The man was quieter now, and the corporal rose. “So you are Telredy?” he said. “Always you actresses go with the Americans. Why is it?”
“Perhaps they are better men.”
“Or have more money,” the corporal said. “All right, we will carry him inside. But we will wait with him until his own people come and give me a receipt for him. I will not be responsible if anything happens.”
4
So they carried Jeff inside, and Sandor came out from under the stairs, his eyes blinking in excitement, and took them up in the elevator. They laid Jeff on the bed and wiped the filth from his face with wet towels, while Rikki telephoned the Park Club. She asked for Fred Keller and told him what had happened and he said he’d be right over with the Mission doctor.
Jeff was still babbling, but not so wildly now. When she spoke to him he still did not reply. She looked in the medicine closet in the bathroom. There were medicines there, but none that would help him except aspirin, and aspirin seemed silly. She saw a bottle of vitamin pills, and without thinking popped two of them into her mouth and swallowed them.
Until Fred Keller and Quincy Todd came with Major L’Engle, the Mission doctor, she sat on the bed, running her fingers along Jeff’s temples, and shielding his wide eyes from the light. The policemen found Jeff’s cigarettes, smoked, and grew bored. Every few minutes the corporal would think of a question, and she would answer in a monosyllable. When Jeff spoke now, she could distinguish words, but they did not make sensible sentences.
5
Major L’Engle was an Army Department doctor who had served in France and Germany, and later in a base hospital in England, and he knew combat fatigue when he saw it. “All right,” he ordered, “everybody clear out!” He looked at Rikki. “You stay. I’ll have to look at you later. Don’t want any delayed shock.”
The corporal wanted to know who was going to give him a receipt, and Fred Keller said he would. Keller said this was a most serious matter, and he trusted that the corporal would make a complete examination of the jeep, and make every effort to discover who was responsible. The corporal shrugged his shoulders and said it was always difficult in a bombing of this type. Also, once the criminals fled, it became a political matter, and therefore a matter for the secret police. No doubt the secret police would make an investigation. Keller and Quincy Todd both laughed. The corporal pocketed a pack of Jeff’s cigarettes, summoned his men, and left.
“You two can stay if you want,” Major L’Engle said then. “Just wanted to get rid of those monkeys.”
He lifted Jeff’s eyelids, and examined the palms of his hands. He loosened Jeff’s collar, and pulled a blanket over his body. “He’s got a bad dose of it,” he said. “Look at his arms and legs. There’s a lot working inside him.”
“Bad dose of what?” Keller asked.
“Combat fatigue. Uncontrollable fear. It’s a young man’s occupational disease.”
“It scares me,” Quincy Todd said. “Can you catch what he’s saying?”
“I wish I could use narco-synthesis,” Major L’Engle said. “We’re not equipped for it here. Looks like we ought to be, doesn’t it? Haven’t any sodium pentothal. But I’ll cool him down with Blue Eighty-Eights.”
“What’s that?” Keller asked.
“Sodium amytal.” Major L’Engle was a tightly knit man who wore a military mustache and he carried a military kit. In the bottom of his bag he found a fat, round, blue bottle. Into his hand he shook two pills, bullet-shaped, blue, and long as the end of a man’s second finger.
“Can he swallow those?” Rikki asked.
“Sure. You get some water, Rikki. And you two fellows hold his arms when I’m ready.”
The major cradled Jeff’s head in one arm, forced the pills into his mouth and shook them into his throat, and made him swallow water after. It reminded Rikki of a veterinarian forcing medicine into an injured and frightened dog.
“What’s he talking about?” said Quincy Todd. “Lot of Italian names, and something that sounds like fire coordinates. I never heard him swear like that before. Sounds like he’s fighting a battle.”
“He is,” said Major L’Engle. “He’s fighting a battle all over again.”
“It must be hell to do that,” said Quincy Todd soberly.
