Once there was a war

TROOPSHIP

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 20, 1943—

The troops in their thousands sit on their equipment on the dock. It is evening, and the first of the dimout lights come on. The men wear their helmets, which make them all look alike, make them look like long rows of mushrooms. Their rifles are leaning against their knees. They have no identity, no personality. The men are units in an army. The numbers chalked on their helmets are almost like the license numbers on robots. Equipment is piled neatly — bedding rolls and half-shelters and barracks bags. Some of the men are armed with Springfield or Enfield rifles from the First World War, some with M-1s, or Garands, and some with the neat, light clever little carbines everyone wants to have after the war for hunting rifles.

Above the pier the troopship rears high and thick as an office building. You have to crane your neck upward to see where the portholes stop and the open decks begin. She is a nameless ship and will be while the war lasts. Her destination is known to very few men and her route to even fewer, and the burden of the men who command her must be almost unendurable, for the master who loses her and her cargo will never sleep comfortably again. He probably doesn’t sleep at all now. The cargo holds are loaded and the ship waits to take on her tonnage of men.

On the dock the soldiers are quiet. There is little talking, no singing, and as dusk settles to dark you cannot tell one man from another. The heads bend forward with weariness. Some of these men have been all day, some many days, getting to this starting point.

There are several ways of wearing a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of his hat, but not with a helmet. There is only one way to wear a helmet. It won’t go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.

Four gangways are open now and the units get wearily to their feet and shuffle along in line. The men lean forward against the weight of their equipment. Feet drag against the incline of the gangways. The soldiers disappear one by one into the great doors in the side of the troopship.

Inside the checkers tabulate them. The numbers chalked on the helmets are checked again against a list. Places have been assigned. Half of the men will sleep on the decks and the other half inside in ballrooms, in dining rooms where once a very different kind of people sat and found very important things that have disappeared. Some of the men will sleep in bunks, in hammocks, on the decks, in passages. Tomorrow they will shift. The men from the deck will come in to sleep and those from inside will go out. They will change every night until they land. They will not take off their clothes until they land. This is no cruise ship.

On the decks, dimmed to a faint blue dusk by the blackout lights, the men sink down and fall asleep. They are asleep almost as soon as they are settled. Many of them do not even take off their helmets. It has been a weary day. The rifles are beside them, held in their hands.

On the gangways the lines still feed into the troopship — a regiment of colored troops, a hundred Army nurses, neat in their helmets and field packs. The nurses at least will have staterooms, however crowded they may be in them. Up No. 1 Gangway comes the headquarters complement of a bombardment wing and a company of military police. All are equally tired. They find their places and go to sleep.

Embarkation is in progress. No smoking is allowed anywhere. Everyone entering the ship is triply checked, to make sure he belongs there, and the loading is very quiet. There is only the shuffle of tired feet on the stairways and quiet orders. The permanent crew of military police know every move. They have handled this problem of traffic before.

The tennis courts on the upper deck are a half-acre of sleeping men now — men, feet, and equipment. MPs are everywhere, on stairs and passages, directing and watching. This embarkation must go on smoothly, for one little block might well lose hours in the loading, just as one willful driver, making a wrong turn in traffic, may jam an avenue for a long time. But in spite of the shuffling gait, the embarkation is very rapid. About midnight the last man is aboard.

In the staff room the commanding officer sits behind a long table, with telephones in front of him. His adjutant, a tired blond major, makes his report and places his papers on the table. The CO nods and gives him an order.

Throughout the ship the loudspeakers howl. Embarkation is complete. The gangways slide down from the ship. The iron doors close. No one can enter or leave the ship now, except the pilot. On the bridge the captain of the ship paces slowly. It is his burden now. These thousands are in his care, and if there is an accident it will be his blame.

The ship remains against the pier and a light breathing sound comes from deep in her. The troops are cut off now and gone from home, although they are not a hundred steps from home. On the upper decks a few men lean over the rails and look down on the pier and away at the city behind. The oily water ripples with the changing tide. It is almost time to go. In the staff room, which used to be the ship’s theater, the commanding officer sits behind his table. His tired, blond adjutant sits beside him. The phone rings, the CO picks it up, listens for a moment and hangs up the receiver. He turns to the adjuntant.

“All ready,” he says.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 21, 1943—

The tide is turning now and it is after midnight. On the bridge, which towers above the pier buildings, there is great activity. The lines are cast off and the engines reversed. The great ship backs carefully into the stream and nearly fills it to both banks. But the little tugs are waiting for her and they bump and persuade her about until she is headed right and they hang beside her like suckling ships as she moves slowly toward the sea. Only the MPs on watch among the sleeping soldiers see the dimmed-out city slipping by.

Down deep in the ship, in the hospital, the things that can happen to so many men have started to happen. A medical major has taken off his blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He is washing his hands in green soap, while an Army nurse in operating uniform stands by, holding the doctor’s white gown. The anonymous soldier, with the dangerous appendix, is having his stomach shaved by another Army nurse. Brilliant light floods the operating table. The doctor major slips into his sterile gloves. The nurse adjusts the mask over his nose and mouth and he steps quickly to the sleeping soldier on the table under the light.

The great troopship sneaks past the city and the tugs leave her, a dark thing steaming into the dark. On the decks and in the passages and in the bunks the thousands of men are collapsed in sleep. Only their faces show under the dim blue blackout lights — faces and an impression of tangled hands and feet and legs and equipment. Officers and military police stand guard over this great sleep, a sleep multiplied, the sleep of thousands. An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is a pulsing, audible thing.

The tired blond adjutant haunts the deck like a ghost. He doesn’t know when he will ever sleep again. He and the provost marshal share responsibility for a smooth crossing, and both are serious and responsible men.

The sleeping men are missing something tremendous, as last things are usually missed. The clerks and farmers, salesmen, students, laborers, technicians, reporters, fishermen who have stopped being those things to become an army have been trained from their induction for this moment. This is the beginning of the real thing for which they have practiced. Their country, which they have become soldiers to defend, is slipping away into the misty night and they are asleep. The place which will fill their thoughts in the months to come is gone and they did not see it go. They were asleep. They will not see it again for a long time, and some of them will never see it again. This was the time of emotion, the moment that cannot be replaced, but they were too tired. They sleep like children who really tried to stay awake to see Santa Claus and couldn’t make it. They will remember this time, but it will never really have happened to them.

The night begins to come in over the sea. It is overcast and a light rain begins to fall. It is good sailing weather because a submarine could not see us 200 yards away. The ship is a gray, misty shape, slipping through a gray mist and melting into it. Overhead a Navy blimp watches over her, sometimes coming in so close that you can see the men in the little underslung cabin.

The troopship is cut off now. She can hear but cannot speak. Her outgoing radio will not be used at all unless she is hit or attacked. For the time of her voyage no one will hear of her. Submarines are in the misty sea ahead, and of the men on board very many have never seen the ocean before and the sea itself is dark and terrifying enough without the lurking things, and there are other matters besides the future fighting that frighten a local boy — new things, new people, new languages.

The men are beginning to awaken now, before the call. They have missed the moment of parting. They awaken to — destination unknown, route unknown, life even for an hour ahead unknown. The great ship throws her bow into the Atlantic.

On the boat deck two early-rising mountain boys are standing, looking in wonder at the incredible sea. One of them says, “They say she’s salty clear down to the bottom.”

“Now you know that ain’t so,” the other says.

“What you mean, it ain’t so? Why ain’t it so?”

The other speaks confidently. “Now, son,” he says, “you know there ain’t that much salt in the world. Just figure it out for yourself.”

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 22, 1943—

The first morning on a troopship is a mess. The problem of feeding thousands of men in such close quarters is profound. There are two meals a day, spaced ten hours apart. Mess lines for breakfast form at seven and continue until ten. Dinner lines start at five in the afternoon and continue until ten at night. And during these times the long, narrow corridors are lined with men, three abreast, carrying their field kits.

On the first day the system does not take effect. There are traffic jams and thin tempers. At ten in the morning a miserable private in chemical warfare whines to a military policeman, who is keeping the lines shuffling along. “Please, mister. Get me out of this line. I have had three breakfasts already. I ain’t hungry no more. Every time I get out of one line I get shoved into another one.”

Men cannot be treated as individuals on this troopship. They are simply units which take up six feet by three feet by two feet, horizontal or vertical. So much space must be allotted for the physical unit. They are engines which must be given fuel to keep them from stopping. The products of their combustion must be taken care of and eliminated. There is no way of considering them as individuals. The second and third day the method begins to work. The line flows smoothly and on time, but that first day is a mess.

The men are rested now and there is no room to move about. They will not be able to have any exercise during this voyage. There are too many feet. The major impression on a troop ship is of feet. A man can get his head out of the way and his arms, but, lying or sitting, his feet are a problem. They sprawl in the aisles, they stick up at all angles. They are not protected because they are the part of a man least likely to be hurt. To move about you must step among feet, must trip over feet.

There are big, misshapen feet; neat, small feet; shoes that are polished; curl-toed shoes; shoestrings knotted and snarled, and careful little bows. You can read character by the feet and shoes. There are perpetually tired feet, and nervous, quick feet. To remember a troopship is to remember feet. At night on a blacked-out ship, you must creep and feel your way among acres of feet.

The men begin to be restless now. It is hard to sit still and do nothing. Some have brought the little pocket books and others go to the ship’s library and get books. Detective stories and short stories. They take what they can get. But there are many men who do not consider reading a matter of pleasure and these must find some other outlet for their interests.

Several months ago Services of Supply, in reporting the items supplied to the soldiers’ exchanges, included several hundreds of thousands of sets of dice, explaining that parcheesi was becoming increasingly popular in the Army. Those who remember parcheesi as a rather dumpy game may not believe this if they have not seen it, but it is so. The game has been streamlined to a certain extent but there is no doubt of its popularity. The board with its string pockets has disappeared in the interest of space. Parcheesi is now played on an Army blanket.

It is a spirited, healthy game, and seems to hold the attention of the players. Some tournaments of parcheesi continue for days. One, indeed, never stopped during the whole crossing. Another game which is very popular in the Army is cassino. Its most common forms are stud cassino and five-card-draw cassino. It is gratifying to see that our new Army has gone back to the old-fashioned virtues our forefathers lied about.

The ship is very heavily armed. From every point of observation the guns protrude. This troopship could fight her way through considerable opposition. On the decks, in addition to the lifeboats, are hundreds of life rafts ready to be thrown into the sea. These boats and rafts are equipped with food and water and medicine and even fishing tackle.

Now the men who slept on the decks last night move inside, as the inside men move out. The wind is fresh. The soldiers take the shelter halves and begin to build ingenious shelters. Some erect single little covers between stanchions and rails, while others, pooling their canvas, are able to make windproof caves among the life rafts. In these they settle down to read or to play parcheesi or cassino. The sea is calm and that is good, for great numbers of the men have never been on any kind of boat. A little rough weather will make them seasick and then there will be an added problem for the worried and tired permanent force on the boat.

The decks cannot be flushed, for there is no place for the men to go while it is being done. There are many delicate problems on such a ship. If another ship should be sighted, the men must not crowd to one side, for that would throw too great a weight on one side of the ship and might even endanger her. Our cargo is men and it must be shifted with care.

Every day there is boat drill. The alarm sounds, and after the first day of pandemonium the men go quietly to their stations. There are so many problems to be faced on a troopship.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 23, 1943—

A troopship is a strange community and it reacts as a community. It is unique, however, in that it is cut off from all the world and that it is in constant danger of being attacked and destroyed. No matter how casual the men seem, that last fact is never very far from their minds. In the water any place may be the submarine and any moment may come the blast that sends the great ship to the bottom.

Thus the gunners never relax, the listening devices are tense and occupied. Half the mind listens and waits all the time and in the night small sounds take on a large importance. At intervals the guns are fired to see that they are in perfect condition. The gunnery officer never relaxes. On the bridge the captain sleeps very rarely and takes his coffee in his hand.

Under such a strain the human brain reacts curiously. It builds its apprehensions into realities and then repeats those realities. Thus a troopship is a nest of rumors, rumors that go whisking from stem to stern, but the most curious thing is that on all troopships the rumors are the same. Some generalized picture takes shape in all of them. The story starts and is repeated, and everyone, except perhaps the permanent crew, believes each for a few hours before a new one takes its place. It might be well to set down some of the rumors so that when heard they will be recognized for what they are, the folklore of a troopship.

The following are heard on every troopship, without exception; further, they are believed on every troopship:

1. This morning we were sighted by a submarine. It could not catch us, but it radioed its fellows and now a pack is assembling ahead of us to intercept us and sink us. This rumor is supposed to come from the radio officer, who heard the submarine calling its brothers. The pack will close in on us tonight. All of these rumors are said to come from a responsible officer.

2. This morning a submarine surfaced, not knowing we were near. We had every gun trained on her, ready to blow her out of the water, because we heard her in our listening devices. She saw us as she broke water and signaled just in time that she was one of ours. It is not explained how it happens that she did not hear us in her listening devices, and if the question arises it is explained that probably her listening devices were out of order.

3. Some terrible and nameless thing has happened among the officers (this rumor is only among the enlisted men). The crime they have committed is not mentioned, but it is known that a number of officers are under detention and will be court-martialed. This rumor may be pure wishful thinking.

4. Both the officers’ post exchanges and the enlisted men’s post exchanges sell a water pop in brown bottles. The soldiers know very well that what is in their bottles is pop, but the rumor runs through the ship that the brown bottles in the officers’ lounge contain beer. Some little discontent arises from this until it is forgotten in a new rumor.

5. The front end of the ship is weak and only patched up. On the last voyage she cut a destroyer (sometimes a cruiser) in two and they patched her up and sent her out anyway. She is perfectly all right, unless we run into heavy weather, in which case she is very likely to fall to pieces. Since men are not allowed on the forepeak, because the gun crews are there, they cannot look over and see whether or not this is true.

6. Last night the German radio announced that this ship had been sunk. The Germans often do this, fishing for information. While parents, wives, and friends do not know exactly what ship we are on, they know about when we were alerted and they will be frantic and there is no way of telling them that we are all right, for no messages are permitted to go out. The soldiers go about worrying to think of the worry of their people.

7. Some kind of epidemic has broken out on the ship. The officers are keeping it quiet to prevent a panic. They are burying the dead secretly at night.

As the days go by and the men grow more restless and the parcheesi games have fallen off because the sinews of the game have got into a few lean and hungry hands, the rumors grow more intense. Somewhere in mid-ocean a big patrol plane flies near to us and circles protectively, and the rumor springs up that she has signaled the captain to change course. Something terrific is going on somewhere and we are changing our destination.

Since we change our course every thirty seconds anyway, there is no telling by watching the wake where we are going. So the rumors go. It would be interesting if the ship’s officers would post a list of rumors the men are likely to hear. It would certainly eliminate some apprehensions on the part of the men, and it would be interesting to see whether then a whole new list of fresh, unused rumors would grow up.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 24, 1943—

A small USO unit is aboard this troopship, girls and men who are going out to entertain troops wherever they may be sent. These are not the big names who go out with blasts of publicity and maintain their radio contracts. These are girls who can sing and dance and look pretty and men who can do magic and pantomimists and tellers of jokes. They have few properties and none of the tricks of light and color which dress up the theater. But there is something very gallant about them. The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive. An accordion is the largest piece of property the troupe carries. The evening dresses, crushed in suitcases, must be pressed and kept pretty. The spirit must be high. This is trouping the really hard way.

The theater is one of the largest mess halls. Soldiers are packed in, sitting on benches, standing on tables, lying in the doorways. A little platform on one end is the stage. Tonight the loudspeaker is out of order, but when it isn’t it blares and distorts voices. The master of ceremonies gets up and faces his packed audience. He tells a joke — but this audience is made up of men from different parts of the country and each part has its own kind of humor. He tells a New York joke. There is a laugh, but a limited one. The men from South Dakota and Oklahoma do not understand this joke. They laugh late, merely because they want to laugh. He tries another joke and this time he plays safe. It is an Army joke about MPs. This time it works. Everybody likes a joke about MPs.

He introduces an acrobatic dancer, a pretty girl with long legs and the strained smile acrobats develop to conceal the fact that their muscles are crying with tension. The ship is rolling slowly from side to side. All of her work is dependent on perfect balance. She tries each part of her act several times and is thrown off balance, but, seriously, she tries again until, in a pause in the ship’s roll she succeeds, and legs are distorted properly for the proper two seconds. The soldiers are with her. They know the difficulty. They want her to succeed and they cheer when she does. This is all very serious. She leaves the stage under whistles and cheers.

A blues singer follows. Without the loudspeakers she can hardly be heard, for her voice, although sweet, has no volume. She forces her voice for volume and loses her sweetness, but she is pretty and young and earnest.

