A Special Providence (9 page)

He let himself out through the blackout curtain, and as soon as the cold air of the vestibule hit him he was crippled over in a paralyzing cough. The spasms went on and on, while he crouched and swayed and leaned against the wall. Little colorless specks hung and danced before his eyes in the darkness, and in the depths of one cough he felt a knifelike pain over his heart – a pain he had first felt on bivouac in Virginia, a month ago, and which Quint had admitted to feeling too. Finally it was over, but not before the younger of the ladies had come out and put her arm around him. She was chattering in French, much too fast for
him to follow, but he needed no translation to know what she meant: that she wouldn’t let anyone leave her house on a night like this with a cough like that.

She led him back through the kitchen, where the other men were laying out their bedrolls, and with motherly insistence she steered him upstairs. It was useless to protest, even if he could have found the words. Before he fully realized what she was doing she had spread blankets and quilts for him on the floor of the children’s room, along the wall opposite their two small beds. Then she instructed him in sign language to leave his rifle in the hall, and to lie facing the wall as a precaution against infecting the little ones.
“Voilà,
” she said.
“Bon nuit.
”

“Modom,” he told her, pleased with himself for getting the words right, “vouse et tray, tray jonteel. Maircee bo-coo.”

When she was gone he spread his overcoat on top of the blankets, took off his overshoes and boots, and crawled under the covers as if relinquishing himself to all the luxury in the world.

He awoke to the smell of urine – one or both of the little girls had used the chamber pot that stood close to his head – and to the sounds of shouting and heavy movement in the road below. He wrestled with the blankets and bolted to his feet, pulled the blackout curtain aside, and looked out. It was blinding white daylight, late in the morning, and the road was filled with a double column of men trudging past under packs and duffelbags. He buckled on his boots and overshoes, grabbed his helmet and overcoat, and was halfway down the stairs before he remembered his rifle. He ran back and got it, and then he was downstairs and outside in the street.

“Hey!” he called in a voice that came out as a croak. “What regiment is this?”

“One eighty-ninth!”

“Which battalion?”

“Second!”

“Where’s the First?”

“Way the hell up ahead!”

There was no point in waking the men downstairs; they were all in the 190th. He broke into a run, his overcoat open and flapping, and ran all the way back to the grain mill. He clambered up to the second floor, which was empty and dead silent, and there, all alone in a heap against the wall, were his field pack and duffelbag. He knelt, sobbing for breath, struggled into the pack harness and buckled it. He hoisted the duffelbag to his shoulder, which sent him reeling, and staggered down and out into the road again, just as the last of the replacements were disappearing around a bend. He chased them, slipping and sliding in the trampled snow, and by the time he’d caught up with them it seemed that the effort of speaking was almost beyond his strength.

“Which – which battalion is this?”

“Third.”

And he lurched into his stumbling, rubber-legged run again. At first, as in a nightmare, he seemed unable to move faster than the pairs of walking men; then he slowly began to overtake them, one pair after another. Once he was seized with a coughing fit and had to drop his bag and stop, crouched and hawking phlegm into the snow, and when it was over a good many of the Third Battalion replacements had passed him again. He was soaked in sweat.

Finally a voice answered “Second” when he asked which battalion it was.

“Can you – can you tell me how far ahead the First is?”

“Quite a ways, buddy. You better haul ass.”

And no sooner had he resumed hauling ass than he slipped and
fell headlong in the snow, which set off cheers of delight in the passing column. Then he was up and running again, aware of the column only as a slow brown blur beside him. He had developed a mindless pounding rhythm to his running now; he felt he was about to faint, and that if he did his legs would somehow go on running.

“Which – which battalion?”

“First.”

“Where’s – where’s ‘A’ Company?”

“Up ahead.”

And so he was almost there, but the line of men still looked endless. He let himself slow down to a walk until the white landscape stopped turning and swimming in his eyes; then he started running again, and at last, some six and then four and then three men ahead, he saw the short, trudging figures of Quint and Sam Rand.

“Well, Jesus God, look who’s here,” Quint said. “Where the Christ have you been?”

