In Sunlight and in Shadow (62 page)

Death leads either to the absence of light or to its omnipresence. One summer night in France, Harry Copeland lay in the brush, dying of a wound he could not see. For a few hours, the morphia had cleared away the frictions and regrets of existence, relaxing him to whatever might come, closing his accounts, dotting every
i,
crossing every
t,
winding every clock, locking every door, packing every case, and forgiving every sin. The only regret that stayed and that morphia could not erase was that he had yet to love or be loved as he had always hoped. All the majestical lights, airy and bright, the floating orbs, the effulgent stars, were lonely things and would not suffice. And here it was, deep in a luminous, moonlit forest, that he had wished for an angel, for as they lay dying all soldiers wherever they may be need an angel to carry them up.

A
MAJOR AND A
lieutenant of the 82nd came to the field hospital in Vierville sometime in June. Like many paratroopers, they were strapping and tall. Their faces were as remarkably even and uneventful as those of bankers and brokers with houses in Scarsdale or on the North Shore. The major was in his late thirties, and smoked a pipe. The lieutenant was young, reserved, and from the South. Harry was too tired to try to guess the state, but nonetheless he could not help but think of Georgia, and left it at that.

Carrying chairs that, like overly cautious lion tamers, they held out before them with both hands, they walked down the center aisle between the invalids. Then they rooted the chairs next to Harry’s cot and stepped close, speaking as if to a foreigner.

“Why are you talking to me that way?” he asked. “I’m an American. I understand English.”

“Sorry,” said the lieutenant. He handled apologies. “We just wanted to make sure you could hear.”

“Why wouldn’t I hear?”

“You’re wounded.”

“Not in the head.”

“We’ve spoken,” the major said, correctively but entirely without animus, “to a lot of men, many of whom were in terribly bad shape.” He dipped his head forward, as if in a bow. “Can you answer a few questions?”

“Sure,” Harry said, weakly. The energy that upon their arrival he thought was his had left him unexpectedly, which they could tell—from his appearance, his breathing, and because now and then he closed his eyes as if he were asleep or wanting to be.

“You were in the church at Montmartin en Graignes?”

“I didn’t know what it was called.”

“During the massacre?”

“And before, and after.”

“How did you get there? It wasn’t your regiment.”

“I know.”

“Did you fight with them to hold the town?”

Harry shook his head to signify that he hadn’t.

“You were wounded and already in the church? During the fight?”

“Brought there after the fight.”

“From where?”

“The Bois de Soulles.”

“Where is that?”

“South of St. Lô.”

“How did you get
there?
”

“We were dropped to harass the Götz von Berlichingen.”

“Who was dropped?” the major asked.

“My stick of pathfinders, detached from the Five Hundred and Fifth.”

“So you were never with the Five Oh Seventh?”

“Not until the church. They were already there. The Germans put me with them.”

“How did you get from St. Lô to Montmartin?”

“With the Germans who captured me. Look, why don’t I just tell you what happened?”

“Please, go ahead.”

“I can’t speak too long: I’m tired.”

“Whatever you can manage,” the lieutenant told him.

Harry turned his head up, mainly for comfort, and saw the sun almost directly overhead through the weave of the olive-drab tent cloth. The oil that coated each thread acted as a refraction grid, plastering the patch of sun with millions of miniature spectra. He could see the sky between the threads in an uncountable number of little boxes faithfully holding the color blue. “I was dropped near Soulles. I made a refuge in the forest, went north to the railroad that leads to St. Lô, and blew up a train.” He stopped to breathe for a while before resuming. “I blew up a whole train, and I killed a lot of them.” He stopped again. “They looked like us. The ones who were left shot me.”

“Then they captured you?”

“I ran north along the river—creek, really. I was going to cut back to throw them off. I did. But before I did, I was hit twice.”

“You have three gunshot wounds,” the major said, almost accusingly. In civilian life, he had been a prosecutor.

