Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Ten

December 15, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Friday, 1900 Hours.

On the night of December 15th, Sergeant Docker stood in a tent at Dog Battery headquarters checking the personal effects of Privates Gruber, Pierce and Spinelli with a soldier from a Graves Registration Unit, Private First Class Edgar Nessel.

The gear of the dead soldiers was spread out on army cots, revealed in bright detail by an overhead light bulb and the glow from a potbellied stove.

“We’ll make up a nice package of their personal things.” Nessel was a thin and nervous young man with slightly bulging eyes. “Clean uniforms and all their mail and postcards, of course. We don’t want any loose ends. Tidy is a comfort, I always say.”

The bodies of Spinelli, Gruber and Pierce, or what was left of them, had been wrapped in mattress covers and tarpaulins and trucked the previous day to a holding cemetery behind the lines.

Nessel checked a quartermaster form and Docker stared at what the soldiers had left behind them.

In Spinelli’s effects were pinups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, a pair of dice, unopened chewing gum from his K-rations, a shaving kit, black oxford shoes, V-mail letters.

Pierce had a similar collection. And a slingshot. Docker noted with some interest, because he’d never seen him use it. There was also an ivory-handled knife tucked into a pair of Pierce’s neatly rolled GI socks. The knife belonged to Shorty Kohler and had disappeared a few weeks earlier. No point in making anything out of it now... ship it home, let it end up on somebody’s mantelpiece as a souvenir of the fallen warrior.

Gruber had apparently kept every letter from home since he’d been in the Army.

“Something’s missing, sergeant,” Nessel said. “Private Spinelli was issued a rubber poncho with a detachable hood. You happen to know where they are?”

“No.”

“I don’t like these loose ends.” Nessel made a pencil check on his list. “Means a statement of charges. But we won’t bother the families. Battalion will send the charges to Battery and they’ll deduct it from whatever wages are due the soldier.”

The tent flap was pushed open by Lieutenant Whitter, who came in and crowded close to the stove, pounding his hands against his upper arms and shoulders.

“Sergeant, you got us up to our ass in paperwork tonight,” he said, but it seemed his irritation was mixed with a measure of satisfaction. “Didn’t you tell those guys of yours not to fuck around collecting souvenirs?”

“Yes, I told them.”

“They’re like babies crawling around sticking their fingers in light sockets. You got to watch ’em all the time. Who in hell was in charge?”

“I was,” Docker said.

“Well, we’ll go into that later.” Whitter took a sheaf of typewritten pages from his overcoat and handed them to Docker. “Right now, I want you to check the statement you gave Captain Grant’s clerk and see if you got anything to add to it.”

Docker read the four typewritten pages. “No, sir, that’s it.”

“You don’t say for sure whether it’s a fighter plane, a rocket, or anything.”

Private Nessel gave Whitter a quick salute and slipped out of the tent. Whitter took the pages from Docker. “Your report and some others are going to First Army at Spa and up to Corps at Bastogne. I’ll tell you something else, Docker. It’s going from there to SHAEF and London. So I hope for your ass that you and your section weren’t drunk on some of the black whiskey you stole from Utah.” He pushed his way out into the night.

Docker stood alone in the tent that smelled of coal and wool and looked at the personal gear of the dead soldiers. The slingshot bothered him, the childish look of it. And Gruber’s letters and Spinelli’s pinups of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Clean socks, clean uniforms, theater ribbons and Purple Hearts, a last tidy package courtesy of Graves Registration.

Dog Battery’s headquarters was in the fields of an abandoned farm about a dozen miles behind its line of guns, south and west of Salmchateau, a rural complex with stone barns and outbuildings chipped and broken by rifle and artillery fire. Pyramidal tents had been erected among the trees to provide quarters for Captain Grant and the officers and noncoms who maintained the battery’s support systems — Supply, Mess, Communications, Medical and Administration. Guards were posted at both ends of the battery “street,” a muddy passage running between the tents. Other guards stood duty at the gasoline and ammo dumps and the lean-tos that sheltered food and medical supplies.