A girl accordion-player comes next. She asks for suggestions. This is to be group singing and the requests are for old songs — “Harvest Moon,” “Home on the Range,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The men bellow the words in all pitches. There is no war song for this war. Nothing has come along yet. The show continues — a pantomimist who acts out the physical examination of an inductee and does it so accurately that his audience howls. A magician in traditional tail coat manipulates colored silks.

In all the acts the illusion does not quite come off. The audience helps all it can because it wants the show to be good. And out of the little acts, which are not quite convincing, and the big audience which wants literally to be convinced, something whole and good comes, so that when it is over there has been a show.

One of the men in the unit has been afraid. He has not slept since the ship sailed. He is afraid of the ocean and of submarines. He has lain in his bunk, listening for the blast that will kill him. He is probably very brave. He does his act when he is terrified. It is foolish to say he should not be afraid. He is afraid, and that is something he cannot control, but he does his act, and that is something he can control.

Up on the deck in the blackness the colored troops are sprawled. They sit quietly. A great bass voice sings softly a bar of the hymn “When the Saints Go Marching In.” A voice says, “Sing it, brother!”

The bass takes it again and a few other voices join him. By the time the hymn has reached the fourth bar an organ of voices is behind it. The voices take on a beat, feeling one another out. The chords begin to form. There is nothing visible. The booming voices come out of the darkness. The men sing sprawled out, lying on their backs. The song becomes huge with authority. This is a war song. This could be the war song. Not the sentimental wash about lights coming on again or bluebirds.

The black deck rolls with sound. One chorus ends and another starts, “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Four times and on the fifth the voices fade away to a little hum and the deck is silent again. The ship rolls and metal protests against metal. The ship is silent again. Only the shudder of the engine and the whisk of water and the whine of the wind in the wire rigging break the silence.

We have not yet a singing Army nor any songs for a singing Army. Synthetic emotions and nostalgias do not take hold because the troops know instinctively that they are synthetic. No one has yet put words and a melody to the real homesickness, the real terror, and the real ferocity of the war.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 25, 1943—

We are coming close to land. The birds picked us up this morning and a big flying boat circled us and then darted away to report us. There has been no trouble at all, and if, on the bridge, the enemy has been reported, we do not know it. The word sifts down from the bridge that we shall land tonight. The soldiers line the rails and report every low-hanging cloud as a landfall. Now that we are near and the lines of our approach are narrow, the danger is greater. The ship swerves and turns constantly. These waters are the most dangerous of all.

The men are reading a little booklet that has been distributed, telling them how to get along with the English. The book explains language differences. It suggests that in England a closet is not a place to hang clothing, that the word “bloody” should be avoided, that a garbage can is a dust bin, and it warns that the English use many common words with a meaning different from what we assign to them. Many of our men find this very funny and they go about talking a curious gibberish which they imagine is a British accent.

A light haze shrouds the horizon, and out of it our Spitfires drive at us and circle like angry bees. They come so close that we hear the fierce whistle of their wings. For a long time they circle us and then go away, and others take their place.

In the afternoon land shows through the haze and, as we get closer, the neat houses and the neat country, orderly and old. The men gaze at it in wonder. It is the first foreign place most of them have ever seen and each man says it looks like some place he knows. One says it looks like California in the springtime of a wet year. Another recognizes Vermont. The men crowd to the portholes and the rails.

The troopship moves into a harbor and drops her anchor. She is surrounded on all sides by shipping and by naval units. The men will go ashore in lighters, but not yet, for disembarkation is, if anything, more complicated than embarkation. Men can easily be lost or mixed with the wrong units.

The night comes and in the staff room officers gather and wait until they are assigned the transportation for their men. It takes a good part of the night. At an exact time each unit must be in an exact place, where a lighter will be waiting to take them on. The troop trains will be waiting ashore. It has been a perfect crossing. No trouble, no sickness, no attack. The ship’s officers show the strain. They haven’t slept much. After a few voyages they must be relieved. The responsibility is too great for a man to bear for too long a stretch.

In the morning the lighters come in and hug the sides of the troopship. The big iron doors open and the troops move out and take their places on the decks of the little boats. The portholes high above are filled with heads looking down. Men for a later debarkation. The little boat moves off, puffs up the bay among the tugs and the destroyers and the anchored freighters. The soldiers are self-conscious in a new place. They regard this new land skeptically as one must when he is not sure of himself. The little boat puffs up to the dock, which has mysteriously become a quay, pronounced “key,” which is, of course, ridiculous.

Now as the lighter ties up an astonishing thing happens. A band of pipers marches out in kilts, with bagpipes and drums and the swingy march of pipers. The harsh skirling cuts through the air. The most military, the most fighting music in the world. Our men crowd the rail. The band approaches, drums banging, pipes squealing and, as they draw abreast, the soldiers break into a great cheer. They may not like the harsh music; it takes time to like it; but something of the iron of the music goes into them. The pipers wheel and march back and away. It was a good thing to do. Our men, in some deep way, feel honored. The music has stirred them. This is a different war from the one of training camps and strategy at post exchanges.

From the deck of the lighter the men can see the roofless houses, the burned-out houses. The piles of rubble where the bombs have fallen. They have seen pictures of this and have read about it, but that was pictures and reading. It wasn’t real. This is different. It isn’t like the pictures at all. On the quay, the Red Cross is waiting with caldrons of coffee, with mountains of cake. They have been serving since dawn and they will serve until long after dark. The gangplank to the lighter is fixed now. The men, carrying their heavy barrack bags, packs on their backs and rifles slung over their shoulders, struggle up the steep gangway to the new country. And in the distance they can hear the sound of the pipes greeting another lighter-load of troops.

A PLANE’S NAME

A BOMBER STATION, June 26, 1943—

The bomber crew is getting back from London. The men have been on a forty-eight-hour pass. At the station an Army bus is waiting, and they pile in with other crews. Then the big bus moves through the narrow streets of the little ancient town and rolls into the pleasant green country. Fields of wheat with hedgerows between. On the right is one of the huge vegetable gardens all cut up into little plots where families raise their own produce. Some men and women are working in the garden now, having ridden out of town on their bicycles.

The Army bus rattles over the rough road and through a patch of woods. In the distance there are a few squat brown buildings and a flagstaff flying the American flag. This is a bomber station. England is Uttered with them. This is one of the best. There is no mud here, and the barracks are permanent and adequate. There is no high concentration of planes in any one field. Probably no more than twenty-five Flying Fortresses live here, and they are so spread out that you do not see them at once. A raider might get one of them, but he would not be likely to get more than one.

No attempt is made to camouflage the buildings or the planes — it doesn’t work and it’s just a lot of work. Air protection and dispersal do work. Barbed wire is strung along the road, coils of it, and in front of the administration building there is a gate with a sentry box. The bus pulls to a stop near the gate and the men jump down, adjusting their gas masks at their sides. No one is permitted to leave the place without his gas mask. The men file through the gate, identify themselves, and sign In back on the post. The crews walk slowly to their barracks.

The room is long and narrow and unpainted. Against each side wall are iron double-decker bunks, alternating with clothes lockers. A long rack in the middle between the bunks serves as a hanger for whiter coats and raincoats. Next to it is the rack of rules and submachine guns of the crew.

Each bunk is carefully made, and to the foot of each are hung a helmet and a gas mask. On the walls are pinup girls. But the same girls near each bunk — big-breasted blondes in languorous attitudes, child faces, parted shiny lips and sleepy eyes, which doubtless mean passion, but always the same girls.

The crew of the Mary Ruth have their bunks on the right-hand side of the room. They have had these bunks only a few weeks. A Fortress was shot down and the bunks were emptied. It is strange to sleep in the bed of a man who was at breakfast with you and now is dead or a prisoner hundreds of miles away. It is strange and necessary. His clothes are in the locker, to be picked up and put away. His helmet is to be taken off the foot of the bunk and yours put there. You leave his pin-up girls where they are. Why change them? Yours would be the same girls.

This crew did not name or come over in the Mary Ruth. On the nose of the ship her name is written, and under it “Memories of Mobile.” But this crew does not know who Mary Ruth was, nor what memories are celebrated. She was named when they got her, and they would not think of changing her name. In some way it would be bad luck.

A rumor has swept through the airfields that some powerful group in America has protested about the names of the ships and that an order is about to be issued removing these names and substituting the names of towns and rivers. It is to be hoped that this is not true. Some of the best writing of the war has been on the noses of bombers. The names are highly personal things, and the ships grow to be people. Change the name of Bomb Boogie to St. Louis, or Mary Ruth of Mobile Memories to Wichita, or the Volga Virgin to Davenport, and you will have injured the ship. The name must be perfect and must be approved by every member of the crew. The names must not be changed. There is enough dullness in the war as it is.

Mary Ruth’s crew sit on their bunks and discuss the hard luck of Bomb Boogie. Bomb Boogie is a hard-luck ship. She never gets to her target. Every mission is an abortion. They bring her in and go over her and test her and take her on test runs. She is perfect and then she starts on an operational flight, and her engines go bad or her landing gear gives trouble. Something always happens to Bomb Boogie. She never gets to her target. It is something no one can understand. Four days ago she started out and never got as far as the coast of England before one of her engines conked out and she had to return.

One of the waist gunners strolls out, but in a minute he is back. “We’re alerted for tomorrow,” he says. “I hope it isn’t Kiel. There was a hell of a lot of red flak at Kiel.”

“The guy with the red beard is there,” says Brown, the tail gunner. “He looked right at me. I drew down on him and my guns jammed.”

“Let’s go eat,” the turret gunner says.

NEWS FROM HOME

BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, June 28, 1943—

The days are very long. A combination of summer time and daylight-saving time keeps them light until eleven thirty. After mess we take the Army bus into town. It is an ancient little city which every American knows about as soon as he can read. The buildings on the narrow streets are Tudor, Stuart, Georgian, and even some Norman. The paving stones are worn smooth and the flagstones of the sidewalks are grooved by apes of strollers. It is a town to stroll in. American soldiers, Canadian, Royal Air Force men, and many of Great Britain’s women soldiers walk through the streets. But Britain drafts its women and they are really in the Army, driver-mechanics, dispatch riders, trim and hard in their uniforms.

The crew of the Mary Ruth ends up at a little pub, overcrowded and noisy. They edge their way in to the bar, where the barmaids are drawing beer as fast as they can. In a moment this crew has found a table and they have the small glasses of pale yellow fluid in front of them. It is curious beer. Most of the alcohol has been taken out of it to make munitions. It is not cold. It is token beer — a gesture rather than a drink.

The bomber crew is solemn. Men who are alerted for operational missions are usually solemn, but tonight there is some burden on this crew. There is no way of knowing how these things start. All at once a crew will feel fated. Then little things go wrong. Then they are uneasy until they take off for their mission. When the uneasiness is running it is the waiting that hurts.

They sip the flat, tasteless beer. One of them says, “I saw a paper from home at the Red Cross in London.” It is quiet. The others look at him across their glasses. A mixed group of pilots and ATS girls at the other end of the pub have started a song. It is astonishing how many of the songs are American. “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home to,” they sing. And the beat of the song is subtly changed. It has become an English song.

The waist gunner raises his voice to be heard over the singing. “It seems to me that we are afraid to announce our losses. It seems almost as if the War Department was afraid that the country couldn’t take it. I never saw anything the country couldn’t take.”

The ball-turret gunner wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “We don’t hear much,” he says, “it’s a funny thing, but the closer you get to action the less you read papers and war news. I remember before I joined up I used to know everything that was happening. I knew what Turkey was doing. I even had maps with pins and I drew out campaigns with colored pencils. Now I haven’t looked at a paper in two weeks.”

The first man went on, “This paper I saw had some funny stuff in it. It seemed to think that the war was nearly over.”

“I wish the Jerries thought that,” the tail gunner says. “I wish you could get Goering’s yellow noses and them damned flak gunners convinced of that.”

“Well anyway,” the waist gunner says, “I looked through that paper pretty close. It seems to me that the folks at home are fighting one war and we’re fighting another one. They’ve got theirs nearly won and we’ve just got started on ours. I wish they’d get in the same war we’re in. I wish they’d print the casualties and tell them what it’s like. I think maybe that they’d like to get in the same war we’re in if they could get it to do.”

The tail gunner comes from so close to the border of Kentucky he talks like a Kentuckian. “I read a very nice piece in a magazine about us,” he says. “This piece says we’ve got nerves of steel. We never get scared. All we want in the world is just to fly all the time and get a crack at Jerry. I never heard anything so brave as us. I read it three or four times to try and convince myself that I ain’t scared.”

“There was almost solid red flack over Bremen last Thursday,” the radio man says. “Get much more and we can walk home over solid flak. I hate that red flak. We sure took a pasting Thursday.”

“Well, we didn’t get any,” says Henry Maurice Grain, one of the gunners. “We got the nose knocked out of our ship, but that was an accident. One of the gunners in a ship high on ahead tossed out some shell casings and they came right through the nose. They’ve got her nearly fixed up now.”

“But anyway,” the first man says doggedly, “I wish they’d tell them at home that the war isn’t over and I wish they wouldn’t think we’re so brave. I don’t want to be so brave. Shall we have another beer?”

“What for?” says the tail gunner. “This stuff hasn’t got even enough character for you to dislike it, I’m going back to wipe my guns. Then I won’t have to do it in the morning.”

They stand up and file slowly out of the pub. It is still daylight. The pigeons are flying about the tower of an old Gothic church, a kind of architecture especially suited to nesting pigeons.

The hotel taken over by the Red Cross is crowded with men in from the flying fields which dot the countryside. Our bus drives up in front and we pile in. The crew looks automatically at the sky. It is clear, with little puffs of white cloud suspended in the light of a sun that has already gone down.

“Looks like it might be a clear day,” the radio man says. “That’s good for us and it’s good for them to get at us.”

The bus rattles back toward the field. The tail gunner muses. “I hope old Red Beard has got a bad cold,” he says. “I didn’t like the look in his eye last time.”

(Red Beard is an enemy fighter pilot who comes so close that you can almost see his face.)

SUPERSTITION

BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, June 30, 1943—

It is a bad night in the barracks, such a night as does not happen very often. It is impossible to know how it starts. Nerves are a little thin and no one is sleepy. The tail gunner of the other outfit in the room gets down from his upper bunk and begins rooting about on the floor.

“What’s the matter?” the man on the lower bunk asks.

“I lost my medallion,” the tail gunner says.

No one asks what is was, a St. Christopher or a good-luck piece. The fact of the matter is that it is his medallion and he has lost it. Everyone gets up and looks. They move the double-decker bunk out from the wall. They empty all the shoes. They look behind the steel lockers. They insist that the gunner go through all his pockets. It isn’t a good thing for a man to lose his medallion. Perhaps there has been an uneasiness before. This sets it. The uneasiness creeps all through the room. It takes the channel of being funny. They tell jokes; they rag one another. They ask shoe sizes of one another to outrage their uneasiness. “What size shoes you wear, Brown? I get them if you conk out.” The thing runs bitterly through the room.

And then the jokes stop. There are many little things you do when you go out on a mission. You leave the things that are to be sent home if you have an accident. You leave them under your pillow, your photographs and the letter you wrote, and your ring. They’re under your pillow, and you don’t make up your bunk. That must be left unmade so that you can slip right in when you get back. No one would think of making up a bunk while its owner is on a mission. You go out clean-shaven too, because you are coming back, to keep your date. You project your mind into the future and the things you are going to do then.

In the barracks they tell of presentiments they have heard about. There was the radio man who one morning folded his bedding neatly on his cot and put his pillow on top. And he folded his clothing into a neat parcel and cleared his locker. He had never done anything like that before. And sure enough, he was shot down that day.

The tail gunner still hasn’t found his medallion. He has gone through his pockets over and over again. The brutal talk goes on until one voice says, “For God’s sake shut up. It’s after midnight. We’ve got to get some sleep.”

The lights are turned out. It is pitch black in the room, for the blackout curtains are drawn tight. A man speaks in the darkness. “I wish I was in that ship by now.” He knows that he will be all right when the mission starts. It’s this time of waiting that hurts, and tonight it has been particularly bad.

It is quiet in the room, and then there is a step, and then a great clatter. A new arrival trying to get to his bunk in the dark has stumbled over the gun rack. The room breaks into loud curses. Everyone curses the new arrival. They tell him where he came from and where they hope he will go. It is a fine, noisy outburst, and the tension goes out of the room. The evil thing has gone.

You are conscious, lying in your bunk, of a droning sound that goes on and on. It is the Royal Air Force going out for the night bombing again. There must be hundreds of them — a big raid. The sound has been going on all evening and it goes on for another hour. Hundreds of Lancasters, with hundreds of tons of bombs. And, when they come back, you will go out.

