Bible Stories for Adults (6 page)

They measured me, and for a few dicey minutes I feared that, being short and scrawny—my father always detested the fact that I wasn't a gorilla like him—I'd flunk out, but the sergeant just winked at me and said, “Stand on our toes, Bill.”

I did, stretching to the minimum height.

“You probably skipped breakfast this morning, right?” said the sergeant. Another wink. “Breakfast is good for a few pounds.”

“Yes, sir.”

My keeper turns: click, click, left face. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle from his right shoulder to his left. He pauses for twenty-one seconds then marches north down the black path. Click, click, he spins toward the Potomac and waits.

It's hard to say exactly why my plans changed. At Camp Sinclair they put me in a crisp khaki uniform and gave me a mess kit, a canteen, and a Remington rifle, and suddenly there I was, Private Bill Johnson of the American Expeditionary Forces, D Company, Eighteenth U.S. Infantry, First Division. And, of course, everybody was saying what a great time we were going to have driving the Heinies into the Baltic and seeing gay Paree. The Yanks were coming, and I wanted to be one of them—Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines wasn't about to risk an AWOL conviction and a tour in the brig while his friends were off visiting
la belle France
and its French belles. After my discharge, there'd be plenty of time to show Harry Hines what his son had learned in the army.

They're changing the guard. For the next half hour, an African-American PFC will protect me. We used to call them coloreds, of course. Niggers, to tell you the truth. Today this particular African-American has a fancy job patrolling my tomb, but when they laid me here in 1921 his people weren't even allowed in the regular divisions. The 365th, that was the nigger regiment, and when they finally reached France, you know what Pershing had them do? Dig trenches, unload ships, and bury white doughboys.

But my division—
we'd
get a crack at glory, oh, yes. They shipped us over on the British tub
Magnolia
and dropped us down near the front line a mile west of a jerkwater Frog village, General Robert Bullard in charge. I'm not sure what I expected from France. My buddy Alvin Platt said they'd fill our canteens with red wine every morning. They didn't. Somehow I thought I'd be in the war without actually
fighting
the war, but suddenly there we were, sharing a four-foot trench with a million cooties and dodging
Mieniewaffers
like some idiots you'd see in a newsreel at the Ziegfeld with a Fairbanks picture and a Chaplin two-reeler, everybody listening for the dreaded cry “Gas attack!” and waiting for the order to move forward. By April of 1918 we'd all seen enough victims of Boche mustard—coughing up blood, shitting their gizzards out, weeping from blind eyes—that we clung to our gas masks like little boys hugging their teddies.

My keeper marches south, his bayonet cutting a straight incision in the summer air. I wonder if he's ever used it. Probably not. I used mine plenty in '18. “If a Heinie comes toward you with his hands up yelling ‘
Kamerad
,' don't be fooled,” Sergeant Fiskejohn told us back at Camp Sinclair. “He's sure as hell got a potato masher in one of those hands. Go at him from below, and you'll stop him easy. A long thrust in the belly, then a short one, then a butt stroke to the chin if he's still on his feet, which he won't be.”

On May 28 the order came through, and we climbed out of the trenches and fought what's now called the Battle of Cantigny, but it wasn't really a battle, it was a grinding push into the German salient with hundreds of men on both sides getting hacked to bits like we were a bunch of steer haunches hanging in our barns back home. Evidently the Boche caught more than we did, because after forty-five minutes that town was ours, and we waltzed down the gunky streets singing our favorite ditty.

 

The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?

The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous?

The mademoiselle from gay Paree
,

She had the clap and she gave it to me
,

Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

 

I'll never forget the first time I drew a bead on a Heinie, a sergeant with a handlebar mustache flaring from his upper lip like antlers. I aimed, I squeezed, I killed him, just like that: now he's up, now he's down—a man I didn't even know. I thought how easy it was going to be shooting Harry Hines, a man I hated.

