THIRD
Gregarious, extrovertive, strongly attached to group and family. Easygoing—line of least resistance, not physically lazy. Very sensitive. Resentful of correction. Easily hurt by criticism in public. Mentally lazy, not retentive. Ruled by instinct and emotion rather than by reason. Has to be made to face facts, prone to escapism ... Lies easily. Can only be led, not driven.
Excerpt from a War Department memo:
‘Certain Characteristics of the Negro Which Affect
Command of Negro Troops’
~ * ~
D+35
July 11
Joe Amos opened his eyes to a white face leaning close.
‘Joe Amos.’
He sat up on the cot.
Joe Amos whispered back, ‘What you need, Lieutenant?’
Garner patted him on his bare shoulder and motioned to follow him outside. The air in the bivouac tent stank of exhaustion, drivers too wiped out to shower or brush their teeth. The smell of snores, farts, and socks added to the humidity leaching from the damp ground. Someone had griped that France got more rain in June and July ‘44 than in any month-and-a-half period of the twentieth century. But the last two days had been hot and dry and the earth seemed finally to be wringing itself out.
Joe Amos tugged on his OD undershirt. He eased from the flimsy mattress and headed for the tent flap held open by Garner.
Outside, he asked, ‘What time is it?’
‘0500. I’ve got a detail I want you to head up this morning.’
‘Alright.’ Garner held three cartons of Chesterfields. Those for me?’
Garner did not smile. He treated the question as ludicrous.
‘No. These belong to Major Clay. At 0700, you’ll lead a squad of ten trucks up to UTAH. You’ll pick up a company of Airborne that’s coming ashore this morning. Take ‘em up to Cherbourg.’
‘No problem.’
Garner lifted the boxes of smokes. He waggled them in front of Joe Amos like they were stacks of dollars.
‘It turns out that the Kraut General in charge of defending Cherbourg, ol’ Von Schlieben, he got himself and his garrison ready for a nice long siege. They stocked a bunch of underground shelters with everything they’d need. Apparently, that included the biggest collection of French wines, champagne, and brandy that anyone has ever seen on this earth.’
Joe Amos thought of the Marquis and his wine cellar. How large must the Krauts’ cellars have been to supply thirty thousand men?
Garner lowered his voice. ‘Von Schlieben had no problem smashing the whole damn harbor so we couldn’t use it. But when it came to spilling good booze, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. So.’ Garner rattled the smokes again for effect, coming to his point. ‘Major Clay would like you to do him a little favor while you’re up in Cherbourg. He wants you to trade these for as much of that booty as you can get your hands on. He says you can keep two packs of the Chesterfields for yourself. What do you say, Sergeant?’
‘Sounds fine.’
‘ ‘Course, if anyone asks, you’re just working for yourself. The Major don’t know nothin’ about this. You understand?’
‘Where’d I get those, just in case?’
‘Same place I got ‘em. From Mr. Nobody.’
Joe Amos took the cartons. ‘Got it.’
‘Good. Go get another couple hours of shut-eye.’
‘Lieutenant?’
The officer turned impatiently.
‘What?’
‘I don’t mind doin’ this. But I got something I’d like to ask you back. Between you and me.’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Every chance you get to send me down to St. Lô, I want it.’
Garner seemed tempted to ask why. But this was a man who’d just handed Joe Amos three cartons of smokes, far more than any single soldier, even a Major, should legally possess. An agreement struck itself between the two with Garner’s quiet, simple nod.
~ * ~
‘Wind ‘em up!’
Joe Amos, lead driver and sergeant on this morning’s route, hollered, walking down the line of Jimmies. He spun his arm in a big arc like a propeller. McGee Mays grinned proudly when Joe Amos climbed behind Lucky’s wheel.
Joe Amos led the ten trucks out of the bivouac. Muddy ruts in the grassy field cut by a thousand tires had dried, and Lucky kicked dust. The muffler had sprouted a hole; the Jimmy sounded powerful in low gear. The day promised to be steamy and clear. McGee seemed raring to go. His breath smelled of coffee. At the main road, Joe Amos was waved onto the tarmac by an MP and quickly set the pace for his little convoy.
‘McGee, look in my pack.’
The boy finished rolling up his sleeves over sleek black forearms. Joe Amos noted again the muscle and color of this Florida Negro. There was nothing ambiguous about McGee, not in his heart or his skin.
‘I be dogged.’ McGee whistled, gazing into the mouth of Joe Amos’s backpack. ‘Where you get these?’
‘Don’t worry about it. Open a carton.’
McGee did not pursue the question. He tore the side out of one long box and handed Joe Amos a pack of Chesterfields. Joe Amos tucked the flimsy pack in his shirt.
‘Take one for yourself and stick the rest in the glove compartment.’
McGee did what he was told and set away the backpack with the two remaining cartons. Joe Amos reached for the pack McGee held on to. He tore open the foil top with his teeth, spit a shred out the window, and stuck a fag on his lips. He flipped his lighter and dragged in the smoke. He returned the pack to McGee.
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’
‘Never had no money for it. I always liked liquor better.’
Joe Amos tossed his lighter and Chesterfields into McGee’s lap.
‘Give it a try.’
In a minute, McGee was doubled over hacking. Between puffs, he looked to Joe Amos, who smoked stylishly without touching the cigarette with his fingers, he just stuck it to his lips and worked the tobacco, with his hands busy on the wheel. McGee labored through the Chesterfield with eyes watering from the coughs. Joe Amos held out his hand.
‘Alright, alright, give ‘em back. You’re gonna kill yourself.’
McGee held on to the cigarettes and lighter. ‘No, I’ll get it, Sarge. Leave me to it.’
At UTAH, the company of Airborne waited. Two hundred scrubbed soldiers milled in the sand with their trouser legs tucked into jump boots, even though they’d come across the Channel on a cruiser. Joe Amos pulled up across the broad beach. Behind him, the other trucks formed a fine straight line. Joe Amos was glad to see the discipline in his convoy, a good first impression for these green white boys.
