Articles of War (2 page)

 

THE RAINS IN NORMANDY
were irregular but persistent. When it wasn't completely overcast, clouds like islands and continents scudded rapidly overhead and in the gaps between them the sunlight played dramatically. Ferocious winds flew in off the Channel and lashed themselves against the trees and the hedgerows. At dusk, when the winds died, insects could be seen swarming into the sky in columns hundreds of feet high. Viscous black mud lay everywhere underfoot, like stuff coming up from a netherworld, and many of the open places had been horrendously cratered and transformed into muddy alien landscapes. The roads were churned and sometimes impassable and the detours only created newly muddy and equally impassable tracks. In the bivouac where Heck had his bunk, the paths between the rows of tents and from the tents to the latrines were stinking mires. Clothing and leather and packs and paper felt sodden; cigarettes grew flaccid; pits of rust appeared on unoiled steel.

Each morning Heck reported for a roll call where some of the waiting replacements were pulled out by number and name, assigned to a unit, given orders, and sent toward the front on a deuce-and-a-half. The mechanisms of the army bureaucracy were beyond logical penetration and these processes had the air of a lottery of ill fortune. Some men were sent forward after only a day or two at Omaha while others had already loitered here for two or three weeks. Occasionally Heck was pulled into some task—KP, perhaps, or unloading rations and ammunition from a truck or landing craft—but until the lottery picked his number he largely existed in a military limbo, essentially without responsibility or practical direction. He passed day to day in tedium and nervous anticipation, in the tent and on the beach where the army's machines and supplies and refuse were spread. At times Heck wanted badly to get away from it. He began to wander down along the coast or into the countryside. This was discouraged, but no one really cared. He had the feeling of walking in a place not quite real, a place strange and boding, as if he had stepped into the geography of some relentless dream. The sandy cliffs rose sharply over the Channel waters, and inland lay wide wheat fields and cow pastures demarcated by tall hedgerows—impenetrably dense tangles of shrubs and trees and vines that grew along the backs of low, long earthen mounds two or three feet high. Many of the hedgerows showed torn and broken gaps where they had been blasted open with explosives or run through by a tank. The elegant spires of the cathedral at Bayeux could be seen from miles around. Roofs were made of slate, and the architecture—even of the barns and the cowsheds—was always of stone, an ash-blond limestone cut with great precision so that the corners of the buildings were defined by sharp right angles. The people seemed small; the older men wore jackets and ties and the younger men wore short sleeves and berets and watched the Americans gloomily. Heck did not know any French, and he listened to these people talking with some awe, some distrust—a part of him had trouble believing people could communicate by sounds so alien. And all around lay the detritus of war, scattered along the beaches and across the fields and into odd corners of the countryside: discarded gas masks, tires, gasoline cans, empty food tins and cartons, fallen telephone cables, parachute containers, deserted gun emplacements, overturned and exploded transports and boats and tanks, rolls of concertina wire, stacks of life belts, mildewed underwear. Homes reduced to door frames. Burned and abandoned bulldozers. The skeletons of goats, cows, dogs, horses. Plastic sheets and bags in all sizes. Paper handbills and flyers strewn amid smashed furniture, fragments of shattered glass. In town the treads of passing tanks were rapidly destroying the cobbled streets. The fallen shop buildings and churches and hotels and houses had the appearance of sand castles bludgeoned by a wrathful child.