For the next three days the Boche counterattacked, and then I did learn to hate them. Whenever somebody lost an arm or a leg to a potato masher, he'd cry for his mother, in English mostly but sometimes in Spanish and sometimes Yiddish, and you can't see that happen more than once without wanting to kill every Heinie in Europe, right up to the Kaiser himself. I did as Fiskejohn said. A boy would stumble toward me with his hands up—
“Kamerad! Kamerad!”
—and I'd go for his belly. There's something about having a Remington in your grasp with that lovely slice of steel jutting from the bore. I'd open the fellow up left to right, like I was underlining a passage in the sharpshooter's manual, and he'd spill out like soup. It was interesting and legal. Once I saw a sardine. On the whole, though, Fiskejohn was wrong. The dozen boys I ripped weren't holding potato mashers or anything else.

I switched tactics. I took prisoners.
“Kamerad!”
Five at first.
“Kamerad!”
Six.
“Kamerad!”
Seven. Except that seventh boy in fact had a masher, which he promptly lobbed into my chest.

Lucky for me, it bounced back.

The Heinie caught enough of the kick to get his face torn off, whereas I caught only enough to earn myself a bed in the field hospital. For a minute I didn't know I was wounded. I just looked at that boy who had no nose, no lower jaw, and wondered whether perhaps I should use a grenade on Harry Hines.

Click, click, my keeper turns to the left. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle, waits. The Old Guard—the Third U.S. Infantry—never quits. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: can you imagine? Three
A.M.
on Christmas morning, say, with snow tumbling down and nobody around except a lot of dead veterans, and here's this grim, silent sentinel strutting past my tomb? It gives me the creeps.

The division surgeons spliced me together as best they could, but I knew they'd left some chips behind because my chest hurt like hell. A week after I was taken off the critical list, they gave me a month's pay and sent me to Bar-le-Duc for some rest and relaxation, which everybody knew meant cognac and whores.

The whole village was a red-light district, and if you had the francs you could find love around the clock, though you'd do well to study the choices and see who had that itchy look a lady acquires when she's got the clap. And so it was that on the first of July, as the hot French twilight poured into a cootie-ridden bordello on the Place Vendôme, Wilbur Hines's willy finally put to port after nineteen years at sea. Like Cantigny, it was quick and confusing and over before I knew it. I had six more days coming to me, though, and I figured it would get better.

My keeper heads north, twenty-one paces. The sun beats down. The sweatband of his cap is rank and soggy. Click, click: right face. His eyes lock on the river.

I loved Bar-le-Duc. The citizens treated me like a war hero, saluting me wherever I went. There's no telling how far you'll go in this world if you're willing to belly-rip a few German teenagers.

Beyond the Poilu and the hookers, the cafés were also swarming with Bolsheviks, and I must admit their ideas made sense to me—at least, they did by my fourth glass of Château d'Yquem. After Cantigny, with its flying metal and Alvin Platt walking around with a bloody stump screaming “Mommy!” I'd begun asking the same questions as the Bolshies, such as, “Why are we having this war, anyway?” When I told them my family was poor, the Bolshies got all excited, and I hadn't felt so important since the army took me. I actually gave those fellows a few francs, and they promptly signed me up as a noncom in their organization. So now I held two ranks, PFC in the American Expeditionary forces and lance corporal in the International Brotherhood of Proletarian Veterans or whatever the hell they were calling themselves.

My third night on the cathouse circuit, I got into an argument with one of the tarts. Fifi—I always called them Fifi—decided she'd given me special treatment on our second round, something to do with her mouth, her
bouche
, and now she wanted twenty francs instead of the usual ten. Those ladies thought every doughboy was made of money. All you heard in Bar-le-Duc was “
les Americains, beaucoup d'argent
.”

“Dix francs,”
I said.

“Vingt,”
Fifi insisted. Her eyes looked like two dead snails. Her hair was the color of Holstein dung.

“Dix”

“Vingt
—or I tell ze MP you rip me,” Fifi threatened. She meant rape.

“Dix,”
I said, throwing the coins on the bed, whereupon Fifi announced with a tilted smile that she had “a bad case of ze VD” and hoped she'd given it to me.

