“Son of a bitch probably ran out of ammunition,” Captain Agate was saying. “Now he’ll disable his gun and take off like a big-assed bird. Either that or he’ll come out with his fucking hands in the air.”
But Finn’s squad couldn’t linger there to find out what Agate planned to do about the gun: they were sent running off to the left, shielded by the train of gondola cars. They were to go as far as the train would allow and try to cross the tracks from there.
They made it, and then with a good deal of struggling and sliding they climbed the coal heap. There was nothing to see on the other side but an empty wet plain stretching away to a horizon of black trees, and the view to the right was blocked by another coal heap built at right angles to this one: there was no way of looking down to where the anti-aircraft fire had come from. When they slid down the far side of the heap in an avalanche of falling coal, Finn waved them off to the left. At the end of the coal heap they met Bernstein’s squad coming around the other side, followed by two machine-gun teams from Weapons Platoon, and Bernstein had a message from Sergeant Loomis. Both squads, with machine-gun support, were now to take up a defensive position at this end of the coal heap. Half the group would dig in on top of the heap, at points that would command the whole stretch of land before them: the other half would rest in a small brick building to the rear. Halfway through the night, the men in the building would relieve the men on the coal.
“Only look, Finn,” Bernstein said. “I’ve only got five men. Can I borrow one of yours? Can I have Prentice here?”
“Sure
you can have him,” Finn said, and Prentice didn’t know whether to feel pride or shame. It was pleasing that Bernstein wanted him – maybe it meant he remembered the day they had crossed that field together – but it was galling that Finn was so eager to let him go.
It was decided that Finn’s squad would take the first shift on the coal heap. Prentice managed to walk beside Bernstein on the trip back to the building, and to engage him in a pleasant, monosyllabic conversation about what a bitch of a day it had been. He was fearful of talking too much, of seeming to court favor, but Bernstein’s kindliness was encouraging. If he did everything right tonight, it was just possible that he might be allowed to transfer to Bernstein’s squad.
The little brick building evidently had something to do with the railroad, though its cold and rubble-cluttered interior was too dark for them to see much of it in detail as they felt around the floor for places to sleep. Someone woke Prentice once to stand guard outside the door, and after that his sleep was so deep and peaceful that it seemed to last for many hours. Then Bernstein’s voice said, “Prentice? Are you awake?”
“Yes.” He got to his feet.
“Okay; come on over here.” And Bernstein led him to an old rolltop desk that was illuminated by two candles stuck onto its writing surface. “You got a watch? Okay, here’s the deal. You’re going to be in charge for a while so I can get some sleep. It’s now twelve-thirty. At one-thirty you wake up Kornish to relieve the guard outside. Got that?”
“Right.”
“And then at two o’clock you wake us all up; that’s when we’re supposed to go out to the coalpile. Okay?”
“Okay.” Prentice sat down in the swivel chair that faced the desk.
“And if anybody comes in bitching from the coalpile,” Bernstein said, “tell ’em you’ve got orders to stick to that schedule. We’re not relieving anybody till two o’clock.”
“Right.”
When he was alone, the quiet and the comfort and the candlelight made him drowsy. He considered resting his head on the desk but decided not to: it was too risky. Instead he took off his wristwatch and laid it on the desk and studied the second hand as it crept around the dial.
In a little while Bernstein came back through the shadows. “Everything all right, Prentice?” he asked.
“Everything’s fine.”
Bernstein sat down in another chair near the desk. “Can’t seem to get to sleep,” he said. “Might as well sit up. You can go on back and sack out again, if you want to.”
“No, I’ll stay awake too.” And soon they were conversing as comfortably as old friends.
“You’re not getting along very well in Finn’s squad, are you?” Bernstein said.
“No; I guess not.”
“I’m not surprised; Finn’s not too bright. I can see how he wouldn’t know what to make of someone like you.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you
are
a little out of the ordinary, don’t you think? Why do you think I picked you out?”
“I thought it was by chance.”
“Well, it wasn’t. I think you and I are essentially two of a kind, Prentice. We’re intelligent, but it’s not the kind of intelligence the Army knows how to appreciate. If there were any justice in the Army, people with minds like yours and mine would be officers. I’ve often thought that. For example, take—”
Suddenly there was a violent gripping and pulling on his arm,
which spun him around in the swivel chair – and there was Krupka, soaking wet and black with coal dust, shouting at him.