UTAH was not strewn with wreckage the way OMAHA had been after the storm. And the invasion here had been less difficult, not defended as heavily by the Krauts. The dunes were flatter, access off the beach was not so limited as it was at OMAHA, with its four bunkered draws. Splashing through the skim of early-morning surf, a local in a beret trotted his sulky behind a beautiful chestnut horse. McGee grinned big at this sight. His fourth cigarette was snugged between fingers that pointed out his window at the clopping horse, the snap of a buggy whip, and the hiss of sliding waves.
‘Mornin’, y’all,’ he called out his good mood to the Airborne. ‘Ya’ll see that buggy? That’s somethin’.’
Joe Amos did not hear the reply from the men climbing into his truck bed. McGee pulled back, his face stung and slack.
‘What?’
‘Nothin’,’ McGee said. ‘Let’s just drive ‘em.’
‘What? Somebody say somethin’ to you?’
‘Leave it, Sarge.’
Twenty soldiers clomped into Lucky’s bed, twenty into each Jimmy in line. Their jump boots made more clatter than regular Joes did. These Airborne troops were weighted with equipment and grenades, every one of them wore at least three knives and two cartridge belts, trenching tool, blanket roll, rifle, and pistol. They looked part soldier, part tractor. Every face bore a scowl, a tough-guy mien, though not a one of them had seen the first minute of combat. McGee had seen more, even from ditch. Joe Amos had shot down a Jabo; these Caspers were standing now on the bullet holes a black man had won. McGee had just been trying to welcome them to France. Joe Amos ground his teeth.
‘Gimme the cigarette.’
McGee handed it over. An Airborne captain came to his driver’s side and spoke up.
‘Cherbourg, right?’
‘That’s right.’
Joe Amos did not say Sir and he did not pull the cigarette from his mouth.
The captain glared up. Joe Amos bore down.
The captain said, ‘That’s right, sir.’
Joe Amos took his elbow from the sill. He tossed the cigarette into the sand.
‘That’s right, sir.’
The captain gave Joe Amos another moment to say more. Joe Amos did not. The officer seemed to consider this all the victory he had time for this morning over this uppity colored driver.
‘Alright, then. Move out.’
The captain leaped last onto Lucky’s back. The canvas shells on all ten Jimmies were down. Joe Amos saw the company mounted in his rearview and gave the gas and clutch their nudges. The muffler grumbled and the Jimmy rolled easy. Men weighed nothing next to Lucky’s normal tonnage.
Joe Amos led the convoy off the beach. He simmered alongside McGee, both sat quiet while the sand gave way to pavement.
Out on the road, Joe Amos’s ten Jimmies got in line behind another column headed north from UTAH. Far back, more trucks closed the gap.
‘Road’s crowded this mornin’,’ McGee said.
Joe Amos didn’t answer. The road to Cherbourg was always crowded, every road in the American lodgment was being choked and worn out. Since June 6, more than a million and a quarter Allied soldiers had been ferried from England, and more than 600,000 tons of supplies, enough to load up a freight train two hundred miles long. All this had been bottled for five weeks behind a front only forty miles long, chewing up men and materiel and the trucks to deliver them and the roads, too, just to gain a few hundred yards a day, especially down around St. Lô and south of Ste. Mère-Église.
Distracted, Joe Amos came up too close behind the rear of the last Jimmy of the convoy ahead. The truck hauled ration crates. He didn’t see a pothole and clipped it.
The truck clouted on its suspension and shimmied, a spring was probably shot. Someone in the Airborne smacked a fist on the canvas roof, the cloth plugs in the bullet holes bowed in.
‘Dammit, boy! Watch it!’
Joe Amos looked in his side mirror. Arms and faces lined the slat sides of the bed. The soldiers arrayed their heads into the wind like riding dogs, mean, junkyard Danville dogs, Joe Amos thought. He’d been chased by a few of them before. He wasn’t a sergeant then. I ain’t being chased anymore, he thought. My men ain’t, either. Not McGee, not any of them in my convoy.
Joe Amos laid back from the bumper in front and waited.
The morning brightened. Without the military traffic roaring everywhere on conked-out mufflers, without the knocked-down fences and char places in the earth, the air felt clean, blue, and sandy. Joe Amos ignored it the way a man in a sour mood dispatches a playful child from his presence. He had something in mind. McGee sensed it.
‘What?’
‘Nothin’. Just watch.’
The column passed through Ste. Mère-Église and slowed, so much administration of the American force in Normandy flowed out of here. Northwest of town stood the village of Le Val. Some of the bombs that fell on Ste. Mère-Église the night before D-Day had landed wide and tore up the little burg and the road that ran through it. COM Z engineers were still working on repairs. Traffic had been routed through the fields over a bulldozed dirt track, rejoining the main road a mile later at Edmondeville.
Joe Amos crossed his fingers that the trucks in front of him would not turn off at Ste. Mère-Église. They did not. He nodded and closed the gap again to the bumper.
He told McGee, ‘Roll your window up.’
The last Jimmy of the convoy in front was put there for a reason. Its muffler was shot. The thing spewed exhaust in smelly gouts. An oily cloud backfired on gear shifts. The engine block was surely on its last go-round, oil was mixing with the cooling water. Joe Amos held a fist out his window. He opened and closed it several times, until he saw the driver behind him, Baskerville from Philadelphia, do the same for the truck behind him. The gesture was repeated truck to truck through the ten Jimmies. Joe Amos had given the signal to close ranks tight. Now he rolled up his window. Baskerville did, too.
Joe Amos moved ten feet behind the spitting exhaust pipe. Instantly the stink of oil smoke thickened the air in the cab. In a minute, his eyes began to sting. Over the muffler prattle, he heard coughs from the Airborne. Someone thumped the canvas roof.
