of.”

  PRIVATE ROGER INABINETT

  WHEN the last prisoner quit kicking, my squad went out of the ravine and back to their trench. I stepped behind a fallen tree, and they passed on ahead without missing me. For a while I could hear them moving through the wood, rustling the leaves with their feet, but after a time everything was quiet again. Then I went back and began going through the pockets of the dead men, but it was hardly worth the trouble. Most of them had paper marks and a few metal coins with square holes punched in them. I put these in my pocket. They might have some value: I didn't know. Then there were a lot of letters and photographs which I tore up and threw on a pile. Some of the men were wearing regimental rings which I took off their fingers—they're worth three or four francs each—and one had a fine, hand-carved cigarette lighter, shaped like a canteen, but there wasn't much of anything else.

  What I was really looking for were Iron Crosses. They're worth real money back in the S.O.S. They make fine souvenirs and the boys buy them to send back to their sweethearts. Sometimes they bring as much as 150 francs each. The squareheads generally wear them pinned to their undershirts, under their tunics, where they won't show. I looked over every man carefully, but if there was a single decoration among those prisoners, I couldn't find it.

  When I was almost through, I looked up and saw Sergeant Pelton watching me steadily, without moving his eyes.

  “I'm looking for Iron Crosses,” I said.

  Then he caught me by the collar and pulled me up. “Put that stuff back,” he said.

  “What's the sense in that, sarge?” I asked. “We got more right to it than anybody else. If we don't get it, somebody else will.” Then I took the cigarette lighter and offered it to him. “Here, you can have this, if you want it,” I said.

  For a moment I thought he was going to hit me, but he thought better of it. He turned me loose suddenly and walked away. “Get on back to your squad,” he said.

  “All right,” I said; “if that's the way you feel about it, it's all right by me.—But there's no use your getting sore.”

  “Get on back to your squad!” he said.

  PRIVATE RICHARD MUNDY

  I DECIDED to take my rifle apart and clean it thoroughly. I didn't want to think about those prisoners any more, but as I sat there with my squad in the shallow trench, with the rifle parts scattered about me, I couldn't help thinking about them. Corporal Foster was opening cans of monkey meat with a bayonet and Roger Inabinett divided the meat and the hardtack into eight equal parts.

  Charlie Gordon got out his harmonica and began to play a lively tune, but Everett Qualls stopped him. Then Foster passed out the rations and each man took his share. At sight of the food, Bill Nugent took sick. He went to the edge of the trench and vomited. When he came back his face was white. Jimmy Wade had a canteen of cognac which he passed over to him and Bill took a big swig of it, but immediately he got up and vomited again. Then he lay stretched out and trembled.

  “What's the matter with you, Bill?” asked Foster.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “They've pulled that trick on the French a thousand times, and got away with it, too!” said Foster. “These Germans are smart hombres. You got to watch them all the time.”

  Ahead of us, in the wheat field, the rays of the late sun lay flat on the trampled grain, but in the wood it was almost dark. Inabinett was playing with a cigarette lighter he had found in the wood. He kept snapping it with a clicking sound. “All it needs is a new flint,” he said. “It'll be as good as new with another flint.”

  I put my rifle back together and rubbed the butt with oil. I kept seeing those prisoners falling and rising to their knees and falling again. I walked to the end of the trench and looked over the top. A long way ahead was the sound of rifle fire and to the west there was intermittent shelling, but here, in the wood, everything was calm and peaceful. “You wouldn't know we were in the war at all,” I thought.

  Then I had an irresistible desire to go to the ravine and look at the prisoners again. I climbed out of the trench quickly, before anybody knew what I was going to do. . . .

  The prisoners lay where we had left them, face upward mostly, twisted in grotesque knots like angleworms in a can, their pockets turned outward and rifled, their tunics unbuttoned and flung wide. I stood looking at them for a while, silent, feeling no emotion at all. Then the limb of a tree that grew at the edge of the ravine swayed forward and fell, and a wedge of late sunlight filtered through the trees and across the faces of the dead men. . . . Deep in the wood a bird uttered one frightened note and stopped suddenly, remembering. A peculiar feeling that I could not understand came over me. I fell to the ground and pressed my face into the fallen leaves. . . . “I'll never hurt anything again as long as I live,” I said. . . . “Never again, as long as I live. . . . Never! . . . Never! . . . Never! . . . ”

  PRIVATE HOWARD NETTLETON

  “I DON'T want to hear any more out of you,” said Sergeant Dunning. “Captain Matlock has passed an order that everybody, except the men detailed to repair roads, are to go to church, and like it, and by God! you'd better do it, if you know what's good for you!—Don't think you can get away with anything, either, because Pig Iron Riggin is going to be there with a roster, and check every man off.” Well, that broke up the black jack game. “It looks like they could leave a man alone on Sunday morning back of the line,” said Archie Lemon; “it looks like they could, at least, do that.”