In thirty minutes Jeff’s trembling was not so apparent, and his incoherent words were spoken thickly and slowly. Then at last he was silent, and his breathing became regular, and he slept.
Rikki began to cry, and Major L’Engle put his arm around her shoulders and said, “Now, honey, I’ll have to find something for you.”
She said, “I’m all right. I am perfectly all right. I want to stay here.” Then she saw herself in the mirror. She looked her thirty-four years, and the three others she never mentioned. She looked all of them. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go.”
“I’ll give you a couple of pills. You can take them when you get home. Fred and Quincy will take you, and I’ll stay here until he comes out of it.”
“Is he going to be all right?” Keller asked. “I mean, this isn’t permanent, it is?”
“No. Oh, no. He’ll have to stay in bed for a few days, and rest for maybe a week. Then he’ll be as good as ever.”
“Suppose he has a recurrence?”
“He won’t—unless he gets another bomb.”
“We’ll all have to be more careful. No more using a car without a driver. I’ll get Quigley out of bed, and send him up here just in case.”
“Yes,” the Major said, “we’ll all have to be more careful.”
6
When Jeff lifted his head and opened his eyes his mouth was thick and parched and his head and face felt swollen and he asked for water. Then he saw L’Engle sitting on the edge of the bed, and Quigley in a chair close by. “Hello, Major. Hello, Quig,” he said. “Christ, what a hangover! My mouth is full of goat wool. Can you hear what I’m saying? It’s morning, isn’t it?”
The Major had a glass of water in his hand, as if he had been waiting. Jeff drank, and said, “Where’s Rikki? What happened?”
“You were booby-trapped.”
“Oh. What about Rikki?”
“She’s okay. Wasn’t scratched. Wasn’t much of an explosion.”
“What happened to me?”
“Baker, that’s something I can’t tell you. You’ll have to tell me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You must’ve had a pretty bad shock, in the war.”
Jeff raised himself on his elbows. “Oh, that’s it. I did have a shock, I suppose. No worse than others. Not as bad as some.”
“Hospitalized for combat fatigue?”
“You mean did I crack up?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“No, I don’t think so. They took me back to the station hospital in Florence, but then they decided I wasn’t so bad, and they sent me to rest camp for a couple of weeks. You know the Fifth Army Rest Camp? The Hotel Imperial in Rome? Boy, was it wonderful!”
“Ever get any narco-synthesis treatment?”
“No. They didn’t think I needed it.” This wasn’t precisely true. The medics in Florence had thought he needed it. But there were so many others in worse shape that when he’d pulled himself together, when his pride conquered his fear, they’d let him go to rest camp instead of base hospital.
Major L’Engle looked at Jeff’s hands again. “I think they were wrong,” he said, very quietly. “However, that’s all past, and you are going to be all right, and Quig is here to see that nobody tosses any more bombs around. But if you were able to tell me everything that happened to you—the thing that sent you to the station hospital—you’d be better off.”
“It wasn’t much,” Jeff said. “Some Nebelwürfe came into my position. That’s all there was to it.”
7
Of course that wasn’t all there was to it, but it was all he could tell—all he could ever consciously tell.
When the 85th Division was
assigned to take the heights commanding Futa Pass Jeff knew nothing of the grand strategy—nothing of the decision of the Combined Chiefs of Staff to order an offensive in Italy to contain the German divisions. All he knew was that the company would kick off at 0200 hours and his platoon would go first and their final objective was Mt. Altuzzo and he was to keep going until another wave leap-frogged him.
He also knew that he was afraid. He was always afraid in battle. There was no waking moment when he was in range of an enemy shell that he was not afraid. He was aware that he felt this fear more acutely than most of the others. It was his damned imagination that made him afraid. Whenever he was under the enemy’s direct observation he could visualize a Kraut officer training his glasses on him, personally, and ordering a round. And he could imagine what he would look like after the shell had torn him up. He knew what shells could do to the frail and yielding flesh of man. He had seen.