‘Back off, goddammit! Hey, boy, back off that truck!’
McGee, breathing through his shirtsleeve, showed Joe Amos a smile with his eyes.
‘Sarge, you bad.’
A great painted arrow outside Le Val turned the convoy off the road into the fields. The ground here was clay, red banks of hard earth plowed level by Army ‘dozers. The Jimmies, each one twenty-six thousand pounds with load, rolling on ten tires slick or treaded, peeled over the dried rain ruts and powdered the ground like brown flour. Billows of dust boiled high and thick. Joe Amos stayed on the tail of the failing Jimmy, close inside its gray trail of exhaust. Behind him, vague in his rearview through the dust, Baskerville hugged Joe Amos’s bumper, and the whole convoy did likewise. Apparently, the Airborne fellows had made themselves unpopular in every one of Joe Amos’s trucks this morning.
Joe Amos endured poundings and curses on his roof, knocks on his window, for five minutes until the clay road ran past Edmondeville and rejoined the tarmac. Then he backed off the exhaust pipe of the leading truck and rolled down his window. His windshield and hot hood wore a jacket of dusky red dust. Joe Amos held out a fist, the signal to the column to stay in echelon, with the standard sixty yards between bumpers. Baskerville laid off. Windows went down. The convoy shed dust in the wind like comet tails. From the truck bed, more coughs and curses burbled from the Airborne.
‘We gon’ get in trouble?’ McGee asked.
‘Naw.’
Joe Amos did a mental run-through of the jawboning he was going to get from the Airborne captain once they stopped in Cherbourg. He’d take it with a stoic face, as hard a face as any of these white boys who’d just seen their first trouble in France, which was dust and black men who wouldn’t take shit off them. The captain would probably threaten to report Joe Amos to his battalion CO, Major Clay. Joe Amos had three cartons of black market cigarettes given him for trade by Major Clay.
‘Naw,’ Joe Amos said again. He punched McGee in the shoulder.
The air in his window was fresh again, playful and blue clean. Joe Amos took it in and thought that a cigarette was no way to breathe this French air. He might quit, he decided, even as McGee shook out another spike for himself and asked for Joe Amos’s lighter.
~ * ~
Cherbourg was as wrecked as anything seen in the war zone. For two weeks, VII Corps had sat outside the port city pummeling the holed-up Kraut garrison with artillery. Then the bombers hit, giving rise to a new phrase in warfare, ‘saturation bombing.’ The Germans sat under an incredible number of American bombs, each blast adding to the wreckage of the city. Driving through the streets, Joe Amos followed a winding path, pointed by MPs from detour to detour because of the destruction. Above the chuffing of Lucky’s muffler, the Airborne soldiers whistled at their initial look at ruined France.
After a half hour straining in first and second gears, lurching through narrow ways between brick piles and dodging craters, Joe Amos spotted COM Z Headquarters. HQ was in a large brownstone facing a statue of Bonaparte on a horse. Beyond that sprawled the ruined harbor.
He eased the truck to a stop. The bad spring made the Jimmy rock like a boat on choppy water. He waited with his elbow in the windowsill.
The Airborne captain walked alongside. The man was red-clay grimy. A raccoon mask of white skin showed around mirthless eyes where he’d put on his jump goggles. Now he looked like a combat soldier.
Joe Amos handed him two fresh packs of cigarettes.
‘Go get ‘em.’
The captain did not react.
‘Sir.’
The officer measured the smokes against giving this uppity colored a tongue-lashing. Then he took the Chesterfields and pocketed them, glaring at Joe Amos the whole time. Finally, he turned to yell for his troops to fall in. Joe Amos watched the Airborne soldiers jump down, filthy, patting dust off themselves like putting out fires in their clothes. McGee watched, too, then smiled admiringly at Joe Amos when the captain and his boys walked away without giving them trouble.
Once the Jimmies were emptied, Joe Amos led the column past the verdigris Napoleon into the sparking harbor. Everywhere, in the air and on the quays, engineers touched welding rods to metal bars and beams, cranes hoisted new trusses in place, twisted wreckage was raised dripping from the water. Acetylene lights twinkled deep in the rust jungles and tangles, and the shouts of men, the clangs of hammers and riveters, made that special echo of metal, what every American knew was an American sound. Hot yellow stars tumbled from a hundred feet in the air, bounced, then disappeared. Every tool these men used, every sound they made except their voices, had come off the back of some truck. Lucky and the rest of the jimmies and tankers and flatbeds and the black drivers inside them were here in the flashes and hammer shots, just like they were in the sounds of battle out in the bocage and fields, Joe Amos drove slowly into the port, leading ten trucks, feeling a pride he could never describe to Boogie, feeling that he with his .50 caliber behind him, his bullet-holed Lucky around him, and his little convoy following him were a parade for the men pounding Cherbourg back into shape. You guys get this port up and running, he said silently to the men putting the harbor back together, and ‘til you do, we’ll keep the supplies flowing off the beaches. We got you covered.
Deep in the harbor, Joe Amos stopped on a broad quay. Beneath the water, with hawsers still tied to gigantic steel cleats, lay a titanic cargo ship scuttled by the Krauts and resting on the mud bottom. The ship’s rails were level with the platform when they should have been twenty feet in the air. Men crawled all over the boat like ants, chopping and slicing with flaring torches and metal saws howling. They whittled the great ship into shards that were lifted by a crane onto the back of a scow. The sight was tragic and remarkable. Joe Amos gazed up at a huge piece of deck floating almost gingerly at the end of the crane’s cable. He watched it swing out over the water, then crash onto the solid back of the scow, the rusty old grave digger attending the dead ship. All that metal would be floated back to England, then America. It would return to France as rifles, cannons, and Liberty ships. McGee thrust his head and arms out his window, astounded at the scale of the operation to clear just this one berth in Cherbourg when there seemed to be another hundred to clear, too.
