“Quint?” said Rolls. “Short fella? Wore glasses? Yeah, I remember him, only I’d forgotten his name.” He looked up, squinting in the fumes of cleaning fluid that rose from the stripped-down pistol he was swabbing on an ornate dining room table. “I was there, all right. I was walkin’ along right behind him.”
“Can you tell me about it? I mean can you tell me exactly what happened?”
The sergeant put down his cleaning rag and applied a match to a flattened cigarette. “Well,” he said, “this mine went off Not exactly up in his face; kinda off to one side; didn’t kill him. Then Dave – that was our medic, best damn medic in the company – Dave goes over to help him. And then this other medic – I don’t know who the hell he was, never saw him before in my life – this other damn fool medic comes chargin’ over outa nowhere. Sumbitch wasn’t even
needed
, that’s the funny part;
just some eager-beaver bastard couldn’t mind his own business. Anyway, this other damn fool medic comes over without watchin’ his step, and
Wham
! another mine.”
“I know,” Prentice said. “I mean I’ve heard that part of it. What I mean is, there’s no question but that all three of them were killed? I mean you’re absolutely sure Quint was dead?”
Sergeant Rolls removed the cigarette from his mouth and picked a fleck of paper from his lower lip. “Buddy,” he said, “the last time I saw him he was layin’ there.” One nicotine-stained forefinger pointed to a place on the dining room carpet, while Prentice nodded; then the finger drew a slow arc in the air and pointed to another part of the floor, five or six feet away: “And his head was layin’ over there.”
On the way back to his own house, Prentice felt his toes curling as if to grip the earth like talons with every step, and he moved as heavily as if he were nearing the end of a ten-mile hike.
When he was still some distance away from the house he heard the noise of laughter and clattering dishware, and only then did he remember what evening this was: the Second Platoon was having a party they’d been planning for days.
A number of chickens had been killed and butchered, many bottles of schnapps and wine had been saved for the occasion, and now the feast was at its height. All the tables in the house had been crowded into the kitchen to form a long, intricate banquet surface. Lieutenant Coverly sat in the place of honor, dwarfed by the hulking presence of Sergeant Loomis on his right, and the rest of the hunched, eating men filled every available inch of table space. As Prentice stood awkwardly in the doorway it was clear that he had nowhere to sit.
“We don’t wait for anybody here, Prentice,” Loomis called out, his mouth and cheeks shining with chicken grease. “I’m afraid you’re out of luck.”
“That’s okay,” he said, and as one chewing face after another turned to look at him, he wished he could dissolve into the wall.
But Ted the medic was on his feet, loading up a plate of food for him. Several of the men had to pull in their chairs to let Prentice sidle past them along the wall toward the stove, and then they had to pull in again to let him make his way back. He ate squatting on the floor, trying to hold his plate steady on one thigh. The elbows and backs and turning heads of the men were high above him, far too high to let him be included in their talk, and he could scarcely taste the food for his embarrassment. The scene was almost too pat, too ludicrous an illustration of his role in this platoon: the one man bound to be late for everything, left out of everything, and finally consigned to a place too low for notice.
At last several men left the table to go belching upstairs, and Prentice slipped into one of their chairs as unobtrusively as possible, nursing his glass of wine. And after a minute or two it no longer mattered that nobody was talking to him, for all the conversations had died away and the talkers had become listeners: Lieutenant Coverly had the floor.
“… but I mean it isn’t an infantry
war
any more,” he was saying. “From now on it’s going to be one big artillery fight all the way. And I mean maybe their infantry
is
shot to hell, but you know damn well there’s nothing the matter with their artillery. And I mean how much chance does a man have against an eighty-eight? You figure it out.”
