A Special Providence (10 page)

Hilton would only blink and obey his tormentors with a mild, drugged smile of chronic humiliation, and Prentice watched him with a terrible sense of foreboding: it
was
possible, then, to be one of a handful of combat survivors and still be despised.

Soon after dark the train came to a stop and a pair of hands slid a carton of C rations into the car. It would be the first time Prentice had eaten all day, but he knew he would have to wait until one of the veterans opened the box and distributed the cans, and none of them seemed hungry. Most of them dropped out into the snow at the cry of “Piss call!” to take advantage of the stop. And it was during the same stop that Lieutenant Agate climbed into the car with a flashlight, followed by a big stout man who was evidently the first sergeant.

“All right, all you new men,” Agate said. “I want to get your names and find out something about your background. First man, over here. What’s your name?” And the flashlight beam fell on the squinting face of Sam Rand, who identified himself.

“How much infantry training you had, Rand?”

“Six weeks, sir, is all. Before that I had three years in the Engineers.”

“Okay. Next man.” And he went through the replacements that way until the light came full into Prentice’s face, making him wince and feel the stares of everyone in the car.

“Prentice, sir. Six weeks’ infantry training. Before that I had six weeks in the Air Force.”

“Where were you before that?”

“Nowhere, sir.” And as the laughter rose and broke around him he said, “I mean I was a civilian before that.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Lieutenant Agate, and the flashlight went away. He conferred quietly with the first sergeant for a while, and then the flashlight swept the replacements’ end of the car again. “Weapons Platoon needs a man or two. Any of you men familiar with the light machine gun?”

“I am, sir.”

“Who’s that again?”

“Quint, sir.”

“Okay, Quint; you report to Sergeant Rolls, soon as we get off the train, tell him you’re assigned to his section. Got that? R-o-double l-s.”

Another man was singled out to serve with a mortar section; the rest of them were to be riflemen. Then, as an afterthought, Agate said: “Oh, hey, wait. Second Platoon needs a runner. Anybody?” The flashlight came into Prentice’s eyes again. “You want the runner’s job?”

“All right, sir.” And he was told to report to a Sergeant Brewer. He wasn’t wholly sure what a runner’s job was, but he suspected it was something easier and safer than being a rifleman; he suspected too that Agate had picked him because he was the youngest, or maybe because he looked the least competent. Still, it had a nice individual sound to it – the runner – and apparently
there was only one for each platoon. Didn’t that mean it might carry a certain amount of responsibility?

“All right, here’s the story,” Agate said, raising his voice to include everyone in the car. “We’re going into the Seventh Army sector, down in Alsace. Looks like we’re turning into one of these bastard divisions they shove all over the map to plug up holes. Anyway, we’ll be under the command of the French First Army, whatever the hell that means, and we’ll be going up to the line tomorrow some time. We’ll be relieving the Third Division. That’s all I know for now. There’s gonna be trucks waiting for us when we get off the train. Meantime you better get as much sleep as you can.”

Prentice was lucky enough to find Sergeant Brewer soon after the train had stopped, and he was lucky too in that Sergeant Brewer turned out to be a big, kindly Westerner with pleasant manners. “You’re the new runner, right?” he asked, standing in the snow with his gloved hand enfolding Prentice’s in a painfully reassuring clinch. “What’s your name again? Okay, Prentice, I’ll fix it for you to meet the squad leaders and everything later on, soon as we’re settled.” And Prentice had to fight an impulse to cling to Sergeant Brewer, whimpering for protection. “Right now, though, you better hurry along and get into that truck.”

The slow ride in the truck convoy, whining in first and second gear over endless mountain roads – somebody said they were in the Vosges – was unbelievably cold. After a while Prentice could feel nothing of his legs from the knees down; it was useless to try flexing his toes or stamping his feet. It could have been two hours or five hours or eight that they traveled; he had lost all sense of time in the cold that held him sitting as stiff as a corpse. When they stopped at last it was almost impossible for him to stand and move. He dropped off and fell in the snow, and it was several seconds before he could get up.