Joe Amos took up his backpack. He opened his door. McGee didn’t turn.
‘Stay here.’
‘Okay.’
In the second Jimmy, Baskerville climbed out to meet him.
‘What’s up?’
‘Gotta see a man. You keep everyone in line for a few minutes? I’ll be right back.’
Baskerville squared his shoulders. ‘You need me, man? You want me to come wit’choo?’
‘Naw, ‘Ville. It’s cool. Just some business. You know.’
Baskerville nodded and narrowed his eyes. He eyed the backpack dangling in Joe Amos’s grip.
‘Awright. Hey.’
‘What.’
‘That was very cool with them crackers.’
Joe Amos didn’t say they deserved it. This was assumed. And if they didn’t deserve it from ‘Ville, Joe Amos figured some others did some other time and got off light, so this squared it.
Baskerville glanced up and down the quay. ‘You go ahead. I got your back.’
Joe Amos turned away, chuckling at the intrigue. It was just a couple cartons of smokes for some fancy French booze. ‘Ville acted like they were on a mission from Ike.
On the opposite side of the quay ran a line of squat wooden sheds, too humble for the Krauts to blow up. The shingle sidings rotted in mint green. Screen doors slapped as greasy engineers went in and out. All of them carried some bundle or other. Joe Amos headed for the shed at the far right end.
Stepping inside, he set his backpack on a long counter. On the far side was a pair of desks clotted with papers, In and Out boxes, and yellow telegrams. Clipboards hung on nails below a filthy window. A tall bald fellow unfolded from an accountant’s chair behind one of the desks. He made a show of slapping his ink pen to the desktop.
‘Well, well, it’s the Jabo killer.’
‘You heard?’
‘Colored boy shoots down a Messerschmitt, yeah, I hear.’
The sergeant behind the counter flipped out a big white palm, not for Joe Amos to shake but to slap.
‘What you got for me today? You bring me my welder’s mitts and goggles? I need gas canisters, more torches, Christ, I’m short of bootlaces.’
Quartermaster Sergeant Thalhimer leaned around Joe Amos to see out to the quay through the screen door.
‘Those trucks are empty.’
Thalhimer looked down at the backpack on his countertop. ‘You drove a bunch of Jimmies to my front door to bring me this? I don’t think so.’
‘I was hauling assholes today. Left ‘em off at COM Z.’
Thalhimer dropped his fast banter. ‘Aw, shit. Bad?’
‘I’ve heard worse. Bad enough.’
Thalhimer shook his head. ‘I don’t get it, man. I don’t get it.’
‘Yeah, you do.’
Joe Amos shrugged and snorted, unable to say more. The Quartermaster sergeant fidgeted in the silence of their shared sympathy. His long fingers beat a bothered tap on the countertop. Joe Amos had never known any Jew to be comfortable with being recognized as one. It wasn’t the same being colored. Then folks saw you coming a mile off. But Jews tended to keep their kind quiet, and who could blame them? At what time or place in history had it ever been a good idea to raise their hands and say, ‘Hey, we’re Jews over here’? Never, that’s when.
‘Well, screw ‘em,’ Thalhimer said.
‘Screw ‘em, Himey. I brought you somethin’.’
Thalhimer slid the backpack closer and looked inside. ‘Cigarettes. Where’d you get two cartons of cigarettes?’
‘Can’t say. You know.’
‘Yeah. What do you want me to do with ‘em? I don’t smoke.’
‘Trade ‘em.’
Thalhimer gave Joe Amos a bemused gaze. ‘Trade ‘em, huh? What makes you think I got anything to trade you for ‘em?’
Joe Amos returned Thalhimer the same quizzical look. The quartermaster shrugged.
‘For what? You want a welder’s apron, I got one your size.’
‘Booze.’
The sergeant snickered. He pushed the backpack across the counter to Joe Amos.
‘I don’t know anything about booze. I’m a quartermaster.’
‘A colored boy shoots down a Jabo, you hear. An underground cellar of wine and enough booze to get thirty thousand Krauts high, you don’t hear about. Himey, come on, brother. Who you talkin’ to here?’ Joe Amos shoved the pack across the countertop again, like another move in chess.
The sergeant considered the pack, then looked at Joe Amos. ‘You on the level?’
‘Straight and true. You know me.’
‘ ‘Cause it’s trouble for a lot of folks if you’re not. You included.’
‘It’s cool. Honest.’
‘Close the door.’
Joe Amos shut the rickety hut door. Outside, Baskerville and the other drivers stood ogling the hunks of metal flying overhead and the great whomps when the crane plopped them on the scow. When Joe Amos turned around, the backpack lay emptied on the countertop. Thalhimer had disappeared into the oily confines of his shack.
Joe Amos waited. He hadn’t expected such drama just swapping some smokes for a couple bottles of Frog brandy. Major Clay must have known it would go this way, that’s why he picked Joe Amos Biggs, a cool hand.
By the time Thalhimer returned with a cardboard box, Joe Amos felt some rite had happened, that he’d passed a kind of test to enter the secret world of alchemy, where cigarettes became booze. Thalhimer set the jingling box on the countertop.
‘Alright. Pick two.’
Joe Amos glanced over the lip. Six dark bottles stood with dusty necks.
‘I dunno, man. You pick.’
Thalhimer dug out a fat bottle. ‘Armagnac. Dupeyron vineyard, ‘34. Nice stuff.’
He set this aside.
‘Lafite Rothschild. Bordeaux, ‘23. You like wine?’
‘It ain’t for me.’
‘Okay. Whatever. Here you go, take this one, somebody will love you.’
‘Gimme one more.’
Thalhimer already had his hands on the sides of the box to put it away, back into the hidden inventory.
