Short Stories: Five Decades (44 page)

“Maybe,” said Segal. “Maybe … Now we will hear that from many people. Fundamentally, I am not a soldier, I am an automobile salesman, a musician, a pet-fancier, a stamp-collector, a Lutheran preacher, a schoolteacher, anything.… But in 1940 we did not hear that as you marched down the boulevards. There were no automobile salesmen then—only captains and sergeants, pilots, artillerists … Somehow, the uniform was not such an accident in 1940.”

They sat silent. A passing automobile backfired twice, and one of the sleeping soldiers screamed in his sleep, the noise echoing strangely in the sunny square. One of the other soldiers woke the sleeping man and explained to him what had happened and the sleeper sat up against a truck wheel, wiped his face nervously with his hand, went to sleep again, sitting up.

“Segal,” said the major, “after this war is over, it will be necessary to salvage Europe. We will all have to live together on the same continent. At the basis of that, there must be forgiveness. I know it is impossible to forgive everyone, but there are the millions who never did anything.…”

“Like you?”

“Like me,” said the German. “I was never a member of the Party. I lived a quiet middle-class existence with my wife and three children.”

“I am getting very tired,” Segal said, “of your wife and three children.”

The major flushed under the dust. He put his hand heavily on Segal’s wrist. “Remember,” he said, “the Americans are not yet in Paris.”

“Forgive me,” said Segal. “I believed you when you told me I could talk freely.”

The major took his hand off Segal’s wrist. “I mean it,” he said. “Go ahead. I have been thinking about these things for a long time, I might as well listen to you.”

“I’m sorry,” said Segal. “I have to go home and it’s a long walk, to the other bank.”

“If you have no objection,” said the major, “I’ll drive you there.”

“Thank you,” said Segal.

The major paid and they walked together across the square, in front of the men, who stared at them both with the same incurious, hostile expressions. They got into the major’s car and started off. Segal couldn’t help enjoying his first ride in an automobile in four years and smiled a little as they crossed the Seine, with the river blue and pleasant below them.

The major barely looked at where they were going. He sat back wearily, an aging man who had been pushed beyond the limits of his strength, his face worn and gentle now with exhaustion as they passed in front of the great statues that guard the Chambre des Députés. He took off his cap and the fresh wind blew his sparse hair in thin curls.

“I am ready to face the fact,” he said, his voice soft and almost pleading, “that there is a price to be paid for what could be called our guilt. We have lost and so we are guilty.”

Segal chuckled drily. By this time he was feeling exhilarated by the beer he had drunk, and the ride, and the sense of danger and victory that came with talking to the major in a town full of German troops.

“Perhaps,” said the major, “even if we hadn’t lost we would be guilty. Honestly, Mr. Segal, for the last two years I have thought that. In the beginning, a man is swept up. You have no idea of the pressure that is applied when a country like Germany goes to war, to make a man join in with a whole heart, to try to succeed in the profession of soldiering. But even so, it wasn’t the older ones like me … It was the young ones, the fanatics, they were like a flood, and the rest of us were carried along. You’ve seen for yourself.…”

“I’ve seen the young ones myself,” said Segal. “But also the older ones, sitting at the best restaurants, eating butter and steaks and white bread for four years, filling the theatres, wearing the pretty uniforms, signing orders to kill ten Frenchmen a day, twenty …”

“Weakness,” said the major. “Self-indulgence. The human race is not composed of saints. Somewhere, forgiveness has to begin.”

Segal leaned over and touched the driver on the shoulder. “Stop here, please,” he said in German. “I have to get off.”

“Do you live here?” the major asked.

“No. Five streets from here,” said Segal. “But with all due respect, major, I prefer not showing a German, any German, where I live.”

The major shrugged. “Stop here,” he told the driver.

The car pulled over to the curb and stopped. Segal opened the door and got out.