They were quartered for the rest of the night in a big shelled-out factory deep between the slopes of two great hills. It was better than sleeping outdoors, but not much, for all the factory’s windows and ragged sections of its walls were open to the wind. Working in the glow of matches and candle stubs, they made their beds on long waist-high work tables that were cluttered with metal scraps and bits of broken glass.

It was still dark when Prentice woke up in a convulsion of coughing, hearing a loud, tearful voice across the room that sounded remarkably like his own:

“Oh Jesus,
help
me, somebody, I’m
sick
! I can’t
breathe
! Oh Jesus – please – Medic! Medic! Somebody
help
me; I’m
sick …
”

His coughing had forced him upright on the work table. He began to retch and leaned over to drop clots of phlegm on the floor; then all at once, still retching, he felt hands gripping his arms and a flashlight was blazing in his face, and he dimly saw that one of the men holding him wore the white-encircled red cross of the medics on his helmet.

“What’s the matter, kid? You the one that called out?”

“No – somebody else – over there.”

“… Oh Jesus, somebody please
help
me …”

The flashlight and the hands went away, and in a minute he saw the medics helping a tall, stumbling, weeping figure down one of the aisles between the work tables and away into the darkness.

In the morning they were issued ammunition in what seemed unnecessary amounts: enough rifle clips to fill the cartridge belt, many additional clips in three cotton bandoliers that hung crisscross from the shoulders, and two hand grenades apiece.

For half an hour or so they lingered in the factory to work over their gear, each man separating the things to be left behind, in duffelbags and bedrolls, from the things to be carried into the
field. Prentice worked not with the Second Platoon but with the much smaller company headquarters group, which was composed of the other platoon runners, the bazooka man, a couple of communications men, and several other specialists whose jobs he didn’t understand. The only one who talked to him was a very short boy named Owens – he looked too small to have been taken into the Army – who was the runner for Weapons Platoon.

“Take plenty of cigarettes,” Owens counseled him, “and take all the socks you’ve got, even if it seems like too many. You don’t change your socks often enough, you wind up with trenchfoot. And take toothpaste too, if you’ve got any. I know that seems funny, but toothpaste comes in handy as hell. Sometimes you brush your teeth, it’s almost as good as getting a night’s sleep.” The only toothpaste Prentice could find in his bag was a big Economy-Size tube of Ipana that he must have acquired in the PX at Camp Pickett, and whether it seemed funny or not he stuffed it into one of his shirt pockets, along with his toothbrush.

When they moved out it was to march five miles to something called the Forward Assembly Area. At first the march seemed easy, with so little to carry, and the action of walking helped to keep the cold out, but before long Prentice’s knees had gone soft and he felt feverish. The loaded cartridge belt was a heavy drag at his waist and the bandolier straps were cutting into his neck.

“… Mutt and Jeff!” Lieutenant Agate was calling, walking backwards at the head of the column, and Prentice saw with a start that he was smiling straight at him.

“… guys look like Mutt and Jeff,” he called again, and this time Prentice got the point: that he and Owens, who was walking beside him, made a comic contrast of tall and short.

“How’s the cough, kid?” the lieutenant called, and when Prentice tried to say “Okay, sir,” he found he had lost his voice. He tried it again, and nothing but a whisper came out. Finally he shaped his cracked lips into a smile and nodded, hoping that would take care of it, and as he walked he tried to clear his throat.

“Hey, Owens?” he tried to say. “Listen. I’ve lost my voice.” And he managed enough of a squeak to make Owens look up.

“What?”

“I’ve lost my
voice
. I can’t
talk.
”

“Laryngitis, I guess.” Owens had his own problems. He’d said this morning that he thought he had dysentery, and he didn’t seem to be feeling any better.

“All right,” the lieutenant was calling now. “Spread it out. Five paces apart.”

The Forward Assembly Area, somewhere up past the artillery positions, was a thinly wooded field of snow in which they were told to dig two-man foxholes. The digging quickly exhausted Prentice – his quivering jabs with the entrenching tool became less and less effectual – but Owens helped him out, and before long they had a hole deep enough to be considered finished. For what seemed hundreds of yards in all directions the field was ravaged by black holes and mounds of thrown-up earth. Everywhere men crouched and dug, or sat in their holes and waited, or gathered in nervous little groups to talk about what they were heading for, which was said to be something called the Colmar Pocket. First Battalion was to lead the attack, and their first objective was to be the taking of a town called Horbourg, around which elements of the 3rd Division were said to have been embattled for several days. It all sounded unreal to Prentice.