“I – I—”

“First thing you’d better do is report to the sergeant up ahead. He’s got you down as AWOL.”

The sergeant was a big, neat regimental headquarters man, swinging athletically along, setting the pace, unencumbered by pack or duffelbag.

“Sergeant, I – I just got here.”

“What the hell’s your name?”

“Prentice.”

“Where the hell you been?”

“I was – I overslept.”

“Well, swell. That’s getting off to a great start, isn’t it? You know how close you came to a court-martial? Okay, fall on back where you belong.”

And Prentice stood slumped and gasping until Quint and Rand came abreast of him.

“Prentice, you take the God damn cake,” Quint said, and that was all he said until the march was over, half an hour later.

They were in a wide, flat field beside a railroad track, with a black forest far in the distance. The “A” Company replacements had been taken out to a seemingly arbitrary place in the field, close to the tracks, and told to stand by. Farther away down the tracks the men for “B” and “C” Companies made similar little clusters in the snow.

Prentice sat sprawled on his duffelbag with his helmet off and his throbbing temples in his hands. He felt almost good, proud at least that he’d made it. After a while he lit a cigarette, but it made him cough and he threw it away. Shyly, he got up and walked over to where Quint and Rand were sitting. “So what’s the deal?” he asked. “Are we going up to the line now, or what?”

Quint looked up, annoyed, as if a stranger were bothering him. “Damn it, Prentice, if you’d made the formation this morning you would’ve heard the announcement. Now I’ve got to explain everything to you, as usual.” He sighed.
“No
, we’re not going up to the line. They’re coming back
off
the line. We’re supposed to meet them here, and then we’re all going up to the line somewhere else.”

“Oh. I see.”

While talking, Quint had been unwinding the tin strip of a can of C rations; and Prentice saw now that Rand and all the others were eating, chewing crackers and spooning up cold meat-and-vegetable stew. The sight of it made him know he was terribly hungry, and he saw at once that Quint had caught him watching.

“And of course you missed breakfast, didn’t you,” Quint said.
“And of course you didn’t draw your rations, so now you’ve missed lunch too. And do you know what that is?” He rose slowly from his duffelbag and stood blinking in fury behind his glasses. “Do you know what that is, Prentice? It’s tough shit, that’s what it is. You think Sam and I are going to give you any of ours, you’re crazy as hell. And I’ll tell you something else.” He was shaking in anger now. Other men were looking at them with smiles of embarrassment, and Sam Rand was looking stolidly down at his can of stew. “I’ll tell you something else. It’s going to be just tough shit for you from now on, until you start learning how to take care of yourself. Is that clear? I’ve been looking out for you and cleaning up after you and wiping your goddam
nose
for you for about three God damned months, and I’ve had it. This is to let you know that I resign. You’re on your own. Is that clear?”

A warm swelling had begun in Prentice’s throat, and he was afraid he might start to cry like a child, right here in this Belgian field, in front of all these men. It was all he could do to keep his face straight.

Quint sat down on his bag again and dug his spoon savagely into his food. But he wasn’t finished yet. “And now if there are any other questions,” he said, “please keep them to yourself. I’m through. I’ve had it. I’m through being your goddam—” he hesitated over the final word, and when he brought it out it seemed calculated to be the cruellest word he could have chosen: “—your God damn father.”

When the men were throwing away their ration cans and lighting up cigarettes, not long after Prentice had managed to swallow his tears, it began to snow. Big, soft flakes came down at first from the darkening sky; then they thinned out into tiny points of white that whirled in the wind until the snow was flying rather than falling, making it hard to see anything except at close range, making it necessary to squint and blink to see anything at all.

Out of this white confusion a train of empty boxcars drew up to a stop on the tracks beside them. And soon, from far away across the field, came one and then another and then another of a long line of open trucks, each packed with standing men. The First Battalion, after its month in combat, was coming back off the line. There was an uneasy stirring among the replacements, most of whom got to their feet as the trucks came closer. What would they be like, these veterans? How would they feel about meeting men and boys fresh from the States, with the chalked numerals of Camp Shanks still plain on their helmets? Would they be friendly? Or would they laugh and point and shout obscenities?

