Once There Was a War (13 page)

“We ain’t got no strawberries,” said the furtive one. “The nurses went through them strawberries like we’re going through Italy. I didn’t get none of them strawberries.”

“Have we got into Italy?”

“Got in? Where you been? We’re halfway up the calf right now. There’s MPs walkin’ the streets of Rome this minute and the Wops puttin’ flowers in the hair.”

The captain interrupted the sleepy poker game. “We’ve got to have a drink on this,” he said. “Who’s got some whisky?”

“Don’t be silly,” said a lieutenant colonel. “We haven’t had any whisky since the second day out. What are you drinking to? The invasion of Italy?”

“Invasion, hell. Italy is in our hands.”

“I’ve got a bottle,” said the lieutenant colonel, and he climbed over legs and dug in his briefcase. They stood together and clinked the glasses and tossed off the whisky. The captain turned and threw his glass out of the porthole. “That’s a pretty important drink,” he said. “I wouldn’t want any common drink to get into that glass.” He peered out the porthole. “A seagull picked us up. We can’t be very far out,” he said.

The lieutenant colonel said, “You know, with Italy out, Germany is going to have a time holding the Balkans down. They’re going to want to get out from under. I bet Greece revolts, too. And Turkey was about ready to come in. This may be the push she needs.” ...

Three GIs sat in a windblown cave, made by slinging their shelter halves between a rail and a davit and a ventilator. They watched the whitecaps go surging by. “I’d like to get there before it’s over, Willie. I won’t get a chance to see any action if we don’t hurry up.”

“You’ll see plenty action and you’ll tote plenty bales before you’re through, brother.”

“I don’t know about that. With those Turks running wild, Germany can’t hold out forever. Why, Germany’s so busy now, I’ll bet we could even get in across the Channel. This is a slow damn scow.” ...

“Gentlemen,” said a twenty-year-old lieutenant to three other twenty-year-old lieutenants, “gentlemen, I give you Paris.”

“My old man took Paris in the last war,” said one of the gentlemen.

“Gentlemen,” said the first speaker, his voice shaking, “we’ve crossed the Channel. Oh, boy, oh, boy! We’re in.”

The three joined hands in a kind of fraternal cat’s cradle. ...

And so the ship came into port with the war fought and won. It took them a little time to get over it.

CRAPS

LONDON,
August 12, 1943
—This is one of Mulligan’s lies and it concerns a personality named Eddie. Mulligan has soldiered with Eddie and knows him well. Gradually it becomes apparent that Mulligan has soldiered with nearly everyone of importance.

At any rate this Eddie was a crap shooter, but of such saintly character that his integrity in the use of the dice was never questioned. Eddie was just lucky, so lucky that he could flop the dice against the wall and bounce them halfway across the barracks floor on a Sunday and still make a natural.

From performances like this the suspicion grew that Eddie had the ear of some force a little more than human. Eddie, over a period of a year or two, became a rich and happy man, not so lucky in love, but you can’t have everything. It was Eddie’s contention that the dice could get him a woman any time, but he never saw a woman who could make him roll naturals. Sour grapes though this may have been, Eddie abode by it.

Came the time finally when Eddie and his regiment were put on board a ship and started off for X. It wasn’t a very large ship, and it was very crowded. Decks and staterooms and alleys, all crowded. And it just happened that the ship sailed within reasonable time of payday.

That first day there were at least two hundred crap games on the deck, and while Eddie got into one, he did it listlessly, just to keep his hand in, and not to tire himself, because he knew that the important stuff was coming later. Between the chicken games Eddie moped about and did a good deed or two to get himself into a state of grace he knew was necessary later. He helped to carry a “B” bag for a slightly tipsy GI and reluctantly accepted a pint of bourbon, which canceled out the good deed, to Eddie’s way of thinking. He wrote a letter to his wife, whom he hadn’t seen for twelve years, and would have posted it if he could ever have found a stamp.

