Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Seven

December 13, 1944. Werpen, Eastern Belgium. Wednesday, 1630 Hours.

Docker’s jeep was parked in the main square of Werpen, a small village of red brick homes above a narrow tributary of the Our River. Section Eight’s guns were positioned at both ends of the main street, pointing in opposite directions to give the weapons clear fields of fire over the farmlands stretching out from the town.

It was a cold and overcast afternoon with snow and sleet sweeping over the square and battering the old church and shops around it.

According to the map Docker was studying with Schmitzer, Werpen was roughly between the big towns of Malmédy and St. Vith but a good deal closer than either to the borders of Germany.

The town was empty except for prowling cats and a few barking dogs tied up in gardens. Fires smoldered in some of the small homes, and in many of them half-eaten meals were still set out on tables and stoves. But the people of Werpen had apparently fled east with the retreating German troops. There wasn’t a cart or bicycle or baby carriage left in the village. Cowsheds and chicken coops were empty, as was the tabernacle in the cold church, its tiny golden door standing open.

Docker had sent out two details to make house-to-house sweeps. Corporal Larkin, with Spinelli, Pierce and Gruber, had taken one side of the main street, while Kohler and Sonny Laurel, with Trankic, were checking the other, rifles off safe as they went slowly through the silent dwellings.

Dormund and Gelnick had set up a gasoline stove in the lee of the town’s fountain and were opening K-rations and brewing coffee. The fountain was dry, its bottom covered with a solid mixture of mud and leaves. A fluted marble column rose a dozen feet above the basin, and on this pedestal stood the slender marble figure of a huntsman, frozen by its creator in the act of drawing an arrow from a quiver slanted across its ice-slick shoulders.

Fog hung low over the town and the snow flew in blinding currents around the soldiers moving in and out of the empty shops and homes. Heavy sleet fell with tiny hissing explosions into the hot coffee Dormund poured into canteen cups, flakes working their way down the collar of Docker’s heavy jacket.

Corporal Schmitzer looked at the silent snow-curtained streets. “Empty towns like this spook me, sarge. We seen ’em in Tunisia.”

“I know, you figure somebody’s got a bad conscience.” Docker folded the map and tucked it under the dashboard of the jeep. “Keep an eye on things. I’m going to inspect the guns.”

“Sarge, the motor of your jeep is running rough. Want me to check it? I won’t strip it down. Just tune it. We got to snap shit out of here, we can haul ass.”

Docker decided then that he could depend on Schmitzer, which gave him Trankic, Solvis and a few of the others. “Okay, check it,” he said.

Schmitzer poured gasoline from a jerry can into a bucket and collected rags from the rear of the jeep, then stood watching Docker’s tall figure swinging into the sleet toward the machine guns.

The jeep’s motor was the only sound in the deserted town as snow fell on the engine block and evaporated in a series of sputtering eruptions.

Gelnick was eating from a can of K-rations with his fingers; cheese and bacon bits rimmed his brush mustache with yellow flecks.

Schmitzer said to him, “Gelnick, why don’t you heat some water in your helmet and give yourself a bath?”

A smile appeared on Gelnick’s lips. “Sarge told me to help Chet with the chow.”

“Then why in hell aren’t you?”

“I was just taking a break.” Gelnick’s smile was obsequious, practiced, but he was thinking. Fuck you, you monkey clown, shit on you, it would end and he would have Doris and his family instead of this rotten war which was just another fucking game loaded against him. Sergeant Korbick had tried to kill him back in that stinking Camp Stewart, but he couldn’t break him, no one could, not even Docker with his goy’s guilt, and so he’d make it, he thought, all the way back to Doris and home—

“So snap some ass,” Schmitzer said.

“Sure thing, you just watch me.” Gelnick smiled again and gave the corporal a big sweeping salute.

Schmitzer cleaned the spark plugs of Docker’s jeep. The engine sounded better then, not perfect, but he couldn’t do much more without stripping it. (Suddenly his thoughts burned again with a need for Sonny Laurel.)