The motor pool was quartered in the rear courtyard of the old stone farmhouse, separated from other battery installations by a broad meadow and a stand of fruit trees.

Nessel was waiting for Docker in the battery street. “Sorry to bother you again sergeant, but there’s one more little thing.”

“What?”

“These men, did they owe anybody any money?”

“I’m not sure, probably not. They didn’t gamble much — what else would they need it for?” He glanced along the dark battery street. Several soldiers were in line at the mess tent. Another group stood around the rough bulletin board nailed to a post near First Sergeant Korbick’s tent. But he saw neither Larkin nor Shorty Kohler, who had driven here with him.

“We like the families of the deceased to know they didn’t owe any money,” Nessel said. “Con men in the States check the local papers for obituaries, then write the family and claim the dead GI was in debt to them.”

Docker saw Kohler coming up the battery street from the direction of the motor pool.

“They usually make a sad story out of it, like they lent the dead guy money for a girl in trouble or to catch a bus so they wouldn’t be AWOL.”

Kohler splashed into a mud puddle and was cursing when he stopped beside Docker.

“Sarge, Larkin went over to the motor pool for a crap game and that son of a bitch Haskell grabbed him.”

“If possible, we like to assure the next of kin that the deceased have no obligations of any kind to—”

“They didn’t owe anybody a fucking dime. Put it in writing, I’ll sign it.” Docker looked at Kohler. “Was he drinking?”

“Shit, yes. I told him Haskell would bust his balls but you know how he is on that black skull-pop. I tried to get in there, but they got a truck rammed against the gate on the inside.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe a half hour. We better get goin’ or there ain’t gonna be much left of him.”

“You get the jeep. Shorty,” Docker said. “Bring it around to the other side of the battery.”

“Where the hell you going?”

“Just get the goddamn jeep.”

“You better not go over there alone.”

“Goddamn it, do what I tell you. Shorty.”

“Well, you’re gonna get your fucking head bent in,” Kohler said.

Docker ran through the meadows to the courtyard behind the farmhouse, which was enclosed by eight-foot stone walls topped with ragged growths of winter ivy and honeysuckle. He heard voices and laughter behind the walls and through cracks in the gate could see strong lights, but the gates didn’t budge when he slammed his shoulder into them. Following a flagged walk to the front of the farmhouse, he kicked in a rotted wooden door. Inside, the rooms were cold and dark and smelled of sour mattresses and moldering wallpaper. A mechanic named Tony Perkovitch stood at the kitchen sink opening a bottle of beet cognac in the glow of a kerosene lamp that spread yellow light on the frosted windows. The soldier turned at the sound of footsteps and blinked when he saw Docker standing in the doorway.

Private First Class Perkovitch was a youngster with heavy shoulders and permanently grease-stained hands. He shrugged and said, “Haskell told me to get him some booze, sarge.”

“Maybe he’s had enough,” Docker said.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that. He just told me to bring him a bottle.”

“I’m here to get Larkin.”

“I didn’t have no part in it, sarge.”

“Then you better stay inside, Tony. I’ll take Haskell his bottle.”

“I guess it’s okay, if you say so.”

Docker nodded and took the bottle from him and walked out onto a rear porch that opened directly onto the courtyard.

The headlights of four GI trucks cut the darkness and formed a lighted ring in the middle of the big yard. Inside this expanse of light, Larkin staggered about drunkenly, blood streaming from his nose and mouth.

Haskell stood watching him. At the edge of that light several of his mechanics, bulky men in soiled fatigues, raised their bottles and drank. Haskell moved forward, grinned and slapped Larkin across the face with enough force so that the corporal turned in a full wobbling circle before tripping and falling to the ground.

Blinking against the glare of the headlights, Larkin worked himself up to his hands and knees, lowered his head and shook it slowly. The lights gleamed on the blood dripping from his mouth into the snow.

Haskell said, “You’re not hurt, Larkin. If I used my fists, you would be. So on your feet. We got the whole night to teach you to watch that mouth of yours.”