Occasionally he drifted back to the deck and got into a small game to keep his wrist limber and his head clear, but he didn’t have to. Eddie had a roll. He didn’t have to build up a bank in the preliminaries. He steered clear of spectacular play for two reasons. First, it was a waste of time. It was just as well to let the money get into a few hands before he exerted himself, and second, Eddie, at a time like this, preferred a kind of obscurity and anonymity. There was another reason too. The ship sailed on Tuesday and Eddie was waiting for Sunday, because he was particularly hot on Sundays, a fact he attributed to a clean and disinterested way of life. Once on a Sunday, and, understand, this is Mulligan’s story, Eddie had won a small steam roller from a road gang in New Mexico, and on another Sunday Eddie had cleaned out a whole camp meeting, and in humility had devoted 10 per cent of his winnings to charity.

As the week went on the games began to fade out. There were fewer games and the stakes were larger. On Saturday there were only four good ones going, and at this time Eddie began to take interest. He played listlessly Saturday morning, but in the afternoon became more active and wiped out two of the games because his time was getting short and he didn’t want too many games going the next day.

At ten o’clock the next day Eddie appeared on the deck, clean and combed and modest and bulging at the pockets of his field jacket. The game was going, but there were only three players in it. Eddie said innocently, “Mind if I get in for a pass or two?” The three players scrutinized him cynically. A Pole with one blue eye and one brown eye spoke roughly to him. “Froggy skins it takes, soldier,” he said, “not is playing peanuts.”

Eddie delicately exposed the butt end of a bank that looked like a rolled roast for a large supper. The Pole sighed with happiness, and the other two, who were remarkable and successful for no other reason than that they could disappear in a crowd, rubbed their hands involuntarily, as though to keep their fingers warm. Eddie concealed his poke as modestly as a young woman adjusts the straps of an evening gown that has no straps. He kneeled down beside the blanket and said, “What about is the tariff?” A wall of spectators closed behind him.

Eddie faded thirty of a hundred. The Pole rolled and won and let it lie, and Eddie took a hundred of the two hundred and the Pole shot a six and made it. Behind the dense circle of spectators running feet could be heard. This was to be a game. The ship took a slight list as GIs ran from all over just to be near a game like this, even if they couldn’t see it.

The four hundred lay on the blanket like a large salad. The two disappearing men looked at Eddie, and Eddie went into his roll and undid four hundred in small bills and laid them timidly out. This Pole glared at him with his brown eye, and smiled at him with his blue eye, a trick which served him very well in poker, but had little effect on a crap game. He breathed on the dice and didn’t speak to them. He rolled an eight and smiled with both his eyes. Again he breathed on the dice and cast them backhanded to show how easy that point was, and a four and a three looked up at him.

Eddie, breathing easily, relaxed and sure, pulled the big green salad gently to his side of the blanket. He unrolled two hundred more from his roll like toilet tissue, and laid them down. “One grand,” he said, “all or part.”

The Pole took half and the two anonymous men split up the rest, and Eddie rolled a rocking chair natural, a six and a five. “Leaving it lay,” he said softly.

Only the Pole listened to him. He picked up the dice and looked them over carefully to be sure they were the ones he had put in himself. And then, scowling with both eyes, he covered Eddie. The pile of money was ten inches high now, and spilling down like a loose haycock.

Eddie hummed a little to himself as he rolled, and a seven settled firmly. The Pole snorted. Eddie said, “And leaving that lay, all or part, anybody.” Breathing had stopped on the ship, only the engines went on. Mouths were open. Figures frozen in the dense crowd about the blanket. Only once in a while word was passed back about what was happening.

Scowling at Eddie, the Pole scraped bottom. A whole week of very tiring play for the Pole lay on the blanket, and the pot was set. Eddie was magnificent. He moved easily. He did not shake or rattle the dice or speak to them or beseech them. He simply rolled them out with childlike faith. For a long moment he stared uncomprehendingly at the snake eyes that stared back at him. And then his expression changed to one of horror. “No,” he said, “somepins wrong. I win on Sunday, always win on Sunday.”