‘One more is for me. Come on, Himey.’
‘I give you one more, you owe me, sport.’
Thalhimer grabbed a bottle with a cork held in by wire. The glass appeared older than the others, fat and dark. Its label had yellowed.
‘Champagne. Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.’
Thalhimer held the champagne at an admiring arm’s length.
Joe Amos asked, ‘What year is that one?’
‘1899- Turn of the century.’
‘Man, that’s old. Is it still good?’
‘It’s probably great.’
Joe Amos reached for the champagne. Thalhimer handed it over, saying, ‘Funny thing, though. The folks who drank this stuff back then had no idea.’
‘About what?’
‘That they were toasting the blood twentieth. You know, Veuve means widow in French. Lot of widows this century.’
Joe Amos almost handed the bottle back for a different, less ominous sounding one. But he kept it, because Thalhimer said it might be great.
~ * ~
Ben Kahn put on his boots. He had not worn them in sixty hours, since Phineas left him at this aid station. He’d kept his uniform on, never took it off, slept in it. But three days ago, the moment Phineas had left, before he collapsed on the cot in a corner of the hot tent, Ben pulled off his boots, washed his socks, and hung them on the bed rail. He stayed barefoot, lying down or sitting upright to talk with the doctors or nurses who checked on him. He did not leave the cot, ate three squares a day, dozed, and stared at nothing. He did not say a prayer, no one asked him to. He sniffed his boots several times a day, to enjoy that they were airing out.
He tied the second shoelace knot and lifted his head. Sitting on a stool next to the cot, Phineas seemed to Ben very much the Christian, grinning his approval. Phineas had rescued him on Mont Castre, from Ben’s own exhaustion and failing spirit. Phineas had come to France to do good, and found much here to do. This was why he never seemed tired or downcast. So much evil and death ran rampant that Phineas was having one long field day. Ben envied Phineas his mission more than his youth and energy.
‘You look swell,’ Phineas told him now. The boots were ready, and the little Baptist had come to take him back. Ben glanced down at the wrinkled sheets of the cot.
‘You sure you don’t want to do a stint here?’ Ben asked. ‘Got this bed all broken in for you.’
‘No, no, I’m fine. You just pushed too hard, is all. But you look great now.’
‘So do you, Phineas.’
The young chaplain did. He propped on the stool like a bit of the bocage itself. Phineas was dirty as a path. Bits of sticks and leaves were caught in the webbing over his helmet. Looking at Phineas, an almost feral-looking boy, Ben did not want to leave the cot just yet.
‘Any news? What have I missed?’
Phineas pulled off his helmet. This was the first time Ben had seen the top of his head. Phineas was strawberry blond, more saffron than his eyebrows revealed. His hair was cropped in a military flattop. He ran a hand over the bristles like a teenager, playing soldier in the mud of a farmer’s field.
‘Well, Monty and the Brits finally took Caen yesterday, a city everybody figured he would’ve gotten on D-Day. I hear the place is blown to Kingdom Come, but at least it’s in our hands now. Down south, the St. Lô sector is heating up. Three divisions set off this morning on a big offensive. A battalion in one of them got raided by four hundred Kraut paratroopers after midnight, before the attack got under way. Krauts just ran right through their lines tossing grenades and firing into foxholes in the dark. That’s crazy. The battalion took fifty percent casualties.’
‘The attack go off on time?’
‘Yeah, but it’s headed right into the hedges. You know it’s gonna be slow.’
Slow meant deadly.
‘How about on Mont Castre? How’d we do?’
Phineas cocked his head. ‘You didn’t hear?’
‘No. I…’
Ben looked down, ashamed suddenly in front of Phineas. He had not ministered to any of the GIs flowing through the aid station. He’d kept to his cot, barefoot.
On the stool, Phineas shifted. He set his hands to his knees and leaned forward.
‘Let me tell you how we did.’
Ben lifted his gaze. Phineas beamed, eager and wholehearted. The little Baptist could do this, absolve a man with just the faith in his eyes.
‘The 90th has got a new name for Mont Castre.’
‘What is it?’
‘Purple Heart Hill.’
Ben envisioned the blood and bandages, bark winging off trees, the gunfire through the forest, and the shouts of men knocked down.
‘Did we take the crest?’
‘Oh, yeah. And a lot more.’
‘What did we lose?’
‘Two thousand for the first five days. A hundred or so yesterday and again this morning.’
Phineas continued with enthusiasm. Ben pushed away the urge to remind the young chaplain he was talking about death and maiming in huge proportions. He figured he was no one to lecture Phineas Allenby. The boy knew the costs and dangers to the soldiers as well as any frontline dogface. Listening to the tale of Mont Castre’s fall, Ben saw how caught up Phineas was in the uncomplicated themes of war, the simplicity of valor, the completeness of blood. Phineas, like Ben, urged the men forward. Ben’s intent was to see victory and find his son. Phineas did it to see the soldiers go, and to go with them.
‘The night we got you off the hill, all three battalions made it to the top. We took away the Kraut’s OP and that made things a little better for a while. We hauled in four hundred fifty prisoners, to boot. Then the Krauts decided they wanted their hilltop back.’
Phineas returned his pot to his head, reliving the incoming rounds of his story.
‘They beat the heck out of us with mortars and such. Then they came after us with everything they had, grenades, hand-to-hand, you name it. It got so bad the 359th had to gin up a J Company out of every boy they could find in the Field Train. Truck drivers, clerks, cooks, mechanics, they handed ‘em all a gun and got ‘em up on the hilltop. Let me tell you, sir, them rear boys fought like banshees, like everybody else did. And they took their lumps like everybody, too.’
Phineas carved images for Ben out of the warm air. He grabbed a steering wheel for the drivers, shoved a rifle in their mitts, and waved hands for the fighting of banshees. His voice took the tone of a sermon, and his passion for war and the Tough Ombres fashioned his words into a great clashing in the forest of Mont Castre. The wounded and killed did not burden his telling.
