Love and Lament (49 page)

They camped in a valley and feasted on some cows and pigs that the Germans had left behind. Two cows joined the regiment, and were given their own gas masks. Captain Pugh took Leon and a few other favored men on a tour of the Germans’ abandoned concrete dugouts. “Underground mansion,” Pugh said, as they poked their heads into rooms that held feather beds, heavy tables and chairs, a grand piano, electric lights, hot and cold running water, a bowling alley. There was a dairy with gleaming tiled walls, a poultry yard, and a summer pavilion with chaise longues and paper lanterns hanging from a trellis.

Before it had hardly settled in, the regiment was moving again, propelled by an invisible motive that seemed to arise from within itself. On toward the Argonne Forest, the fields strewn with corpses and the lines harassed day and night by black-cross airplanes. “If we can just keep moving,” Leon would say, for there was the illusion that they made easier targets standing still. That sickening rise-and-fall drone coming from somewhere off to the right or left, and nothing to do but keep rolling onward, offering what encouragement he could.

“Those mosquitoes won’t hurt us, boys.”

At one encampment, Leon and Corn Koonce went forward as usual with their ration cart. Everybody knew them, because Leon would always wave and have some snappy remark to make about
how his food was the best in the regiment, better than anything in France. They made their delivery, and an MP directed them to use a different road back. It was dark.

“What you reckon they’ll make of prune apple pie?” Corn said.

“They’ll think it was the best they ever ate,” Leon said.

They went on a ways, for an hour or more, the sound of shelling appearing to grow louder. The only light they had was from the clouds, sporadically lit by rockets and flares. “I don’t know but what we’re on the wrong road,” Corn finally said. He sucked in his caved cheeks and put a hand to his stubble.

“Yep,” Leon agreed. “The MPs don’t know from one day to the next.”

They kept jostling along, the horse as content to go toward the firing as away. There was one pitch of road solid enough to keep the wheels from getting mired. “I don’t like the looks of it,” Corn said.

“Ssh now, Corn, it’ll be all right. Don’t get all hollow-eyed. We’ll run into somebody before long.”

“That’s what worries me.”

“We’ve got these nice woods here.”

“But over yonder’s all clear, except the brambles. What do you reckon’s on the other side of that rise?”

“I reckon it’s a music hall, boys gettin’ illuminated, and the prettiest girls you ever saw.” A shell dropped so close, up to their right, that the horse flinched and stalled. Leon flipped the reins and they plodded on. He began chewing an old cigar. He hadn’t been nervous until Corn got worried, and now Corn could relax knowing he’d stirred Leon up. Leon would have lit the cigar, except that Corn would worry even more about the light. As if anybody’d waste a shell on a ration cart.

They crested a little hill and found themselves in a vast bowl from which they could see the shelling at a low angle; the ground shook almost constantly. “I don’t like this at all,” Corn proclaimed.

On a little knoll off to the right stood the ruins of a stone house; beyond lay a desolate plain, with a row of stumps at the farthest edge, and in the light of a flare Leon could see another plain beyond. A doughboy emerged from the ruins. “What the hell’re you doing here with that damned ration cart?” he said.

“I’m looking for my battery,” Leon told him.

“Well, you won’t find it here, and you won’t be here much longer yourself. You’re practically in no-man’s-land.”

“You got a match?” Leon asked. He wasn’t about to make a dash for the rear to please a tough-sounding private.

The soldier handed him one, and Leon took his time. He asked the soldier for directions, then drove out into the rutted field, making the widest turn he could. Shells dropped to their right and left, the air in concussion. Corn held onto his hat. “You trying to give them something to shoot at?” he yelled.

“Those are our shells,” Leon said. “They’re not gonna hit us.”

As they drove past the doughboy, standing on guard in the ruins, Leon saluted. The doughboy saluted back and watched as they headed off into the night. It was not until they were a mile up the road that Corn could bring himself to speak. He shook his head and guffawed to himself, and then he laughed so hard he vibrated from knees to chin. “Them’s our shells,” he repeated, “they ain’t gonna hit us.”

In late September the regiment went into position at the edge of the Bois d’Esnes in the Argonne Forest. Over the next two weeks, casualties were commonplace, and horses became fodder for the drive. “There won’t be any left,” Leon said one morning, looking sadly at a pile of carcasses, carted there by the remaining healthy animals. “It’s a shame.” But he let it go at that. There was no time for thought or sleep, let alone pity. He had a battery to feed, and the battery had a regiment to serve. And the regiment, shuffled from one division to another, lived only to fight.

Sometimes they slept on the ground, other times in cootie-infested shacks, but Leon always chose to be near his wagon and ration cart over whatever makeshift comfort the battery had found. He began to see clearly that his mission in life was to fuel his men. When he thought of home and his days as a classroom teacher, it was as though he were looking through a series of muddy windows that revealed a scene he could barely discern. The only real thought he had of home was of Mary Bet, and he composed mental letters lying in his bedroll, until he could no longer stay awake.

The days were filled with cooking and carting. As the Germans were pushed back, they seemed fiercer to retaliate, and Leon’s rolling kitchen became the target of machine guns on a couple of occasions. Once a Boche plane picked him out when the cart was stuck in the mud and he and Corn were gathering stones to put beneath the wheels. Finally Allied planes found the Boche with tracer bullets, and Leon watched with admiration as the German aviator dipped and slipped and, at last, looped his way out of trouble and disappeared. He and Corn pulled the cart free and went on their way. Showing up with food on schedule, no matter how impossible the situation, and acting as if he’d just gone to the store for a bottle of milk—that became the joy of his life.