A sergeant shuffled his feet uneasily. “Mister,” he said. “Mister, you see, it ain’t Sunday. We’ve went and crossed the date line. We lost Sunday.”

Anyway, it’s one of Mulligan’s lies.

Africa

PLANE FOR AFRICA

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (
Via London
),
August 26, 1943
—At nine o’clock in the morning word comes that you have been accepted for Africa. You go to the office of the transportation officer. “Can you go tonight?” he asks. “Your baggage must be in at three. You will report to such and such an address at seven-thirty. Do not be late.”

It is then about noon. You do the thousand things that are necessary for a shift of continents. You pack the one bag and store the other things which you will not take, the warm clothes and the papers and books. You call the people with whom you have made appointments and call them off.

At seven-thirty you arrive at the address given and from then on the process is out of your hands and it works very smoothly. At a quarter of eight you get in an Army truck and are taken to the station. An Army train is waiting. It is called a ghost train because it has no given destination. All kinds of units are getting on board the train: combat crews going out to get their ships, colonels who are going home after months in the field, couriers with bags and packages of mail. The combat crews carry pistols and knives and they have the huge bags of flying equipment with them. They are brown officers who have been serving in the desert and they look a little sick with fatigue.

A bomber crew that has not yet gone into action, indeed has not had a ship since it got overseas, has been working on English beer and has managed to get to the singing state. The whistle blows and everyone piles into the train. It is a sleeper.

There is no place to gather. You go to bed right away. In the corridor the singing crew leans out of the window and the men shriek at girls as the train starts. Then they break into “Home On the Range,” but the noise of the train drowns them out. The beer was not strong enough to give them much of a lift. The blacked-out train roars through the night. The windows are shut and painted so that no light can shine out. The singing collapses and the crews retire to their staterooms.

At four-thirty in the morning the steward knocks on your door, sets a cup of tea on the little shelf over your bed, and leaves. You quickly drink the tea and shave in time to be out of the train at five. It is cold and rainy when you get out of the train. You don’t know where you are. You were never told. Army trucks are waiting to take you to the airfield. Deep puddles of rain water are standing all about the little station. You climb into a truck and in a short while you have come to a huge airfield. This is one of the fields of Air Transport Command, which moves men and goods all over the world. Fighter planes are dispersed about the field, dimly visible through the rain. The C-54s stand ready to go.

This is a large and comfortable station. There are club-rooms and a bar and a large restaurant. It is cold outside and inside the fireplaces are piled high with glowing coals. In the largest clubroom are many people waiting their time to go. There are men who have been here a week and some crews which just got in. A phonograph is playing something sung by Dinah Shore. The men sleep on the couches and wait for their time.

The control-desk officer says, “Come back at one-thirty and you will be told when you go.”

The nearest town is several miles away. The crews wander about for a while and then go back to the club-room to read comic books—Superman and the rest. They read them without amusement, but with great concentration.

The officer says, “You will probably go in eight hours,” and again the wandering. A ship is warming up. It is going home. The men on it will be in New York tomorrow. Even the ones who recently came over look longingly at these lucky ones. Just before they go they are cornered and messages given. “Call my wife and tell her that you saw me. Here is the telephone number.” There would be letters to carry, but that is forbidden.

The men going home actually write the numbers down. They look a little self-conscious to be going home, and very happy about it, too. They get into the big ship and the door closes. It is a four-motored ship and you have to climb high to get into it. The little crowd stands in the entrance and watches it go and then it has disappeared into the rain almost before it is off the ground. The field has suddenly become very lonely. The men go back to the coal fires and to old copies of magazines,
Esquires
and
New Yorkers
, months old, copies of
Life
from April and May.