And he was afraid because he was a smart soldier who kept track of casualty percentages in the combat infantry, and he could estimate his chances, which were never very good, and which got worse with every action. He was deathly afraid of mines and booby traps. He always tried to put his feet only on the fresh tracks of heavy vehicles.. He never opened a door, or sat on a toilet in a newly captured village, without careful preliminary examination. His nerves were tuned to every sound of battle. The soldier who has an ear for battle—who can distinguish between all the sinister sounds with which death announces its arrival—lives longer.
He tried to conceal all his fears from his men. If his men guessed he was afraid, his platoon would go to pieces, and the company would suffer. The failure of a single small unit would cause trouble, and unnecessary casualties, all along the line. So every minute he was holding in his fear, for he had pride in his outfit and in the way his men regarded him.
In the late afternoon they rode in trucks almost as far as the regimental CP in Scarperia, hit the ground there, and immediately came under fire. You will remember that it was very dry in Italy that autumn, and the vehicles and the scuffling boots of the men raised a tattling cloud of dust as they pressed forward. Jeff cursed the dust, for he knew it invited shellfire. As he had expected, the German SP guns up in the mountains fired into the dust all the afternoon. At the crossroads in Scarperia Jeff lost his communications sergeant, who was an old and reliable friend, and from that moment Jeff was depressed, and had a premonition he would die.
In his progress up the Italian boot he had accumulated a number of fetishes. Twice, while whistling, shells had come in on him. Now he never whistled. He had shaved the morning of the first landing, and had come through the landing unhurt. So now he shaved before every battle, which his men thought curious and in some way proof that he was cool and reliable. In his pocket he carried a wrist watch that didn’t run, because it had been with him in the first landing. And always, before battle, he said a prayer under his breath. It was very short and simple. “Please God, get me through this one time, and I won’t ask again.” The words were always the same, but he always knew he would ask again.
So they came to the jumping-off place, and flopped down in a little dry ditch shielded by dusty bushes. He had not known there would be a ditch there, and it was handy because the enemy’s heavy machine guns were searching this ground, and his mortars were nervously working it over.
In the dusk when his silhouette could not be spotted he stood up on a mound and surveyed the place where he must go. It was the first line he had ever seen that looked like a line. In this light the mountains cleaved together, and became an unbroken wall, an escarpment that towered over him, so that he had to lift his chin high to see the crest. It did not seem possible that anyone could climb this wall in the night, much less fight his way up. “My God,” he said aloud, “they’re looking right down our throats!”
And he had then the conviction that even in this dusk with the mountains red in the west and black in the east they could see him. They were watching. They could see him coming. They were waiting.
His bazooka man said, “Ain’t good, is it, Lieutenant?”
And Jeff said, “You never had it so good! Look at that sunset! Ever see a sunset like that?”
Jeff heard his bazooka man moving back along the ditch, and whispering, and he heard the muffled laughter of his men. He knew they would be repeating, “Did you hear what he said? We never had it so good! Ain’t that rich!” So he believed his men were going to be all right, and he told them to eat and get their rest. He wished he could eat or rest, but he couldn’t, for his imagination was leading him into black and fearful places.
Dark brought the storm. Behind him the earth erupted in barrage, and five hundred shells seared the sky, and the world trembled. He thought, thank God that stuff is going out. But whenever the fire slackened, he could hear the German shells come in with a crash like the short snarl of an animal. The one that landed in his platoon he did not hear coming. There was a crack and red flash and the whoosh of heated air and jagged iron. After he picked himself up and checked the line of men he found he must attack five men shy. And his own percentages had worsened.
He could not sleep, although the others seemed to sleep. He grudged each minute that slipped by on his watch (the one that ran), and he found himself wishing crazy things, such as how wonderful it would be if time would turn backward, and the minute hand would move the other way. He thought of yesterday, and wished he could live yesterday over again. He wished he could live it all over again, even the bad days, because no day could be as bad as this. He tried not to think of tomorrow, for there might be no more tomorrows.