Prentice began trying to make out individual faces in the first truck when it was still many yards away, but all he could see were
their dull helmets, which were covered with combat netting. Then the trucks had drawn up and stopped, parallel to the tracks, and the men were shockingly visible as they dropped off over the tailgates and milled around in little groups of their own.

Most of them had beards. Some wore grimy woolen hoods under their helmets, and others had used towels or pieces of blanket for the same purpose. Most of their overcoats were burned at the hem and hanging in blackened shreds, probably from standing too close to campfires, and none of them had combat boots. Some wore old-style canvas leggings, stiff and shrunken; some had improvised their own leg wrappings with torn strips of cloth, and others let their pants hang indifferently in or outside the loose tops of their galoshes. Their faces were all brownish gray, with black lips that slackened occasionally to disclose surprisingly pink interiors, and these inner lips were the only clean parts of each man’s face except for the bright, blank eyes. If they felt anything at all on seeing the replacements, they gave no sign.

“ ‘A’ Company replacements over here,” the headquarters sergeant called, holding his clipboard aloft in the whirling flakes. Beside him stood a ragged man who looked no different from the other veterans, and whose eyes seemed to be counting the replacements as they gathered around. “Shit,” he said. “Is this all I get?”

The sergeant mumbled something apologetic, and when he backed away it was odd to hear him call the ragged man “sir.”

“All right,” the ragged man said, raising his voice to address the group. “My name’s Lieutenant Agate, and you won’t have any trouble remembering that because I’m the only officer left in this company.” It was a high, rasping voice, and as he talked he kept taking a few steps forward and a few back, like a man in a cage. “We’re gonna get on this train now, and it’s no use
anybody asking me where we’re going because I don’t know. We’re going south, I know that much, and we’ll be going up to the line again very shortly. I’ll try to get around and talk to you on the train, get you oriented a little bit; meantime I’ll give you some advice. I’ll advise you to keep your eyes and ears open and your mouths shut around my men. They’re all sore as hell and so am I. We were supposed to be going back for a rest this morning, and now they’ve sprung this new shit on us. All right, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

In the boxcar, which had no straw on its splintered floor, the replacements huddled together to give the veterans most of the room. Prentice sat cold and hungry in a corner, as far away as possible from Quint, and he spent the afternoon watching the veterans and trying to figure them out. It was apparently the first time any of them had seen their duffel bags since before going into combat – the bags were all either soaked or frozen from having lain for a month in some supply dump – and most of the veterans who stayed awake were clawing through their moldy possessions like haggard ragpickers. The most conspicuous was a skinny, awkward man with the face of a clown and a voice that rose to falsetto shrieks of laughter. Probing in his bag, which bore the faded stenciling of the name Mays, he had pulled out a clean overseas cap and set it rakishly on his tangled head; then he found his wrinkled brass-buttoned tunic and pulled it on over his filthy field jacket.

“Hey, you guys ready to go on pass?” he kept shouting, delighted with the comic effect of his costume. “You guys wanna go to town and get laid tonight? Looka me, I’m all ready. Let’s go!” And no matter how many times he said the same thing it drove him into uncontrollable giggles. “Let’s go, hey! Let’s go get laid tonight! Everybody ready? Let’s go to town. Looka me, I’m all set to go!”

But however annoyingly shrill he grew it was clear that he commanded respect: the other veterans either ignored him or smiled at his antics; nobody told him to shut up. He was evidently a noncom of some kind, possibly a squad leader, though there were no chevrons on his old tunic; in any case he was someone who had proved himself and could therefore play the fool as much as he liked.

At the other extreme was a square-jawed man who seemed to want nothing more than a chance to sleep, and who incurred the merciless scorn of everyone around him:

“Hilton, move your useless ass.”

“Damn it, Hilton, get your feet off my stuff.”

“What the hell does Hilton need sleep for? Ain’t he been sleeping his life away all month?”