To distract himself, Schmitzer emptied the bucket of gasoline, folded the rags and walked aimlessly around the fountain, staring at the stone archer and forcing himself to imagine what his Uncle Ernie would have said about it. He’d probably have shouted that it was put up by working stiffs so rich people could walk by it on fine nights with their ladies while a fat priest bowed to them from the church. Yeah, that’s what Uncle Ernie would say. He’d say the workers would get nothing but a cup of gruel and a shafting for using their stupid backs to make a statue that was just for rich people to smile at. Yes, he’d have said things like that if they hadn’t broken his crazy head in prison in Barcelona... Schmitzer’s mother and father hadn’t known for a long time that Ernie was in prison. They’d just stopped hearing from him. He had written from Madrid, letters full of excitement and bullshit about meeting writers and reporters. No way to know whether it was true or not, because Ernie was always half-crazy anyway, joining weird groups, picketing plants he’d never punched a time clock in... Uncle Ernie was like a dog in heat to get to Spain. Then they’d got a handwritten Christmas card from him in Spanish, and that’s when they knew he was in jail. He must have got someone to write it for him, and bribed a guard to get it out.

Schmitzer took it to a high school teacher who had liked him and she had translated it for him. But it was Schmitzer’s father who figured out what the poem really meant because he saw that the first letter of each line, in Spanish and in English, spelled out the word J-A-I–L.

The little poem told them what had happened to Uncle Ernie — and what a wild story he would have made about how he had suckered the Spanish jailers with that message, except they’d split his head and killed him before he had a chance to tell everybody how smart he was. But what the hell was he doing off in Spain with a lot of other crazy Americans, anyway, what the fuck business was it of theirs...?

Schmitzer checked the jeep again; it sounded fine, but he couldn’t concentrate on the rhythmic thrust of the pistons, the smooth hum of the motor, or even what was around him, Dormund pumping the stoves and Gelnick still feeding his face with the cheese and bacon. The snow and sleet that cut his cheeks and the backs of his wrists, he tried to think about that, tried consciously to feel it, but he couldn’t, not any more than he could keep his mind on the statue of the archer and his crazy Uncle Ernie dead in Barcelona or even the other deaths that were always present in his mind, his father with the gun in his hand at the empty coal bin and the portholes welded shut on the Lex. They had all become shadows through which the face of Sonny Laurel stared at him, lips soft and curved in laughter, eyes clear and fresh and gay... Schmitzer had tried to convince himself over the past few days that his pleasure in the boy was only natural, the way he’d probably feel about anything that pleased him... like a freshly ironed shirt, a hot meal at a table, a shower he didn’t have to share with a dozen other guys... it was normal enough, wasn’t it, for a veteran noncom to look after a raw recruit, help him on the guns, answer his questions? The effort it took to justify this had made Schmitzer sullen, resentful; his feelings were so close to the surface that he had begun to imagine that some of the men in the section were watching him. Screw them, he had nothing to apologize for. Hell, the proof of it was a talk he’d had with Laurel a day or so ago... They were together in the cab of the truck and Sonny had said he’d been afraid the war would be over before he had a chance to get into it. And because Schmitzer believed he knew certain things about life, he’d taken that opportunity to explain them to the boy. Was there anything the hell wrong with that? Anything strange or funny about helping out a younger guy? He’d said, “Look, you’re nineteen, I’m twenty-six. So listen to me... you didn’t have to worry about getting into the war because they were killing people all over the world to make room for you.” He’d paused to search for words, picking at skeins of thought as clumsily as if he were sorting them with mittened fingers... “So here’s the thing to remember, don’t make room for nobody else here. We stay alive. This section’s like a factory with all the jobs filled. No vacancies, no fucking help wanted. Keep that in your head and you’ll be all right...”

Maybe the way he felt about death, he was thinking, glancing with instinctive caution down the empty streets of Werpen, maybe that feeling explained his attraction to Sonny Laurel, a powerful, almost painful response to someone so alive. He welcomed a sudden distracting sound, relief from the tensions of his thoughts... a vehicle laboring up through the woods to the town, the motor’s echo flat and muffled under the heavy fog. He picked up his rifle, which he had propped against the jeep, and as he snapped a round into the chamber saw Docker running back into the square, his head turned toward the sound of the laboring engine.