The last hour was the worst, and his eyes hardly left his watch. Fifteen minutes before 0200 the guns all opened at once and he thought surely the sky must crack and fall in. The 4.2 chemical mortars beat their iron tom-toms not so far in front, and he was grateful for them, but he hoped they remembered to roll their fire up the mountains when he kicked off.
He sensed the men stirring around him, and he passed the word. When the minute hand touched the hour he said, “Okay, let’s go.” He climbed out of the ditch and moved forward, his body and mind concentrating on making himself small. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his men moving along with him, and he felt a measure of relief. Every platoon leader is relieved when he sees his men are with him.
Almost immediately he saw what would have to be done. There was a fence of tracer bullets across his path, coming from a machine gun on the left. He had been taught that tracers at night looked deadlier than they actually were, and you should ignore them and press on. This was probably a good theory until you actually saw the tracers. Then it was no good. He thought they should get that gun.
They did get the gun, and then miraculously there was no tracer wall to cross, and it seemed that they walked through a lane. There was fire and terror on both sides, but straight ahead miraculously it was not bad. So he walked straight ahead towards the deeper black that was the mountains. They went on until they were climbing, and Jeff wondered whether they had gone too far.
Then he saw the bulk of this hill and realized that he crouched at its very base. He thought it would be good if he went up this hill, although he had not been told to take any hills. He saw little red gouts of rifle fire from the top of the hill, and heard a burp gun working up there. He was surprised there was nothing else, but perhaps the shells had knocked out whatever else there had been.
His bazooka man said, “Where the hell you goin’, Lieutenant?”
Jeff said, “Up the hill.”
His bazooka man said, “I don’t think we ought, Lieutenant.”
Jeff said, “Come on.”
Somebody in the darkness laughed and said, “You never had it so good, you lanky bastard!” And he could hear men laughing all around him and they went up the hill and at the top they found six Krauts, two of them wounded. They had to kill the Kraut officer, and the others gave up. The Krauts said they were from the Fourth Para Division, and had been expe
cting the attack for a week. They said they were all that was left of a company. The bombardment had killed all the rest. You could see that.
Jeff sent two men back with the three whole Krauts, and he instructed them to tell the Captain he had his platoon up on this hill, but he didn’t know what hill it was. He was sure he had no flanks, so the hill would be hard to hold if there was a counter-attack and he suggested that the Captain bring up the rest of the company when the Captain found out what hill he was on. Also he needed a communications team. It would be best if they could get wire to the top of this hill, because he thought it would make a good O.P. But anyway he had to have a walkie-talkie.
He told his men to dig in.
In the early dawn he stared north and west until his eyes watered, and finally the landscape began to come clear. “Oh, Christ!” he said, and involuntarily ducked. It looked as if he could spit across to the top of Altuzzo. Directly opposite, on the level of his eyes, was the corkscrew road that ran up Altuzzo, and there were Germans on this road with tanks and self-propelled guns and queer-looking equipment. The guns were firing far behind him. He looked to the left, and there was Futa Pass, and it was below him, clear as an aerial photograph, and there was heavy traffic on it moving in both directions. He knew the Germans were using the last of the darkness to reinforce their positions. The men were now all looking at what he saw, and one of them said, “We never had it so good,” but this time nobody laughed.
He did not fire on the Germans, because he did not want to attract their attention sooner than necessary. He waited for what he knew must come.
It came. They had received three salvos before Jeff realized from the color of the smoke that a battery of his own 105s was zeroed in on his position.
He was counting his dead, and shouting for the morphine syrettes for the wounded when heavier stuff began to come in, and this time the smoke was brown and he knew he had got his platoon under bombardment from both armies. He lay on the ground, the concussions hurting his belly, and prayed that the men he had sent back with the prisoners would get back. It turned out, later, that the men never did get back. They were never seen again, and were listed as MIA. Probably they were killed.