“I know I have three gunshot wounds, Major: I’m the one who has them. After the train, I was hit twice. I went back to the forest thinking I was hit only in the shoulder, but then discovered that I also. . . . Here.” He motioned to the wound around his back. They nodded. “I was good for nothing. I couldn’t even move. I thought I was going to die, and I would have. I lay there for I don’t know how long. Used up all the morphine. I was out.”

“Then what?”

“They found me.”

“Who?”

“Seventeenth SS.”

“How? You had lost them.”

“Dogs.”

“They took you to Montmartin? What for?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t conscious all that much. I thought they were taking me to Germany.”

“Did they interrogate you?”

“I think they tried. They brought a lot of officers to look at me. I remember a lot of black suits. Maybe it was a dream. I couldn’t tell you if I were on a train or a truck or a donkey cart or what. For much of the time I thought I was dead.”

“That they were going to kill you?”

“No, that I was dead. I was carried around all the time. It never stopped. I would wake up in the dark, in a strange place. I didn’t know what was happening. Things wouldn’t stick to my memory but just slide off. I thought I was a child again. I thought I was an old man. I thought I was in a cathedral. That I was flying. That my mother was there, taking care of me.”

“There were nuns in the church. They were executed.”

Harry took this in quietly. They could see that he was trying to remain composed, and they were not surprised, as they had discovered that wounded men are often very emotional. “They weren’t your mother,” the major said. “Your mother’s okay.”

“Yes, she is,” Harry said. “She died a long time ago.”

“I’m sorry, Captain. I wasn’t thinking. Really, I’m sorry. Do you remember who shot you? I take it that this is how you got the third wound. Was it an officer?”

“Yes.”

This animated them to the edge of their lion tamer’s chairs. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. They went around shooting people. It was very quick. We tried to get up, but most couldn’t. People fell over and were shot on the floor, sometimes as they were crawling. I was in the litter they brought me in on, and they hadn’t taken off the straps.”

“You hadn’t been there long?”

“I don’t know. The straps had been loosened, but not enough. I tried to get out, but couldn’t. They moved down the row, shooting.”

“What did you see, exactly?”

“I wasn’t looking. I was using what I thought would be my last few seconds to prepare myself.”

“How?” the major asked, though not as a part of his inquiry.

Harry remembered how, and always would. “To fill my heart with love,” he said, “as if breathing in every moment of my life. That’s what I tried to do. You know those wrappers that you can do a trick with by lighting them on a plate?”

They didn’t have the slightest idea of what he was talking about.

“They come wrapped around an Italian cookie,” he said, twirling his finger to help them along. “I can’t think of the name, but if you fold them the right way they hold together after they burn. The ash that’s left is so light it suddenly launches upward on the rising convection current that was made when it itself burned. The denser cold air that follows pushes them up, and they rise. I breathed in. I tried to take in all the love I had ever known, and then I felt that I was rising, really rising up. We’ve all been there, up there,” he said, meaning airborne troops, although his questioners were not sure. “We know what it’s like, but instead of descending, this time I was going up.”

“But they shot you in the leg.”

“In the leg.” Harry looked over the sheets and toward his legs.

“Did they miss?”

He moved his head from side to side.

“How do you know?”

“The pistol was pointed at my forehead. I thought that was it. I was sure. He shot me in the leg. I waited for the next shot to end the pain, but when it came it wasn’t for me. He had moved on. Though it doesn’t make sense, I was sorry that I was still there. Maybe it was because I was really ready to go, and it wasn’t so bad. I wasn’t afraid.”

“They killed seventy of our men that way,” the major told him.

“I didn’t know how many,” Harry said. “And I’ll never . . . I’ll never quite. . . . I mean, I’m still there, I always will be.”