You cannot call the things that happen to bombing crews superstition. Tension and altitude do strange things to a man. At 30,000 feet, the body is living in a condition it was not born to withstand. A man is breathing oxygen from a tube and his eyes and ears are working in the reduced pressure. It is little wonder, then, that he sometimes sees things that are not there and does not see things that are there. Gunners have fired on their own ships and others have poured great bursts into empty air, thinking they saw a swastika. The senses are not trustworthy. And the sky is treacherous with flak. The flak bursts about you and sometimes the fragments come tearing through your ship. The fighters stab past you, flaring with their guns. And, if you happen to see little visions now and then, why, that’s bound to happen. And if on your intensified awareness, small incidents are built up with meanings, why, such things always happen under tension. Ghosts have always ridden through skies and if your body and nerves are strained with altitude, too, such things are bound to happen.

The barrack room is very silent. From a corner comes a light snore. Someone is talking in his sleep. First a sentence mumbled and then, “Helen, let’s go in the Ferris wheel now.”

There is secret sound from the far wall, and then a tiny clink of metal. The tail gunner is still feeling through his pockets for his medallion.

PREPARATION FOR A RAID

BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, July 1, 1943—

In the barracks, a brilliant white light flashes on, jerking you out of sleep. A sharp voice says, “All right, get out of it! Briefing at three o’clock, stand-by at four-twenty. Better get out of it now.”

The crew struggles sleepily out of their bunks and into clothes. It is 2:30 a.m. There hasn’t been much sleep for anyone.

Outside the daylight is beginning to come. The crew gropes its way through sleepiness and the semidarkness to the guarded door, and each goes in as he is recognized by the guard.

Inside there are rows of benches in front of a large white screen, which fills one wall. Some of the crews are already seated. The lights go out and from a projector an aerial photograph is projected on the screen. It is remarkably clear. It shows streets and factories and a winding river, and docks and submarine pens. An Intelligence officer stands beside the screen and he holds a long pointer in his hand. He begins without preliminary. “Here is where you are going,” he says, and he names a German city.

“Now this squadron will come in from this direction,” the pointer traces the road, making a black shadow on the screen. The pointer stops at three long, narrow buildings, side by side. “This is your target. They make small engine parts here. Knock it out.” He mentions times and as he does a sergeant marks the times on a blackboard. “Standby at such a time, take-off at such a time. You will be over your target at such a time, and you should be back here by such a time.” It is all on the minute—5:52 and 9:43. The incredible job of getting so many ships to a given point at a given time means almost split-second timing.

The Intelligence officer continues: (Next three sentences cut by censor.) “Good luck and good hunting.” The lights flood on. The pictured city disappears. A chaplain comes to the front of the room. “All Catholics gather at the back of the room,” he says.

The crews straggle across the way to the mess hall and fill their plates and their cups, stewed fruit and scrambled eggs and bacon and cereal and coffee.

The Mary Ruth’s crew is almost gay. It is a reaction to the bad time they had the night before. All of the tension is broken now, for there is work and flying to be done, not waiting. The tail gunner says, “If anything should happen today, I want to go on record that I had prunes for breakfast.”

They eat hurriedly and then file out, washing their dishes and cups in soapy water and then rinsing them in big caldrons near the door.

Dressing is a long and complicated business. The men strip to the skin. Next to their skins they put on long light woolen underwear. Over that they slip on what looks like long light-blue-colored underwear, but these are the heated suits. They come low on the ankles and far down on the wrists, and from the waists of these suits protrude electric plugs. The suit, between two layers of fabric, is threaded with electric wires which will carry heat when the plug is connected to the heat outlet on the ship. Over the heated suit goes the brown cover-all. Last come thick, fleece-lined heated boots and gloves which also have plugs for the heat unit. Next goes on the Mae West, the orange rubber life preserver, which can be inflated in a moment. Then comes the parachute with its heavy canvas straps over the shoulders and between the legs. And last the helmet with the throat speaker and the earphones attached. Plugged in to the intercommunications system, the man can now communicate with the rest of the crew no matter what noise is going on about him. During the process the men have got bigger and bigger as layer on layer of equipment is put on. They walk stiffly, like artificial men. The lean waist gunner is now a little chubby.

They dress very carefully, for an exposed place or a disconnected suit can cause a bad frostbite at 30,000 feet. It is dreadfully cold up there.

It is daylight now and a cold wind is blowing. The men go back to the armament room and pick up their guns. A truck is waiting for them. They stow the guns carefully on the floor and then stiffly hoist themselves in. The truck drives away along the deserted runway. It moves into a side runway. Now you can see the ships set here and there on the field. A little group of men is collected under the wings of each one.

“There she is,” the ball-turret man says. “I wonder if they got her nose repaired.” It was the Mary Ruth that got her nose smashed by cartridge cases from a ship ahead. The truck draws up right under the nose of the great ship. The crew piles out and each man lifts his gun down tenderly. They go into the ship. The guns must be mounted and carefully tested. Ammunition must be checked and the guns loaded. It all takes time. That’s why the men were awakened so long before the take-off time. A thousand things must be set before the take-off.

THE GROUND CREW

BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, July 2, 1493—

The ground crew is still working over the Mary Ruth. Master Sergeant Pierce, of Oregon, is the crew chief. He has been long in the Army and he knows his engines. They say of him that he owns the Mary Ruth but he lends her to the skipper occasionally. If he says a flight is off, it is off. He has been checking the engines a good part of the night.

Corporal Harold is there, too. He has been loading bombs and seeing that the armament of the ship is in condition. The ground crew scurry about like rabbits. Their time is getting short. They have the obscure job, the job without glory and without publicity, and the ships could not fly without them. They are dressed in coveralls and baseball caps.

The gunners have mounted their guns by now and are testing the slides. A ground man is polishing the newly mended nose, rubbing every bit of dirt from it, so that the bombardier may have a good sight of his target.

A jeep drives up, carrying the officers — Brown, Quenin, Bliley, and Feerick. They spill a number of little square packets on the ground, one for each man. Captain Brown distributes them. They contain money of the countries near the target, concentrated food, and maps. Brown says, “Now, if we should get into any trouble don’t go in the direction of — because the people haven’t been very friendly there. Go toward — you’ll find plenty of help there.” The men take the packets and slip them in pockets below the knees in their coveralls.

The sun is just below the horizon now and there are fine pink puff clouds all over the sky. The captain looks at his watch. “I guess we better get going,” he says. The other Brown, the tail gunner, runs over. He hands over two rings, a cameo and another. “I forgot to leave these,” he says. “Will you put them under my pillow?” The crew scramble to their places and the door is slammed and locked. The waist doors are open, of course, with the guns peering out of them, lashed down now, but immediately available. The long scallop of the cartridge belts drapes into each one.

The captain waves from his high perch. His window sits right over the ship’s name—Mary Ruth, Memories of Mobile. The engines turn over and catch one at a time and roar as they warm up. And now, from all over the field, come the bursting roars of starting engines. From all over the field the great ships come rumbling from their dispersal points into the main runways. They make a line Like giant bugs, a parade of them, moving down to the take-off stretch.

The captain signals and two ground-crew men dart in and pull out the chocks from in front of the wheels and dart out again. The Mary Ruth guns her motors and then slowly crawls out along her entrance and joins the parade. Along the runway the first ship whips out and gathers speed and takes the air, and behind her comes another and behind another and behind another, until the flying line of ships stretches away to the north. For a little while the squadron has disappeared, but in a few minutes back they come over the field, but this time they are not in a line. They have gained altitude and are flying in a tight formation. They go roaring over the field and they have hardly passed when another squadron from another field comes over, and then another and another. They will rendezvous at a given point, the squadrons from many fields, and when the whole force has gathered there will be perhaps a hundred of the great ships flying in Vs and in Vs of Vs, each protecting itself and the others by its position. And this great flight is going south like geese in the fall.

There is incredible detail to get these missions off. Staff detail of supply and intelligence detail, deciding and briefing the targets, and personnel detail of assigning the crews, and mechanical detail of keeping the engines going. Bomb Boogie went out with the others, but in a little while she flutters back with a dead motor. She has conked out again. No one can know why. She sinks dispiritedly to the ground.

When the mission has gone the ground crews stand about looking lonesome. They have watched every bit of the take-off and now they are left to sweat out the day until the ships come home. It is hard to set down the relation of the ground crew to the air crew, but there is something very close between them. This ground crew will be nervous and anxious until the ships come home. And if the Mary Ruth should fail to return they will go into a kind of sullen, wordless mourning. They have been working all night. Now they pile on a tractor to ride back to the hangar to get a cup of coffee in the mess hall. Master Sergeant Pierce says, “That’s a good ship. Never did have any trouble with her. She’ll come back, unless she’s shot to pieces.” In the barracks it is very quiet; the beds are unmade, their blankets hanging over the sides of the iron bunks. The pin-up girls look a little haggard in their sequin gowns. The family pictures are on the tops of the steel lockers. A clock ticking sounds strident. The rings go under Brown’s pillow.

WAITING

BOMBER STATION IN ENGLAND, July 4, 1943—

The field is deserted after the ships have left. The ground crew go into barracks to get some sleep, because they have been working most of the night. The flag hangs limply over the administration building. In the hangars repair crews are working over ships that have been Injured. Bomb Boogie is brought in to be given another overhaul and Bomb Boogie’s crew goes disgustedly back to bed.

The crews own a number of small dogs. These dogs, most of which are of uncertain or, at least, of ambiguous breed, belong to no one man. The ship usually owns each one, and the crew is very proud of him. Now these dogs wander disconsolately about the field. The life has gone out of the bomber station. The morning passes slowly. The squadron was due over the target at 9:52. It was due home at 12:43. As 9:50 comes and passes you have the ships in your mind. Now the flak has come up at them. Perhaps now a swarm of fighters has hurled itself at them. The thing happens in your mind. Now, if everything has gone well and there have been no accidents, the bomb bays are open and the ships are running over the target. Now they have turned and are making the run for home, keeping the formation tight, climbing, climbing to avoid the flak. It is 10 o’clock, they should be started back—10:20, they should be seeing the ocean by now.

The crew last night had told a story of the death of a Fortress, and it comes back to mind.

It was a beautiful day, they said, a picture day with big clouds and a very blue sky. The kind of day you see in advertisements for air travel back at home. The formation was flying toward St. Nazaire and the air was very clear. They could see the little towns on the ground, they said. Then the flak came up, they said, and some Messerschmitts parked off out of range and began to pot at them with their cannon. They didn’t see where the Fortress up ahead was hit. Probably in the controls, because they did not see her break up at all.

They all agree that what happened seemed to happen very slowly. The Fortress slowly nosed up and up until she tried to climb vertically and, of course, she couldn’t do that. Then she slipped in slow motion, backing like a falling leaf, and she balanced for a while and then her nose edged over and she started, nose down, for the ground.

The blue sky and the white clouds made a picture of it. The crew could see the gunner trying to get out and then he did, and his parachute fluffed open. And the ball-turret gunner — they could see him flopping about. The bombardier and navigator blossomed out of the nose and the waist gunners followed them. Mary Ruth’s crew was yelling, “Get out, you pilots.” The ship was far down when the ball-turret gunner cleared. They thought the skipper and the co-pilot were lost. They stayed with the ship too long and then — the ship was so far down that they could hardly see it. It must have been almost to the ground when two little puffs of white, first one and then the second, shot out of her. And the crew yelled with relief. And then the ship hit the ground and exploded. Only the tail gunner and ball-turret man had seen the end. They explained it over the intercom.

Beside the no. 1 hangar there is a little mound of earth covered with short, heavy grass. At 12:15 the ground men begin to congregate on it and sweat out the homecoming. Rumor comes with the crew chief that they have reported, but it is rumor. A small dog, which might be a gray Scottie if his ears didn’t hang down and his tail bend the wrong way, comes to sit on the little mound. He stretches out and puts his whiskery muzzle on his outstretched paws. He does not close his eyes and his ears twitch. All the ground crews are there now, waiting for their ships. It is the longest set of minutes imaginable.

Suddenly the little dog raises his head. His body begins to tremble all over. The crew chief has a pair of field glasses. He looks down at the dog and then aims his glasses to the south. “Can’t see anything yet,” he says. The little dog continues to shudder and a high whine comes from him.

And there they come. You can just see the dots far to the south. The formation is good, but one ship flies alone and ahead. “Can you see her number? Who is she?” The lead ship drops altitude and comes in straight for the field. From her side two little rockets break, a red one and a white one. The ambulance, they call it the meat wagon, starts down the runway. There is a hurt man on that ship.

The main formation comes over the field and each ship peels to circle for a landing, but the lone ship drops and the wheels strike the ground and the Fortress lands like a great bug on the runway. But the moment her wheels are on the ground there is a sharp, crying bark and a streak of gray. The little dog seems hardly to touch the ground. He streaks across the field toward the landed ship. He knows his own ship. One by one the Fortresses land and the ground crews check off the numbers as they land. Mary Ruth is there. Only one ship is missing and she landed farther south, with short fuel tanks. There is a great sigh of relief on the mound. The mission is over.

DAY OF MEMORIES

LONDON, July 4, 1943—

All the day there have been exercises and entertainments for the troops on leave in London. Everything that can be done for a guest has been done. There was a hay ride this morning. There have been exercises and dances and speeches, excursions to points of interest. The British and the Canadians and the others have been extra friendly. The bands in the parks played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “Dixie” and “Home, Sweet Home.” Everything has been done that can be done and this is a city of the most abject homesickness.

The speaker said in clipped and concise English, “We welcome you again on this day that is dear to you.” And the minds were on the red-necked politician, foaming with enthusiasm and bourbon whisky, screaming the eagle on a bunting-covered platform while his audience longed for the watermelon and potato salad to come.

The conductors of parties said, “We are going to the Tower of London. It is in a sense the cradle of English civilization”—the fat man’s race, the three-legged race, the squeals of women running with eggs in tablespoons, the smell of barbecuing meat on a deep pit.

The band played beautifully in Trafalgar Square a dignified and compelling march — and Coney Island, in its welter of squalling children, the smell of ice cream and peanuts and water-soaked cigar butts, the surf, one-third water and two-thirds people, fighting their way through the grapefruit rinds, the squeak and bellow of honky-tonk music.

Soldiers have paraded in London, men who marched like clothed machines, towering men, straight as their own rifles and their hands swinging — at home, the knights of this and that in wilted ostrich-plumed hats, in uniforms out of the moth-balls again, knights who were butchers last evening, and clerks and tellers of the local bank, but knights now, out of step, shambling after their great banner, their tinsel swords at all angles over their shoulders, the knights of this and that.

The hospitable people of London have served flan and trifle, biscuits and tea, marmalade, gin and lime, scotch and water, and beer — hot dogs, with mustard drooling from the lower end and running up your sleeve. Hamburgers, with raw onions spilling out of the round buns. Popcorn dripping with butter. The sting of neat whisky and the barrels of beer set on trestles. Chocolate cakes and deviled eggs, but mostly hamburgers with onions, and which will have you have, piccalilli or dill or mayonnaise, or all of them?

The cool girls dance well and they are pleasant and friendly. They work hard in the war plants, and it’s a job to get a dress so neatly pressed. The lipstick is hard to get, and the perfume is the last in the bottle. Neat and pretty and friendly. At home the sticky kisses in the rumble seat and the swatting at mosquitoes on a hot, vine-covered porch. And in the joints the juke box howls and its basses thump the air. When you say something the girl knows the proper answer. None of it means anything, but it all fits together. Everything fits together.

This is a time of homesickness, and Christmas will be worse. No grandeur, no luxury, no interest can cut it out. No show is as good as the double bill at the Odeon, no food is as good as the midnight sandwich at Joe’s, and no one in the world is as pretty as that blond Margie who works at the Poppy.

When they come home they’ll be a little tiresome about London for a long time. They will recall exotic adventures and strange foods. Piccadilly and the Savoy and the White Tower, the Normandie Bar and the place in Soho will drip from their conversation. They will compare notes enthusiastically with other soldiers who were here. The cool girls will grow to strange and romantic adventures. The lonesome little glow will be remembered as a Bacchic orgy. They will remember things they did not know that they saw — St. Paul’s against a lead-colored sky and the barrage balloons hanging over it. Waterloo Station, the sandbags piled high against the Wren churches, the excited siren and the sneak air raid.

But today, July 4, 1943, they wander about in a daze of homesickness, seeing nothing, hearing nothing but the faces and voices of their own people.