One day, after having idled more than a week at Omaha, Heck followed along the coastside cliffs and beaches a couple of miles, then turned inland. He passed through a muddy wood, skirted the high grasses of a swampland, then followed a narrow cart path through several pastures. A skinny goat watched him as he passed. It seemed he had entered a place where the war had not encroached. It was, he thought, very beautiful. He sat for a few minutes on a broad, dry stone and watched a pair of rabbits foraging in a meadow. He smoked a cigarette. He stood again and followed a long hedgerow until it ended among some trees and he worked his way through these until he could see out into another meadow, where a German airplane had fallen. It lay on its belly, and the wings and tail section were gone, the fuselage blackened around the engine and cockpit. Small white clouds scurried by, orchestrating rapid passages of light and shadow, and the wind pushed gently at Heck making his eyes water, so that when he saw a shape moving in the plane's cockpit he thought at first it was an illusion of the wind, the tears, and the shadows of the clouds. But as his eyes cleared the figure failed to dissolve—it was a small, rounded shape, bobbing up and down in the airplane cockpit. The more Heck studied it, the more he thought it had to be a person's head. It kept popping up and down, then disappearing for a while, then reappearing. It reminded Heck of a bird, but it was too large. Then a small shape climbed out and began running forward and back along the fuselage and Heck realized it was a child, a boy. Heck could hear faintly the boy shouting. It struck Heck that, for a child, all this mess of war might seem like the equipment of a complicated and marvelous game. Then another figure appeared at the edge of the meadow to the right, a girl or young woman, who called to the boy. Heck turned and started away. He strode quickly, and he was hoping, without knowing or even wondering exactly why, that the boy and the woman had not observed him when there was the convulsive, sharp noise of a detonation, then screams.

Heck ran back to the edge of the field. The boy lay beside a smoking hole in the earth, screaming and flailing. The woman also was screaming, and she was running toward the boy.

Heck stepped forward, then halted. The boy, he guessed, had set off a land mine. Heck began shouting for the woman to stop, and she slowed for a step or two, looking wildly in his direction, then set off running again. Heck gazed in fear at her and the boy, then at the route before him across the field. He could see only densely growing grasses. When he looked up, the girl, running clumsily in her skirts, was already nearly halfway to the boy. Peering again at the grasses just before him Heck could see no glint of metal, no dark line of wire. Gingerly he pushed a foot forward, set it down, brought the other foot up beside it. The boy's screams already seemed to have become something eternal and luminous, thin and bright in the open air.

Then the woman reached the boy and she tried to haul him up by the armpits. The boy's screams redoubled then fell apart into loud sobs while he floundered and she staggered with him a couple of steps. The boy in his panic seemed to be fighting her, and he slid through her grip. She tried again but could only bring his shoulders to her waist. Then she looked over at Heck. She waved and shouted. Blood from the boy stood out brightly on one of her hands.

Heck glanced behind himself. It would probably take at least half an hour to find his way back to someone who could help. The girl continued to yell at him in French, and he couldn't understand her, but it sounded like she was already shouting at him more in anger than in pleading. For a second he swayed forward and back and forward; then something inside unexpectedly released and he began to run toward them. The tall grasses cracked under his boots, each one feeling exactly like a trip wire, so that every step contained several horrible instants during which he fell toward oblivion. The explosion and pain and void, however, did not come. As he reached the girl she alternately smiled and grimaced and yelled belligerently and loudly at him as though he were still somewhere across the field. She was probably sixteen or seventeen years old, only slightly younger than Heck was himself.

The boy's foot was bloody and looked a mess. Heck took off his shirt for a bandage; finally, he felt like he knew what he was doing. He said, “Quiet now, you're going to be fine, you'll be okay,” and the boy probably could not understand any of this but his cries fell to a strangled whimpering. The boy's hands and face were marked with black streaks of soot from the airplane, the knees of his trousers were patched, and his hair appeared combed but greasy, unwashed for a week or two. Heck got him into a sitting position, then, with an arm under the boy's shoulders, lifted him upright. The boy bounced on his good foot and moaned. “Be strong,” Heck said. “Be a good boy.” He looked around, and the girl pulled on his sleeve.

“There,” she said, pointing in the direction she had come across the field.

Heck hesitated, still wary of mines. It would be impossible to find the precise route the girl had taken across the field—the grasses had closed over and made it invisible. The way he had come was unmarked now, too, but he thought he could see the point where he had come out of the woods. He had run directly out, on a straight line, and he believed he could re-create it. Also, the woods were nearer in that direction. “We'll go back that way,” he said to the girl. “Then we can circle through the woods.” Half-carrying, half-dragging the boy he started ahead. The girl put an arm around the boy from the other side, and the three moved together slowly. The boy moaned; the shirt tied around his foot grew red and moist with blood. Heck watched the grasses ahead carefully, not sure exactly what he was looking for. Suddenly, about halfway to the woods, a new thought came to him. He looked at the girl. “You know English.”