  “Come on, let's get it over with,” said Vester Wendell. “Once more won't hurt anybody.”

  Bob Nalls spoke up: “If I have to listen again to that chaplain praying to God to spare all the American Galahads and destroy their ungodly enemies, I'm going to get up and say: ‘Who was telling you? Where do you get all this inside information? . . . ’ If he does that again, I'm going to ask him if he doesn't know that the Germans are praying too.—‘Let's be logical about this thing,’ I'm going to say; ‘Let's pi
ck out different Gods to pray to. It seems silly for both sides to be praying to the same one! . . . ’”

  “Come on! Come on!” said Sergeant Dunning. “You birds give me a pain.—You're not going to say anything at all: You're going to do just what you're told, and you're going to pray and sing hymns and like it!—Come on,” he said, “let's get going.”

  PRIVATE HARLAND PERRY

  A MAN from the Fifteenth Field Artillery named Charlie Cantwell told me this story. It seems he had been gassed, and was lying with his eyes bandaged, when the man next him reached over and woke him. He thought, at the time, that it was about three o'clock in the morning, but he didn't know for sure.

  Then, according to Charlie's story, his neighbor said that he was going to die. Charlie couldn't see him, of course, because of his bandaged eyes, but he had a feeling that the man was about twenty-five years old, with brown eyes, black curly hair and a cleft in his chin. Charlie scoffed at the idea of the other man dying, but the man insisted that he was. Then he asked Charlie if he thought he, Charlie, was going to get well, and Charlie said yes, he was pretty sure of it. So the man reached under his pillow (I don't know how Charlie knew all this, if he had his eyes bandaged like he said) and pulled out a roll of bills that would choke a cow. “Here are ten thousand francs,” the man said. “Spend it all for a good time.” Charlie took the money and slipped it under his mattress. “Spend it foolishly,” the man said; “spend as much of it on women as possible.” Charlie promised to do that, and toward morning the man died. . . .

  Well, that's the way Charlie told me the story, and personally I don't give one good God damn whether you believe it or not! It's no skin off my back-side.—All I know is what Charlie told me, and that he did have ten thousand francs, and that we spent hell out of the money after we got well enough to go on liberty into the town.

  PRIVATE ALBERT NALLETT

  BEFORE the company came to France, they were stationed in the tropics and while there they picked up Tommy, the company mascot. I don't know exactly what he was, but he looked more like a ’coon than anything else. Sergeant Halligan said the natives of Honduras called them ant bears. I don't know about that, but I do know Tommy had more sense than Captain Matlock and all his officers put together. We'd all be asleep in a dugout and some sentinel would sniff the air, get excited and turn in the gas alarm. Then the men would sit around with their gas masks on until their heads ached with the strain. Finally I tumbled to the fact that Tommy would lie curled up asleep through the excitement, if the alarm was false, but if there really was gas about, he didn't need a sentinel to tell him: He'd go dig a hole in the ground and pile dirt up around his snout. After I found that out, I never paid any attention to the alarms unless Tommy said it was all right. I never got gassed, either.

  Tommy was very fond of condensed milk and Mike Olmstead, the mess sergeant, used to feed it to him. One time after St. Mihiel, the rolling kitchen got lost from the company for two days. Captain Matlock sent out a dozen runners to try to locate it, but none of them could. Then I unchained Tommy and said to him: “Listen, Tommy!—Find Mike!—Condensed milk! . . . Mike's got condensed milk for you!” Tommy jumped off my shoulder and took out through the woods, straight ahead, his tail twitching with excitement. I thought he was wrong that time, myself, but I followed him, anyway, and in fifteen minutes he had located the kitchen and was climbing up Mike's leg and nuzzling his cheek. It turned out that Mike and his kitchen had passed us in the night, on the road, and was several kilometers in advance of our line, but Captain Matlock hadn't sent any runners in that direction. When Mike came back with his kitchen and reported where he had been, Captain Matlock said that that was impossible. He said Mike couldn't possibly have passed us in the night without somebody hearing him.

  I scratched Tommy's belly, which was full of condensed milk, and winked and Tommy drew back his lips and rubbed his snout, which is as close as he can come to giving anybody the horse-laugh.

  PRIVATE ROBERT NALLS

  FOLLOWING the fighting at St. Mihiel, we were billeted in Blenod-les-Toul with an old French couple. They had had an only son, a boy named René, who had been killed early in the war, and they were constantly finding points in common between us and him. I had brown eyes, and René's eyes had also been brown; René had had long, slender fingers, and Sam Quillin's fingers were also long and slender. They found resemblances to René in every one: Jerry Blandford because his teeth were even and white; Roger Jones for his thick, curling hair and Frank Halligan because of the trick he had of closing his eyes and throwing back his head when he laughed. Their lives centered around their dead son. They talked about him constantly; they thought of nothing else.