Larkin tried to laugh. He rubbed at his lips. “Haskell, you’re the only good fucking argument I know for abortion.”

One of Haskell’s mechanics, an older man named Lenny Rado, noticed a movement in the shadows. He looked off and saw Docker walking across the courtyard, the low beams of the headlights catching the flash of the bottle in his swinging hand. “We got company,” he said to Haskell.

Haskell turned slowly, his big boots sucking against the snow and mud, and grinned at Docker, the tense smile bunching his rubbery cheeks.

Docker looked at Larkin. “Get up, we’re going back to the guns.”

Haskell drew a breath, causing the roll of muscle around his stomach to bulge over his broad leather belt. “You leaving right now, sarge?”

“That’s right.”

“But I still got some business with Corporal Larkin.”

“No, that business is all over.”

“Kind of depends. He comes here with his filthy mouth, gets on me and my guys, it’s only fair to give him what he’s asking for.”

Docker looked down at the blood on the dirty snow. “I think you’ve done that, Haskell. I told you, it’s over.”

“Only thing is, part of the country where I’m from, third parties don’t make that decision. Not for fair fights, Docker. And nobody touched this Irish shit-heel but me.”

“Sure,” Docker said. “Larkin’s so drunk he couldn’t hit the ground with his hat and you’ve got fifty pounds on him.”

“You said it about your gun section, Docker... said everything there was your business. Well, it works the same way here.”

“Get up,” Docker said to Larkin.

“I been begging him to do that little thing,” Haskell said, “so I can slap his silly face into the mud again.”

Docker stared at the mechanics standing behind Haskell, remembering their names — Dolan, Granowski, Lenny Rado, but nothing else about them because now they were only ugly reflections of Haskell to him, and for the waste and stupidity they represented he felt an anger that was different from what had gripped him when he had looked at the personal effects of his dead soldiers. This anger had no loneliness or pain or compassion mixed in it... it was pure, a destructive feeling that denied Haskell and his men even contempt or bitterness. “You’re not listening,” he said. “It’s over now.” There were touches of color high in his face, and behind the masked alertness in his eyes an evidence of something so violent that when Haskell recognized it his smile changed and he rubbed a heavy hand over his lips.

“I didn’t go out of my way for this. Docker. Larkin came looking for it.”

Docker pointed to the bright headlights. “You’re violating blackout security, Haskell. I know you’re a goddamn meathead, but I’m surprised at Dolan and Granowski and Rado here.”

The sound of their names seemed to startle the mechanics; they shifted restlessly and nervously, like oxen stung on their blind sides by whips.

“Keep this between you and me, Docker. Just leave them—”

“Shut up, damn you.”

Haskell sucked in another breath, puffing himself up like a frog, but his voice was unaccountably higher when he said, “You want a piece of me, Docker, I’m right here, Fm not going anywhere.”

“We’ll get to that,” Docker said, and stared at the mechanics. “You’re playing in the snow like a bunch of goddamn kids, but if a thermal cut a hole in this weather a German fighter could fly a strafing pattern right down your stupid throats.”

Larkin began laughing, the blood dripping from his chin onto the muddy front of his overcoat. “You tell ’em. Bull,” he said, coughing and gasping for breath. “Rip their asses off. You didn’t go to college for nothing. Not by a shit sight.”

Docker drew his .45 and flipped the safe lever to the off position.

Haskell grinned tightly. “Hold it, there’s no call...”

Docker turned to the mechanics. “Now get those lights out. If you’re not moving when I take care of the first truck you’ll spend Christmas in a stockade.”

Docker steadied the gun in both hands and squeezed off two rounds that smashed out the headlights of the truck nearest him. Before the flat reports had time to echo on the frosty air Haskell’s mechanics were running toward the other trucks.

Darkness now plunged over the courtyard, an almost weighable blackness relieved only by the spinning snow-flakes and the yellow glow from the kerosene lamp in the farmhouse. Docker put the .45 away and twisted the metal clip to lock the holster strap, then looked at Haskell. “Just how far do you want to take this?”