The officer says, “The plane will leave for Africa in fifteen minutes.” It would seem the plane would be crowded, but it isn’t. There are on board only one combat crew and two civilians. It is a C-54-A, which means that it has bucket seats and is more than half cargo plane. Now the crew are gathering together their bags and their parachutes, slinging on their pistols and knives and web equipment. They are being very nonchalant about the whole thing. Africa means nothing to them.

For a while we stand shivering in the rain while our names are called off. Then each one climbs the ladder and goes through the door. The windows of the plane are not blacked out, the way they are at home. They don’t mind if you see. The big door slams, and outside you can hear the motors begin to turn over.

ALGIERS

ALGIERS (
Via London
),
August 28, 1943
—Algiers is a fantastic city now. Always a place of strange mixtures, it has been brought to a nightmarish mess by the influx of British and American troops and their equipment. Now jeeps and staff cars nudge their way among camels and horse-drawn cars. The sunshine is blindingly white on the white city, and when there is no breeze from the sea the heat is intense.

The roads are lined with open wagons loaded high with fresh-picked grapes, with military convoys, with Arabs on horseback, with Canadians, Americans, Free French native troops in tall red hats. The uniforms are of all colors and all combinations of colors. Many of the French colonial troops have been issued American uniforms since they had none of their own. You never know when you approach American khaki that it will not clothe an Arab or a Senegalese.

The languages spoken in the streets are fascinating. Rarely is one whole conversation carried out in just one language. Our troops do not let language difficulties stand in their way. Thus you may see a soldier speaking in broad Georgia accents conversing with a Foreign Legionnaire and a burnoosed Arab. He speaks cracker, with a sour French word thrown in here and there, but his actual speech is with his hands. He acts out his conversation in detail.

His friends listen and watch and they answer him in Arabic or French and pantomime their meaning, and oddly enough they all understand one another. The spoken language is merely the tonal background to a fine bit of acting. Out of it comes a manual pidgin that is becoming formalized. The gesture for a drink is standard. Gestures of friendship and anger and love have also become standard.

The money is a definite problem. A franc is worth two cents. It is paper money and comes in five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, and one thousand franc notes. The paper used is a kind of blotting paper that wads up and tears easily.

Carried in the pocket, it becomes wet and gummy with perspiration, and when taken out of the pocket often falls to pieces in your hands. In some stores they will not accept torn money, which limits the soldier, because most of the money he has is not only torn but wadded and used until the numbers on it are almost unrecognizable. A wad of money feels like a handful of warm wilted lettuce. In addition there are many American bills, the so-called invasion money, which is distinguished from home money by having a gold seal printed on its face. These bills feel cool and permanent compared with the Algerian money.

A whole new tourist traffic has set up here. A soldier may buy baskets, bad rugs, fans, paintings on cloth, just as he can at Coney Island. Many GIs with a magpie instinct will never be able to get home, such is their collection of loot. They have bits of battle debris, knives, pistols, bits of shell fragments, helmets, in addition to their colored baskets and rugs. In each case the collector has someone at home in mind when he makes the purchases. Grandma would love this Algerian shawl, and this Italian bayonet is just the thing to go over Uncle Charley’s fireplace, along with the French bayonet he brought home from the last war. Suddenly there will come the order to march with light combat equipment, and the little masses of collections will have to be left with instructions to forward that will never be carried out. Americans are great collectors. The next station will start the same thing all over again.

The terraces of the hotels are crowded at five o’clock. This is the time when people gather to get a drink and to look at one another. There is no hard liquor. Cooled wine and lemonade and orange wine are the standard drinks. There is some beer made of peanuts, which does have a definite peanut flavor. The wine is good and light and cooling, a little bit of a shock to a palate used to bourbon whiskey, but acceptable.

On these terraces the soldiers come to sit about little tables and to meet dates. The French women here have done remarkably well. Their shoes have thick wooden soles, but are attractive, and the few clothes they have are clean and well kept. Since there is little material for dyeing the hair or bleaching it, a new fashion seems to have started. One lock of the hair is bleached and combed back over the unbleached part. It has a strange and not unattractive effect.