‘Dang a mule, Ben, you should’ve seen ‘em. Coming down the south slope of that hill, those Joes fought through five kinds of damnation. Went whoopin’ after the Krauts. The closer they got to the bottom, the harder the Jerries tried to stop ‘em. They had hidden machine guns and mines, trenches, everything prepared way in advance, and you couldn’t barely see twenty feet for the trees and scrub brush all around. But yesterday we got across the Lastelle road and broke through the Mahlman Line. And while this was all going on, the 357th kicked the Krauts out of Beau Coudray. So this mornin’ the Jerries are on their heels and backin’ up.’
Ben rested his palm on the cot beneath him. The bed had been his refuge for three days while the 90th slugged up and over Mont Castre, then chased the Germans down the back side of the hill. There was no reproach in Phineas’s voice for the fact that Ben stood in a bed instead of the fight. Nonetheless, Ben wriggled on the cot, working his toes in his clean socks, uncomfortable with his own safety. He’d told the men in the trench he would stay with them, and he hadn’t. Whitcomb had ordered him to come down. Ben was not at fault. But he’d given his word. He juggled these thoughts, guilt and blamelessness, while Phineas spun his heroic tale.
The young Baptist must have seen Ben’s agitation. He quit his descriptions of the battles and outcomes.
Quickly, he said, ‘So I came to get you. Figured you’d want to be in on the last of it. You sure earned it, Rabbi.’
‘Thank you, Phineas.’
Ben stood. He reached for his helmet, its metal was cooled and rested, too. Over two thousand casualties, he thought. What will be left of the Tough Ombres? Shavetail lieutenants nobody knows or trusts, exhausted veterans using up their luck, green boys with clean hands. The 359th’s CO had already got the boot, more brass will follow him out the door. More high-up asses will be covered to explain the body count. The 90th’s victory on Purple Heart Hill will do little to lift the division’s morale. Who will be left to remember it? Barely more than half. Ben. And Phineas.
‘Let’s go.’
Phineas did not rise from his stool. He pulled off his helmet again.
‘Not so fast. Have a seat.’
Baffled—he thought he was supposed to be leaving—Ben sat again on the cot. The mattress felt foreign now, with his boots on.
‘What, Phineas?’
‘You had a son.’
‘Yes. Have a son. Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘I want to know.’
‘About what in particular?’
‘About him, about the blood on your hands. Why you’re back in France. What happened?’
‘You’re younger than my son. I never explained myself to him. I don’t think I need to explain myself to you.’
‘I’m your colleague, Ben. And your friend.’
Phineas’s posture on the stool was firm. He held the power of belief, what a man can do when he knows he is right.
‘Neither of us has got a single soul we can talk to out there, Ben. We get tight with a fella and next thing we know we’re collectin’ his things. Dang it, you’re gonna go crazier’n you already are if you don’t open up to somebody. I don’t care if I’m no older than your last haircut, I’m here and I’m willing to talk. Especially if I’m the one who’s gonna have to come and round you up every time you push too far. Now, talk to me.’
Phineas crossed his arms over his chest and waited.
‘Where do you want me to start?’
The suddenness of this startled Phineas. The little Baptist clearly expected more of a fight. Caught off guard, he lowered his arms. Ben lifted a palm.
‘You’re right, Phineas. Everything you just said. It’s very lonely what we do. I hadn’t expected that but it is. I wasn’t lonely back then as a soldier, we were all in it together and we were so young. But I am now as a chaplain. I just spent three lousy days barefoot on this cot wishing somebody would ask me what’s wrong, afraid the whole time somebody would.’
Phineas couldn’t keep his seat. He stood and began a step forward, perhaps to lay a hand to Ben’s shoulder. Ben pointed him back to the stool.
Ben hid his smile at the little nebbish. He thought, the boy has such a good, Christian heart. And such a different one from a Jew. Goyim are so willing and quick to speak out their ills, to ask each other for grace and forgiveness. It must be so healthy for them. Jews, we endure. We’re not a people inclined to ask for help, it has come so rarely. Perhaps like Phineas says, we’re a bit crazier than we otherwise might be.
‘Tell me about your home,’ Phineas said. ‘And the first war.’
Ben knit his fingers and dropped his gaze to his lap. He caught himself being reluctant, looking away, his habit of avoidance. Then he brought his gaze to Phineas and spoke.
‘My papa was a German, my mother was Hungarian. They lived in Berlin and left in 1904 when I was five. We settled in western Pennsylvania. Papa was a rabbi in Germany. Respected. He was an eydel mentsch, a gentle, refined man. In America he was a coal miner. I had one older brother, a ganif, a crook. He got killed in the mines in a fight.’
Phineas said, ‘I’m sorry.’
Ben carried on his story. The long-dead brother was so little of what there was to be sorry about.
‘When the war came, Papa told me not to go. I was the only son. He told me to stay in school, to become an American rabbi.’
Ben chuckled.
‘Mama never liked the Germans. She said go, fight them. I couldn’t do what my father asked, Phineas. One brother was a disgrace and he was dead because of it. I wasn’t going to live a disgrace, that’s how it felt when I was eighteen. Everyone was signing up. I wasn’t going to live my father’s life over for him. I joined up. And I never saw my papa again. He died while I was overseas.’
‘That must’ve been hard.’
‘I’ll be honest, I didn’t feel it really deep when I found out. There was so much else going on. Papa dying didn’t hurt any more than the guy next to me. Later... later, when I came home and saw Mama without him. Then.’
Phineas let a silent moment hover, a monument to Ben’s papa and mama. This is something, Ben thought, a Jewish moment from the little Goy. Remembrance, a very Jewish thing.
‘Tell me about the war.’