THE PEOPLE OF DOVER

DOVER, July 6, 1943—

Dover, with its castle on the hill and its little crooked streets, its big, ugly hotels and its secret and dangerous offensive power, is closest of all to the enemy. Dover is full of the memory of Wellington and of Napoleon, of the time when Napoleon came down to Calais and looked across the Channel at England and knew that only this little stretch of water interrupted his conquest of the world. And later the men of Dunkerque dragged their weary feet off the little ships and struggled through the streets of Dover.

Then Hitler came to the hill above Calais and looked across at the cliffs, and again only the little stretch of water stopped the conquest of the world. It is a very little piece of water. On the clear days you can see the hills about Calais, and with a glass you can see the clock tower of Calais. When the guns of Calais fire you can see the flash, while with the telescope you can see from the castle the guns themselves, and even tanks deploying on the beach.

Dover feels very close to the enemy. Three minutes in a fast airplane, three-quarters of an hour in a fast boat. Every day or so a plane comes whipping through and drops a bomb and takes a shot or so at the balloons that hang in the air above the town, and every few days Jerry trains his big guns on Dover and fires a few rounds of high explosive at the little old town. Then a building is hit and collapses and sometimes a few people are killed. It is a wanton, useless thing, serving no military, naval, or morale business. It is almost as though the Germans fretted about the little stretch of water that defeated them.

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed.

Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes about what he was doing. Nothing in the world is as important as his garden and, in other days, his lobster pots. Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, “Jerry was bad last night,” as he would discuss a windstorm.

It goes like this — on the Calais hill there is a flash in the night. Immediately from Dover the sirens give the shelling warning. From the flash you must count approximately fifty-nine seconds before the explosion. The shell may land almost anywhere. There is a flat blast that rockets back from the cliffs, a cloud of debris rising into the air. People look at their watches. The next one will be in twenty minutes. And at exactly that time there is another flash from the French coast, and you count seconds again. This goes on sometimes all night. One hour after the last shell the all-clear sounds. This does not mean that it is over. Jerry sometimes lobs another one in, hoping to kill a few more people.

In the morning there are wrecked houses; the dead have been dug out. A little band of men are cleaning the debris out of the street so that traffic may go by. A policeman keeps the people from coming too close for fear a brick may fall. That house is probably wrecked and will be unlivable until the war is over, but the houses all about are hurt. The windows are all blown out, and there will be no glass until after the war, either. The people are already sticking paper over the broken windows. Plaster has fallen in the houses all about. A general house cleaning is in progress. Puffs of swept plaster come out the doors. Women are on their knees, with pails of water, washing the floors. The blast of a near shell cleans the chimneys, they say. The puff of the explosion blows the soot out of the chimney and into the rooms.

There is that to clean up, too. In a front yard a man is standing in his garden. A flying piece of scantling has broken off a rose bush. The bud, which was about to open, is wilting on the ground. The man leans down and picks up the bud. He feels it with his fingers and carries it to his nose and smells it. He lifts the scantling from the trunk and looks at it to see whether it may not send out new shoots, and then, standing up, he turns and looks at the French coast, where five hundred men and a great tube of steel and high explosive and charts and plans, mathematical formulae, uniforms, telephones, shouted orders, are out to break a man’s rose bush. A neighbor passes in the street.

“The Boche was bloody bad last night,” he says. “Broke the yellow one proper,” he says. “And it was just coming on to bloom.”

“Ah, well,” the neighbor says, “let’s have a look at it.” The two kneel down beside the bush. “She’s broke above the graft,” the neighbor says, “she’s not split. Probably shoot out here.” He points with a thick finger to a lump on the side of the bush. “Sometimes,” he says, “sometimes, when they’ve had a shock, they come out prettier than ever.”

Across the Channel, in back of the hill that you can see, they are cleaning the great barrel, studying charts, making reports, churning with Geopolitik.

MINESWEEPER

LONDON, July 7, 1943—

Day after day the minesweepers go out. Small boats that in peacetime fished for herring and cod. Now they fish for bigger game. They are equipped with strange, new fish lines. The crews are nearly all ex-fishermen and whalers and the officers are from the same tough breed. Theirs is an unromantic and unpublicized job that must be done and done very thoroughly. The danger lurks without flags and firing. Very few decorations are awarded to the minesweeping men.

They usually sail out of the harbor in a line, three boats to sweep and two to drop the buoyed flags, called dans, which mark the swept channel. Once on the ground to be swept, three of the boats deploy and travel abreast at exact and set distances from one another. The space between them is the area that can be reached by their instruments. The little boats are searching for the two kinds of mines which are usually planted — the magnetic mines which explode when a ship with its self-created magnetic field sails over, and the other kind which is exploded by the vibration of a ship’s engines. The sweepers are equipped with instruments to explode either kind and to do it at a safe distance from themselves.

The three abreast move slowly over the area to be cleared of mines and behind them the dan ships follow at intervals, putting out the flags. At the end of their run they turn and come back, overlapping a little on the old course and the dan ships pick up the flags and set them on the outer course again.

All the boats are armed against airplanes. The gunners stand at their posts and search the sky constantly, while the radio operator listens to the spotting instruments on the shore. They take no chances with the planes. When one comes near them they train their guns in that direction until they recognize her. And even the friendly planes do not fly too close. For these men have been bombed and fired on from the air so often that they will fire if there is any doubt at all. Sticking up out of the water are the masts of many ships sunk early in the war when the German planes ranged over the Channel almost with impunity. They do not do it any more.

The voice of the radio man comes up through the speaking tube to the little bridge. “Enemy aircraft in the vicinity,” he says, and then a moment later, “Red alert.” The gunners swing their guns and the crew stands by, all eyes on the sky. From the English coast the Typhoons boil out angrily, fast and deadly ships that fly close to the water. In the distance the enemy plane is a spot. It turns tail and runs for the French coast. The radio man calls, “All clear,” and the crew relaxes.

On the little bridge the captain directs the laying down of the colored flags, while his second checks the distance between the boats. If the dan ship gets too close, a mine may explode under her. With instruments the distance is checked every few seconds. The little flotilla moves very slowly, for when it has passed and marked the free channel the ships with supplies must be able to come through in safety.

Suddenly the dan ship is struck by a heavy blow, the sea about flattens out and shivers, and then a hundred yards ahead a tower of water and mud bursts into the air with a roar. It seems to hang in the air for a long time and when it falls back the dan ship is nearly over it.

There is a large, dirty place on the ocean, bottom mud and a black gluey substance, which comes from the explosive. The crew rush to the side of the ship and search the water anxiously. “No fish,” they say. “What has happened to the fish? You’d think there would be one or two killed by the blast.” They have set off one of the most terrible weapons in the world and they are worried about the fish.

The captain marks with great care on his chart the exact place where the mine was exploded. He takes several sights on the coast to get the position. Another mine roars up on the other side of the lane. The second in command takes up the blinker and signals, “Any fish?” and the answer comes back, “No fish.”

The day is long and tedious, sweeping and turning and sweeping, and when the job is done it is only done until the night, for on this night the mine layers may creep over from the French coast and sow the field again with the nasty things, or a plane may fly low in the darkness and drop the mines on parachutes. The work of the sweepers is never finished.

It is late when they turn for home and it is dark when the little ships file into the harbor and tie up to the pier. Then the captain and his second relax. The strain goes out of their faces. No matter how long or uneventful the sweep, the danger is never gone. The gun crew clean and cover their guns and go to their quarters. The officers climb down to the tiny wardroom. They kick off their fleece-lined boots and settle back into their chairs. The captain picks up the work he has been doing for weeks. He is making a beautifully exact model of — a minesweeper.

COAST BATTERY

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, July 8, 1943—

The guns hide in a field of grain and red poppies. You can see the cannon muzzles protruding and aiming at the sky. The battery is on the south coast, in sight of France. There was a time when the great flights of German bombers came over this undefended coast and carried their bomb loads to London and Canterbury. But the coast is not undefended now.

The spotters are all over the hills, the complicated and delicate listening posts which can hear a plane miles away, and the spotters are girls. When a strange ship is heard, its position is phoned to the plotters of position, and the plotters are girls, too. The sighters are girls. Only the gunners who load and turn the gun itself are men. It is an amazing institution, the mixed battery, something unique in the history of armies.

The barracks are nearby, one for the girls and another for the men. The eating hall is common, the recreation room is common, and the work is common.

Twenty-four hours a day the crews are on duty. They can do what they want within a certain distance from the gun. The girls read and wash their clothing, sew and cook. The kitchen, a temporary affair, is built of kerosene tins filled with sand laid like bricks. The new kitchen is just now being built.

The countryside is quiet. The guns are silent. Suddenly the siren howls. Buildings that are hidden in camouflage belch people, young men and women. They pour out, running like mad. The siren has not been going for thirty seconds when the run is over, the gun is manned, the target spotted. In the control room under ground the instruments have found their target. A girl has fixed it. The numbers have been transmitted and the ugly barrels whirled. Above ground, in a concrete box, a girl speaks into a telephone. “Fire,” she says quietly. The hillside rocks with the explosion of the battery. The field grass shakes and the red poppies shudder in the blast. New orders come up from below and the girl says, “Fire.”

The process is machine-like, exact. There is no waste movement and no nonsense. These girls seem to be natural soldiers. They are soldiers, too. They resent above anything being treated like women when they are near the guns. Their work is hard and constant. Sometimes they are alerted to the guns thirty times in a day and a night. They may fire on a marauder ten times in that period. They have been bombed and strafed, and there is no record of any girl flinching.

The commander is very proud of them. He is fiercely affectionate toward his battery. He says a little bitterly, “All right, why don’t you ask about the problem of morals? Everyone wants to know about that. I’ll tell you — there is no problem.”

He tells about the customs that have come into being in this battery, a set of customs which grew automatically. The men and the women sing together, dance together, and, let any one of the women be insulted, and he has the whole battery on his neck. But when a girl walks out in the evening, it is not with one of the battery men, nor do the men take the girls to the movies. There have been no engagements and no marriages between members of the battery. Some instinct among the people themselves has told them trouble would result. These things are not a matter of orders but of custom.

The girls like this work and are proud of it. It is difficult to see how the housemaids will be able to go back to dusting furniture under querulous mistresses, how the farm girls will be able to go back to the tiny farms of Scotland and the Midlands. This is the great exciting time of their lives. They are very important, these girls. The defense of the country in their area is in their hands.

The manager of the local theater has set aside two rows of seats this evening for members of the battery who are off duty. The girls who are to go change from their trousers to neat khaki skirts and blouses. They spend a good deal of time making themselves pretty. They sit in the theater, leaning forward with excitement. The film is a little stinker called War Correspondent, made six thousand miles from any conflict, where people are not likely ever to see any.

It concerns an American war correspondent who through pure handsomeness, cleverness, bravery, and hokum defeats every resource of the Third Reich. The Gestapo and the German Army are putty in his hands. It is a veritable Flynn of a picture.

And these girls who have been bombed and strafed, who have shot enemies out of the sky and then gone back to mending socks — are these girls scornful? Not in the least. They sit on the edges of their seats. When the stupid Gestapo men creep up to the hero they shriek to warn him. This is more real to them than this afternoon, when they fired on a Focke Wulf 190. The hero who emerges from a one-man Dunkerque, with combed hair and immaculate dress, is the true, the good, the beautiful.

This afternoon the girls were sweaty, dusty, and they smelled of cordite. That was their job — this is war. And when the film is done they walk back to their barracks, talking excitedly of the glories of Hollywood warfare. They go back to their routine job of defending the coast of England from attack, and as they walk home they sing, “You’d be sooo naice to come ’ome to, You’d be so naice by a fire.”

ALCOHOLIC GOAT

LONDON, July 9, 1943—

His name is Wing Commander William Goat, DSO, and he is old and honored, and, some say, in iniquity. But when he joined the RAF wing two years ago he was just able to totter about on long and knobby legs. For a long time he was treated like any other recruit — kicked about, ignored, and at times cursed. But gradually his abilities began to be apparent. He is very good luck to have about. When he is near, his wing has good fortune and good hunting. Gradually his horns, along with his talents, developed, until now his rank and his decorations are painted on his horns in brilliant colors and he carries himself with a shambling strut.

He will eat nearly everything. No party nor any review is complete without him. At one party, being left alone for a few moments, it is reported that he ate two hundred sandwiches, three cakes, the arrangements for piano and flute of “Pomp and Circumstance,” drank half a bowl of punch, and then walked jauntily among the dancers, belching slightly and regarding a certain lieutenant’s wife, who shall be nameless, with lustful eye.

He has the slightly bilious look of the military of the higher brackets. Being an air-goat, he has rather unique habits. If you bring an oxygen bottle into view, he rushes to it and demands it. He puts his whole mouth over the outlet and then, as you turn the valve, he gently relaxes, grunting happily, and his sides fill out until he nearly bursts. Just before he bursts he lets go of the nozzle and collapses slowly, but the energy he takes from the oxygen makes him leap into the air and engage imaginary goats in horny combat. He also loves the glycol cooling fluid which is used in the engines of the Typhoons. For hours he will stand under the barrels, licking the drips from the spouts.

He has the confidence of his men. Once when it was required that his wing change its base of operations quickly, he was left behind, for in those days it was not known how important he was. At the new base the men were nervous and Irritable, fearful and almost mutinous. Finally, when it was seen that they would not relax, a special plane had to be sent to pick up the wing commander and transport him to the new base. Once he arrived, everything settled down. The Typhoons had four kills within twenty-four hours. The nervous tension went out of the air, the food got better as the cook ceased brooding, and a number of stomach complaints disappeared immediately.

Wing Commander Goat lives in a small house behind the Operations Room. His name and honors are painted over the door. It is very good luck to go to him and stroke his sides and rub his horns before going out on operations. He does not go out on operations himself. There is not room in the Typhoons for him, but if it were possible to squeeze him in he would be taken, and then heaven knows what great action might not take place.

This goat has only truly bad habit. He loves beer, and furthermore is able to absorb it in such quantities that even the mild, nearly non-alcoholic English beer can make him tipsy. In spite of orders to the contrary he is able to seek out the evil companions who will give him beer. Once inebriated, he is prone to wander about sneering. He sneers at the American Army Air Force, he sneers at the Labor party, and once he sneered at Mr. Churchill. The sneer is probably inherent in the beer, since punch has quite a different effect on him.

In appearance this goat is not impressive. He has a shabby, pinkish fur and a cold, fishlike eye; his legs are not straight, in fact he is slightly knock-kneed. He carries his head high and his horns, painted in brilliant red and blue, more than offset any physical oddness. In every way, he is a military figure. He is magnificent on parade. Eventually he will be given a crypt in the Air Ministry and will die in good time of that military ailment, cirrhosis of the liver. He will be buried with full military honors.

But meanwhile Wing Commander William Goat, DSO, is the luck of his wing, and his loss would cause great unrest and even despondency.

STORIES OF THE BLITZ

LONDON, July 10, 1943—

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. Again and again this happens in conversations. It is as though the mind could not take in the terror and the noise of the bombs and the general horror and so fastened on something small and comprehensible and ordinary. Everyone who was in London during the blitz wants to describe it, wants to solidify, if only for himself, something of that terrible time.

“It’s the glass,” says one man, “the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle. That is the thing I remember more than anything else, that constant sound of broken glass being swept up on the pavements. My dog broke a window the other day and my wife swept up the glass and a cold shiver went over me. It was a moment before I could trace the reason for it.”

You are going to dine at a small restaurant. There is a ruin across the street from the place, a jagged, destroyed stone house. Your companion says, “On one of the nights I had an engagement to have dinner with a lady at this very place. She was to meet me here. I got here early and then a bomb hit that one.” He points to the ruin. “I went out in the street. You could see plainly, the fires lighted the whole city. That front wall was spilled into the street. You could see the front of a cab sticking out from the pile of fallen stone. Thrown clear, right at my feet as I came out of the door, was one pale blue evening slipper. The toe of it was pointing right at me.”

Another points up at a wall; the building is gone, but there are five fireplaces, one above another, straight up the wall. He points to the topmost fireplace, “This was a high-explosive bomb,” he says. “This is on my way to work. You know, for six months there was a pair of long stockings hanging in front of that fireplace. They must have been pinned up. They hung there for months, just as they had been put up to dry.”

“I was passing Hyde Park,” says a man, “when a big raid came over. I went down into the gutter. Always did that when you couldn’t get a shelter. I saw a great tree, one like those, jump into the air and fall on its side not so far from me — right there where that scoop is in the ground. And then a sparrow fell in the gutter right beside me. It was dead all right. Concussion kills birds easily. For some reason I picked it up and held it for a long time. There was no blood on it or anything like that. I took it home with me. Funny thing, I had to throw it right away.”

