To the End of the War (3 page)

One of the faults of the novel, which made it clumsy, was the spewing out of gossip in the exposés of wealthy or prominent citizens of Robinson. A close friend of Lowney and Jones wrote on December 9, 2010: “It was Lowney’s experiences as part of Robinson bridge playing and golfing partners at the country club that supplied Jim with material for
Laughter
. He had been too young to know his characters. And I now realize that it was more gossip than true portrayals.” Jones did know his fellow soldiers.

Writing to Perkins on February 10, 1946, to ask about Scribner’s decision concerning publishing
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
, Jones mentioned that he wanted to do a novel about his friend Stewart and the peacetime army.

Perkins telegraphed Jones on February 16, 1946: WOULD YOU CONSIDER PAYMENT FIVE HUNDRED NOW FOR OPTION ON STEWART NOVEL [FROM HERE TO ETERNITY] AND SETTING ASIDE INHERIT LAUGHTER FOR REASON ILL WRITE SOME FURTHER PAYMENT TO BE MADE AFTER WE APPROVE SOME FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS. WISH TO COOPERATE BUT HAVE MORE FAITH IN SECOND NOVEL, AND HAVE FURTHER REVISIONS TO PROPOSED [SIC] FOR LAUGHTER.

Jones wired Perkins on February 17: PROPOSITION ACCEPTED PLACING MYSELF IN YOUR HANDS AND AWAITING LETTER HERE. . . . In Maxwell Perkins, Jones had found another person who believed in his promise as a writer.

Perkins sent Jones an encouraging letter and explained his reasons for not accepting
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
. He felt the public was not interested in the subject at that time and that the novel would seem insulting by military people and by civilians. It might be more acceptable at a later time, Perkins believed. Jones never revised the novel, but
Some Came Running
and
Whistle
were indebted to it.

The editors at Scribner’s were correct;
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
should not be published, but there are chapters and parts of chapters that deserve to appear as stories.

I have rescued the best parts of the manuscript, but this publication is not
They Shall Inherit the Laughter
. It is a collection of interrelated stories now titled
To the End of the War
, a toast given by servicemen suffering from remembrances of death and destruction and fear, always fear, and at present they were possessed by anger, confusion, and guilt. They drank to stilled guns and to peace.

The best stories are about the autobiographic hero, Johnny Carter, and his friends. Corny has not disappeared, but her role is diminished, and she has been renamed. Jones turned a chapter about his friend George in the novel into the short story “Two Legs for the Two of Us” (which was eventually published elsewhere). He changed Corny’s name to Sandy to distance that story from Corny. I have followed Jones’s lead and used the name
Sandy
throughout. All other names remain the same.

Chapters based on gossip about prominent Robinsonians have been omitted.

Sections of the novel that read like book reports on Eugene Debs, Prince Kropotkin, Thorstein Veblen, and other radicals have been omitted. Reading in Lowney’s library, Jones caught the excitement of college students taking the course “Great Ideas of the World” and wanted to let the whole world know about his intellectual discoveries. Again, he had not internalized these ideas. That material is omitted.

Lessons on Emersonian Transcendentalism have been omitted, as has a lecture on the yin-yang symbol. Lowney’s comments on art and politics are not included.

Johnny’s rage remains, the causes near the surface and deep, deep.

One man whom Johnny once liked now gleefully wants to drop bombs. He remains in all his sinfulness.

Hypocrisy on the home front remains, as do war-mongering ministers, businessmen, and citizens.

Johnny and friends remain, frozen in time, as are their anger, frustration, pain, and humanity.

A toast: “To the end of the war.”

From his first writings about army life, James Jones had a gift for dialogue. In this story, probably written in 1944, he explores the mistreatment and resentments of enlisted men. Wounded and with physical or psychological impairments, they were now declared fit for additional combat service. Desertion was an option.

Little has changed since 1944: the Walter Reed Medical Center scandal, the repeated deployments, the refusal to give benefits to some wounded men and women, and the need for wartime cannon fodder, even if the soldier is not physically fit.

The widow of a fifty-year-old reservist in one of our current wars “said her husband suffered from a bad knee, a bum shoulder, and high blood pressure—and never should never have been sent to Iraq in the first place, given his physical ailments” (
Newsweek
, February 14, 2011, p. 34).