‘Back then, the 90th wasn’t the Tough Ombres. We were the Alamo Division. I came in as a replacement. Almost everybody else was from Texas and Oklahoma. I joined them in England. On July 4, 1918, we put on a parade for the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. The whole brigade was given a banquet right in the city square. Then we shipped over to Bordeaux for six weeks of training. In mid-August, we got to the front lines at Limey near St. Mihiel.’
Ben paused.
‘Phineas.’
‘Yes, Ben.’
‘I wasn’t the same man back then.’
‘It’s okay.’
Ben let out a long breath.
‘I don’t know if it is.’ He looked away again. ‘Right at the turn of the century, the guns changed. Quick-firing artillery, machine guns, the magazine rifle, this was the first time these things had shown up in large-scale battle. So the armies, we didn’t know what to do with each other. We almost never fought the Boche out in the open, it was a slaughter both ways whenever we did. Instead, we dug in, sometimes a half mile apart from each other, sometimes fifty yards.’
In the same way Phineas had done describing the fighting on Mont Castre, Ben began unconsciously to build images with strokes of his hands. He swept the flat of his palm across a ruined vista he could still see. The land was stripped of vegetation down to soil and rock, every tree was snapped jagged. Even the fallen branches and leaves were blown away by bombs and their green bits burned or swept off by unfettered wind. The first trench in line was protected by a range of barbed-wire obstacles strung between posts. Ben recalled how the posts, arrayed for miles in meticulous order, looked like a vast black cemetery, and the wires made a dark mist that never lifted.
‘The trench systems were pretty elaborate. Three lines in a row, a couple hundred yards apart, all connected by communication trenches. We had bunkers for sleeping and eating. Imagine digging enough trenches for twenty thousand men to live belowground. And the Boche did the same.’
Phineas gasped, the way young men always have at the primitiveness of their elders.
Ben’s hands felt blisters and calluses again. He remembered looking at his nineteen-year-old palms, thinking then how they were not the hands of a rabbi, how much they resembled his father’s coal miner hands.
‘For a month, we sat staring over no-man’s-land. The Krauts dropped artillery on us every day, at dawn and dinner. We did the same to them.’
Ben halted his telling. He stilled his tapping fingers. He’d reached the point in his story where his hands, like the guns of the new century, changed.
Phineas said, ‘Ben, go on.’
Ben set his hands on his knees, to keep them out of the telling.
‘Every night, we sent out scouts. They called us scouts, but we weren’t. We were assassins. Phineas.’
The little chaplain said and did nothing. Ben did not know why he’d said Phineas’s name just then, until he felt the warm drops around his eyes, and knew he was calling to Phineas for help.
‘I volunteered, you understand. No one made me do it. I was mad at my papa. I was mad at my German background. I didn’t want to be anything or anywhere else in the world but a soldier in Germany. I was an American doughboy and I volunteered to crawl out at night and slit as many Hun throats as I could. I did that for two months. Two months. I don’t know how many...’
‘Ben ...’
‘No. I don’t know how many throats I cut, a hundred, probably more. You want to know how it’s done? You take your time and come up from behind ...’
Ben lifted his left hand and curled it to muffle a hundred mouths.
‘...you draw the knife sideways like this. You pull the head back to stretch the gash. You cut one more time to finish the windpipe. That keeps him from screaming. Then you stab hard into the heart from behind. You got to lay him down easy, so no one else hears you coming.’
Ben held both arms away from himself, done. He did not look at Phineas but into the crumpling air between his hands.
‘Every night, I crawled back across no-man’s-land under the barbed wire, me and a dozen others just like me. We left a few of us in the wire, but there was always another volunteer to take his place. In the dark we’d crawl past the ones laying out in no-man’s-land, we’d pat ‘em on the helmets for luck. We used to say our favorite nights to go out were in the rain. We got to come back to the line washed clean.’
‘But you weren’t.’
The young chaplain’s voice was not sympathetic. Ben saw Phineas was giving him what he needed, strength instead of coddling. God just said that to me, Ben thought, God through Phineas.
‘September 12, at dawn, we went over the top. After that, we didn’t stop for seventy-five days, every one of them under fire. Beyond St. Mihiel we were in the Argonne operation. When the Armistice came in November, we were still advancing. We took ten thousand casualties, Phineas. We were gassed, bayoneted, shot, blown up. The 90th never gave back a foot of ground. Not one.’
Ben turned the tale to his homecoming. He went back to the coal mines, his old job was waiting. His sad mother sickened and died in his first year back. Ben was twenty, a veteran, a hero, and alone.
‘Suddenly, I was an orphan. And I was a coal miner again. The two years before, the war and Mama and Papa dying, it was like I’d come through some sort of fog, and when I came out the other side I was by myself. All of a sudden, it seemed like I’d been robbed.’
Phineas listened, saying nothing.
‘I couldn’t remember much, Phineas, not much except two years of death. That was the thing that stood out, all the dying around me. I know it sounds weird but that’s how it felt. My parents, they...they were just two more folks who’d died. I couldn’t feel them going away, not like I should have. I tried. After France ... I used to play this game in my head. I’d count the people I’d speak to in a day, just to say hello or how are you, down in the mine or up in the mess shack. They never amounted to more than the number I’d killed. Once, I tried to talk to a hundred people in one day. It wore me out, but I did it. Then I imagined I’d stabbed or shot every one of them myself. I never went back in that mine, Phineas. I had no family left, no home really, so I went off to the city, to Pittsburgh. Got a job in a steel mill. It was like working on the sun, but it was better than a coal shaft. There were folks everywhere, noise and fires, and I liked it. It made me hard again, like the Army. In 1920, my first year there, I met a Jewish girl, got married. I went to night school at Pitt.’
‘You had a son.’
‘Thomas.’
Phineas nodded, as if this were progress, having Ben say his boy’s name.