One night, when the bombs screamed and blatted, a refugee who had been driven from place to place and tortured in all of them until he finally reached London, couldn’t stand it any more. He cut his throat and jumped out of a high window. A girl, who was driving an ambulance that night, says, “I remember how angry I was with him. I understand it a little now, but that night I was furious with him. There were so many who got it that night and they couldn’t help it. I shouted at him I hoped he would die, and he did.

“People save such strange things. One elderly man lost his whole house by fire. He saved an old rocking chair. He took it everywhere with him; wouldn’t leave it for a moment. His whole family was killed, but he hung on to that rocking chair. He wouldn’t sit in it. He sat on the ground beside it, but you couldn’t get it away from him.”

Two reporters sat out the blitz in the Savoy Hotel, playing chess and fortifying themselves. When the bombs came near they went under the table. “One or the other of us always reached up and cheated a little,” the reporter says.

Hundreds of stories, and all of them end with a little incident, a little simple thing that stays in your mind.

“I remember the eyes of people going to work in the morning,” a man says. “There was a quality of tiredness in those eyes I haven’t forgotten. It was beyond a tiredness you can imagine — a desperate kind of weariness that never expected to be rested. The eyes of the people seemed to be deep, deep in their heads, and their voices seemed to come from a long distance. And I remember during a raid seeing a blind man standing on the curb, tapping with his stick and waiting for someone to take him across through the traffic. There wasn’t any traffic, and the air was full of fire, but he stood there and tapped until someone came along and took him to a shelter.”

In all of the little stories it is the ordinary, the commonplace thing or incident against the background of the bombing that leaves the indelible picture.

“An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. The air was just one big fat blasting roar. And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in — a squeaky voice. ‘Lavender!’ she said. ‘Buy Lavender for luck.’ ”

The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.

LILLI MARLENE

LONDON, July 12, 1943—

This is the story of a song. Its name is “Lilli Marlene” and it was written in Germany in 1938 by Norbert Schultze and Hans Leit. In due course they tried to publish it and it was rejected by about two dozen publishers. Finally it was taken up by a singer, Lala Anderson, a Swedish girl, who used it for her signature song. Lala Anderson has a husky voice and is what you might call the Hildegarde type.

“Lilli Marlene” is a very simple song. The first verse of it goes: “Underneath the lanterns, by the barracks square, I used to meet Marlene and she was young and fair.” The song was as simple as that. It went on to tell about Marlene, who first liked stripes and then shoulder bars. Marlene met more and more people until, finally, she met a brigadier, which was what she wanted all along. We have a song with much the same amused cynicism.

Eventually Lala made a record of the song and even it was not very popular. But one night the German station in Belgrade, which sent out programs to Rommel’s Afrika Korps, found that, due to a little bombing, it did not have many records left, but among a few uninjured disks was the song “Lilli Marlene.” It was put on the air to Africa and by the next morning it was being hummed by the Afrika Korps and letters were going in demanding that it be played again.

The story of its popularity in Africa got back to Berlin, and Madame Goering, who used to be an opera singer, sang the song of the inconstant “Lilli Marlene” to a very select group of Nazis, if there is such a thing. Instantly the song was popular and it was played constantly over the German radio until Goering himself grew a little sick of it, and it is said that, since inconstancy is a subject which is not pleasant to certain high Nazi ears, it was suggested that the song be quietly assassinated. But meanwhile “Lilli Marlene” had got out of hand. Lala Anderson was by now known as the “Soldiers’ Sweetheart.” She was a pin-up girl. Her husky voice ground out of portable phonographs in the desert.

So far, “Lilli” had been solely a German problem, but now the British Eighth Army began to take prisoners and among the spoils they got “Lilli Marlene.” And the song swept through the Eighth Army. Australians hummed it and fastened new words to it. The powers hesitated, considering whether it was a good idea to let a German song about a girl who did not have all the sterling virtues become the favorite song of the British Army, for by now the thing had crept into the First Army and the Americans were beginning to experiment with close harmony and were putting an off-beat into it. It wouldn’t have done the powers a bit of good if they had decided against the song.

It was out of hand. The Eighth Army was doing all right in the field and it was decided to consider “Lilli Marlene” a prisoner of war, which would have happened anyway, no matter what the powers thought about it. Now “Lilli” is getting deeply into the American Forces in Africa. The Office of War Information took up the problem and decided to keep the melody, but to turn new words against the Germans. Whether this will work or not remains to be seen. “Lilli Marlene” is international. It is to be suspected that she will emerge beside the barrack walls — young and fair and incorruptly inconsistent.

There is nothing you can do about a song like this except to let it go. War songs need not be about the war at all. Indeed, they rarely are. In the last war, “Madelon” and “Tipperary” had nothing to do with war. The great Australian song of this war, “Waltzing Matilda,” concerns itself with sheep-stealing. It is to be expected that some groups in America will attack “Lilli,” first, on the ground that she is an enemy alien, and, second, because she is no better than she should be. Such attacks will have little effect. “Lilli” is immortal. Her simple desire to meet a brigadier is hardly a German copyright. Politics may be dominated and nationalized, but songs have a way of leaping boundaries.

And it would be amusing if, after all the fuss and heiling, all the marching and indoctrination, the only contribution to the world by the Nazis was “Lilli Marlene.”

WAR TALK

LONDON, July 13, 1943—

It is interesting to see that the nearer one comes to a war zone the less one hears of grand strategy. There is more discussion of tactics and the over-all picture in the Stork Club on a Saturday night than in the whole European theater of operations. This may be, to a certain extent, because of a lack of generals to give the strategists a social foundation. For that matter, there are more generals in the Carlton Hotel in Washington at lunch time than in all the rest of the world.

This narrowing point of view may be geographical. Papers in England are not avidly seized, and as one gets down to the coast where some action is going on all the time, the discussion of the war dwindles until it almost disappears. It is further interesting how completely civilian ferocity disappears from the soldier or the sailor close to action or in action.

In the concrete wardroom over the berths of the motor torpedo boats the young men gather to drink beer. They are very young men, but there is an age in their faces that comes of having put their lives out at stake too often. The dice have rolled right for some of these young men so far, but a seven has turned up for too many of their friends for them to take the game or their luck for granted. The little boats are not heavily armed for defense, but they carry terrible blows in their torpedo tubes. They are the only lightweights in the world that can deliver a heavyweight punch. For their own safety they have only their speed and the cleverness of their crews.

Tonight they are going out on what the men call a Thing. A Thing is something bigger than a Scramble, but slightly less large than The Thing. A Thing is likely to be an attack on a German convoy, slipping secretly in the night through the Channel, but heavily armed and heavily guarded and, moreover, hugging the coast so that they are under the shore guns most of the time. And against them these tiny ships are going to dodge in under the shellfire, twist and turn in the paths of the tracers, and, finally, shoot their torpedoes into the largest ship they can find and then race for home.

In the wardroom the men speak with a kind of intense gaiety. You never hear the enemy discussed. By unstated agreement or because there has just been too much war they do not discuss war. The enemy is Jerry, or the Boche, and his name is spoken as something disembodied and vague. Jerry is a problem in navigation, a job, a danger, but not much more personalized than any other big and dangerous job. The men suffer from strain. It has been so long applied that they are probably not even conscious of it. It isn’t fear, but it is something you can feel, a bubble that grows bigger and bigger in your mid-section. It puffs up against your lungs so that your breathing becomes short. Sitting around is bad. You have a tendency to think that everything is very funny. This is the time to bring out the frowsy story that wouldn’t do so well at any other time. It will get a roar of laughter now.

There is a little bar in the wardroom where a Wren serves the flat beer that no one likes. The beer isn’t good, but everyone has a glass of it, and it is hard to swallow, because so much of you is taken up with the big bubble.

On the wall there is a clock and the hands creep slowly, much too slowly, toward the operation time. The waiting is the terrible part. The weather reports come in, There is wind, but perhaps not enough to cancel the Thing. Dozens of the little ships are going out. It is an Allied operation. There are Dutch boats, and Polish boats, and English. The Poles are great fighters. This is their kind of work. When the little ships attacked the Scharnhorst, slipping through the Channel, it is said that a Polish sailor was down on the prow of his torpedo boat, calmly firing at the great steel battleship with a rifle. The Dutch have a calm, cold courage, and the British pretend, as usual, it is some kind of a garden party they are going to.

At ten minutes to the time the men start to get into their suits, complicated coats and trousers of oilskin that tie closely around the ankles. A towel is wrapped around the neck and the coat buttoned in tight about it. The little ships are wet. The green water comes over the bow constantly and there isn’t much cover. In action the men will presumably wear helmets on their heads, but this is only a presumption. Now they stand about, padded and wadded, their arms a little out from their sides, held out by the thick clothing. The leader of this group is a young man of great age. He is twenty-two and he came from a destroyer to the little MTBs. The big hand of the clock creeps on to the time of departure. The commander says, almost casually, and just as it is on the minute, “All ready?”

All the young men stride heavily out of the door, down the steps to the hidden pens where the little stinging fish lie. There is a roar as engine after engine starts. Now the bubble bursts in your stomach and you can breathe again. Everything is all right. It’s a good night, misty and with little visibility. The boats back, one by one, from their berths and fall into line. A tiny blinker signals from the leader, the great motors thunder, the boats leap forward, and the white wake Vs out. The green water comes in over the bow. The crew huddles down, braced against the wind and the sea — no one has mentioned the war.

THE COTTAGE THAT WASN’T THERE

LONDON, July 14, 1943—

The sergeant lay in the grass and pulled grass and a bit off the tender stems and chewed them. It was Sunday, and a number of people were lying about, sailors and soldiers and even a few civilians. Across the path a line of people were fishing in the Serpentine, sitting on rented chairs, fishing in water that was stirred with the oars of boats and kicking swans. Each fisherman had his little audience.

The sergeant said, “This is a crazy country. Look at that, there hasn’t been a fish caught there all day, and they go right on with it. Maybe they’re not after fish. It’s a crazy country, and it’s getting me nuts, too.” He spat out a little chewed wad of green grass stems. “I’ve got something bothering me,” he said. “It’s a ghost story. I don’t believe it happened, and I know it happened. Only I don’t believe in ghosts. I’ve been thinking about it, sniffling around it, and I can’t make any sense out of it.

“You see,” he said, “I’m at a little station up in the country. Not a very big outfit. There is a village about a mile from camp, and in the evening we walk in and get a couple of glasses of beer and try to figure out this darts game.”

Far up the line of fishermen a man caught a fish about the size of a sardine and caused so much excitement that he was surrounded by people in a moment. The sergeant chuckled. “I used to work salmon in the Columbia River,” he said, and let it go at that. “Well, anyway,” he said, “it came on toward dark, and I’ve got some paper work to do, so I figured I’d walk back to camp. The other fellows weren’t ready to go yet. They’re kidding the barmaid, telling her they know movie stars. So I started out alone.

“I’ve been over that little road at least a hundred times. I know every foot of it, I guess. It’s a narrow, little road, with hedges on both sides, so you can’t see into the fields. The road is kind of cut down, like a trench. It’s not a very dark night, at least there is some starlight, and you can see big clouds, like it was going to rain.” He stopped and seemed to be considering whether he should go on at all. He was looking across the Serpentine at the little pavilion where they rent boats, where the line of people wait all day for their turn to rent a boat.

The sergeant made up his mind suddenly. “About halfway back there was a light out onto the road. There was a little cottage, kind of, with the hedge coming up to it on both sides. There is a garden in front, a fence and then this big square window with little panes. Well, the light is coming out of that window. I looked right through and could see the room. It was kind of pleasant. There was a lamp on the table, and a fire in a small fireplace. It was kind of pleasant. It wasn’t a very bright light, but you could see pretty well. There’s a white cat asleep on the seat of a chair, and sitting beside the table under the lamp is a woman about fifty, I should say, and she is sewing on something. I stood there. Peeping-Tommed for a couple of minutes. It was peaceful and cozy-looking and nice.

In a minute I walked on. There was something bother-big me in the back of my mind. And then I thought, ‘Sure that’s what it is, no blackout curtains.’ I hadn’t seen a light coming out of the window at night for ten months — that’s how long I’ve been over. I was going to go back and tell that woman to pull her blackout curtains in case some country cop came along. She’d get a stiff fine. I turned around and looked back. I couldn’t see the cottage, but I could see the light shining out in the road. Well then, I thought, ‘What the hell, maybe no cop will come by.’ It looked so nice, the room and the fire that you could look in on. You get awful tired of the blackout.”

The sergeant picked up a little twig, dug at a grass root with it. “I walked along, but there was something that kept ticking away in my head, something I couldn’t get hold of. It began to sprinkle a little bit of rain, but not enough to hurt anything. I thought about the work I had to do, but I couldn’t get away from the feeling that there was something wrong with something.”

He dug out his grass root, and it came up with a little lump of soil in it. He shook the dirt out of it. “I was just about to turn into the camp when it plumped into my mind. Now, this is what it is. And I’ve been thinking about it, and I can’t figure it out. There isn’t any cottage there, just four stone walls all black with fire. Early in the blitz some Jerry dropped a fire bomb on that cottage.”

His fingers were restless. They were trying to plant the grass roots again in the hole they had come out of. “You see what worries me about the whole thing is this,” he said. “I just don’t believe stuff like that.”

GROWING VEGETABLES

LONDON, July 15, 1943—

On the edges of American airfields and between the barracks of troops in England it is no unusual thing to see complicated and carefully tended vegetable gardens. No one seems to know where the idea originated, but these gardens have been constantly increasing. It is fairly common now that a station furnishes a good part of its own vegetables and all of its own salad greens.

The idea, which had as its basis, probably, the taking up of some of the free time of men where there were few entertainment facilities, has proved vastly successful. The gardens are run by the units and worked by the groups, but here and there a man may go out on his own and try and raise some strange seed which is not ordinarily seen in this climate. In every unit there is usually some man who knows about such things who advises on the planting, but even such men are often at a loss because vegetables are different here from the vegetables at home.

The things that the men want to raise most, in order of choice, are green corn, tomatoes, and peppers. None of these do very well in England unless there is a glass house to build up sufficient heat. Tomatoes are small; there are none of those master beefsteak tomatoes bursting with juice. It is a short, cool season. Green corn has little chance to mature and the peppers must be raised under glass. Nevertheless, every care is taken to raise them. Men who are homesick seem to take a mighty pleasure in working with the soil.

The gardens usually start out ambitiously. Watermelons and cantaloupes are planted and they have practically no chance of maturing at this latitude, where even cucumbers are usually raised in glass houses, but gradually some order grows out of the confusion. Lettuce, peas, green beans, green onions, potatoes do very well here, as do cabbages and turnips and beets and carrots. The gardens are lush and well tended. In the evenings, which are very long now, the men work in the beds. It does not get dark until eleven o’clock, there are only so many movies to be seen, English pubs are not exciting, but there does seem to be a constant excitement about the gardens, and the produce that comes from them tastes much better than that purchased in the open market.

One station has its headquarters in a large English country house which at one time must have been very luxurious. Part of the equipment of this place is a series of glass houses, and here the gardens are exceptional. There has never been any need to exert pressure to get the men to work in the gardens. They have taken it up with enthusiasm and in many cases men from the cities, who have never had a garden in their lives, have become enthusiastic. There is some contact with the normal about the garden, a kind of relationship with peace.

Now and then a garden just coming in to produce must be deserted as the unit is shifted to another area. But this does not seem to make any difference. The new unit takes over the garden, and the old one, if there is none at the new station, starts afresh. The value is in the doing of it. The morale value of the experiment is very high, so high that it is being suggested that supply officers should be equipped with an assortment of seeds as a matter of course. The seed takes up little room and gardening equipment can be made on the spot or is available nearly everywhere.

There is a great difference in the ordinary preparation of vegetables by the English and by us. The English usually boil their vegetables to a submissive, sticky pulp, in which the shape and, as some say, the flavor have long since been overcome. Our cooks do not cook their vegetables nearly so long, are apt to like them crisp. The English do not use nearly as many onions as we do and they use practically no garlic at all. The little gardens are a kind of symbol of revolt against foreign methods.

For example, the average English cook regards a vegetable with suspicion. It is his conviction that unless the vegetable is dominated and thoroughly convinced that it must offer no nonsense, it is likely to revolt or to demand dominion status. Consequently, only those vegetables are encouraged which are docile and capable of learning English ways.

The Brussels sprout is a good example of the acceptable vegetable. It is first allowed to become large and fierce. It is then picked from its stem and the daylights are boiled out of it. At the end of a few hours the little wild lump of green has disintegrated into a curious, grayish paste. It is then considered fit for consumption.