“Any fucking place you like. Docker.”

“We’ll see just how far.” He tossed the bottle of beet brandy to Rado, carefully smoothed his gloves across the backs of his knuckles. “Let’s go, you sorry meathead.”

“Fifty bucks on Docker,” Larkin said, his voice shaded with laughter. “Come on, you fuckers, let’s see some cash on your meathead. Another fifty says he don’t last three minutes.”

Docker dropped his helmet on the ground and walked toward Haskell.

“Just hear me first,” Haskell said, raising his open hands. “I’m goin’ for regular Army, Docker, I can’t afford to lose these stripes.” An uneasy frown clouded his heavy, stubbled features. “They don’t mean all that much to you college guys, you don’t have to—”

“Haskell, if you want to get dumped on your ass with your hands at your sides, that’s up to you.”

Haskell studied the deliberate anger in Docker’s eyes, then moved backward and squatted on the ground, picking up a handful of snow and letting the melting flakes sift slowly through his fingers. He frowned at the thin spill of snow, watching the starry particles melt into the crusted ground.

“I don’t want to keep it going,” he said without lifting his eyes to Docker’s.

“Well, be damned sure, Haskell.”

Haskell took the bottle from Rado but didn’t drink from it. He looked up at Docker then, his face sullen. “You and me know, sarge, this ain’t the right time for it.”

“You and I know something else, don’t we, Haskell?” Docker said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Larkin spoke up, “It means you’re a revolving shit-heel, Haskell, a shit-heel from any direction, a mothering, gutless shit-heel coward, that’s what it means—”

“Shut up, Larkin.” Docker picked up his helmet, put it on him and adjusted the chin strap. “Let’s go.”

“What Docker means, there’ll never be a right time for you, Haskell.”

“Goddamn it, at ease, Matt.”

“Hup-tup-thrup-four, boss. Movin’ out.”

They headed for the jeep through the grove of trees that flanked the battery street. “Okay, get the goddamn sermon over with,” Larkin said.

“You’re turning into a pain in the ass and a fuck-up.” Docker’s tone was casual but there was an edge of anger under it. “You probably can’t help the first, but you’re not going to foul up in my section anymore.”

“That’s the best kind of sermon. Bull, nice and short, then, bless the flock and cut ’em loose for a drink. That’s the best part of mass for us poor micks.”

“Listen, I don’t give one damn that your uncles got drunk and tore up their money on payday, or that landlords periodically kicked your Irish asses out into the snow.”

Larkin’s smile flashed through the smudge of dirt and beard on his face. “That’s pretty good. Bull. You got a real pair of brass knucks on your tongue when you want—” He was seized by a coughing fit, stopped walking and braced his hands on his knees, almost strangling in his effort to ease and soothe the hot ache in his lungs. Finally, breathing slowly and carefully, he straightened and brushed at the spittle and blood on his lips with a dirty handkerchief. Holding his sides against a contraction of pain, he hurried to catch up with Docker.

“You tell Whitter I was in charge of that detail?”

“No, but I’ll tell you something. I don’t care where you guys came from or what the hell you’re going back to... Trankic’s woman runs a boardinghouse in Chicago, that’s what he’s fighting for, to get back and help her. Schmitzer’s brother went down on the Lexington and he wants to make it home to keep his mother out of the poorhouse. Okay, that’s his trip to the chaplain. My business, as you may or may not have heard, is running this gun section.”

“You’re real sharp, got all of us tucked in pigeonholes,” Larkin said. “So what’s the morning line on Gel-nick? You got him figured out?”

Docker shook his head.

Larkin daubed again at his swollen lip. “All right, pay attention to your Uncle Matt. Gelnick took a shafting from Korbick from day one of basic. But I’ll say this for Gelnick, he took it like a sponge. KP every night after a full day on the firing range, scrubbing down grease tubs in the mess hall, his fatigues so dirty they stank. On weekends Korbick had him digging four-by-four holes in that red shit they call sand in Georgia, then filling them up again in sun that took the paint off the barracks. But the Hogman never broke, never slammed a shovel into the back of Korbick’s head, just took it and stayed out of the stockade.” He uncapped his canteen and took a short swig of whiskey, gagging at its raw heat, the black liquor running in icy trickles down his chin and throat. “You want a belt?”