And the nods and murmurs around the table conveyed agreement and sympathy, if something less than respect. Even Prentice had come to know by now, as well as anyone, that the lieutenant was wholly unsure of his command and of himself. His nail-biting, his shyly darting eyes and breathless, almost whispering voice all betrayed him, and so did his insistence that
the men call him “Covey,” instead of “Lieutenant” or “Sir,” as if informality might relieve him of his obligation to lead. His talk was always full of his having been trained as an administrative Signal Corps officer, and of the unhappy transfer and shockingly brief retraining that had brought him to this platoon in Holland; there was a rumor too that he’d recently received a Dear John letter from his wife. Please, his gentle Southern voice seemed always to be saying, please don’t expect very much of me. And nobody did, though nobody seemed to dislike him. The men did call him “Covey” without embarrassment, and for the most part they seemed tactfully determined to do whatever they could to help him through his ordeal.
“… Hell,” he was saying now, and his drink-enriched voice was taking on an uncommon authority. “Hell, when you’re up against infantry at least it’s a fair fight, right? I mean then it’s essentially one man against another, kill or be killed. And hell, I’ll take my chances in that kind of a situation any day.”
Prentice couldn’t help doubting this, and looked furtively around the table to see if there were any other doubting faces. Would Coverly really rather take his chances in that kind of a situation any day? It didn’t matter: foolish statement or not, he was getting away with it.
“I’ll make you a little bet,” he was saying now. “I’ll bet you not one man in ten of us gets to fire his weapon from now on. Nothing to
shoot
at. No way to fight
back
. Hell, we might as well be going in unarmed, for all the good our weapons’ll do us.” His eyes were glittering defiantly around the table. “We’ll be sitting ducks for their eighty-eights all the way; that’s what scares me – and I don’t mind telling you men, it scares the piss out of me.”
Sergeant Loomis elaborately cleared his throat, and when he began to speak Prentice could understand what it was about Loomis – despite his fine record and despite his being the real
leader of the platoon – that made most of the men detest him. It was that he was such a God damn actor: everything he said came out with the ponderous fraudulence of something in the movies; it was as if he had learned how to be a platoon sergeant by watching every Hollywood war picture ever made. “Well, I don’t know, Covey,” he was saying now, staring at the schnapps he rolled in the bottom of his glass, “at least we’re winning the damn war. I’d a hell of a lot rather be winning a war than losing one. For a while back there in the Bulge it looked like we might be losing – that’s when you find you really got some trouble on your hands.”
And the lieutenant could only lower his eyes in deference; he hadn’t, of course, been in the Bulge.
“I agree with Covey, though,” said Klein, the unkempt and sycophantic radio man. He had washed and shaved for the party and looked almost clean, except that his white cheeks now called attention to a multitude of blackheads in his nose. When his endless agreeing with Loomis became too obvious, even to himself, the next best thing was to agree with “Covey.” “The worst part about artillery
is
just that,” he said. “You can’t fight back. I mean there’s no
sense
to it.”
But Klein was ignored, as usual; and the next speaker was the man on the lieutenant’s left, who was rising now and gathering up his dishes – a tall, ruddily handsome staff sergeant named Paul Underwood, who was the platoon guide. Underwood rarely stayed around the house for long; he seemed to have so many friends throughout the company that he was always on the move, as if to bestow his presence on a few admirers at a time. When Prentice had first seen him stride into this house to a happy chorus of “Hey, Paul” and “Where you been, Paul?” and “Wait a second, Paul, I got something to tell you,” he had felt an instinctive, envious resentment.
Nobody
could be that
good-looking, that charming, that much in demand. But then Underwood had strolled over and said, “I don’t believe I’ve met you, soldier; you a new man?” and Prentice had been meekly won over. He
was
perfect; and now, as he sidled away to carry his dishes from the table, he held everyone’s attention.
“Well,” he said, “all I know is they can’t get the damn thing over with too soon for me. I just wish they’d keep us here on this side of the river and let the Russians clean it up; that’d suit me perfectly.”
“Buddy,” said Ted the medic, “you can say that again.” And there were nods and rumblings of agreement all around the table. It would suit them all perfectly – all, apparently, except Prentice, who hid his mouth in the last of his wine.
A faint, faraway buzzing in the eastern sky made them all freeze and look at each other, round-eyed; then it grew louder and lower – an aircraft engine, a lone German plane come to reconnoiter the bridge.