About five o’clock the streets are invaded by little black Wog boys with bundles of newspapers. They shriek, “
Stahs’n Straipes. Stahs’n Straipes
.” The Army newspaper is out again. This is the only news most of our men get. In fact, little news comes here. New York and London are much better informed than this station, which is fairly close to action. But it seems to be generally true that the closer to action you get, the more your interest in the over-all picture diminishes.

Soldiers here are not so much interested in the trend of war as the soldiers are in training camps at home. Here the qualities of the mess, the animosities with the sergeant, the price of wine are much more important than the world at war.

This is a mad, bright, dreamlike place. It is probable that our soldiers will remember it as a whirl of color and a polyglot babble. The heat makes your head a little vague, so that impressions run together and blot one another up. Outlines are hazy. It will be a curious memory when the soldiers try to sort it out to tell about after the war, and it will not be strange if they improvise a bit.

A WATCH CHISELER

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (
Via London
),
August 37, 1943
—It was well after midnight. The sergeant of MPs and his lieutenant drove in a jeep out of Sidi Belle Road from Oran. The sergeant had carved the handles of his gun from the Plexiglas from the nose of a bomber and he had begun to carve figures in it during off times with his pocket knife. It was a soft African night with abundant stars. The lieutenant was quite young and sensible enough to depend a good deal on his sergeant. The jeep leaped and rattled over cobblestones. “Let’s go up to the Engineers and get a cup of coffee and a sandwich,” the lieutenant said. “Turn around at the next corner.”

At that moment a weapons carrier came roaring in from the country, going nearly sixty miles an hour. It flashed by the jeep and turned the corner on two wheels. “Jeezus,” said the sergeant, “shall I go after him?”

“Run him down,” said the lieutenant.

The sergeant wheeled the jeep around and put his foot to the floor. Around the corner he could see the tail lights in the distance and he seemed to gain on it rapidly. The weapons carrier was stopped, pulled up beside a field. The jeep skidded to a stop and the sergeant leaped out with the lieutenant after him.

Three men were sitting in the weapons carrier, three in the front seat. They were quite drunk. The sergeant flashed his light in the back. There were two empty wine bottles on the floor of the truck. “Get out,” said the sergeant. As the men got out he frisked each one of them, tapping the hind pockets and the trousers below the knees. The three soldiers looked a little bedraggled.

“Who was driving that car?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know him,” a small fat soldier said. “I never saw him before. He just jumped out and ran when he saw you coming. I never saw him before. We were just walking along and he asked us to come for a ride with him.” The small fat soldier rushed the words out.

“That’ll be enough out of you,” the sergeant said. “You don’t have to tell your friends the alibi. Where did you dump the stuff?”

“What stuff, Sergeant? I don’t know what stuff you mean.”

“You know what I mean all right. Shall I take a look about, sir?”

“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said. The sergeant went to the border of the field and flashed his light about in the stubble. Then he came back. “Can’t see anything,” he said, and to the men, “Where’d you get this truck?”

“Just like I told you—this soldier asked us to come for a ride, and then he saw you coming and he jumped out and ran.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. We called him Willie. He said his name was Willie. I never saw him in my life before. Said his name was Willie.”

“Get in the jeep,” said the sergeant. “I’ve got the keys, lieutenant. We’ll send out for the truck. Go on now, you guys, get in that jeep.”

“We ain’t done anything wrong, Sarge. What you going to take us in for? Guy named Willie just asked—”

“Shut up and get in,” said the sergeant.

The three piled uncomfortably into the back seat of the jeep. The sergeant got behind the wheel and the lieutenant loosened his gun in its holster and sat on the little front seat with his body screwed around to face the three. Only the little man wanted to talk. The jeep rattled into the dark streets of Oran and pulled up in front of the MP station, jumped up on the sidewalk, and parked bumper against the building. Inside brilliant lights were blinding after the blacked-out streets. A sergeant and a first lieutenant sat behind a big, high desk and looked over at the three ranged in front of them.