The major held his hand. “Don’t you think we’ve paid?” he asked harshly. “Have you seen Berlin, have you seen Hamburg, were you at Stalingrad, have you any idea what the battlefield looked like at Saint Lô, at Mortain, at Falaise? Have you any notion of what it’s like to be on the road with the American air force over you all the time and Germans trying to get away in wagons, on foot, on bicycles, living in holes like animals, like cattle in slaughter pens in an abattoir? Isn’t that paying, too?” His face worked convulsively under the dust and it seemed to Segal as though he might break into tears in a moment. “Yes,” he said, “yes, we’re guilty. Granted, we’re guilty. Some of us are more guilty than the rest. What are we to do now? What can I do to wash my hands?”

Segal pulled his arm away. For a moment, helplessly, he felt like comforting this aging, wornout, decent-looking man, this automobile salesman, father of three children, this weary, frightened, retreating soldier, this wavering, hopeless target on the straight, long roads of France. Then he looked at the rigid face of the driver, sitting at attention in the front of the car, with his machine pistol, small, and clever, well-oiled and ready for death in the sling under the windshield.

“What can I do?” the major cried again, “to wash my hands?”

Segal sighed wearily, spoke without exultation or joy or bitterness, speaking not for himself, but for the first Jew brained on a Munich street long ago and the last American brought to earth that afternoon by a sniper’s bullet outside Char-tres, and for all the years and all the dead and all the agony in between. “You can cut your throat,” he said, “and see if the blood will take the stain out.”

The major sat up stiffly and his eyes were dangerous, cold with anger and defeat, and for a moment Segal felt he had gone too far, that after the four years’ successful survival, he was going to die now, a week before the liberation of the city, and for the same moment, looking at the set, angry, beaten face, he did not care. He turned his back and walked deliberately toward his home, the space between his shoulder blades electric and attendant, waiting tightly for the bullet. He had walked ten steps, slowly, when he heard the major say something in German. He walked even more slowly, staring, stiff and dry-eyed, down the broad reaches of the Boulevard Raspail. He heard the motor of the car start up, and the slight wail of the tires as it wheeled around sharply, and he did not look back as the car started back toward the Seine and the Madeleine and the waiting troops sleeping like so many dead by their armored cars before the Madeleine, back along the open, unforgiven road to Germany.

Act of Faith

“
P
resent it in a pitiful light,” Olson was saying, as they picked their way through the mud toward the orderly room tent. “Three combat-scarred veterans, who fought their way from Omaha Beach to—what was the name of the town we fought our way to?”

“Konigstein,” Seeger said.

“Konigstein.” Olson lifted his right foot heavily out of a puddle and stared admiringly at the three pounds of mud clinging to his overshoe. “The backbone of the army. The noncommissioned officer. We deserve better of our country. Mention our decorations in passing.”

“What decorations should I mention?” Seeger asked. “The marksman’s medal?”

“Never quite made it,” Olson said. “I had a cross-eyed scorer at the butts. Mention the bronze star, the silver star, the Croix de Guerre, with palms, the unit citation, the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

“I’ll mention them all.” Seeger grinned. “You don’t think the CO’ll notice that we haven’t won most of them, do you?”

“Gad, sir,” Olson said with dignity, “do you think that one Southern military gentleman will dare doubt the word of another Southern military gentleman in the hour of victory?”

“I come from Ohio,” Seeger said.

“Welch comes from Kansas,” Olson said, coolly staring down a second lieutenant who was passing. The lieutenant made a nervous little jerk with his hand as though he expected a salute, then kept it rigid, as a slight superior smile of scorn twisted at the corner of Olson’s mouth. The lieutenant dropped his eyes and splashed on through the mud. “You’ve heard of Kansas,” Olson said. “Magnolia-scented Kansas.”

“Of course,” said Seeger. “I’m no fool.”

“Do your duty by your men, Sergeant.” Olson stopped to wipe the rain off his face and lectured him. “Highest ranking noncom present took the initiative and saved his comrades, at great personal risk, above and beyond the call of you-know-what, in the best traditions of the American army.”