  After his death, the French government had sent them a small copper plaque showing in bas-relief the heroic face of a woman surrounded by a wreath of laurel, and under the woman's face were the words, “Slain on the Field of Honor.” It was not an unusual decoration. It was the sort of thing that a Government would send to the next of kin of all men killed in action, but the old couple attached great importance to it. In one corner of the room they had built a tiny shelf for the medal and its case, and underneath it the old woman had fixed up an altar with two candles that burned day and night. Often the old woman would sit for a long time silent before the altar, her hands twisted and old, resting her knees. Then she would go back and scrub her pans, or walk outside to the barn and look at her cow.

  We remained in Blenod for five days, and then one night we got orders to move. The old couple had become very friendly with us by that time. They walked with us to the place of assembly, offering to carry our rifles or our packs. Then they stood in the muddy road, the September wind blowing against them strongly, crossing themselves and asking God to bring us all safely back.

  A few weeks later, when we were miles away from Blenod, I saw the copper plaque again: It rolled out of Bernie Glass's kit bag while he was shaving one day. He picked it up quickly, but he knew that I had seen it.

  “How could you do it, Bernie?” I asked; “how could you do a thing like that?”

  “I don't know that it's any of your business,” said Bernie, “but I thought it would make a good souvenir to take home.”

  I never returned to Blenod, and I never saw that old couple again, but somehow I wish they knew that I am ashamed of the whole human race.

  PRIVATE OSWALD POLLARD

  HERE'S a funny thing: In September a fellow named Fallon out of the fourth platoon went off his nut. He got up on the parapet of the trench, during a barrage, and nobody could coax him in. We tried to talk to him, to make him come back, but he wouldn't do it. “I want to get shot,” he kept saying; “I know perfectly well what I'm doing. I want to get shot—I'm committing suicide, you see!”

  Then Pig Iron Riggin took out his pistol and leveled it at this fellow Fallon's head. “If you don't quit committing suicide, I'll kill you as sure as I'm a foot high!” he said. Instantly Fallon turned white and began to whimper. He jumped into the trench and got down upon his knees. “Don't!” he said. “Don't kill me—please . . . ”

  PRIVATE MARTIN PASSY

  THE boys all wondered about my lack of fear. I didn't let on, but deep in my heart I knew I didn't deserve any credit like Harold Dresser or Sergeant Tietjen for the things I did. At first I used to worry about the war and getting killed, and then that day in Baltimore, while on leave, I saw a sign on a door:

  MADAME BONATURA

  THE SEEREST OF THE EAST

  Tells Your Past, Present and Future

  I went into her parlor and we sat there talking for a time. Then she lowered the blinds and lighted a tiny lamp that shone on her face, and looked into a crystal ball. A funny expression came into her eyes and she began to twitch. Then she started talking in a sleepy voice, telling me the names of my two brothers, the number of my company and many other things. Finally she seemed to get excited: she began to talk hoarsely. “Ask me a question, and I will answer it,” she said.

  “We
ll,” I thought, “I might as well know once and for all and get it off my mind. . . . ”

  “Ask me a question—any question you want,” she said.

  “Will you really tell me the truth, even if the answer is bad?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then tell me if I will be killed in the war.”

  Madame Bonatura looked into the crystal ball for a long time before answering. I wanted to say, “No!—Don't tell me! Don't answer!” but I wouldn't do it. “I might as well know the truth now, as any time,” I thought. Finally the Madam began to speak, and I caught my breath again. “You will not be killed, or even wounded,” she said. “You will be returned to those you love, will marry the girl of your choice and live happily ever after.”

  So you see I didn't really deserve all the credit I got. I wasn't any braver than anybody else and besides that I knew all the time that nothing could possibly happen to me, no matter what I did.

  PRIVATE LEO HASTINGS

  ALL that morning the German sniper shot at me. I would stick my head up, or walk across the open space, and there would come a faint ping and a bullet would pass harmlessly over my head. Then I would stop in my tracks and stand there a full two seconds, or suddenly take a step backwards and a step to the side. I would walk that way up and down the parapet of the trench laughing at the sniper. I knew I had him so sore at me that he was almost ready to break down and cry. I'd shot with telescopic sights myself and I knew no sniper in the world could hit a man who varied his stride as I did, unless the sniper could figure out in advance the man's system and he's got about as much chance of doing that as he has of breaking the bank at Monte Carlo.