As field hospitals go, which isn’t saying very much, the hospital at Vierville was excellent in many ways. By the time Harry got there it was far enough from the fighting that only occasionally and with a south wind did he hear the distant concussions of bombs and artillery. Small arms fire, as familiar to him as rain on the roof, was entirely absent. And yet, day and night, even though the port of Cherbourg was soon open, one could hear trucks and tanks on the road, streaming south from the artificial harbors at Utah Beach six miles to the north; and bombers, fighters, transport, and reconnaissance aircraft passing overhead at various altitudes, their sounds covering a range from angry and urgent to the intermittency of a fly in the winter sun. The twenty-four-hour flow into the battle was reassuring if only because the Germans had no such overbrimming supply and were literally stunned by its ceaseless swelling.

As soon as Harry was told where he was, and was well enough to keep it in mind, he was happy. The name alone,
Vierville, had made him so, because of a Radcliffe girl, Alice Vierville. He couldn’t remember how he had come to know her, but he had, enough so that they had stopped to talk on Mount Auburn Street sometime in late May of their senior year. It was burned into his memory. She was facing east; he, west. She was wearing a print sundress, and with her right hand in salute as she shielded her eyes from the light, her hair was so blond it shone almost violently. On his cot, grateful to be in Vierville, he remembered the deep crescents near the corners of her mouth when she smiled. And she had them, she really had them, and they were beautiful, as was she. Although beginning in freshman year he had wanted to, he had never approached her. Now he did, and her response was seductive, charming, and to tell him that she was about to be married. “Alice,” he said, “why didn’t you marry me?”

Her reply was kind, respectful, and perhaps wistful: “As I recall, Harry, you never asked.” Then they parted, with Harry, at least, dreaming of the counterfactual and vibrating with regret. That was one reason he liked being in Vierville, a place from which the quintessentially American Alice Vierville had undoubtedly descended, though probably through many generations. And, that summer, Vierville was as sunny as she was.

The half-dozen tents that had seen so much triage, surgery, and dying were now filled with those who would be able to return to duty soon enough so that it made no sense to evacuate them to England. There were some who had just arrived and who slept most of the time, and some about to be sent back into battle. The latter were fully healthy and had organized physical training to get into shape. It was a wonderful place, and as no one was dying there, it was unusual.

And then there was the weather, which after the storms at the beginning of the month could not have been more splendid. And then the food. It wasn’t army food, which was trundled past them by the ton in groaning, can-filled trucks on their way to the fighting. So as not to open a distraction on the route of supply, the army had contracted with the village. Four women with what was for them a nearly unthinkable budget cooked for the more than one hundred patients and staff. Just the bread, butter, and jam were almost beyond the imagination of the American soldier. The pâtés, cheeses, summer fruits and vegetables, meats, fish, and fowl were for many not only a relief from military cuisine but something they had never experienced and might never experience again.

It is most difficult to get something you want in an army rather than what the army dictates, but it can be done, and with patience and a trick that Harry figured out in his hospital bed, he did it. The trick is to be happy and optimistic. Unhappy soldiers who want or desperately need something are so numerous, and their petitions come in such a flood, that for bureaucrats to survive they must make them invisible, and they do. A joyful, confident soldier, one who is illogically cheerful, almost a lunatic, will stand out like a lighted sign. Clerks and even higher officers seem magically to seek the satisfaction of obliging him, and delight in sending him on his way as much as if they were freeing a bird by tossing it into the air. They see in him a possibility of which they might not have been aware but that they wish to nurture and support. They see him as an emissary from a place that holds the potential of their own happiness, which is how and why it works.

He needed to know about his pathfinder team—Rice, Bayer, Johnson, Hemphill, Reeves, and Sussingham. He wanted to hear their stories and tell them his own, but above all he wanted to know that they were alive and well. As an army in combat is a very hard thing from which to pry information, he would need help, so he went to the physician in command at Vierville.

“Sir,” he began.

“
Doctor
sounds better to me,” said the physician, a major who, like all practicing physicians in the army, was not quite in the army, if only because keeping people alive is different from killing them. And an army doctor was also supposed to be a kind of shelter from the army itself, as anyone, including illiterate privates, knew well.

“Doctor, sir.”

“Just
Doctor,
please. Get out of the habit,” said the doctor, who wore round wire glasses and had an unfolded surgical mask hanging over his chest, like a bib.