Once There Was a War (9 page)

His fingers were restless. They were trying to plant the grass roots again in the hole they had come out of. “You see what worries me about the whole thing is this,” he said. “I just don’t believe stuff like that.”

GROWING VEGETABLES

LONDON, July
15, 1943
—On the edges of American airfields and between the barracks of troops in England it is no unusual thing to see complicated and carefully tended vegetable gardens. No one seems to know where the idea originated, but these gardens have been constantly increasing. It is fairly common now that a station furnishes a good part of its own vegetables and all of its own salad greens.

The idea, which had as its basis, probably, the taking up of some of the free time of men where there were few entertainment facilities, has proved vastly successful. The gardens are run by the units and worked by the groups, but here and there a man may go out on his own and try and raise some strange seed which is not ordinarily seen in this climate. In every unit there is usually some man who knows about such things who advises on the planting, but even such men are often at a loss because vegetables are different here from the vegetables at home.

The things that the men want to raise most, in order of choice, are green corn, tomatoes, and peppers. None of these do very well in England unless there is a glass house to build up sufficient heat. Tomatoes are small; there are none of those master beefsteak tomatoes bursting with juice. It is a short, cool season. Green corn has little chance to mature and the peppers must be raised under glass. Nevertheless, every care is taken to raise them. Men who are homesick seem to take a mighty pleasure in working with the soil.

The gardens usually start out ambitiously. Watermelons and cantaloupes are planted and they have practically no chance of maturing at this latitude, where even cucumbers are usually raised in glass houses, but gradually some order grows out of the confusion. Lettuce, peas, green beans, green onions, potatoes do very well here, as do cabbages and turnips and beets and carrots. The gardens are lush and well tended. In the evenings, which are very long now, the men work in the beds. It does not get dark until eleven o’clock, there are only so many movies to be seen, English pubs are not exciting, but there does seem to be a constant excitement about the gardens, and the produce that comes from them tastes much better than that purchased in the open market.

One station has its headquarters in a large English country house which at one time must have been very luxurious. Part of the equipment of this place is a series of glass houses, and here the gardens are exceptional. There has never been any need to exert pressure to get the men to work in the gardens. They have taken it up with enthusiasm and in many cases men from the cities, who have never had a garden in their lives, have become enthusiastic. There is some contact with the normal about the garden, a kind of relationship with peace.

Now and then a garden just coming in to produce must be deserted as the unit is shifted to another area. But this does not seem to make any difference. The new unit takes over the garden, and the old one, if there is none at the new station, starts afresh. The value is in the doing of it. The morale value of the experiment is very high, so high that it is being suggested that supply officers should be equipped with an assortment of seeds as a matter of course. The seed takes up little room and gardening equipment can be made on the spot or is available nearly everywhere.

There is a great difference in the ordinary preparation of vegetables by the English and by us. The English usually boil their vegetables to a submissive, sticky pulp, in which the shape and, as some say, the flavor have long since been overcome. Our cooks do not cook their vegetables nearly so long, are apt to like them crisp. The English do not use nearly as many onions as we do and they use practically no garlic at all. The little gardens are a kind of symbol of revolt against foreign methods.

For example, the average English cook regards a vegetable with suspicion. It is his conviction that unless the vegetable is dominated and thoroughly convinced that it must offer no nonsense, it is likely to revolt or to demand dominion status. Consequently, only those vegetables are encouraged which are docile and capable of learning English ways.

The Brussels sprout is a good example of the acceptable vegetable. It is first allowed to become large and fierce. It is then picked from its stem and the daylights are boiled out of it. At the end of a few hours the little wild lump of green has disintegrated into a curious, grayish paste. It is then considered fit for consumption.

The same method is followed with cabbage. While the cabbage is boiling it is poked and beaten until, when it is served, it has given up its character and tastes exactly like brussels sprouts, which in turn taste like cabbage. Carrots are allowed to remain yellow but nothing else of their essential character is maintained.

No one has yet explained this innate fear the English suffer of a revolt of the vegetables. The easy-going American attitude of allowing the vegetable a certain amount of latitude short of the ballot is looked upon by the English as soft and degenerate. In the American gardens certain English spies have reported they have seen American soldiers pulling and eating raw carrots and turnips and onions.

It is strange to an American that the English, who love dogs and rarely eat them, nevertheless are brutal with vegetables. It is just one of those national differences which are unfathomable.

THE SHAPE OF THE WORLD

LONDON,
July 16, 1943
—This is no war, like other wars, to be won as other wars have been won. We remember the last war. It was a simple, easy thing. When we had destroyed the Kaiser and a little military clique, the evil thing was removed and all good things came into flower. It was not so, but the war was fought on that basis by troops who sang and then ran home for the millennium.

It is said that this is not a singing war and that is true. The soldiers fight and work under a load of worry. They know deeply that the destruction of the enemy is not the end of this war. And almost universally you find among the soldiers not a fear of the enemy but a fear of what is going to happen after the war. The collapse of retooled factories, the unemployment of millions due to the increase of automatic machinery, a depression that will make the last one look like a holiday.

They fight under a banner of four unimplemented freedoms—four words, and when anyone in authority tries to give these freedoms implements and methods the soldiers hear that man assaulted and dragged down. It doesn’t matter whether the methods or the plans are good or bad. Any planning is assorted at home. And the troops feel they are going to come home to one of two things—either a painless anarchy, or a system set up in their absence with the cards stacked against them.