The sergeant climbed onto the rim of the fountain, tracking the valley with his binoculars until he picked up a command car traveling through dark stands of trees. Stepping down, he said to Gelnick, “You better get lost for a while. Go on into the church and light a candle or something.”

“Hey, I’m a nice Jewish boy,” Gelnick said. “What’s this church crap? You want my mother to drop dead, she finds out?”

“It’s Lieutenant Longworth and your buddy Korbick’s with him,” Docker said. “Let’s pay the two dollars, okay?”

“You want me to go hide? Dig a hole or something?”

“Look, Gelnick, Korbick’s got you in his sights for some reason and he’d love to have you back at Battery headquarters where he could work you over. So don’t let’s make it easy for him.”

“Sure, I’ll go hide. I don’t want to spoil his day,” Gelnick said easily, but his head felt like it might explode; he was afraid his thoughts would goad him into something reckless, so he managed a wide smile by flattening his lips and squinting his eyes, and that smile was fixed and steady on his face as he ran through the square and into the church.

The battery command car with First Sergeant Miles Korbick at the wheel stopped in the square between the church and the statue of the archer. Second Lieutenant Longworth, short and compact with a weathered face and careful eyes, climbed from the jeep and casually returned Docker’s salute. He had a bottle in his hand and he tossed it to him, saying, “Think fast, sergeant. Live bottle of bourbon, courtesy of Captain Grant. Merry Christmas.”...

At about this time Carmine Spinelli and Tubby Gruber were searching the bedrooms of a two-storied house at the opposite end of the village, accompanied by Private Leo Pierce, a thin, solemn youngster with patches of raw acne flaming on his cheeks.

Corporal Larkin shouted at them from the street to report for mail call and then started toward the square, where he saw Lieutenant Longworth standing with Docker, and distributing the section’s mail and packages.

Larkin had no letters, he seldom did, but there was an oblong package for him that he knew contained a quart-size Mazola oil can. An identical package arrived every month or so, sent to him by a cousin, the oil carefully rinsed out and replaced with thirty-two ounces of rye whiskey.

Docker had letters from Dave Hamlin and his father, who wrote in his cool style of politics and the German shepherd pups which he had (so long ago, it seemed to Docker) named after American towns — Wheeling, Chicago, Detroit, Kennett, Rye — “Rye’s temperament is constant, I fear. Violent, that is, particularly in regard to felines.”

Docker’s father published and edited two small weekly newspapers in southwestern Pennsylvania. Of politics, he wrote: “FDR will bring the country to ruin and damnation, which we may or may not deserve. I long for the passion if not the principles of Father Coughlin. The voice from Royal Oak is authentic, at least. I distrust people who see all sides of the question. They see none, in fact. Remember, he warned us of ‘the prostituted panderings of a purchased press’? I say this with distress, for there is hardly a newspaper in this country I trust anymore.”

Docker disagreed completely with his father’s politics, but there had never been a way to establish a dialogue in those areas. Even when he was in high school it had seemed to him his father’s views were lacking in substantial conviction. He had begun to wonder how deliberate this was on his father’s part, because those political views had become a wall between them over the years, sounds without any particular sense or significance, as meaningless as the extensive reports he sent him on the antics of his German shepherds.

Docker next read bits of Hamlin’s letter... “Yes, only the Swiss and the dead are neutral in this war... On campus there is an almost fearful anticipation of the end. The war has animated us and given us a sense of importance. We are growing fat and tough and confident on it... Everyone is working again and there is more overtime than the workers can handle. But no sense of guilt — take this with a raised eyebrow if you will — because the civilians feel they are pulling their weight too.”

Docker put the letters away in his map case.

First Sergeant Korbick toured Werpen in the HQ command car, stopping only long enough at the machine gun mount to chew out Tex Farrel for not having properly buckled the chin strap of his helmet. Gunning the vehicle, the first sergeant zigzagged through the narrow streets until he came out again on the square. He patted his forehead with a handkerchief and called to Dormund to bring him coffee.

Sergeant Korbick was thirty-one, stout and thick, with very little fat on him. His complexion was dark, his eyes were liquid and brown. His head was large and his black, close-cut hair stuck up and away from a clean white scalp like porcupine quills.