The same method is followed with cabbage. While the cabbage is boiling it is poked and beaten until, when it is served, it has given up its character and tastes exactly like brussels sprouts, which in turn taste like cabbage. Carrots are allowed to remain yellow but nothing else of their essential character is maintained.

No one has yet explained this innate fear the English suffer of a revolt of the vegetables. The easy-going American attitude of allowing the vegetable a certain amount of latitude short of the ballot is looked upon by the English as soft and degenerate. In the American gardens certain English spies have reported they have seen American soldiers pulling and eating raw carrots and turnips and onions.

It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD

LONDON, July 16, 1943—

This is no war, like other wars, to be won as other wars have been won. We remember the last war. It was a simple, easy thing. When we had destroyed the Kaiser and a little military clique, the evil thing was removed and all good things came into flower. It was not so, but the war was fought on that basis by troops who sang and then ran home for the millennium.

It is said that this is not a singing war and that is true. The soldiers fight and work under a load of worry. They know deeply that the destruction of the enemy is not the end of this war. And almost universally you find among the soldiers not a fear of the enemy but a fear of what is going to happen after the war. The collapse of retooled factories, the unemployment of millions due to the increase of automatic machinery, a depression that will make the last one look like a holiday.

They fight under a banner of four unimplemented freedoms — four words, and when anyone in authority tries to give these freedoms implements and methods the soldiers hear that man assaulted and dragged down. It doesn’t matter whether the methods or the plans are good or bad. Any planning is assorted at home. And the troops feel they are going to come home to one of two things — either a painless anarchy, or a system set up in their absence with the cards stacked against them.

Ours is not a naive Army. Common people have learned a great deal in the last twenty-five years, and the old magical words do not fool them any more. They do not believe the golden future made of words. They would like freedom from want. That means the little farm in Connecticut is safe from foreclosure. That means the job left when the soldier joined the Army is there waiting, and not only waiting but it will continue while the children grow up. That means there will be schools, and either savings to take care of illness in the family or medicine available without savings. Talking to many soldiers, it is the worry that comes out of them that is impressive. Is the country to be taken over by special interests through the medium of special pleaders? Is inflation to be permitted because a few people will grow rich through it? Are fortunes being made while these men get $50 a month? Will they go home to a country destroyed by greed? If anyone could assure them that these things are not true, or that, being true, they will not be permitted, then we would have a singing Army. This Army can defeat the enemy. There is no doubt about that. They know it and will accomplish it, but they do not want to go home to find a civil war in the making. The memory of the last depression is still fresh in their memories.

They remember the foreclosed farms, the slaughtered pigs to keep the prices up, the plowing under of the crops, because there was not intelligence enough in the leaders to devise a means of distributing an oversupply of food. They remember that every plan for general good life is dashed to pieces on the wall of necessary profits.

These things cannot be overstated. Anyone who can reassure these soldiers that such things will not happen again will put a weapon in their hands of incredible strength. What do the soldiers hear? — that Mr. Jones is calling Mr. Wallace names; that Mr. Jeffers is fighting with Mr. Ickes; czars of this and that are fighting for more power and more jurisdiction.

Congress, in a kind of hysteria of immunity from public criticism, has removed even the machinery of relief which might take up the impact of a new depression; black markets are flourishing and the operators are not little crooks, but the best people. The soldiers hear that the price of living is going up and wages are following them. A soldier is not a lone man. He usually has a family dependent to a large extent on the money he can allot, and his pay does not increase with the cost of living.

These are the things that he hears. The papers are full of it, the letters from home are full of it — quarreling, anxiety, greed. And, being a soldier, he cannot complain. He is forbidden to complain. You cannot have that kind of thing in an army. He is not cynical, but he is worried. He wants to get this war over with, and to get home to find what they have done to his country in his absence. The Four Freedoms define what he wants but unless some machinery, some foundation, some clear method is shown, he is likely to believe only in that freedom which Anatole France defined — the equal freedom of rich and poor to sleep under bridges.

THEATER PARTY

LONDON, July 18, 1943—

It was late afternoon of the English summer and in one of London’s innumerable outlying districts the motion-picture house was comfortably filled. There were some soldiers who had been wounded and were on their way to recovery. There were women of the services off duty for a few hours. Some civilian women were there for a quick picture after shopping and there were factory workers off shift. Down in front were rows of children, crowding as close to the screen as they could get.

It was just an average afternoon at the pictures. The house was comfortably filled but not crowded. In special places were some men in wheel chairs from the hospital. The picture was I Married a Witch with Veronica Lake — a fantasy comedy wherein a New England witch of Puritan times returns to life and falls straight into the traditional bedroom comedy — neither a distinguished piece of work nor a bad one. The children loved the picture and believed it because they believe all moving pictures.

Outside there was low cloud and it looked as though there might be rain later in the evening and there had not been enough rain.

While Veronica Lake, long blond hair over one eye, sat in pajamas on a man’s bed and he worried for his good and respectable name and the children crowed with delight — ten German fighter-bombers whirled in over the coast. The spotters picked them up. The Spitfires took the air. The anti-aircraft guns fired and two of the raiders were shot down. A third crashed against a little hill. Then a crazy, ragged chase started in the gray cloud. Spitfires ranging and searching in the cloud. The raiders separated and lunged on toward London, and on the ground the sirens howled and the tremendous system of alarms and defenses went into action.

Only one of the raiders got through, twisting and dodging through the defenses. He came racing down out of the cloud and right under him was the theater. He was very low when he released his bombs. The top of the theater leaped into the air and then settled back into a rubble. The screen went blank. The raider banked his plane, whipped around, came back, and poured his guns into the wreck. Then he jerked his ship into the gray clouds and ran for the coast. And he left behind him the screaming of children in pain and fear.

The communities are organized for things like this. In a matter of minutes the rescue squads were at work; the firemen were on the ground. The squads are well trained. They forced themselves into the torn and shredded building. The broken children were carried out and rushed to the hospital, crushed and shot and destroyed. The dead ones were set aside for burial, but those who still breathed and kicked and whimpered went to the waiting doctors.

All night long the operations went on. Probing for bullets, hands and arms and legs cut off and put aside. Eyes removed. The anesthetists worked delicately against pain, dripping unconsciousness onto the masks. It went on through the night, the procession of the maimed to the hospital. The doctors worked carefully, speedily. Quick judgments — this one can’t live — kept consciousness away. This one has a chance if both legs are sliced off. Judgments and quick work.

From the depots the blood plasma was rushed In and the strength from other people’s veins dripped into the arteries of the children.

It was nine in the morning when the operating was finished. At the theater the tired squads were still finding a few bodies. And in the hospital beds — great wads of bandage and wide, staring, unbelieving eyes and utter weariness — the little targets, the seven-year-old military objectives.

Workmen were digging a great, long, common grave for the dead. Veronica Lake had flared up with the quick flash of burning film and only the reels she was wound on were left. And in the houses in the morning people were just beginning to be aware enough to cry. It was very quiet in the streets.

At a bar a tired doctor got a drink before he went to bed. His eyes were ringed with red sorrow and his hand shook as he lifted the whiskey to his lips.

DIRECTED UNDERSTANDING

LONDON, July 19, 1943—

International amity, good fellowship, and mutual understanding between the British and Americans often reaches a pitch where war between the two seems very close. This is usually directed understanding, and it gives rise to some very silly situations.

Directed understanding and tolerance ordinarily begin with generalizations. Our troops approaching England are told in pamphlets what the British are like, where they are tender and where hard, what words, innocent at home, are harsh and ugly on the British ear. This has much the same effect as telling a friend, “You must meet Jones — wonderful fellow. You two will get along.” With a start like that, Jones has got two strikes on him before you ever meet him. He has to live down being a charming fellow before you can tolerate him. In this case it is even worse, because the British are told that they will like us when they just get to know us. The result is that the two come together like strange dogs, each one looking for trouble. It takes a long time to live down this kind of understanding.

The second phase of getting along is carried on in innumerable attempts to describe each other. The British are so and so. The Americans are so and so. The British are just like other people only more so. The Americans are boasters who love money. This love of money is, of course, unique with Americans. Every other people detests money. The Americans are fine, sturdy people. The British are fine, sturdy people. This is obviously a lie. There are good ones and stinkers on both sides. Setting them up doesn’t do any good. Just about the time you get a liking and a respect for a number of Englishmen, someone comes along and tells you about the English and you have to start from scratch again. This same thing, undoubtedly, happens to the English too.

The third little pitfall concerns the qualities of the fighting men. A big, rangy old mountain boy comes rolling down the street with his knuckles just barely clearing the pavement, and right behind is a Guardsman, shoulders back, chin up, nine buttons glowing like mad. Immediately the comparison is made. One is a fine soldier and the other is a lout. The fact of the matter is that they are both covering ground at the same rate, and each one could probably cover the same ground with a full pack. And then, having learned about soldierly qualities, you see a little twist-faced, wide-shouldered Tommy who walks sideways like a crab, and you realize that he’s as good a fighting man as the world had produced, but on his record, not on his soldierly bearing.

The whole trouble seems to lie in generalities. Once you have made a generality you are stuck with it. You have to defend it. Let’s say the British and/or American soldier is a superb soldier. The British and/or American officer is a gentleman. You start in with a lie. There are good ones and bad ones. You find out for yourself which is which if you can be let alone. And when you see an American second lieutenant misbehaving in a London club, it is expected that you will deny it. Or if you meet an ill-mannered, surly popinjay of a British officer, the British are expected to deny that he exists. But he does exist, and they hate him as much as we do. The trouble with generalities, particularly patriotic ones, is that they force people to defend things they don’t normally like at all.

It must be a great shock to an Englishman who is convinced that Americans are boasters when he meets a modest one. His sense of rightness is outraged. Preconceived generalities are bad enough without trying consciously to start new ones. Recently a Georgia boy with a face like a catfish and the fine soldierly bearing of a coyote complained bitterly that he had been here four days and hadn’t seen a duke. He had got to believing that there weren’t any dukes and he was shocked beyond words.

Somewhere there is truth or an approximation of it. If there is an engagement and the British say, “We got knocked about a bit,” and the Americans say, “They shot the hell out of us,” neither statement is true. Understatement is universally admired here and overstatement is detested, whereas neither one is near the truth and neither one had anything to do with the fighting quality of the soldier involved. We know that you can’t say the Americans are something or other when those Americans are crackers and long-legged men from the Panhandle and the neat business men in bifocals and shoddy jewelry salesmen and high riggers from the woods in Oregon. And it is just as silly to try to describe the British when they are Lancashiremen and Welshmen and cockneys and Liverpool longshoremen. We get along very well as individuals, but just the moment we become the Americans and they become the British trouble is not far behind.

BIG TRAIN

LONDON, July 25, 1943—

Private Big Train Mulligan, after induction and training and transfer overseas, found himself, with a minimum of goldbricking, in a motor pool in London, the driver of a brown Army Ford, and likely to take any kind of officers anywhere. It is not a job the Big Train dislikes. He drives generals or lieutenants where he is told to drive them at the speed he is told to drive them. Leaves them. Waits. Picks them up. You have only to tell him what time you want to get there and he will have you there, and although the strain on you and pedestrians and wandering dogs and cats will be great, Big Train will not be affected at all.

In his position he probably knows more military secrets than anyone in the European theater of operations. But he explains, “Mostly I don’t listen. If I do, it goes in one ear and out the other. I’ve got other things to think about.” He has arrived at a certain philosophy regarding the Army and his private life. About promotion he has this to say: “If you want to be a general, then it’s all right for you to take stripes, but if you figure that maybe you personally can’t win the war, then you’re better off as a private and you have more fun.” He doesn’t like to order other people about any more than he likes to be ordered about. He can’t avoid the second, but he gets around the first by just staying a private. “Not that I’d mind,” he said. “I’d take the hooks for a job like this, but I don’t want to tell a bunch of men what to do.”

Having decided (1) that he couldn’t win the war single-handed, (2) that the war was going to last quite a long time, (3) that he wasn’t going to get home on any given day, and (4) what the hell anyways, the Big Train settled down to enjoy what he couldn’t resist.

He probably knows England as well as any living American. He knows the little towns, the by-roads, north and south, and he has what is generally considered the best address book in Europe. He talks to everyone and never forgets a name or address. The result of this is that when he deposits his colonel, two majors, and a captain at some sodden little hotel in a damp little town, there to curse the beds and the food, when the Big Train gets dismissed for the night he consults his address book. Then he visits one of the many friends he has made here and there.

The Big Train gets a piece of meat and fresh garden vegetables for supper. He drinks toasts to his friends. He sleeps in clean white sheets and in the morning he breakfasts on new-laid eggs. Exactly on time he arrives at the sodden little hotel. The colonel and the majors are exhausted from having fought lumps in their beds all night. Their digestions are ruined by the doughy food, but the Big Train is rested and thriving. He is alert and eventually will leave his officers in another tavern and find a friend for lunch.

The Big Train is not what you call handsome, but he is pleasant-looking and soft-spoken and he particularly likes the company of women, the casual company or any other kind. He just feels happy if there is a girl to talk to. How he finds them no one has ever been able to discover. You can leave the Big Train parked in the middle of a great plain, with no buildings and no brush, no nothing, and when you come back ten minutes later there will be a girl sitting in the seat beside him, smoking the colonel’s cigarettes and chewing a piece of the major’s gum, while the Big Train carefully writes down her address and the town she comes from.

His handling of women and girls is neither wolfish nor subtle. It consists in his being genuinely interested in them. He speaks to them with a kind of affectionate courtesy. Is a stickler for decorum of all kinds. He addresses all women, whether he knows them or not, as “dear” and he manages to make it convincing, probably because it is true. The result is that the women always want to see him again and, if the war lasts long enough, this wish will be granted in time. Mulligan is perfectly honest. If he should give the colonel’s cigarettes to the girl, a whole package of them, he explains this fact to the colonel and agrees to replace them as soon as he gets back to London. The colonel invariably refuses to consider such a thing, as being ungallant on his part. Of course the girl should have his cigarettes. He puts the girl at her ease, a place she has never left. Goggles at her, puffs out his chest and drives away. Big Train knows where she lives and who lives with her and he has already calculated what he will be likely to have for dinner when he calls on her.

About the English the Big Train has terse and simple ideas. “I get on all right with the ones I like and I don’t have nothing to do with the ones I don’t like. It was just the same at home,” he says. It is probable that he has more good effect on Anglo-American relations than two hundred government propagandists striving to find the fundamental differences between the nations. Big Train is not aware of many differences except in accent and liquor. He likes the ones he likes and he refuses to like for any reason whatever a man he wouldn’t like at home.

His speech is picturesque. He refers to a toothy, smiling girl as looking like a jackass eating bumblebees. He refuses to worry about the war. “When they want me to do that let them pin stars on my shoulders,” he says. “That’s what we got generals for.” Big Train Mulligan, after two years in the Army and one year overseas, is probably one of the most relaxed and most successful privates the war has seen. When they want him to take up his rifle and fight he is quite willing to do so, but until someone suggests it, he is not going to worry about it. There are good little dinners waiting for him in nice little cottages all over England. And so long as the colonel’s cigarettes hold out the Big Train will not leave his hostess empty-handed.

BOB HOPE

LONDON, July 26, 1943—

When the time for recognition of service to the nation in wartime comes to be considered, Bob Hope should be high on the list. This man drives himself and is driven. It is impossible to see how he can do so much, can cover so much ground, can work so hard, and can be so effective. He works month after month at a pace that would kill most people.

Moving about the country in camps, airfields, billets, supply depots, and hospitals, you hear one thing consistently. Bob Hope is coming, or Bob Hope has been here. The Secretary of War is on an inspection tour, but it is Bob Hope who is expected and remembered.

In some way he has caught the soldiers’ imagination. He gets laughter wherever he goes from men who need laughter. He has created a character for himself — that of the man who tries too hard and fails, and who boasts and is caught at it. His wit is caustic, but is never aimed at people, but at conditions and at ideas, and where he goes men roar with laughter and repeat his cracks for days afterward.

Hope does four, sometimes five, shows a day. In some camps the men must come in shifts because they cannot all hear him at the same time. Then he jumps into a car, rushes to the next post, and because he broadcasts and everyone listens to his broadcasts, he cannot use the same show more than a few times. He must, in the midst of his rushing and playing, build new shows constantly. If he did this for a while and then stopped and took a rest it would be remarkable, but he never rests. And he has been doing this ever since the war started. His energy is boundless.

Hope takes his shows all over. It isn’t only to the big camps. In little groups on special duty you hear the same thing. Bob Hope is coming on Thursday. They know weeks in advance that he is coming. It would be rather a terrible thing if he did not show up. Perhaps that is some of his drive. He has made some kind of contract with himself and with the men that nobody, least of all Hope, could break. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of this thing and the responsibility involved.