“I will throw myself in the breach,” Seeger said.

“Welch and I can’t ask more,” said Olson, approvingly.

They walked heavily through the mud on the streets between the rows of tents. The camp stretched drearily over the Rheims plain, with the rain beating on the sagging tents. The division had been there over three weeks by now, waiting to be shipped home, and all the meager diversions of the neighborhood had been sampled and exhausted, and there was an air of watchful suspicion and impatience with the military life hanging over the camp now, and there was even reputed to be a staff sergeant in C Company who was laying odds they would not get back to America before July Fourth.

“I’m redeployable,” Olson sang. “It’s so enjoyable …” It was a jingle he had composed to no recognizable melody in the early days after the victory in Europe, when he had added up his points and found they only came to 63. “Tokyo, wait for me …”

They were going to be discharged as soon as they got back to the States, but Olson persisted in singing the song, occasionally adding a mournful stanza about dengue fever and brown girls with venereal disease. He was a short, round boy who had been flunked out of air cadets’ school and transferred to the infantry, but whose spirits had not been damaged in the process. He had a high, childish voice and a pretty baby face. He was very good-natured, and had a girl waiting for him at the University of California, where he intended to finish his course at government expense when he got out of the army, and he was just the type who is killed off early and predictably and sadly in motion pictures about the war, but he had gone through four campaigns and six major battles without a scratch.

Seeger was a large, lanky boy, with a big nose, who had been wounded at Saint Lô, but had come back to his outfit in the Siegfried Line, quite unchanged. He was cheerful and dependable, and he knew his business and had broken in five or six second lieutenants who had been killed or wounded and the CO had tried to get him commissioned in the field, but the war had ended while the paperwork was being fumbled over at headquarters.

“They reached the door of the orderly tent and stopped. “Be brave, Sergeant,” Olson said. “Welch and I are depending on you.”

“O.K.,” Seeger said, and went in.

The tent had the dank, army-canvas smell that had been so much a part of Seeger’s life in the past three years. The company clerk was reading a July, 1945, issue of the
Buffalo Courier-Express
, which had just reached him, and Captain Taney, the company CO, was seated at a sawbuck table he used as a desk, writing a letter to his wife, his lips pursed with effort. He was a small, fussy man, with sandy hair that was falling out. While the fighting had been going on, he had been lean and tense and his small voice had been cold and full of authority. But now he had relaxed, and a little pot belly was creeping up under his belt and he kept the top button of his trousers open when he could do it without too public loss of dignity. During the war Seeger had thought of him as a natural soldier, tireless, fanatic about detail, aggressive, severely anxious to kill Germans. But in the past few months Seeger had seen him relapsing gradually and pleasantly into a small-town wholesale hardware merchant, which he had been before the war, sedentary and a little shy, and, as he had once told Seeger, worried, here in the bleak champagne fields of France, about his daughter, who had just turned twelve and had a tendency to go after the boys and had been caught by her mother kissing a fifteen-year-old neighbor in the hammock after school.

“Hello, Seeger,” he said, returning the salute in a mild, offhand gesture. “What’s on your mind?”

“Am I disturbing you, sir?”

“Oh, no. Just writing a letter to my wife. You married, Seeger?” He peered at the tall boy standing before him.

“No, sir.”

“It’s very difficult,” Taney sighed, pushing dissatisfiedly at the letter before him. “My wife complains I don’t tell her I love her often enough. Been married fifteen years. You’d think she’d know by now.” He smiled at Seeger. “I thought you were going to Paris,” he said. “I signed the passes yesterday.”

“That’s what I came to see you about, sir.”

“I suppose something’s wrong with the passes.” Taney spoke resignedly, like a man who has never quite got the hang of army regulations and has had requisitions, furloughs, requests for court-martial returned for correction in a baffling flood.