The sergeant had a particular distaste for dirt and foul odors that was near-pathological; his duffel bag was packed with deodorants and foot powders, salves, ointments and balms, stiff brushes and strong laundry soaps. Each night in his tent the first sergeant ritualistically scrubbed himself in a tub the battery’s technical sergeant had converted from an oil drum for that specific purpose.

When Dormund brought the steaming coffee, Korbick moistened his handkerchief and carefully wiped the rim of the canteen cup. Glancing around the square, he saw Guido Linari and Laurel scuffling in the snow with a large mongrel dog, and Docker and Trankic talking to the lieutenant. When Longworth and the corporal went off toward the guns, Korbick yelled to Docker, “Hey, Bull! You got more fuck-ups in your section than the whole battery put together.”

Docker walked over to him. “What’s your problem. Miles?”

“Don’t worry about my problem. I just had to raise hell with that Texas hotshot you got on the machine guns. He was sitting there with his helmet strap hanging down like a second cock. I got to do your work. Docker, the least you could do is remember me on payday.”

“Sure,” Docker said. “What would you like — a couple more bars of soap?”

“That’s real fucking funny. Docker, really fucking funny.” Korbick grinned at him, looking relaxed and comfortable in his warm sweater and spotless fatigues and field jacket, but a flush of color in his face betrayed his anger. Looking around again, he said, “I don’t see my favorite fuck-up. Where’s the Jew-boy, Docker?”

“I suspect it’s a waste of time to mention this, but he doesn’t like being called that.”

“Don’t give me that shit. He’s a Jew, ain’t he? And he sure as hell ain’t a man in my book. So what does that make him?”

“It’s a tough war without you making it tougher, Korbick.”

“What the hell’s it to you anyway? This morning you got on Haskell about Spinelli. Now it’s Gelnick. Hell, I’m just trying to make soldiers out of these fuck-ups.”

“Gelnick doesn’t need you pounding on him.”

Korbick sipped his coffee, then grinned at Docker. “What is it with you. Docker? You got something going with the Jew-boy?”

Let it ride, Docker thought, but he’d forgotten his own capacity for anger and when he realized he couldn’t rein it in, he decided the practical thing would be to get this over fast.

“You shitheads never turn it around, do you?”

“What’s this shitheads crap. Docker?”

“I heard you’re a Catholic. Is that right?”

“Sure, what about it?”

“Then you’ve heard the rumor that the Pope’s a queer, I suppose.”

“Don’t put your filthy mouth on me. Docker. We aren’t talking about religion.”

“Oh, sure we are. You started it and it’s interesting. Is that why all those cardinals in Rome wear red? Because that’s the color of pansies, Korbick?”

“Good talk, real good college-boy talk.” Korbick’s hands trembled and coffee splashed on the front of his field jacket. “I’ll remember this, Docker, you can bet on it.”

“Float a duck for me tonight,” Docker said, but his anger was almost gone and the residue of it left him disgusted with himself and what he had said. “Forget it, Korbick, just forget it,” he said.

Private Irving “Tubby” Gruber had been conditioned by his mother to believe that comic antics and clownish behavior were specifics against most problems in life. Sarah Gruber had told her son, “If you can make people laugh, they don’t expect so much.” Gruber could deflect her own infrequent exasperation by making crazy faces, or wailing and collapsing on the floor, and this dissolved her frowns into helpless giggles which she tried to smother behind her small hands.

Now in a freezing bedroom in a house on the outskirts of the village of Werpen, Tubby Gruber was goading Spinelli to similar laughter by prancing about with a pink and ruffled corset laced tightly about his stout waist, batting his eyes in a sexual travesty. The corset had been constructed for an ample lady; the lower metal stays were slack at Gruber’s hips and even his fleshy chest was more than comfortable in the huge cups of the garment.

Spinelli was laughing so hard that the sound of it seemed to bounce in demented splinters about the icy room. Private Pierce rubbed a windowpane and looked into the street, worried now because it had been fifteen or twenty minutes since Larkin had shouted at them to get back to the square.

“Hey, we better get going,” he said.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Spinelli said. “It’s time for chow.”