The battalion of men who are moving half-tracks from one place to another, doing a job that gets no headlines, no public notice, and yet which must be done if there is to be a victory, are forgotten, and they feel forgotten. But Bob Hope is in the country. Will he come to them, or won’t he? And then one day they get a notice that he is coming. Then they feel remembered. This man in some way has become that kind of bridge. It goes beyond how funny he can be or how well Frances Langford sings. It has been interesting to see how he has become a symbol.

This writer, not knowing Hope, can only conjecture what goes on inside the man. He has seen horrible things and has survived them with good humor and made them more bearable, but that doesn’t happen without putting a wound on a man. He is cut off from rest, and even from admitting weariness. Having become a symbol, he must lead a symbol life.

Probably the most difficult, the most tearing thing of all, is to be funny in a hospital. The long, low buildings are dispersed in case they should be attacked. Working in the gardens, or reading in the lounge rooms are the ambulatory cases in maroon bathrobes. But in the wards, in the long aisles of pain the men he, with eyes turned inward on themselves, and on their people. Some are convalescing with all the pain and itch of convalescence. Some work their fingers slowly, and some cling to the little trapezes which help them to move in bed.

The immaculate nurses move silently in the aisles at the foot of the beds. The time hangs very long. Letters, even if they came every day, would seem weeks apart. Everything that can be done is done, but medicine cannot get at the lonesomeness and the weakness of men who have been strong. And nursing cannot shorten one single endless day in a hospital bed. And Bob Hope and his company must come into this quiet, inward, lonesome place, and gently pull the minds outward and catch the interest, and finally bring laughter up out of the black water. There is a job. It hurts many of the men to laugh, hurts knitting bones, strains at sutured incisions, and yet the laughter is a great medicine.

This story is told in one of those nameless hospitals which must be kept safe from bombs. Hope and company had worked and gradually they got the leaden eyes to sparkling, had planted and nurtured and coaxed laughter to life. A gunner, who had a stomach wound, was gasping softly with laughter. A railroad casualty slapped the cast on his left hand with his right hand by way of applause. And once the laughter was alive, the men laughed before the punch line and it had to be repeated so they could laugh again.

Finally it came time for Frances Langford to sing. The men asked for “As Time Goes By.” She stood up beside the little GI piano and started to sing. Her voice is a little hoarse and strained. She has been working too hard and too long. She got through eight bars and was into the bridge, when a boy with a head wound began to cry. She stopped, and then went on, but her voice wouldn’t work any more, and she finished the song whispering and then she walked out, so no one could see her, and broke down. The ward was quiet and no one applauded. And then Hope walked into the aisle between the beds and he said seriously, “Fellows, the folks at home are having a terrible time about eggs. They can’t get any powdered eggs at all. They’ve got to use the old-fashioned kind that you break open.”

There’s a man for you — there is really a man.

A COZY CASTLE

LONDON, July 27, 1943—

The jeep turns off the main road and pulls to a stop. The great gate of gray stone arches over the driveway. When it was built America was a wilderness with a few colonies clinging passionately to its edges. From the stone sentry room an American sentry emerges and stands by the jeep. He looks at passes. He salutes and opens a huge iron gate.

The jeep moves on into an ascending driveway overarched with oaks and beeches six feet through the trunks. The road curves and climbs a little hill and ahead you can see a gray tower poking above the enormous trees. Then you come out of the neat, ancient forest and there is a perfect castle against a hill, with lawns in front of it. It is a little castle, only about forty rooms, a cottage for its period. And it was built by a certain English king for a certain English mistress.

It is odd that this ancient scandal must not be identified but it is so. If, for instance, it were known which king and which mistress were involved in the building of the little castle, then it would be known by the enemy which castle it is and if, further, it were known that American troops are quartered in this castle, it would become a target for enemy aircraft. But since a wholesome number of English kings had mistresses and built little castles for them, so much information does not give the enemy a target or rather it gives him a number of targets too great to concentrate on.

On the lawn in front of the castle, where once perhaps gentlemen in heavy armor challenged one another with spears, a platoon of American soldiers, helmeted and with full packs, are doing close-order drill, marching, countermarching, opening and closing ranks, their bayonets gleam-in the summer English sunshine.

In the gardens leading to the pointed door the roses are blooming. Red roses and white roses. Great-grand-children of the bushes from which perhaps the symbols of Lancaster and York were picked and worn as insignia in the Civil War. The stones of the entrance are deeply worn, concave as basins, and beyond is a dark hall, so high and shadow-deep in the midday that you must get your eyes used to it before you can see the carved oaken ceiling from which thousands of little oak faces look out. And in this great hall an American Army sergeant sits behind a pine table and does his work.

Beyond, through an open door, is an even larger room but this one is lighter, for one side of it has large leaded windows, constructed in diamonds and lozenges and circles and moons of glass. And this also looks on the rose garden, the lawn, and finally to the forest.

There is a great fireplace in this room, a fireplace so high that a tall man can walk inside without stooping and could lie down without scrunching. The mantel over the fireplace is deep with heraldic carving. This is the lounge. On chairs procured somewhere the GIs sit and read and listen to the radio. A fine bar has been built against one wall, where Coca-Cola and pop are sold. And overhead, the arching roof of carved oak, chiseled and fitted long before America was born. And a soldier leaning back in his chair is staring fascinated at the ceiling. There is a copy of Yank in his lap. He squints his eyes and studies the ceiling. He withdraws his attention and calls, “Hey, Walter, have the Dodgers got twenty-four or twenty-five games?”

Up the broad stairway is a gallery and then the thirty rooms or so in which the guests of the couple were made comfortable, for it is probable that only five or six hundred people knew about this old scandal, including the lady’s husband. The rooms are large, and each one has its carved fireplace and its little leaded, diamond-paned window, looking dimly on the gardens. But the rooms themselves are squad rooms with the cots arranged in a line, the shoes at attention underneath, the lockers with drawn-up blouses and trousers and towels and the helmets squarely on top. The rooms are probably much cleaner than they were when the king’s mistress lived there.

Downstairs in a kind of cave is the kitchen, where an Army cook is baking square apple pies by the quarter-acre. The floor is so deeply worn that he has to step over some of the high places. His coal stove is roaring, and he has arrived at that quiet hopelessness that cooks get on finally realizing that their work is never going to be finished, that there is no way of feeding a man once for all.

The CO of the post is a first lieutenant from Texas and the second in command is a Chicago second lieutenant. They are young and stern and friendly. The job of keeping the castle in order is just a job to them.

There is no point to any of this except the change of pageantry. The place, which was built for heralds and courtiers, for soldiers in body armor, is in no way outraged by the new thing. The jeeps and armored cars, the half-tracks that came in through the gates, the helmeted soldiers on the lawn do not seem out of place. They belong here. They are probably very little different from the earlier inhabitants. Certainly the king in question would have been glad for them, because he had his international troubles too.

THE YANKS ARRIVE

LONDON, July 28, 1943—

The little gray English station is set in the green, rolling fields where the grass is being cut and, where the mowing machine has gone, the cut grass is wilting and the red poppies are wilting. The double tracks go by the front of the station and a “Y” siding runs in back of the station. At 4:03 the American commandant and four officers drive to the station. A British officer comes out of the signal-man’s room. “The train will be four minutes late,” he says. All the officers look at their watches. On the main line a through train roars through at about seventy miles an hour. The young lieutenant says, “I thought British trains were slow.”

“They used to hold the world’s record for speed,” the commandant says.

On another track a freight train moves rapidly through the station. The flat cars are loaded with tanks, a solid line of tanks the whole length of the train. A hundred yards from the station a clubmobile is parked, a bus converted into a kitchen for the cooking of doughnuts and coffee and run by two Red Cross girls. Their coffee urns are steaming and great baskets of doughnuts are accumulating. They lift out the doughnuts and load the baskets with them. On top of the bus is a loudspeaker connected with a phonograph.

The commandant says, “That big girl is a great one. We got five hundred men at six o’clock this morning. They were pretty tired. That big girl put on a record and did a Highland fling to some hot music. She’s a funny one.” The smell of the cooking doughnuts comes down the breeze.

The British officer comes out of the signalman’s house again. “It will be here in three minutes,” he says. And again the officers look at their watches. The little train comes around the bend. It passes the station, puts its tail into the “Y,” and backs into the siding. The compartments are solid with helmeted men and their equipment is piled in front of them to the knees. Their faces are almost as brown as their uniforms. They are sitting with their packs on. It is a hot afternoon, one of the few of the summer.

As the train pulls in, the phonograph in the clubmobile howls, “Mr. Five by Five.” The sound carries a long way. The soldiers turn their heads slowly and look toward the music. Now a sergeant runs down the side of the train and opens the doors of the compartments but the men do not move. A stout captain, with a very black mustache, shouts, “All right, men. Pile out of it.” And the little compartments disgorge the men. They stand helplessly on the platform, their shoulders damp with sweat under the pack straps and their backs wet under the packs. They carry their barracks bags too and the things which won’t go in, a guitar here, and a mandolin, a pair of shoes. One man has a mongrel fox terrier on a string and it stands beside him panting with excitement.

The stout, worried captain gets the men lined up and marches them to the clubmobile. Swing music is still shrieking from the loudspeaker on the roof. A single file of men passes a little counter on a side of the truck and each one gets a big cup of coffee and two doughnuts. Then they break their ranks and stand about drinking the coffee and looking lost. The big girl comes out of the truck and works on them.

“Where you from, boy?”

“Michigan.”

“Why, we’re neighbors. I come from Illinois.”

A local wolf, a slicker at home, a dark boy with sideburns, says wearily and just from a sense of duty, “What you doing tonight, baby?”

“What are you doing?” the big girl asks, and the men about laugh loudly as if it were very funny.

The tired wolf puts an arm about her waist. “Plant me,” he says, and the two do a grotesque shag, a kind of slow-motion jitterbug.

A blond boy with a sunburned nose and red eyelids shyly approaches a lieutenant. He has his coffee in one hand and his two doughnuts in the other. Too late he realizes that he is in trouble. He balances the two doughnuts on the edge of his cup and they promptly fall into the coffee. He salutes and the lieutenant returns it gravely.

“Excuse me, sir,” the boy says. “Aren’t you a movie star?”

“I used to be,” the lieutenant says. “I used to be.”

“I knew I’d seen you in pictures,” the boy says. “I’ll write home about seeing you here. Say,” he says with excitement, “would you write your name here on something and I could send it home and then they’d have to believe me and they could keep it for me.”

“Sure,” the lieutenant says, and he signs his name with a pencil on the back of a grubby envelope from the soldier’s pocket. The boy regards it for a moment.

“What’re you doing here?” he asks.

“Why, I’m just in the Army, the same as you are.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Yes, I see you are. Well, they’ll have to believe I saw you now.”

“How long have you been over?” the lieutenant asks.

“We’re not supposed to say anything about stuff like that.”

“Sure, I forgot. Good boy to remember it.”

The doughnuts in the coffee have become semi-liquid by now. The boy drinks the coffee and the doughnuts without noticing.

“Do you suppose we’ll ever be let to go to London?” he asks.

“Sure. When you get a pass.”

“Well, that’s a long way off, isn’t it?”

“Not so far. You could make it on a forty-eight hour pass easy and have lots of time.”

“Well. Are there lots of girls there?”

“Sure. Plenty.”

“And will they, will they talk to a guy?”

“Sure they will.”

“Hot damn!” says the boy. “Oh, hot damn!”

“Fall in,” the stout, worried captain shouts, and, “Fall in,” the sergeants shout. The blond boy gets in line, still holding his cup. The big girl yells at him over the music, “Hey, sonny. We need those cups.”

She rushes fiercely up to him and grabs the cup and then quickly pats him once on the shoulder. The men on both sides of him laugh loudly, as if it were very funny.

A HAND

LONDON, July 29, 1943—

The soldier wears a maroon bathrobe and pajamas and slippers, the uniform of the Army hospital. He is a little pale and shaky, the way convalescents are. His left arm he carries crooked and high, and the fingers of his left hand hook over helplessly. In front of him on a table is a half-built model of a Liberator. Not covered yet, but a mass of tiny struts and ribs and braces. And he has a sheet of balsa wood, stamped with the patterns, and he has a razor blade and a little bowl of glue, with a match sticking out of it.

“I got hurt in Africa,” he says. “Got hit in the stomach, but they fixed that up pretty good.” He holds up his left arm. “This is what bothers me,” he says. “That was broke awful bad. I haven’t been out of a cast long.” He moves the fingers slightly. “Not much feeling in them,” he says. “I can’t make a fist. I can’t grab hold of anything. At least, I couldn’t. It’s kind of numb.

“I got hold of this model,” he says. “I can hold things down with my hand, like this.” He puts the side of his hand down on the sheet of balsa. “I did all of that with my right hand. I guess it’s lucky I’m right-handed.” He regards his left hand and moves the fingers. “The doctor says I’ll be able to use it to grab hold of things if I just exercise it. But it’s hard to exercise it when you can just barely feel it’s there.

“A funny thing happened yesterday,” he says. “Here, I’ll show you the exact place.” He takes a pencil and sticks it into the maze of tiny braces. “There, you see that piece in there? The one with the little pencil mark on it? I marked it so I’d remember which one it was.

“Yesterday I was trying to get that set in right, and you can see it’s a hard place to get at. You’ve got to hold it here and work it up under. Well, I didn’t even know I was doing it. I came to, and I was holding that little piece in my left hand.” He regards the wizened finger with amazement. “I told the doctor about it and he said that was all right and I should try to use it every bit I could. Well, sir, when I think about it I can’t do it. Not yet, anyway. Maybe I can later, a little bit at a time. I roll a pencil under my fingers. They say that’s a good thing to do. I can feel it some, too.”

He holds a sheet of balsa pattern down with the side of his left hand and with a razor blade carefully cuts out the tiny curved piece he is going to use next. It is an intricate piece, and his hand shakes a little, but the razor blade runs through on the black line, and he lifts the little piece free and puts it down on the table to apply a spot of glue to each end of it. Then carefully, with his right hand, he sets the piece in its place. “I let my nails grow long,” he says. “I can use my fingernails for lots of things.” With the long fingernail of his right forefinger he scrapes off a little drop of glue that is squeezed out of the joint and wipes it on a piece of paper.

“I’m worried about this hand,” he says. “Of course, I guess I can get a job. I’m not worried about that so much. I can always get a job. But I’ve got to get this hand into shape so that it will grab ahold of things.” He turns the model plane over and then studies the pattern sheet for the next piece. He is silent for a long time. “My wife knows I was hurt. She doesn’t know how bad. She knows I’m going to get well all right and come home, but — she must be thinking pretty hard. I got to get that hand working. She wouldn’t like a cripple with a hand that wouldn’t work.”

His eyes are a little feverish. “Well, how would you like a cripple to come home? What would you think about that?

“It will always be a little crooked,” he says, “but I wouldn’t mind that so much if it worked. I don’t think she would mind so much if it worked. She has got a job in a plane factory out on the Coast — doing a man’s work. She says she is doing fine and I’m not to worry. Here. I’ll show you a picture of her.” He reaches in his bathrobe pocket. “Where is it?” he says. “The nurse always puts it in here.” He puts his left hand in his pocket and brings out a little leather wallet. And suddenly he sees what he has done and the fingers relax and the wallet drops to the table. “God Almighty!” he says. “Did you see that?” He looks at the crooked hand still suspended in the air. “That’s twice in two days,” he says softly. “Twice in two days.”

THE CAREER OF BIG TRAIN MULLIGAN

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, August 4, 1943—

It has been possible to compile further data on the life and methods of Private Big Train Mulligan, a man who has succeeded in making a good part of the Army work for him. It has been said of him by one of his enemies, of whom he has very few, that he would be a goldbrick but he is too damn lazy.

In a course of close study, extending over several days, certain qualities have stood out in the private in addition to those mentioned in the previous report. Big Train has a very curious method. If you are not very careful, you find yourself carrying his luggage and you never know how it happened. Recently, in one of the minor crises which are an everyday occurrence to Big Train, this writer came out of a kind of a haze of friendship to find that he had not only lent Mulligan £2 10s, but had forced it on him without security and had, furthermore, emerged from the transaction with a sense of having been honored. How this was accomplished is anybody’s guess. Sometime in the future, no doubt, Mulligan will pay this money back, but in such a manner that it will seem that he has been robbed.