They came along a track beside a desolate field that had been plowed and replowed by so many shells it seemed there were more craters than solid ground. In one crater, a bloated rat was gnawing on a corpse that was still holding a Bible. A group of soldiers had just discovered a blue-eyed German lad of perhaps fourteen hiding in another of the yellow-green craters. Leon stopped his cart and watched as the leader tried to tell the boy to drop his rifle, but the boy was too afraid to let go. The American handed his own rifle to a fellow soldier and started forward, showing his palms, talking calmly. The boy raised his gun and fired. There was an explosion of
gunfire. Leon and Corn watched as the boy’s right half was ripped away below his shoulder, and then they moved on.

That night Leon learned that the American soldier was hit in the arm and was fine. He wrote to Mary Bet:

I don’t have time for a full letter, just a quick note to say I am thinking of you, and I hope you are well and happy. Army life has its high and low points, that’s for sure. One of the low points is the bellyaching some of the men do about the food, and how much better it is at home. I’ll be home soon, because we’re making good progress, and I don’t mind if I never have to see another can of corned beef again. I won’t stop here, because the mail doesn’t go out for some time, but for now, I wish you the sweetest of dreams
.

Love
,

LST

He lay there for a while, seeing the face of the German boy. He knew he would never forget it; he wondered how many nights he would see the face, the vivid blue eyes.

CHAPTER 31

1919

L
EON
’
S FINAL LETTER
came from the forwarding camp in Le Mans, dated February 13, 1919:

Dear Miss Mary Bet
,

Now at last I can write to you and catch you up with everything that has happened. Well, perhaps not everything, because I don’t know if I could put it all in one letter. I look forward to sitting down with you and having a good long talk. Shall we take a picnic down to Mt. Jordan Springs? I can see us now, with a checkered blanket spread out beneath the elms and the water trickling in the background. When I get home, the daffodils should be out, and I’ll pick you a bunch. I know I’m presuming a lot, saying that you’ll still be interested in riding out with me, but it helps me to get through this last ordeal
.

First, to go back to the war. I didn’t explain properly about how it ended on the morning of the Armistice. It seemed that just the day before, we were getting showered by those infernal propaganda leaflets from Hun aeroplanes. I saved one to bring home. It says, “WHAT BUSINESS IS THIS WAR IN EUROPE TO YOU ANYHOW? You don’t want to annex anything do you? You don’t want to give up your life for the abstract thing, humanity. If you believe in humanity, save your own life and dedicate it to your own country and the woman who deserves it of you. If you stay with the outfit, ten chances to one all you will get out of it will be a tombstone in France.” It was pure rubbish, I expect just as a last-ditch effort to stave off disaster
.

On the morning of the Armistice the order to cease firing came just as we were loading the lunch buckets for the trenches. My right-hand man Corn Koonce and me started on forward with the ration cart, because the men had to eat no matter what. We didn’t know what to believe because the firing was going on just like always, thundering and whistling and thumping. It turns out, the Boche were unloading everything they had, mostly mustard shells, and a few of our boys were gassed that morning, after the cease-fire orders had been handed down. Two in our regiment died. Well we got down past the first checkpoint and suddenly the guns stopped. It was the strangest thing after eleven weeks of unending noise, to hear nothing at all. And I mean nothing. It seemed like the world had stopped. Corn said something to me, and I couldn’t even hear what he said sitting right beside me, everything was so quiet
.

That night there was a celebration like I never expect to see again. Both sides were shooting off flares and star rockets, and there was no fear in them—just sapphires and emeralds bursting in the black sky. And we were singing and carrying on so, men getting illuminated on French wine stashed away for such an occasion. It’s hard to explain how jubilant everybody was. We wouldn’t have chosen to be anywhere else in the world
.

Then we were three weeks clearing out all the mines and debris. Our unit had to patrol an area half the size of Haw County. After that we were on the march to Luxemburg, and how it rained! I remember one clear day and everybody was scrambling to get a bath and shave and clean clothes. But mostly we were hiking along past muddy shell-torn fields, demolished walls, tangles of barbed wire, and rows of dead trees. There were whole towns burned because the citizens didn’t pay their levy to the Germans. We hiked so much and on such bad roads, it seemed like we went out of our way to cover every bad road in France. I’ll never forget the sight of one bedraggled woman passing our entire column, pushing a baby carriage loaded with a two-week bread ration from the relief commission. She said she was walking 15 miles
.

When we finally got to Belgium, it was like returning to civilization. There were nice, clean little villages that hadn’t been scarred by the war. I’ll wait until I get home to describe everything in Luxemburg, except to say that it was deluxe living after France. Lots of our boys made fools of themselves trying to talk with the local women in what little high school French and German they had. Despite the hard sledding with the language, there were temptations, but I and many in my outfit carried a picture in our minds if not our wallets of the women we loved. I didn’t need a photograph to remind me of your face and your sweet voice and the touch of your hand. There were other amusements to occupy us, and things to worry us as well. The worst thing was that Capt. Pugh, a boon companion and the best battery commander one could wish for, got pneumonia and died on Christmas day. You might already have heard of it
.