Love and Lament (45 page)

When the other batteries heard about it, they began sending out their own scouting parties, and it became quite a contest among outfits to see who could procure the finest provender.

“You know you’re ruining our men,” Captain Pugh told Leon one day.

“I know, Captain,” Leon said, smiling, “but they love it. And you never know what we’ll be eating tomorrow.” It became a favorite phrase, and then a guiding philosophy. Feed the men well whenever you can. “You can’t live on hard bread and corn willie.”

His best cook was a man named Corn Koonce from up in the
mountains. He had a terrible weakness for the
vin rouge
, but Leon forgave him because he’d figured out omelets and French soups. They would sit around after dinner smoking cigarettes and telling stories, and there was always a nervousness in the air and an excitement as well, as news trickled in from the western front. It seemed to Leon that the men most outspoken about their eagerness to get there were the most afraid. But all of them, except a very few, wanted to hurry up with the training and keep pressing forward to whatever climax or disaster awaited, because nobody knew what it was and yet they all sensed that what they were most afraid of was their own unknown nature.

They would belch and shout after a particularly good dinner, and then the guilt would set in when somebody wondered aloud what the men in the trenches were eating. Then, since they didn’t want to imagine the trenches in great detail, they’d talk about what they’d already done. “Tell us again what you told that preacher, Leon,” somebody would say.

“I don’t remember exactly,” Leon would reply.

“Well, I do,” Captain Pugh said, the night before they entrained for northeastern France. “I was there, so I’ll tell it. We’d heard about this little country church out east of Durham, and some of the boys wanted to go there one Sunday. When we got there, Leon said it made him feel right at home because it was just like his own church. And the preacher, a Methodist preacher if I’m not mistaken, started going on about how the army was a den of corruption and how the young men who enlisted were blinded into false patriotism.”

“They serve a false god,” Leon imitated. “They fight overseas so they can come back ruined in mind, body, and spirit.”

“Go on and tell it, Leon,” the captain said. The men, a dozen or so, sitting on camp stools in the officers’ tent, smoking and drinking, urged him on as well.

“No, you’re doing fine.”

“So Leon sat there fidgeting and stewing, and I could tell something was the matter, because I was sitting just behind him. And then I reckon he couldn’t take it any longer, and he stands up and says, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt you, Mr. Cockerel, but I have something to say about the army and I’d be happy for anybody who cares to hear me to stick around.’ Of course, everybody, including the preacher, stayed, and Sergeant Thomas here told them that he thought patriotism was no sin atall, that it was in fact close kin to religion itself.”

“You tell ’em, Leon!” one of the men said. “We ain’t so bad, are we, gentlemen?”

“Naw,” came a lieutenant’s reply, “we’re as good as the next people, as good as sheep.”

“Then,” the captain went on, “then, he said it was a shame the army should be accused of breeding vice, and that if the church felt that way they ought to see about providing a remedy for the evil instead of trying to keep men from performing their patriotic duty by enlisting. He said, ‘I’m thirty-three years old, too old for the draft, but I enlisted. I’m as good a man as anybody here, and I don’t expect to be any the worse when I get out of the army. And anybody that says so is guilty of slander.’ His exact words: ‘guilty of slander.’ ”

“And then what?” asked one of the more by-the-book officers.

“Well, the preacher was routed. He went off, and he never came back. And the church had to find a new preacher.”

“And now,” said the lieutenant, “Leon has no choice but to live the model life. That’s why he can’t drink and cuss and chase mademoiselles.” He winked at Leon, who drained the last of the
vin rouge
from his tin cup, but refused to take the bait.

“No, I’m not much on swearing,” Leon said. “My daddy played cards and drank, but I have a lady friend who doesn’t much care for it. Her grandfather pretty near ruined himself with drink.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “Not even your wife, and you can’t get away from her here.”

“Maybe that’s
why
I can’t,” Leon said, and the men laughed. But he wished he hadn’t brought her into it.

August 22
Camp de Coetquidan
Guer
Morbihan Province
France

Dear Miss Mary Bet
,
We ship for Toul tomorrow, so I may not be able to write you again for some time. We’ve enjoyed exploring the old town of Rennes, about 30 miles from here, which you can get to on a narrow railway for 25 cents. It seems that every town around here has a very pretty church or cathedral, and the one in Rennes has the most beautiful stained glass I believe I’ve ever seen
.

I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say I was excited about Toul and what adventures lie in wait for us there. The truth is that we’re also a little nervous. I don’t want you to worry about us, though, just to know that you are in my thoughts. This has to be a short letter because I was up late with the cooks, giving the boys a big feed before we ship out tomorrow. It’s late here, so I know you’re already in dreamland and I hope dreaming happy and peaceful dreams
.

With love and best wishes
,

Sincerely
,

LST

They were two days getting to Toul, in boxcars, forty men or eight horses to the car. They slept in shifts on the rough wood floor,
jostling in the dark, the smells of men and animals thick in the stale air. For the first time they could see that they were in a nation at war as they passed mile after mile of munitions factories, aerodromes, and vast artillery parks, and they began hearing, faintly over the racket of the train, the low thumps of heavy guns. At the stops the sound was unmistakable.