“How long,” he squeaked to Owens, “– how long do you think we’ll be staying here?”

“Oh, probably till morning. I don’t think they’d have us digging in if they figured on moving us out any sooner.”

But he was wrong: they moved out that same afternoon. A shelled-out village, some three miles to the rear of Horbourg, was the jumping-off point for the attack. “A” Company arrived there to find the place a jumble of men and machines: the broken streets, strung with many-colored communications wire, were crawling with vehicles of all kinds, and there were men from the 57th, the 3rd, and a French unit, all busy and hurrying in what seemed a state of total confusion. There were a few civilians too, mostly old men and women in black, with shy, bewildered faces. It puzzled Prentice at first that they seemed to be speaking German, and that the spattered road signs were in German too, until a dim store of schoolroom knowledge reminded him that Alsace was only technically a part of France.

“You hear what I heard?” Owens asked him as the column sat resting against a shrapnel-scarred wall, waiting for Agate to finish his briefing with a number of other officers. “They say Horbourg’s changed hands three times in the past two days.”

“Changed what?”

“Changed hands. Between us and the Germans.”

“Oh. No, I hadn’t heard that.” His voice was still either a squeak or a husk, and he was weak and lightheaded from the day of marching and digging and marching again. He hoped Agate’s briefing would take a long time, so that he could stay seated on this wet sidewalk with his back against this wall. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get up and move again.

The orders, according to Agate, were that they would move out soon after nightfall. An artillery barrage would be laid down on Horbourg at seven o’clock, and then they’d go in. In the meantime, each platoon was assigned to a separate cellar or stable
in the village for resting and waiting. The password for the night was “Mickey Mouse.”

Prentice was called upon to deliver several routine messages to Sergeant Brewer while they waited, and he found his fever and fatigue dissolving into a kind of appalled exhilaration that felt nothing at all like fear. He hoped he was being noticed as he walked slowly but conspicuously alone down the streets of churned snow, where everyone else was moving in groups, and he took pride in delivering his small messages, even though the effort of speaking made him twist and rise on tiptoe before any sound came out. He hoped the men who overheard him wouldn’t think this chirping was his normal voice.

Late in the afternoon the company cooks brought food up to the village for the first hot meal they’d had since Belgium – salmon patties, dehydrated potatoes, and canned fruit salad – and most of the men seemed in high spirits as they sat or squatted over their mess kits in the street.

“What kind of catshit is this?”

“Salmon-patty catshit, that’s what kind.”

Prentice looked around for Quint but couldn’t see him, though he did catch a glimpse of Sam Rand soberly chewing and talking with some other men. It occurred to him that Sam Rand was the only man in sight he really knew, and that of all the others he knew only three or four by name. Even so, he began to feel a sentimental affection for all of them. Very soon now, all these strangers might well be his friends.

But he found he could eat only a few mouthfuls without retching, and after he’d thrown away most of his meal he felt the sickness closing in on him again.

He found a broken slab of concrete to sit down on, and wondered if he dared to light a cigarette. The worst thing about Horbourg now was that it was three miles away: he felt it would
take everything he had to walk three miles. The scene around him began to float and blur, and if there had been a place to lay his head he would have fallen instantly asleep.

“Move over, old buddy,” said John Quint’s voice; and there he came, lugging a machine-gun barrel on his shoulder, slowly strutting out of the crowd with his cold pipe clenched upside down in his teeth. He had apparently forgotten that he and Prentice were not on speaking terms. “You look like I feel,” he said, letting himself carefully down on the slab.

“It’s funny, you know? I felt—”

“What the Christ’s the matter with your voice?”

“I don’t know. Laryngitis or something. But I mean it’s funny, you know? I felt pretty good just before we ate, and now I’m sick as hell again. I guess it comes and goes.”