Ours is not a naive Army. Common people have learned a great deal in the last twenty-five years, and the old magical words do not fool them any more. They do not believe the golden future made of words. They would like freedom from want. That means the little farm in Connecticut is safe from foreclosure. That means the job left when the soldier joined the Army is there waiting, and not only waiting but it will continue while the children grow up. That means there will be schools, and either savings to take care of illness in the family or medicine available without savings. Talking to many soldiers, it is the worry that comes out of them that is impressive. Is the country to be taken over by special interests through the medium of special pleaders? Is inflation to be permitted because a few people will grow rich through it? Are fortunes being made while these men get $50 a month? Will they go home to a country destroyed by greed? If anyone could assure them that these things are not true, or that, being true, they will not be permitted, then we would have a singing Army. This Army can defeat the enemy. There is no doubt about that. They know it and will accomplish it, but they do not want to go home to find a civil war in the making. The memory of the last depression is still fresh in their memories.

They remember the foreclosed farms, the slaughtered pigs to keep the prices up, the plowing under of the crops, because there was not intelligence enough in the leaders to devise a means of distributing an oversupply of food. They remember that every plan for general good life is dashed to pieces on the wall of necessary profits.

These things cannot be overstated. Anyone who can reassure these soldiers that such things will not happen again will put a weapon in their hands of incredible strength. What do the soldiers hear?—that Mr. Jones is calling Mr. Wallace names; that Mr. Jeffers is fighting with Mr. Ickes; czars of this and that are fighting for more power and more jurisdiction.

Congress, in a kind of hysteria of immunity from public criticism, has removed even the machinery of relief which might take up the impact of a new depression; black markets are flourishing and the operators are not little crooks, but the best people. The soldiers hear that the price of living is going up and wages are following them. A soldier is not a lone man. He usually has a family dependent to a large extent on the money he can allot, and his pay does not increase with the cost of living.

These are the things that he hears. The papers are full of it, the letters from home are full of it—quarreling, anxiety, greed. And, being a soldier, he cannot complain. He is forbidden to complain. You cannot have that kind of thing in an army. He is not cynical, but he is worried. He wants to get this war over with, and to get home to find what they have done to his country in his absence. The Four Freedoms define what he wants but unless some machinery, some foundation, some clear method is shown, he is likely to believe only in that freedom which Anatole France defined—the equal freedom of rich and poor to sleep under bridges.

THEATER PARTY

LONDON, July 18, 1943—It was late afternoon of the English summer and in one of London’s innumerable outlying districts the motion-picture house was comfortably filled. There were some soldiers who had been wounded and were on their way to recovery. There were women of the services off duty for a few hours. Some civilian women were there for a quick picture after shopping and there were factory workers off shift. Down in front were rows of children, crowding as close to the screen as they could get.

It was just an average afternoon at the pictures. The house was comfortably filled but not crowded. In special places were some men in wheel chairs from the hospital. The picture was
I Married a Witch
with Veronica Lake—a fantasy comedy wherein a New England witch of Puritan times returns to life and falls straight into the traditional bedroom comedy—neither a distinguished piece of work nor a bad one. The children loved the picture and believed it because they believe all moving pictures.

Outside there was low cloud and it looked as though there might be rain later in the evening and there had not been enough rain.

While Veronica Lake, long blond hair over one eye, sat in pajamas on a man’s bed and he worried for his good and respectable name and the children crowed with delight—ten German fighter-bombers whirled in over the coast. The spotters picked them up. The Spitfires took the air. The anti-aircraft guns fired and two of the raiders were shot down. A third crashed against a little hill. Then a crazy, ragged chase started in the gray cloud. Spitfires ranging and searching in the cloud. The raiders separated and lunged on toward London, and on the ground the sirens howled and the tremendous system of alarms and defenses went into action.

Only one of the raiders got through, twisting and dodging through the defenses. He came racing down out of the cloud and right under him was the theater. He was very low when he released his bombs. The top of the theater leaped into the air and then settled back into a rubble. The screen went blank. The raider banked his plane, whipped around, came back, and poured his guns into the wreck. Then he jerked his ship into the gray clouds and ran for the coast. And he left behind him the screaming of children in pain and fear.

The communities are organized for things like this. In a matter of minutes the rescue squads were at work; the firemen were on the ground. The squads are well trained. They forced themselves into the torn and shredded building. The broken children were carried out and rushed to the hospital, crushed and shot and destroyed. The dead ones were set aside for burial, but those who still breathed and kicked and whimpered went to the waiting doctors.

All night long the operations went on. Probing for bullets, hands and arms and legs cut off and put aside. Eyes removed. The anesthetists worked delicately against pain, dripping unconsciousness onto the masks. It went on through the night, the procession of the maimed to the hospital. The doctors worked carefully, speedily. Quick judgments—this one can’t live—kept consciousness away. This one has a chance if both legs are sliced off. Judgments and quick work.

From the depots the blood plasma was rushed In and the strength from other people’s veins dripped into the arteries of the children.

It was nine in the morning when the operating was finished. At the theater the tired squads were still finding a few bodies. And in the hospital beds—great wads of bandage and wide, staring, unbelieving eyes and utter weariness—the little targets, the seven-year-old military objectives.

Workmen were digging a great, long, common grave for the dead. Veronica Lake had flared up with the quick flash of burning film and only the reels she was wound on were left. And in the houses in the morning people were just beginning to be aware enough to cry. It was very quiet in the streets.

At a bar a tired doctor got a drink before he went to bed. His eyes were ringed with red sorrow and his hand shook as he lifted the whiskey to his lips.

DIRECTED UNDERSTANDING

LONDON,
July 19, 1943
—International amity, good fellowship, and mutual understanding between the British and Americans often reaches a pitch where war between the two seems very close. This is usually directed understanding, and it gives rise to some very silly situations.