“Well, as long as I’m wearing” — Gruber paused and said with a giggling lisp — “the skirts in this house, I’m serving chow-chow right here.”

“Damn it, cut it out, Tubby,” Pierce said. “We’re gonna get our ass in a sling.”

Gruber wriggled his hips, which sent Spinelli into another spasm of laughter.

“You guys are asking for it,” Pierce said.

“Don’t argue with mother,” Gruber said, and with mincing steps started down the stairs to the kitchen.

Docker and Lieutenant Longworth stood together under the statue of the archer and studied the gray fog they could see rolling across the open fields and forming clusters like chill cotton candy around orchards of black fruit trees.

“It’s the town,” Docker said, in answer to the lieutenant’s question. “The look of it bothers me.”

He pointed to the empty streets, which stretched out from the square like the spokes of a wheel. “You begin to worry when you don’t see girls leaning out windows waving petticoats and American flags. Or the priest blessing the tanks and trucks. The food these people left behind gives me a pretty scary timetable.”

“Like what, sergeant?”

“About an hour or so. Some of the meals are only half-eaten and the ashes in the fireplaces are still warm. It could be that German troops aren’t far east of here.”

The lieutenant stared at the gray, storming horizons. “I’m wide open for suggestions.”

“I’d like permission to pull back a few thousand yards west of here, then send a patrol out to look around.”

Longworth dropped his cigarette on the ground and put it out with the tip of his boot. He nodded slowly. “All right. Docker. That makes sense. I’ll countermand Whitter’s orders. You get your section out of We-pen.”...

Ten minutes later, Docker watched the HQ command car go down the hill and disappear into the gray weather in the valley. He felt an acute loneliness, a peculiar diminishment of spirit he suspected was compounded of the fog and snow and his concern about their position, plus a worrisome notion that he didn’t belong on this hill in Belgium any more than he really belonged anywhere else in the world right now. And he wondered, as he had on other occasions, whether invisible parts of him might have been left behind in Tunisia and Sicily, or at Utah, or Avranches.

He knew other soldiers who were haunted by this feeling that something of themselves would always remain in the places the war had taken them, the towns and rivers and fields they would never see again...

Docker was familiar with these emotional swings because they usually came when the jeeps and trucks brought mail from home... “Kennett, the tan bitch, seems to regard my study as the ideal place to commit her...” And Hamlin... “Brutal as it may sound (from the uninvolved) I say hit the beaches of the sacred isles of Nippon with every damn soldier we’ve got... Ran into Amy at a party last week, says she hasn’t heard from you but—”

Trankic suddenly began shouting at him. “Bull, for Christ’s sake, ten o’clock behind the church.”

Everyone in the square turned to where Trankic was pointing, and they all saw them clearly for several seconds, glowing spheres of red light streaking across the horizon accompanied by a faint hissing sound that faded into silence when the lights disappeared behind the long hills and forests sloping off toward the German borders. Docker had seen that it was some kind of aircraft with rockets under the wings, but he couldn’t even guess at its power source because he had seen no conventional motors or propellers.

“That’s just what I saw before,” Sonny Laurel said.

Unexpectedly, Dormund now said, “I saw it, too.”

“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?” Docker said.

“Well...” Dormund’s lopsided features twisted in confusion. “I ain’t no wretched volunteer.”

Docker told Trankic, “Try to get Longworth on the radio, or the battery commander,” then turned to Larkin. “Where’s the rest of your detail?”

Larkin was drinking whiskey from the Mazola can, which he lowered, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I told them to get back here. Same as I tell them to button their flies or blow their noses. I can’t do everything for them. Bull.”

“All right, go get them,” Docker said. “But snap it, Larkin. We’re moving out.”

Larkin put his Mazola can into the jeep and went off down the street, his figure lost quickly in the slanting snow and settling darkness.

Still wearing the pink-ruffled corset. Tubby Gruber hammed it up, swishing around the kitchen of the Belgian home, opening drawers and cupboards until he found a crock of applesauce behind the mesh screen of a window icebox.

When Pierce and Spinelli returned from a hasty search of the root cellar and cowshed, they found Gruber seated on a table spooning thick gobs of the cold applesauce into his mouth with his fingers.