“Put that away, you’ve had enough.”

“Okay, okay. So then it’s time for three-day passes after sixteen weeks at Camp Stewart, and damned if Gelnick didn’t jolt the bejesus out of everybody by scrubbing himself to the bone and then pulling a package from under his bunk and dumping out a new uniform, a tailor-made job he’d ordered from a military supply shop in Athens. So after more than three months of looking like somebody who slept in a slit trench, Gelnick comes up roses... And that had to be one of Korbick’s worst moments, Bull, watching a man whose guts he hated, a man he’d put the blocks to for months, marching off the post as smart as a fucking West Point cadet... He told everybody — Kohler, Solvis, Trank — that he was going to Atlanta but he didn’t. He went to Waycross. I know, because I was there. His wife was waiting for him, that’s right, his wife. A Jewish girl, Doris, I think her name was. Not your all-American cheerleader type with big tits, but little, almost thin, you could say, but great legs and great black hair. And brown eyes that made you think she could be Spanish or something. I met her when I walked into a bar and saw her sitting with Gelnick. He was so shocked, he damned near shit himself. He came up to my room that night, begged me not to tell any of the guys at camp about his wife. So I promised, but I asked him why didn’t he shape up and get off Korbick’s shit list. And he told me something I thought a lot about. Because it’s the way some Irish people think, my uncles anyway. They didn’t mind that the drunk wagon was called the paddy wagon. I mean, they pretended they didn’t mind, made jokes about it. That’s Gelnick for you. He knew he was going to get flak from Korbick no matter what he did. So he stayed sane by making sure he deserved what Korbick was handing out. He knew he was getting it because he was a Jew and there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it. But he knew he couldn’t stand it if anybody started riding him about his wife. So you know what he did when he got back to camp? Made a bundle of his smart new gear and the next morning dumped it all in the trash fire behind the mess hall, and then he went straight back to being Korbick’s favorite fuck-up.”

“So what do you want from me? A medal for keeping Gelnick’s little secret?”

“Jesus, you don’t give a guy anything, Bull.”

Shorty Kohler was waiting for them at the jeep, and with Docker at the wheel they started up the hairpin turns toward their guns, with snow and sleet around them and the distant noise of V-1 rockets making a drumming noise inside their helmets.

Suddenly the front wheels smashed into a crusted pothole, and Kohler sprawled forward against Larkin. When Docker got the wheel under control, Larkin sniffed and looked closely at a stain on the sleeve of his overcoat. “What the hell did you smear on me?”

“I slipped on the road,” Kohler said. “I stepped in something.”

“You stepped in something with your hands, you silly bastard?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Kohler said, but he was laughing, his breath fusing in white bursts with the cold air. “I had to do something, know what I mean? Some of the guys told me Korbick was getting all fixed up, you know, soaking in that big tub of his, a clean uniform all laid out, just so he could go over to the motor pool and have a ringside seat to watch the other shithead, Haskell, working over Larkin. So I got to thinking, what the fuck? Who we supposed to be fighting? So I went to the supply tent and got me a helmet and filled it with crap from a slit trench behind the barn. That’s how I got it on my hands, it was sloppin’ over. I took it back to Korbick’s tent, he was sitting there in a big tub of water, scrubbing his back. I dumped the helmet over his head, right down to his ears, and was gone before he even started yelling. I tell you guys, he screamed like he had his balls caught in an eggbeater.”

Docker braked the jeep and pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out and scrub your hands, Shorty,” he said.

“Jesus.” Larkin slapped the dashboard. “Perfect.”

“Let’s forget it,” Docker said.

“But you got to admit—”

“I told you, forget it.”

“All right.” Larkin’s voice was quiet, empty. He took a handkerchief from his overcoat and began moistening the blood hardening on his lips. “I know what you’re thinking about.”