She kept her face to the ground and did not immediately answer. Her skirts, brushing the boy's injured foot, were becoming bloodied. She said, with a thick accent, “A little English. Yes.”

In the woods the branches hid them from the sunlight and Heck had a feeling of being enclosed and having left the danger behind. When the girl pointed and said, “House,” he did not protest but helped move the boy in that direction.

Concentrating on helping the boy along, Heck failed to pay close attention to where they were going. They had not walked for long, it seemed, when he looked up and just ahead lay a stone building. It stood in a small clearing among the trees where the weeds and brush had grown so high that the walls of the house were largely obscured. The roof was sagging and had fallen through in a couple of places. As they came up to the door he saw that the windows were gone; some had been boarded up with panels of stained and varnished wood evidently removed from pieces of furniture. They stepped inside, and the walls glistened with water. Spread across the floor were things in sacks and rough bundles, ready, it appeared, to be moved at a moment's notice. Daylight came through the holes in the ceiling, and under the largest of these was an improvised, blackened fire pit. A man rose from a chair in the corner and hurried to the boy. Only when the man had taken the boy and Heck stood watching the two of them, feeling suddenly useless, did he notice that the man had only one arm. The man laid the boy out on a thin paillasse, then ran around the room fetching water and soap and a vial of iodine, tearing a sheet into bandages, all the while shouting at the children in French. He was extraordinarily dexterous with his single hand, able, using his teeth and underarms as anchors, to tie knots and wrap bandages. Heck stood in his dirty undershirt watching while they worked on the boy's foot. When it had been cleaned it actually did not look so bad. The boy's eyes caught the light and shone like beacons while he watched the others work on him.

When he finished dressing the boy's foot, the man stood and, for the first time, looked at Heck. His cheeks were scarred by purplish, pocked tissue that was only poorly obscured by a thin beard. He wore a suit of battered, dark blue wool and a yellowing shirt, open at the collar. His left sleeve was pinned up to the shoulder. He said, unprompted, “Lost it during the previous war with the Germans.” He gestured at the pinned sleeve. “You can stare if you like. Nation of brutish engineers, the Germans.” He spoke with an odd, pinched, vaguely British accent. “Running forward and back, up to this trench, back to that one. Then an explosion, and I find I've lost the arm. Could've been worse, of course.” He laughed, as though this were a joke. “You are American. My name is Albert. What's your name?”

“You're the father? Of the boy, and her?”

“Yes, of course. Please have a seat. She is Claire. The boy is Ives.”

Instinctively Heck felt wary of giving his real name. He said, “They've been calling me Heck.” He looked at Albert expecting questions, but Albert only nodded.

“Welcome,” said Albert, “to our château.” Again he laughed.

Heck sat at the small wooden table where Albert had been sitting when they entered. Albert rummaged into a trunk and offered Heck a shirt. It smelled sour and in the stomach was a cigarette burn, but it fit reasonably well. The left arm had to be unpinned. Albert then rinsed Heck's own shirt perfunctorily, and hung it to dry from a coat rack. The bloodstains still showed. Peering through doorways, Heck could see that the rooms farther back lay in ruined, haphazard arrangements of timber, stone, glass, and roof slates. The building had once been fairly large but it seemed only two front rooms survived more or less intact. The girl, Claire, was sitting in a wooden chair, near her brother. Heck watched her a moment then looked down at the table before him. He hoped this was not too obvious. She quietly studied her father or Ives and it was difficult to guess what she was thinking. Then, when Heck looked up, he saw all three of them gazing at him—hungrily, he thought.

“Their mother is dead, of course,” Albert said. “I do the best I can. Difficult times.” The flesh of his face and his neck drooped a little, as if he had been partially deflated.

“Maybe,” Heck said, “the boy should be taken to a doctor for stitches?”