Spinelli said, “Hey, you out of your mind. Tubby?”

“Damn it, Docker told us not to touch anything,” Pierce added.

Gruber, however, was in too exuberant a mood to pay attention. He loved clowning like this, it reminded him of home and his mother and the smell of food in the kitchen. When he was little and didn’t want to eat his cereal or vegetables he could always get around his mother’s laments by crawling about on his hands and knees and pretending to gobble up the designs of cabbage roses on the linoleum.

His sister, Hilary, who was seven years older, wailed to her parents that she couldn’t bring friends home if Irving didn’t stop acting so crazy, but as long as Gruber could control his mother’s smiles he was able to control everyone else in the family.

And Gruber felt almost as if he were at home now, making comical faces and gulping down the sweet applesauce, flattered by Pierce and Spinelli’s anxious attention... “So we’ll start chow with some soup, all right?” he said. “Everybody likes soup, just give ’em a fork and let ’em go. Then we’ll have some lox and bagels and some blinny-tin-tins. You guys got any idea what blinny-tin-tins are?”

Pierce knew this was all wrong. Worse, it was dangerous horsing around like this in somebody’s home, with crucifixes and pictures of people in wedding clothes on the mantel and kids’ toys piled in a corner of the room — animals carved from wood with ears and tails made from tufts of braided rope. “I’m getting the hell out of here,” he said.

“Hey, don’t you want to know what blinny-tin-tins are? They’re pancakes with hotdogs in ’em, like rinny-tin-tin.” As he laughed at his own wit. Tubby was thinking about the kitchen at home when it was set with chicken soup and egg bread for supper and the way his father always washed his hands in the sink when he came home from his work as a barber at a chair rented from a cousin in a shop in the Williamsburg district of Brooklyn. It was understood that he loved his only son, Irving, but it was also understood that since he worked nights as well as days — Hyman Gruber sold funeral insurance door-to-door at night — he was too tired to spend much time with Irving... as much as he’d like to, anyway.

Yet with all this mutual forbearance and understanding, Irving Gruber had not understood what his father told him outside the draft board in Brooklyn on that bitterly cold morning when he had been inducted into the United States Army... “Irvy, you’re getting into something serious, so I’ll tell you what it is. It’s life you’re getting into, so please don’t screw around. All right, Irving?” Hyman Gruber had dabbed at his leaking nose with a handkerchief. “Listen to me, Irvy. This is your father. So listen, please. Here’s the thing about life. The guy who screws around is the guy who screws up. Don’t laugh and make faces at me. This ain’t your bubala mama talking to you. Think about what your father is telling you. Don’t screw around...”

From somewhere down the street, they heard Larkin yelling for them.

“Damn it! Let’s go!” Pierce said.

They crowded into the living room, where Gruber, after a series of grunts and tugs, managed to strip off the big pink corset which he threw on a sofa under a tinted photograph of the Chancellor of the Third Reich.

“Achtung!” Gruber shouted, raising his arm in a stiff salute to the picture of Adolf Hitler. Then he made one of the rubbery faces that had always delighted his mother and in a lisping voice said, “I think Adolfums would make a real cute souvenir, don’t you, guys?”

“No, goddamn it, no,” Pierce screamed at him.

But the warning came too late. In the dim, fading light, their young faces were suddenly gray and they stood as if frozen to the old wooden floor.

Because when Tubby Gruber climbed on the sofa and jerked the picture from the wall, they all saw for one paralyzing instant the gleaming metal wires running down the faded wallpaper and into the basement.

The rush of air from the explosion demolished the house and the three men in it; then struck Larkin with massive, buffeting blows, knocking him sprawling backward over snowdrifts into the street. His body rolled along the slick cobblestones, arms and legs spinning in helpless cartwheels, the rising wind pounding his ears and stinging his face with showers of sleet and ice.

A second explosion blasted out two more homes and released pillars of smoke and flame that turned the falling snow into scarlet steam and ripped open the black skies above Werpen like angry knives of lightning.

And then the settling silence marked the end of the war for the young private soldiers Gruber, Pierce and Spinelli.