ON THE ROAD, AUTUMN 1943

T
HE HOSPITAL
R
ECEIVING
O
FFICE WAS
a small wooden building set in the large quadrangle of brick buildings that held the wards and the various branches of Surgery and Therapy and Pharmacy. Through an opening in this brick bulwark the trucks brought the newly arrived patients from the hospital trains, and long lines of the walking sick and wounded twined in and out around the inner sanctum and passed through the Receiving Office to be assigned and checked and looked over. The hospital, originally built to handle three thousand patients, was already becoming overcrowded and plans were being figured as to how to handle the influx that swept in like waves from the hospital trains that pulled into the hospital siding downtown in Memphis every few days.

This day, however, was not one of those in which a wild scramble was enacted to get the patients settled before dark. There was no influx of patients in the quadrangle, and its largeness looked deserted and lonely except for the occasional uniformed figures going back and forth on some kind of duty.

Corporal Johnny Carter, formerly of Endymion, Indiana, carrying the black gladstone which held all his earthly possessions, limped indifferently across the expanse of dusty sparsely grassed red earth from the Convalescent Barracks to the Receiving Office. He was on his way out, back to duty.

He left his bag on the porch of the white wooden building and went inside to pick up his records and travel orders. He didn’t know yet where he was going, and he didn’t care much since one place would be about the same as another: The best he could hope for would be a camp near or in a large town. He was not happy at the prospect of going back to duty.

The chief clerk, who handed him the orders and the large brown envelope of records, was a tall slim arrogantly intelligent young man, after the usual pattern of army clerks. He was a technical sergeant and his black wavy hair was worn long in defiance of tradition, showing proudly that he did not spend time in the field as do the less intelligent common ruck of soldiery.

“Corporal,” he said. “You will have a two-man detail to report in with you. Here are the train tickets. That two-and-a-half-ton job out in front is the truck to take you to the station. Your detail hasn’t shown up yet. When they do, have them load their equipment in the back and get in. All three Service Records are in that envelope. Be very careful of them. In the army, a man’s Service Record is more important than anything else. Including the man.”

Johnny did not like the chief clerk’s long hair or his arrogant intelligence that he wore like chevrons. He grunted an “Okay,” and turned to the door. In his four and a half years in the army, he had done some clerical work himself and had come in contact with a great many clerks.

The chief clerk leaned his elbows on the counter behind which he stood and elaborately lighted a cigaret with a silver Dunhill lighter which he took from his pocket.

“Is that that Camp Campbell detail?” A first lieutenant sat behind the counter, his feet—encased in the prescribed leggings—cocked up on a typing table, a pencil behind his ear, reading a newspaper. “Yessir,” said the chief clerk. “I want to talk to him,” said the lieutenant, “Corporal,” said the chief clerk. “The lieutenant wants to speak to you.”

Johnny came back and stood at a weary attention before the lieutenant. The lieutenant put down his newspaper irritably, took down his feet, stood up, took the pencil from behind his ear and turned it over and over in his bands. He neglected to give Johnny “at ease,” and Johnny continued to stand at attention. The chief clerk stood respectfully near, a little behind the lieutenant. “These two men you’re in charge of are bad ones,” the lieutenant said. “One of them, Wilkinsson, has been over the hill four times since he came here. The other one—what’s his name?” he turned to the chief clerk who handed him a copy of the Special Orders and murmured a respectful “Gettinger.”

The lieutenant took the paper and ran his pencil down the page line by line as a pointer. “Gettinger,” he said finally. “The other one, Gettinger, has been over twice. You may have trouble with them. If they try to get away from you, put the hammer on ’em.” The lieutenant gave Johnny a sharp glance to impress his order. Johnny was not an MP and did not carry sidearms. He had a wild vision of himself throwing rocks at two retreating figures. But being more or less experienced in the army, he refrained from asking for clarification as to with what he would put the hammer on ’em.