Mulligan has carried looting, requisitioning, whatever you want to call it, to its highest point. He is a firm believer in the adage that an army moves on its stomach, a position he rather likes. He loves nice foods and he usually gets them. A few days ago a party was visiting a ship which had recently put into a port in England with war materials. The party went to the bridge, met the master and the other officers, drank a small cup of very good coffee, and ate a quarter-ounce of cookies, conversing politely the while. On coming back to the dock where the car stood and where Mulligan should conceivably be on duty, of course, no such thing was true.

Mulligan was not in sight. One of this party who has known the private and admired him for some time remarked, “If I were to look for Mulligan right now I should find the icebox on that ship with a good deal of confidence that Mulligan would not be far from it.” Accordingly, the party found its way to the ship’s refrigerator and there was Mulligan, leaning jauntily back against a table. He was holding the thickest roast-beef sandwich Imaginable in his hand. He has learned to eat very rapidly while talking on all subjects. He never misses a bite or a word. His pace seems slow but his execution is magnificent. Not between bites but during bites he was telling an admiring circle, made up of a steward and three naval gunners, a story of rapine and other amusements which completely distracted them from noticing that Big Train had a foot-high stack of sandwiches behind him on the table.

The senior officer said, “Mulligan, don’t you think it is about time we went along?”

Mulligan said, “Yes, sir. I was just coming along but I thought the captain might be a little hungry. I was just getting a snack ready for the captain.” He reached behind him and brought out the great pile of roast-beef sandwiches, which he passed about. Now, whether these sandwiches had been prepared for just such an emergency or whether Mulligan had intended to eat them himself will never be known. We prefer to believe that it was just as he said. Mulligan is a thoughtful friend and an unselfish man. Besides this, he never goes into a blind alley. He has always a line of retreat, which simply proves that he is a good soldier.

Should his officer be faint with hunger, Mulligan has a piece of chocolate to tide the captain over. What difference that the chocolate belonged to the captain in the first place and he was led to believe that it was all gone? The fact of the matter is that when he needs his own chocolate Mulligan is happy to give him half of it.

The Big Train has been in England now something over a year and he has acquired a speech which can only be described as Georgia-Oxford. He addresses people as “mate” or even “mait.” He refuses to learn that he cannot get petrol at a gas station but he refers to lifts and braces.

Many an officer has tried to get Mulligan promoted to a corporalcy, if only to have something to break him from, but he is firmly entrenched in his privacy. There is nothing you can do to Mulligan except put him in jail and then you have no one to drive you. If he were a corporal you could break him, but Mulligan has so far circumvented any such move on the part of his superiors. When the recommendation has gone in, at just the right moment he has been guilty of some tiny infraction of the rules — not much, but just enough to make it impossible to promote him. His car is a little bit dirty at inspection. Mulligan does six hours’ full-pack drill and is safe from promotion for a good time.

Mulligan has nearly everything he wants — women, leisure, travel, and companionship. He wants only one thing and he is trying to work out a way to get it. He would like a dog, preferably a Scottie, and he would like to take it in his car with him. So far he has not worked out his method, but it is a foregone conclusion that he will not only get his dog but that his officer will feed it, and when Mulligan has a date in the evening his officer will probably take care of the dog for him and will feel very good about it, too. The Army is a perfect setting for this Mulligan. He would be foolish ever to leave it. And he is rarely foolish.

CHEWING GUM

LONDON, August 6, 1943—

At the port the stevedores are old men. The average age is fifty-two, and these men handle the cargo from America. Their pace does not seem fast, but the cargo gets unloaded and away. The only men on the docks anywhere near military age who are not in uniform are the Irish from the neutral Free State, who are not subject to Army call. They stay pretty much to themselves; for while they may approve of then: neutrality, it is not pleasant to be a neutral in a country at war. They feel like outsiders.

Little old Welshmen with hard, grooved faces handle the cargo. There is a shrunken man directing the big crane. He stands beside the open hatch and with his hands directs the cargo slings as though he were directing an orchestra. Palm down and the fingers fluttering brings down the sling. Palm up raises it, and by the tempo of his motions the operator knows whether to go slowly or rapidly. This man has a thin, high voice which nevertheless cuts through the noise of the pounding engine and grinding gears. His fingers flutter upward and the locomotive rises into the air on the end of a sling. The man seems to waft it over the side with his hands. Eighty-seven tons of locomotive, and he lowers it to the tracks on the docks with his hands.

On an imaginary line the children stand and watch the cargo come out. They are not permitted to go beyond their line for fear they might be hurt. There are at least a hundred of them, a little shabby, as everyone in England is after four years of war. And not too clean, for they have been playing on ground that is largely coal dust. How they cluster about an American soldier who has come off the ship! They want gum. Much as the British may deplore the gum-chewing habit, their children find it delightful. There are semi-professional gum beggars among the children. “Penny, mister?” has given way to “Goom, mister?”

When you have gum you have something permanent, something you can use day after day and even trade when you are tired of it. Candy is ephemeral. One moment you have candy, and the next moment you haven’t. But gum is really property.

The grubby little hands are held up to the soldier and the chorus swells. “Goom, mister?”

“I don’t have any,” the soldier says, but they pay no attention to that. “Goom, mister?” they shriek and crowd in closer. A steward comes down the gangplank from the ship. He is a little tipsy and he is dressed for the town. He is going to have a time for himself. A few children go to him and test him out. “Goom, mister?” they ask. The steward grins genially, pulls a handful of coins from his pocket and throws them into the air. The dust rises and covers a little riot, and when it clears the steward is in full flight with the pack baying after him.

Only one small boy has stayed with the soldier — a very little boy with blond hair and gray eyes. He holds the soldier’s hand and the soldier blushes with pleasure. “Is it as nice in America as it is here?” the boy asks.

“No — it’s just about the same as here,” the soldier says. “It’s bigger, but just about the same.”

“I guess you really have no goom?”

“No, not a piece.”

“Is there much goom in America?”

“Oh, yes, lots of it.”

The little boys sighs deeply. “I’ll go there sometime,” he says gravely.

The pack returns slowly. They have lost their quarry and are looking for new game. Then over the side the garbage is lowered in a large box. It is golden with squeezed orange skins. The children hesitate, because it is against all their training to break rules. But the test is too great. They can’t stand it. They break over the line and tumble on the garbage box. They squeeze the skins for the last drop of juice that may conceivably be there.

A bobby comes up quickly, his high hat making him seem a foot taller than he is. “Get ahn naow, get ahn,” he says mildly.

The rebels cram the skins into their pockets and then, dutifully, they go back to their boundary, but their pockets bulge with the loot.

“That’s naught naice,” the bobby says. “But they do get very ’ungry for horanges. They really do. I ’avent ’ad a horange in four years. It’s the law; no one hover five years old can ’ave a horange.

“They need them most, you see,” he explained.

MUSSOLINI

LONDON, August 9, 1943—

The ship was in mid-ocean when Mussolini resigned. Rumor ran among the soldiers and the crew and the Army nurses that something important had happened. Then, down from the bridge, came the corroboration—“Mussolini has resigned”—on that. For five days the people on board had that for their minds and their hopes to play with. And the process went something like this:

Two sergeants and a PFC stood out of the wind in the lee of a life raft. “Well, you’ve got to admit it’s good news if it’s true,” the PFC said.

“Yes,” said the technical sergeant, “but you know how it is when a guy is quitting. He gets kicked in the pants. There must be plenty of people who would like to take a sock at old Musso. I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t live too long.”

“You got right,” the staff sergeant said. “I’d hate to be in Musso’s shoes.”

The ship plowed through the sea and the escorts hovered about like worried chickens…

A second lieutenant sat in the lounge, talking to an Army nurse. “Gin rummy?” he asked.

“Sure,” said the nurse.

The lieutenant leaned toward her. “A private in my outfit got it pretty straight. Somebody knocked off the Duce.”

“How do you mean?”

The second lieutenant shuffled and passed the deck for cut. “Got him. That’s what I mean. Cut his throat. I hope he bled some.”

The nurse ignored the cards. She frowned. “I wonder whether he really had power or whether he was just a figurehead.”

“Why? What difference does it make if he’s dead?”

“Well, said the nurse, “if he had power, than the Fascists go out with him gone. They’ll all get killed. There’ll be a revolution. That’s what I mean.”

“I guess you’re right,” said the lieutenant. “You want to keep score…?”

The captain lay on his back in his bunk in the crowded stateroom. He talked to the bunk above him. “You’ve got to hand it to those Wops,” he said. “When they’ve got something to fight for, they sure put up a fight.”

A major’s head appeared over the edge of the upper bunk. “What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t you hear? After Mussolini got bumped off, the Wops revolted. They’ve got the nicest little revolution going you ever heard. Rome is a shambles. They’re hunting down the Fascists like rats.”

“God Almighty,” said the major, “this would be the right time to invade. From a military point of view, you couldn’t ask for a better time. I wonder if we’ve got the stuff ready to do it?”

A steward lingered in the passageway near the icebox. A KP came furtively near. “Stay out of those strawberries,” the steward said sternly.

“We ain’t got no strawberries,” said the furtive one. “The nurses went through them strawberries like we’re going through Italy. I didn’t get none of them strawberries.”

“Have we got into Italy?”

“Got in? Where you been? We’re halfway up the calf right now. There’s MPs walkin’ the streets of Rome this minute and the Wops puttin’ flowers in the hair.”

The captain interrupted the sleepy poker game. “We’ve got to have a drink on this,” he said. “Who’s got some whisky?”

“Don’t be silly,” said a lieutenant colonel. “We haven’t had any whisky since the second day out. What are you drinking to? The invasion of Italy?”

“Invasion, hell. Italy is in our hands.”

“I’ve got a bottle,” said the lieutenant colonel, and he climbed over legs and dug in his briefcase. They stood together and clinked the glasses and tossed off the whisky. The captain turned and threw his glass out of the porthole. “That’s a pretty important drink,” he said. “I wouldn’t want any common drink to get into that glass.” He peered out the porthole. “A seagull picked us up. We can’t be very far out,” he said.

The lieutenant colonel said, “You know, with Italy out, Germany is going to have a time holding the Balkans down. They’re going to want to get out from under. I bet Greece revolts, too. And Turkey was about ready to come in. This may be the push she needs.”…

Three GIs sat in a windblown cave, made by slinging their shelter halves between a rail and a davit and a ventilator. They watched the whitecaps go surging by. “I’d like to get there before it’s over, Willie. I won’t get a chance to see any action if we don’t hurry up.”

“You’ll see plenty action and you’ll tote plenty bales before you’re through, brother.”

“I don’t know about that. With those Turks running wild, Germany can’t hold out forever. Why, Germany’s so busy now, I’ll bet we could even get in across the Channel. This is a slow damn scow.”…

“Gentlemen,” said a twenty-year-old lieutenant to three other twenty-year-old lieutenants, “gentlemen, I give you Paris.”

“My old man took Paris in the last war,” said one of the gentlemen.

“Gentlemen,” said the first speaker, his voice shaking, “we’ve crossed the Channel. Oh, boy, oh, boy! We’re in.”

The three joined hands in a kind of fraternal cat’s cradle…

And so the ship came into port with the war fought and won. It took them a little time to get over it.

CRAPS

LONDON, August 12, 1943—

This is one of Mulligan’s lies and it concerns a personality named Eddie. Mulligan has soldiered with Eddie and knows him well. Gradually it becomes apparent that Mulligan has soldiered with nearly everyone of importance.

At any rate this Eddie was a crap shooter, but of such saintly character that his integrity in the use of the dice was never questioned. Eddie was just lucky, so lucky that he could flop the dice against the wall and bounce them halfway across the barracks floor on a Sunday and still make a natural.

From performances like this the suspicion grew that Eddie had the ear of some force a little more than human. Eddie, over a period of a year or two, became a rich and happy man, not so lucky in love, but you can’t have everything. It was Eddie’s contention that the dice could get him a woman any time, but he never saw a woman who could make him roll naturals. Sour grapes though this may have been, Eddie abode by it.

Came the time finally when Eddie and his regiment were put on board a ship and started off for X. It wasn’t a very large ship, and it was very crowded. Decks and staterooms and alleys, all crowded. And it just happened that the ship sailed within reasonable time of payday.

That first day there were at least two hundred crap games on the deck, and while Eddie got into one, he did it listlessly, just to keep his hand in, and not to tire himself, because he knew that the important stuff was coming later. Between the chicken games Eddie moped about and did a good deed or two to get himself into a state of grace he knew was necessary later. He helped to carry a “B” bag for a slightly tipsy GI and reluctantly accepted a pint of bourbon, which canceled out the good deed, to Eddie’s way of thinking. He wrote a letter to his wife, whom he hadn’t seen for twelve years, and would have posted it if he could ever have found a stamp.

Occasionally he drifted back to the deck and got into a small game to keep his wrist limber and his head clear, but he didn’t have to. Eddie had a roll. He didn’t have to build up a bank in the preliminaries. He steered clear of spectacular play for two reasons. First, it was a waste of time. It was just as well to let the money get into a few hands before he exerted himself, and second, Eddie, at a time like this, preferred a kind of obscurity and anonymity. There was another reason too. The ship sailed on Tuesday and Eddie was waiting for Sunday, because he was particularly hot on Sundays, a fact he attributed to a clean and disinterested way of life. Once on a Sunday, and, understand, this is Mulligan’s story, Eddie had won a small steam roller from a road gang in New Mexico, and on another Sunday Eddie had cleaned out a whole camp meeting, and in humility had devoted 10 per cent of his winnings to charity.

As the week went on the games began to fade out. There were fewer games and the stakes were larger. On Saturday there were only four good ones going, and at this time Eddie began to take interest. He played listlessly Saturday morning, but in the afternoon became more active and wiped out two of the games because his time was getting short and he didn’t want too many games going the next day.

At ten o’clock the next day Eddie appeared on the deck, clean and combed and modest and bulging at the pockets of his field jacket. The game was going, but there were only three players in it. Eddie said innocently, “Mind if I get in for a pass or two?” The three players scrutinized him cynically. A Pole with one blue eye and one brown eye spoke roughly to him. “Froggy skins it takes, soldier,” he said, “not is playing peanuts.”

Eddie delicately exposed the butt end of a bank that looked like a rolled roast for a large supper. The Pole sighed with happiness, and the other two, who were remarkable and successful for no other reason than that they could disappear in a crowd, rubbed their hands involuntarily, as though to keep their fingers warm. Eddie concealed his poke as modestly as a young woman adjusts the straps of an evening gown that has no straps. He kneeled down beside the blanket and said, “What about is the tariff?” A wall of spectators closed behind him.

Eddie faded thirty of a hundred. The Pole rolled and won and let it lie, and Eddie took a hundred of the two hundred and the Pole shot a six and made it. Behind the dense circle of spectators running feet could be heard. This was to be a game. The ship took a slight list as GIs ran from all over just to be near a game like this, even if they couldn’t see it.

The four hundred lay on the blanket like a large salad. The two disappearing men looked at Eddie, and Eddie went into his roll and undid four hundred in small bills and laid them timidly out. This Pole glared at him with his brown eye, and smiled at him with his blue eye, a trick which served him very well in poker, but had little effect on a crap game. He breathed on the dice and didn’t speak to them. He rolled an eight and smiled with both his eyes. Again he breathed on the dice and cast them backhanded to show how easy that point was, and a four and a three looked up at him.

Eddie, breathing easily, relaxed and sure, pulled the big green salad gently to his side of the blanket. He unrolled two hundred more from his roll like toilet tissue, and laid them down. “One grand,” he said, “all or part.”

The Pole took half and the two anonymous men split up the rest, and Eddie rolled a rocking chair natural, a six and a five. “Leaving it lay,” he said softly.

Only the Pole listened to him. He picked up the dice and looked them over carefully to be sure they were the ones he had put in himself. And then, scowling with both eyes, he covered Eddie. The pile of money was ten inches high now, and spilling down like a loose haycock.

Eddie hummed a little to himself as he rolled, and a seven settled firmly. The Pole snorted. Eddie said, “And leaving that lay, all or part, anybody.” Breathing had stopped on the ship, only the engines went on. Mouths were open. Figures frozen in the dense crowd about the blanket. Only once in a while word was passed back about what was happening.

Scowling at Eddie, the Pole scraped bottom. A whole week of very tiring play for the Pole lay on the blanket, and the pot was set. Eddie was magnificent. He moved easily. He did not shake or rattle the dice or speak to them or beseech them. He simply rolled them out with childlike faith. For a long moment he stared uncomprehendingly at the snake eyes that stared back at him. And then his expression changed to one of horror. “No,” he said, “somepins wrong. I win on Sunday, always win on Sunday.”

A sergeant shuffled his feet uneasily. “Mister,” he said. “Mister, you see, it ain’t Sunday. We’ve went and crossed the date line. We lost Sunday.”

Anyway, it’s one of Mulligan’s lies.