“What the fuck’s goin’
on
, Prentice? Where the fuck’s our relief?”
Then Prentice was on his feet too, shouting back, feeling immensely powerful. “Now, you just hold your water, Krupka. You’ll get your God damn relief when I say so. I’m under specific orders to—”
Only then, with sickening slowness, did he begin to to separate reality from the dream. Krupka was real; the candles and the desk were real, too; so was the fact that his watch read 2:35, and so was the undeniable appearance of Bernstein hurrying forward from the shadows, heavy with sleep, saying: “What the hell’s the trouble?”
And the whole conversation had been false. It had taken place only in Prentice’s head, and he knew now that his head, until the very moment of Krupka’s grabbing him, had been lying on the desk.
For the rest of that night, soaked and freezing on the coal heap, he suffered little spasms of self-loathing that made lumps of coal rattle under his weight.
But that was the last and worst of his humiliations. Whatever mistakes he made after that were mercifully hidden from public exposure; if he remained the worst man in the squad, at least he managed to keep from calling attention to himself. And then one memorable morning, not long after the coal heap, the onus passed from him to Walker.
They had marched all night again. They had followed no road but gone over rough country in the dark, through what Captain Agate grimly told them was enemy territory (“I see one man strike a match, that man’s dead”). And they had done it in absolute silence, each of them wearing a strip of white bandage
tied to his right shoulder tab, so that the man behind him could stay in line without calling out. By dawn they had reached the place on Agate’s map that was supposed to be their destination, and most of the Second Platoon found itself in a warm, clean farmhouse where a woman agreed to heat water for their coffee and more water to wash and shave in. But soon they were out in the fields again, with a bright misty morning as sharp as winter on their scrubbed skin. They were on the outskirts of another town, and they had to approach it across a swamp that led into a number of little hummocks so dense with shrubbery that they couldn’t spread out: the squads had to proceed in single file, making crude wet footpaths between the hills. The bright, dripping fog was so heavy that nobody could see more than a few yards, and any object emerging into view as they walked – a tree, a bush, a shed – had a look of ghostly danger. They were on rising ground when a great rectangular shape appeared on their right, and it was just then, when the shape had established itself as a barn, that the silence was shattered by a burst of machine-gun fire on their left.
Everyone hit the ground and wriggled for cover, and there were isolated rifle shots from somewhere ahead. Somebody on the left was shouting, “Fire! Fire!” and Prentice guessed he ought to bring his rifle up and use it; but how could he tell where he was shooting? Bernstein’s squad was hidden in the fog to the left, and so was the third squad. Was he supposed to fire anyway, at the risk of hitting his own men?
“Don’t shoot, you men – hold your fire,” Sam Rand called from close behind him, and that made it all right just to lie there. He looked ahead, where the foreshortened shape of Walker’s boots and buttocks lay just beyond his face.
Then Finn’s voice came back: “Let’s go, my squad – follow me!” And Walker’s boots sprang into action. He was up in a
crouching run, heading in a wide circle to the right, past a thick hedge and around to the shelter of the barn. Prentice followed him, with Sam Rand close behind, and they got all the way around the corner of the barn before discovering that there were only the three of them: the rest of the squad had disappeared.
“What the hell?” Rand demanded. “Where’s Finn? Who was you
followin’
, Walker?”
And Walker’s big, breathless face betrayed his guilt. “I thought that’s what he
meant
, Sam. I thought he
meant
get behind the barn.”
“How come?”
“Well, I mean – Jesus, Sam; I don’t know.”
“Shit. Now how the hell we gonna find ’em? They go straight on ahead, or to the left, or what?”
They were safe as long as they huddled here behind the barn, but Sam Rand didn’t let them huddle for long. First he sent Prentice through the hedge to go back the way they’d come, but the machine gun opened up again and a quick splatter of broken plaster a foot over Prentice’s head made it clear that he was the target. He dropped flat and scrambled back through the hedge in what seemed a single frantic motion, and Rand said, “All right. We’ll try another way, is all.”