“If they get away from you,” the lieutenant said, “report them to the nearest Provost Marshall.” Outside of downtown Memphis, Johnny had no idea of the whereabouts of any Provost Marshall in the country. However, he did not interrupt the lieutenant to ask. Johnny, who was still standing at attention, snapped out a belligerent salute, said “Yessir,” and walked outside. The lieutenant returned the salute with a casual gesture and, his duty attended to, sat back down, replaced the pencil behind his ear, recocked his feet, and took up his interrupted newspaper. He began to speak authoritatively about the Russians to the chief clerk, who successfully accomplished the feat of listening respectfully and comradely at the same time.

Outside Johnny tossed his bag into the back and then sat down on the running board of the empty truck to wait, feeling vaguely resentful and irritated. In 1945 the fall was a long one, and in November the weather was still hot out in the sun. Johnny scraped little crosses in the dust with the toe of his shoe and felt the sweat begin to trickle down his spine and drip from his armpits. His vague irritation rose and became specific: He was wearing one of his good uniforms. He possessed four; two of them had been issued by the hospital, the other two he had bought downtown in Memphis. The issue uniforms were khaki chenille summer uniforms; they fitted him like bags, and there are no post tailors or regimental tailors here as there had been at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii to put them down. He wore them as little as possible. The other two uniforms were officer uniforms with shoulder straps and were of tropical worsted wool. He had been ordered by several MPs to remove the shoulder straps, but up to now he had been able to wriggle out of doing so, although he never considered why it was so necessary to him to keep the unauthorized officer shoulder straps. He got up from the running board and moved out of the sun to sit on the edge of the little porch of the Receiving Office.

Presently, he saw the other two men coming. They struggled down the dusty road, each carrying his two blue barracks bags, heavily stuffed and awkward. Johnny watched them sympathetically. He was glad he had lost all his gear; when he came back to the States he wore hospital pajamas and had nothing left of four years’ accumulation of property except a toothbrush, razor, a minute can of Dr Lyon’s toothpowder, and a GI shaving brush. After his outfit moved out to beach positions on December 7, 1941, self-appointed salvage artists had gone through the barracks: he lost two civilian suits, a tropical dinner outfit, a radio/Victrola and a hundred records, three expensive pairs of civilian shoes, and an assortment of other things, including his favorite pair of dice. When he was evacuated from Guadalcanal, he lost everything he owned except the fatigue uniform he wore and his toilet articles, including an A-1 portable typewriter. He was glad though now, because he didn’t have to lug it all around or take care of it.

The two men plumped down their barracks bags in the dust and stood breathing heavily and wiping the sweat from their faces.

“Wilkinsson and Gettinger?” Johnny asked.

The two men nodded. “Wilkinsson,” said the tall dark one. The short red-headed youth muttered “Gettinger.”

“This is our truck,” Johnny said. “You guys better report in when you get your breath.”

Both men grunted sourly and continued to stand where they were, breathing heavily from the quarter-mile trip with the heavy cumbersome barracks bags. Johnny lit a cigaret.

The chief clerk stuck his head out the window. “All right, you two men,” he said. “Get in here and report. You can’t spend the morning out there.” Wilkinsson and Gettinger climbed up on the porch and went inside with tightened lips. After a moment, during which the chief clerk asked them their names, they came back out and sat down on the edge of the porch in the shade.

“Where we going?” the red-headed youth asked.

“Camp Campbell, Kentucky,” Johnny said. “26th Division.”

“Well, Jesus Christ,” commented Gettinger. “That outfit’s supposed to be getting ready to ship.”

Johnny nodded. “That’s what I heard.”

“These lousy cockbeaters,” said the dark saturnine Wilkinsson. “If they think they’re going to send me back overseas, they’re crazy.”

“You and me.” Gettinger shook his red head. “What the hell do they want from a man anyway? Were you in Surgery?”

“Yeah,” said Johnny. “That son of a bitch, O’Flagherty,” said Gettinger. He was referring to Captain O’Flagherty, in charge of convalescent surgery cases. “If he was overseas, he’d get his guts shot out in ten minutes.” Captain O’Flagherty was a huge Irishman with a caustic sarcasm for a voice and a sneering moustache.

“You know what he told me?” asked Gettinger. “O’Flagherty called me in and asked me if I could do Infantry duty. I told him no and he said: ‘What’s the matter with you, Gettinger? Don’t you like the army? You think you can goldbrick your way out of it? Well, you can’t. That’s why I’m here.’