Just remember, you weren't there. Your body wasn't full of raw metal, and you didn't have Fifi's clap, and nobody was expecting you to maintain a lot of distinctions between the surrendering boys you were supposed to stab and the Frog tarts you weren't. It was hot. My chest hurt. Half my friends had died capturing a pissant hamlet whose streets were made of horse manure. And all I could see were those nasty little clap germs gnawing at my favorite organs.

My Remington stood by the door. The bayonet was tinted now, the color of a turnip; so different from the war itself, that bayonet—no question about its purpose. As I pushed it into Fifi and listened to the rasp of the steel against her pelvis, I thought how prophetic her mispronunciation had been: I tell ze MP you rip me.

I used the fire escape. My hands were wet and warm. All the way back to my room, I felt a gnawing in my gut like I'd been gassed. I wished I'd never stood on my toes in the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. A ditty helped. After six reprises and a bottle of cognac, I finally fell asleep.

 

The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous?

The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous?

The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc
,

She'll screw you in the chicken coop
,

Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

 

On the sixteenth of July, I boarded one of those 40-and-8 trains and rejoined my regiment, now dug in along the Marne. A big fight had already happened there, sometime in '14, and they were hoping for another. I was actually glad to be leaving Bar-le-Duc, for all its wonders and delights. The local gendarmes, I'd heard, were looking into the Fifi matter.

Click, click, thock, thock, thock. My keeper pauses, twenty-one seconds. He marches south down the black path.

At the Marne they put me in charge of a Hotchkiss machine gun, and I set it up on a muddy hill, the better to cover the forward trench where they'd stationed my platoon. I had two good friends in that hole, and so when Captain Mallery showed up with orders from
le général
—we were now part of the XX French Corps—saying I should haul the Hotchkiss a mile downstream, I went berserk.

“Those boys are completely exposed,” I protested. The junk in my chest was on fire. “If there's an infantry attack, we'll lose 'em all.”

“Move the Hotchkiss, Private Johnson,” the captain said.

“That's not a very good idea,” I said.

“Move it.”

“They'll be naked as jaybirds.”

“Move it.
Now
.”

A couple of wars later, of course, attacks on officers by their own men got raised to a kind of art form—I know all about it, I like to read the tourists' newspapers—but this was 1918 and the concept was still in its infancy. I certainly didn't display much finesse as I pulled out my Colt revolver and in a pioneering effort shot Mallery through the heart. It was all pretty crude.

And then, damn, who should happen by but the CO himself, crusty old Colonel Horrocks, his eyes bulging with disbelief. He told me I was arrested. He said I'd hang. But by then I was fed up. I was fed up with gas scares and Alvin Platt getting his arm blown off. I was fed up with being an American infantry private and an honorary Bolshevik, fed up with greedy hookers and gonorrhea and the whole dumb, bloody, smelly war. So I ran. That's right: ran, retreated, quit the western front.

Unfortunately, I picked the wrong direction. I'd meant to make my way into Chateau-Thierry and hide out in the cathouses till the Mallery situation blew over, but instead I found myself heading toward Deutschland itself, oh, yes, straight for the enemy line. Stupid, stupid.

When I saw my error, I threw up my hands.

And screamed.

“
Kamerad! Kamerad!”

Bill Johnson née Wilbur Hines never fought in the Second Battle of the Marne. He never helped his regiment drive the Heinies back eight miles, capture four thousand of the Kaiser's best troops, and kill God knows how many more. This private missed it all, because the Boche hit him with everything they had. Machine-gun fire, grapeshot, rifle bullets, shrapnel. A potato masher detonated. A mustard shell went off. Name: unknown. Address: unknown. Complexion: charred. Eye color: no eyes. Hair: burned off. Weeks later, when they scraped me off the Marne floodplain, it was obvious I was a prime candidate for the Arlington program. Lucky for me, Colonel Horrocks got killed at Soissons. He'd have voted me down.