Kohler climbed back into the jeep and Docker gunned the motor. After another hour’s drive he made the last winding turn high in the hills, where they saw the smudge of smoke from Dormund’s fire and the section’s guns against the curtains of snow.

In the rear of a truck Private Solvis sat cross-legged with a blanket pulled around his shoulders. Using a flashlight and a stubby pencil, Solvis brought his diary up-to-date:

Corporal Schmitzer stood on the loading platform of the cannon and studied the valley mists through his binoculars. Linari and Tex Farrel were huddled in the iron seats on either side of the breechblock, gloved hands resting on cranks that moved the gun barrel through its tracking patterns.

Schmitzer thought about the wet snow creeping under the cuffs of his gloves and the coffee Dormund was making and of Spinelli’s face (“Live coconut, corporal!”); sure, it was funny if you thought about it, but some part of his mind strayed helplessly in the direction of Sonny Laurel, who was curled up in a sleeping bag near the trucks...

“You got it all wrong,” Guido Linari was telling Farrel. “Italians don’t like being called wops.”

The lanky Texan had merely asked Linari if he’d been born in an Italian neighborhood in New York, but Linari’s mental processes frequently produced responses of confused and worrisome irrelevance. “See, Tex, at a ball game when I was a kid a guy called Frankie Crosetti a wop. Crosetti went into the stands and beat hell out of him. So you can’t say he liked being called a wop.”

“Which don’t really answer my question,” Farrel said, without interrupting his careful scrutiny of the valley below him...

Schmitzer knew that if he focused his binoculars on Laurel he would see the delicate blond eyelashes feathering his cheeks, the lips slightly parted and traced with melting snowflakes... Like a skilled campaigner these past days, Schmitzer had plotted his hours to be near the boy, working beside him on the guns, sitting as inconspicuously close to him as possible at chow breaks, but always furiously aware, and hating the reality of it, that this tantalizing proximity would never be enough to satisfy the need he could feel building inside him.

Schmitzer forced himself to look away from the boy and think about his father and brother and uncle, deliberately raising those dark shapes to obscure visions of a sleeping young man and blond hair turned frosted by the cold wind...

The mark on the wall in the basement in Detroit, that was all that was left of the old man, the footprint he’d made near the ceiling, Christ, what a young bull he’d been, laughing and running up the wall like it was a flight of stairs with him and his brother tight in his arms. That faded footprint was just above the empty coal bin where they’d found him one morning with the gun in his hand. And crazy Uncle Ernie dead in a jail where they didn’t even talk his language...

Schmitzer knew that private Joe Pitko was staring at him from where he sat near Dormund’s covered fire, his eyes bright and watchful under the rim of his helmet, his stubby forefinger, as if with a will of its own, moving slowly across the open Bible on his knee. The bald old bastard had his eye on him all right; every time he was near Sonny Laurel he was damn sure to find Pitko staring solemnly, accusingly at him. Somehow it was all part of the shit of this war... Pitko’s staring, vindictive eyes, and the awful explosions that tore open the hull of the Lexington... all the same damn thing... all of it could kill you...

In Barcelona, one of Uncle Ernie’s cell mates had given him a copy of a poem written by a writer named Ernest Hemingway. Uncle Ernie claimed it was written by Hemingway, but the poem had been typed on a piece of ruled paper and wasn’t signed so it could have been written by anybody. That’s what Schmitzer thought, and the only thing he knew about that Hemingway writer was a fishing piece in a sports magazine. But whoever wrote the poem, it was so goddamn true about war it made him almost weak with anger. It had been shipped back to Detroit with some of his uncle’s stuff, old uniforms, a few books and a picture of a girl the family didn’t know anything about, a smiling, dark-haired girl who held a leather bottle of wine up to whoever was taking the picture.

Schmitzer had memorized the last lines of the poem:

That Hemingway, or whoever it was, knew what it was all about, he sure as hell knew the score, Corporal Schmitzer thought as he studied the white expanse of the valley and the hazy outline of the trails leading down and through the rocky gorges and fir trees.