He led them around the other corner of the barn, and they were crouched there, wondering whether to risk it into the open, when the noise of fire broke out again: intermittent bursts from the machine gun answered by rifle and B.A.R. fire that seemed to be coming from several directions; and suddenly all the firing stopped after the shock of a single explosion – a hand grenade. Then there was shouting:
“Get the bastard!”
“There he is!”
“Kamarade …
”
“Comrade my ass!
Get
the bastard …”
Sam Rand was pointing the way into the open now, not toward where the shouting was but to a farmhouse that was now plainly in sight and near which they could see the rising, standing figures of Finn and the rest of the squad.
“God damn it,” Finn said, “where you been, Prentice?”
“I – look, Finn, it wasn’t my – we were over behind the—”
But Sam Rand came quickly to his rescue. “It wasn’t his fault, Finn. Walker led us around behind the barn.”
And Finn switched his narrow gaze to Walker. “What the hell d’ja do that for?”
“I – Finn, I
thought
I saw you going—”
It was a great pleasure for Prentice to watch Walker’s abasement, and the pleasure increased during the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next, as Walker seemed to go from bad to worse.
Then a few days later there occurred what seemed to be a chance for both Walker and Prentice to redeem themselves: Captain Agate wanted volunteers for a special patrol. “I’m going,” Finn announced to his squad. “Anybody else?”
“Shit no,” said Krupka. “Volunteer? When the whole fuckin’ war’s practically over? You oughta get your head examined, Finn, no shit.”
Walker and Prentice were the only two other volunteers; with Finn they joined eight or ten other men at the Company command post, and they solemnly listened to their briefing by the captain.
“All right,” he said, squinting around the group, and there were uneasy glances among the men as they began to realize he was drunk. “Here’s what I want you men to do. I want you to go out through that underpass, turn left, and keep going till you meet the Krauts. We know there’s Krauts out there but we don’t
know how many and we don’t know how far. You men are gonna find out. Who’s the ranking non-com?”
“I guess I am, sir,” said a huge, bearded staff sergeant from the First Platoon named Kovarsky.
“All right. Sergeant Kovarsky’ll be in command. Any questions, Kovarsky?”
“Sir, is this a reconnaisance patrol?”
“Hell no, it’s no reconnaisance patrol. Whaddya think we’re on, maneuvers? This is a
combat
patrol. When you meet those Krauts they’re gonna be shootin’ at you, and you better gonna be damn sure shootin’ back. How the hell else you gonna find out how many they are?”
“Son of a bitch,” somebody muttered, “is this ever gonna be a ball-buster.”
But instead it was an abortion. They had gone scarcely a hundred yards beyond the underpass when Kovarsky halted them and called them together for a briefing of his own.
“I don’t know about you guys,” he said, “but personally I never would of volunteered for this deal if I’d known Agate was drunk. I think this here is one patrol we can damn well afford to goof off on. Anybody want to argue with that?”
Nobody did.
“Okay, then. What we’re gonna do is, we’re gonna go on up as far as those trees. We’ll lay down some fire into the woods, and that’s it. Then we take off, whether we get any answering fire or not. I’ll make the report, and everybody else keep their mouth shut. Okay?”
They did exactly that, robbing Prentice and Walker of any chance for heroism; and Captain Agate accepted Kovarsky’s fraudulent report, looking, throughout the brief interview, as though what he really needed now was an hour or two to sleep it off.
*
By now the days and nights were so full of rumors that one story had as much chance of truth as the next. Almost anything could be believed: nothing in the blur and drift of daily events had the power of surprise. One rumor had the northern salient of the Ninth Army on the outskirts of Berlin; others placed it hundreds of miles further west. And there was still neither corroboration nor denial of a story that had been circulating for days: that President Roosevelt was dead. “All right, hold it up here,” Sergeant Loomis called one warm afternoon, turning against a shrapnel-pocked wall to address the platoon. They had come through a village that day and across a great expanse of open country without any sign of enemy troops, but it had now become clear that there were a good many of them dug into the side of a high, steep hill that rose beyond this larger town. It had begun to seem, in fact, that this afternoon might bring about the first hand-to-hand fighting of the campaign. But Prentice was too tired to feel either excitement or fear, and as he looked around at the other dusty, sweat-streaked, black-lipped faces it appeared that everyone was in the same listless mood.