They passed trains sidetracked at little field hospitals, tent cities, and men unloading wounded soldiers. And the shelling grew louder the farther east they traveled. They were heading to the front at last.

Leon thought that he had never known such happiness, such purity of purpose and joy in the company of his fellow man. They were singing boisterous, jubilant songs as they arrived in Toul. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, and the sky was buzzing with Boche planes, the black crosses on their wings more vivid even than they had imagined. They watched in amazement as an antiaircraft battery felt out a plane, and they gave a collective sigh of disappointment as it droned away unharmed.

There was some confusion about the billeting for the night. The villages around Toul were already full with other units, and even though Leon’s regiment had sent horse feed and rations in advance to one of the villages and much negotiation in high-school French had appeared to promise decent accommodations, the regiment was commanded to camp on the road outside town, finding what shelter they could. The men took it well. It was all part of army life, and, anyway, they were so close they could smell the front.

Leon made sure his men had all they could eat, especially of bacon and beans, and, his big surprise, an apple betty made with fruit they’d brought from Coetquidan. From now on it was to be canned rations. They rested a few hours, until darkness inked the eastern sky, and an eerie quiet settled over the men as the light faded in the west. At pitch dark they began hiking north and east.

They climbed for hours, up through the Forêt de la Reine, until they came to a clearing that afforded a view some twenty miles wide. It was a sight so magnificent and stirring Leon was sure he would never forget it. The front at last. On the far horizon rockets shot into the black sky, and now and then a flare would arc up, warning of a trespasser in no-man’s-land. Sometimes, only a few miles away, the brilliant flash of a nearby battery would boom and rumble the ground, but the steady noise was the distant thunder of the real front, like the sound of drums the size of ponds. And as they marched, paced by the wagons and limbers and caissons—the horses, unperturbed in their dumbness, steadily rattling their harnesses—the men knew what it was to feel at once thrilled and terrified. There was little talking.

The trucks and wagon trains and men moved with no light, not even cigarettes, a long black snake sliding through the dark. Gone too were the usual blaring horns of the heavy vehicles. Only once that first night did they hear a distant Klaxon, and they knew it was a gas scare but they didn’t know if it was real. At the edge of the forest, in the shelter of tremendous oaks and beeches, they pitched their pup tents. “If I can sleep here,” one of Leon’s tentmates said, “I can sleep anywhere.”

“I’m so tired,” Leon said, “I could sleep standing up.”

They spent thirteen days on the edge of the forest, and though the batteries went into action, it was a kind of seasoning period, allowing the regiment to taste battle from a safe distance. They even retreated farther into the woods for better cover, and when the rains came in the second week the forest roads became a bog, swarming with fifteen hundred soldiers and a thousand horses. They’d finally discovered a source of water that wasn’t entirely punk, though it still had to be chlorinated. Too many men had already gone down with terrible retching illnesses. Dehydrated water was what they called the chemical stuff, and it was barely palatable in sugared coffee. But
the men had the comfort of a YMCA hut with hot water and soap for showering, and, even better, a Salvation Army house where two stout, merry beauties baked the best pies and doughnuts the men had tasted since leaving home. And sometimes there were bowls of Hershey’s Kisses.

“War’s not as bad as Sherman said it was,” Leon remarked one morning to the captain after breakfast.

“Don’t count your chickens, Sergeant,” the captain warned. “I expect we’ll look back on this time like it was home.”

Leon nodded. “I expect you’re right,” he said. “It’s just that I tell my boys things like that to keep their spirits up.”

CHAPTER 28

1918

T
HE DOOR OF
the roadhouse stood slightly ajar. Mary Bet could make out the words “orgie tonite” and “jazz” and some initials. Would he have come here to a place where there was loud music and liquor, and people who might make fun of him? Would he have brought his girl here, or might he have come here to meet someone, a hearing girl? He’d liked music, the vibrations, the sense of motion he got from his hand on the piano. If she could picture clearly those last days and hours, she could, in her mind at least, get to him and warn him away from the tracks, away from whatever was urging him on to his own destruction. A lizard glinted in a shard of sunlight on the window frame, and disappeared through a crack. She suddenly had the feeling that this had not been a bad place, a den of vice and iniquity, but a place where lovers could escape to, and she felt herself relent a little. People younger than she had met here—yes, black and white, as hard as
that was to believe—not to sin, but because they had to cleave to each other in a lonely world.

She went back outside and told the driver to take her to the courthouse. On the way over she opened her compact to adjust her hair.

“Wait here,” she told the driver as she got out. “I don’t expect to be long.” She would speak to the sheriff on business—introduce herself and tell him she was up paying a visit to the state hospital. She knew that you couldn’t just say what you wanted, because most men would find some way to jolly you out of it if they didn’t want the bother. You had to play their own game—be friendly, in no particular hurry, and then firm of purpose.