Almost at once the anti-aircraft gun opened up in the fields behind the house, and the men all bolted to their feet, knocking over chairs and spilling glasses: they were clambering out of the kitchen door like frantic children, and then they were all outside and running in the field to watch it, shouting and pointing.
There it was, the plane trying to break away out of range and pursued by the yellow tracers and the flak that burst in little black puffs against the pink of the evening sky.
“Get
the bastard!
Get
’im!
Get
’im!”
“They’re firing
short
! Christ’s sake, bring it up! Bring it
up
!”
“They
got
’im! They
got
’im!”
“No they ain’t – not
yet
they ain’t –
Get
’im!”
The plane was still climbing, heading northwest and apparently moving away from the flak, but then it began to cough out a trail of black smoke. It described a long, graceful arc
and went into a gliding fall: they saw the small black and orange burst of its crash a mile or more away, and then the sound of it came back across the flatland in the abrupt and ringing silence of the gun.
“Wow!”
“D’ja see that? D’ja see that?”
“Beautiful! Beautiful!”
“Wow!”
“How
about
that?”
Somebody slapped Prentice on the back and he felt the sting of his own hand slapping somebody else’s back; he didn’t know who either man was. He had been as wholly caught up in the spectacle as anyone else, and it seemed to have made him one of them for the first time.
As they turned and started back to the house in a straggling group, each looking very small and individual in the wide evening landscape, he could look from one walking, talking figure to another – even the frightening Finn, with his absurd straw hat; even Krupka; even Walker; even the kiss-ass Klein – and take pleasure in the simple knowledge that they were the men of his platoon. He knew it probably wouldn’t last long, this sense of fellowship, and he knew it was probably the wine as much as the plane that had brought it on, but there it was. This was his outfit; these were the men with whom he would cross the river and find whatever was left of his chance for atonement, whatever was left of the war.
The day of the crossing began before dawn. It began with a rude, angry jostling of men made weak by the unaccustomed weight of urgency and equipment, with a laggard company formation on the dark road, and a sullen, cursing forward march.
The sky and the land were turning blue by the time the column reached the bridge. The crossing itself was a matter of trying to keep from slipping down a hill of loose dirt that led to the waterline, then of treading carefully and for what seemed a great distance on the steel cleats of a footpath whose shuddering pontoons rode low in the loud black and silver flood of the river, and then of climbing another hill of dirt on the opposite shore.
Soon everything was green and gold. They were walking on a neat macadam road through woodland, and the only sound except for their rubber-heeled boots was the song of birds high in the trees.
Lieutenant Coverly, in what appeared to be a burst of nervous energy, was making his way down the platoon to have encouraging little talks with his men. Prentice saw him up ahead, chatting with Finn. Then he dropped back to spend some time with Mueller, walking with his hand on Mueller’s shoulder, and then he exchanged a few words with Walker, who said something that made him laugh.
“And how
you
doing, Prentice?” he said, still smiling from Walker’s joke.
“Okay, sir.”
“I imagine this is quite a change for you, after the hospital. Well; keep it up.”
They marched all morning, with five-minute breaks every hour. At noon they stopped in a clearing beside the road – a clearing that contained two dead German soldiers – to eat their K rations. Most of the men stayed as far away as possible from the corpses, but Krupka seemed to enjoy them. He kicked them in the ribs and stood on them; then, finding a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses in the grass near one of them, he fitted them back onto the dead man’s face as carefully as a little girl playing with a doll.
“Hey, you guys,” he called. “I betcha none a ya’s got guts enough to sit on one of these bastards and eat. Five bucks. I got five bucks says none a ya’s got guts enough.”
Nobody took him on, so he did it himself: he sat on the chest of the bespectacled corpse and spooned up his can of dehydrated eggs, which were almost exactly the color of the dead man’s flesh.
Then they marched all afternoon. They passed occasional barns and farmhouses, all of which appeared to be abandoned, but for the most part there was nothing in sight but trees and fields and endlessly unwinding road.