The wife did not stay long, only six years, until she met a softer man, not one out of the mines and mills but a Ford car salesman. Ben made the steel that went into that man’s cars, made the wife that clung to the salesman now, made the son the new man called his own. Ben, with no knife or gun in his hand, no mama or papa, no mate, child, or brother, was alone again.
In the mills, Ben stoked himself, trying to make his heart an ingot, the hardest he could. He finished his schooling at Pitt. On the nights he was not in classes, he drank. He did every stupid thing a young man out of war and love can do. The Depression took his job.
‘But I couldn’t leave Pittsburgh.’
Phineas said, ‘Your son.’
God did not come to Ben in one fell blow. Instead, Ben sensed God arriving in bouts, in the jabs and gouges he’d suffered since defying his father and going off to war, as though God spent fourteen years beating His way into Ben’s spirit. God came also in the form of a run-down Ford coupe his ex-wife’s husband gave him, perhaps out of pity, more likely as a way to show the contested son, Thomas, who was the better man. In 1933, Ben enrolled in the rabbinical school at Union Seminary College in Cincinnati. Every other weekend he drove three hundred miles each way to Pittsburgh to be with Thomas, never letting on that he slept in his car in warm weather and in a Squirrel Hill flophouse in winter. He worked nights in Cincinnati as a security guard. After four years, he received his rabbinical degree and became the rabbi of a small conservative synagogue in Squirrel Hill, down the street from the flophouse.
Ben reached to his breast pocket. He undid the button and took out the letter. It was too soon in the story for Thomas’s final note but Ben held it, turning the folded sheet like a slow pinwheel.
‘Those were good years,’ he said.
Phineas nodded but did not smile.
Ben tried and became a better father. The boy grew into a handsome lad, dark-haired and deep-eyed, lean and quick like his father, prudent like his mother, and in the way of all young men, passionate. Thomas came to Friday night services, where Ben watched the teenage boy dahven when he prayed, rocking with the pace of the Hebrew under his breath.
Ben unfurled the letter. ‘When he was fifteen, I started to see some of myself in the boy I didn’t like.’
‘He had a mean streak,’ Phineas said.
‘Yes.’
A few times, Thomas got in scrapes at school and with the police. He was in fights, he’d lobbed rocks into car windows, some drinking, some pranks went awry.
‘Teenage stuff,’ Ben said. ‘But underneath, there was something else, I could tell, I knew him. He wasn’t just rebelling. He didn’t just fall in with a bad crowd. There was a taste there. For trouble.’
The demons that had chased Ben away from home and into no-man’s-land now pursued his only child. Thomas read everything he could on the worsening situation in Europe. He listened to radio reports of Hitler’s speeches and Neville Chamberlain’s appeasements of the Nazis. On his eighteenth birthday, Thomas told Ben he intended to finish high school, then enlist in the Army. Ben said no, he would go to college, he would study.
‘He asked me, “What about the Jews over there? Don’t you care?”‘
‘What’d you tell him?’
‘I said what the Jews of Europe needed most from Thomas Kahn was not another soldier but another Jew, a leader of their people in America. I wanted my son to become a rabbi. “You’re Kohain,” I told him, “like me.” Turns out he was more like me than I wanted. Nothing stopped me. Why did 1 think I could stop him?’
Thomas’s mother and stepfather begged the boy not to enlist. The stepfather bribed him off with a new Ford. Thomas took the car and enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. He studied aviation for eighteen months. He sold the car, quit school, and enlisted in the Army Air Corps.
By this time, Churchill and England were fighting the Germans in Africa. Hitler steamrolled across Russia. U.S. troops surrendered on Bataan. Doolittle bombed Tokyo. War had again swallowed the world.
Ben fingered the letter, making it crinkle. He began to unfold it, peeling back the top portion slowly, like a parchment. The page was thin blue. A hole had sprung in one of the creases. Ben studied the rip, careful not to make it worse.
‘The last thing I said to him, right before he left for Basic, was no. He just turned away. That was the last word I ever spoke to him, Phineas.’
He unfolded the bottom half of the letter.
Thomas’s handwriting never failed to fool Ben for a heartbeat that the boy was alive. Each inked word still bore the swirl of a pen. How easy it was for Ben to pretend that he could answer this letter, that he might still make right that moment when Thomas turned away.
He prepared the blue sheet to be read, spreading it. The rip in the crease lengthened just a bit.
Thomas was with the 95th Bomb Group, the pilot of a B-17. His twenty-second mission was over Hanover, February 25, 1943. On the way home, over France, a flight of Focke-Wulfs caught up with them and shot up his squadron. His B-17 lost a wing and exploded mid-air. The mission report said only three chutes from the ten-man crew ejected before the plane hit the ground. The tail gunner made it back to England. He didn’t know who else got out. The other nine men were listed as missing.
‘He could still be alive,’ Phineas said.
‘He could be,’ Ben answered. ‘I don’t know.’
He held up Thomas’s letter, the last known thing.
‘I got the Army’s telegram that he was MIA. A week later, I got this,’
He read aloud:
Dear Dad,
I have to make this one short. We’re taking off before sunup. I’ve been awake for a few hours now. You can sure see a lot of stars here in England, was it like that when you were here?
I know I haven’t written you much. I guess I should have. I’m sorry the way things have gone between us in the last year or so. But I’m writing you and I hope you’ll write back.
Like I said, there’s not a lot of time right now, so I’ll get right to it. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I want to tell you that you were wrong to try and keep me from joining the war. I don’t want to be a rabbi like you, I never did. Maybe I should have said this before, maybe it would have spared us both some hurt feelings and a shouting match or two, but I don’t want to live your life for you over again. I don’t want to end up in the coal mines and the steel mills when this war is over. I don’t want to end up sleeping in a car. You didn’t think I knew but I did. That’s okay, I admire you for what you’ve done, but it’s not my life, Dad. I want different things, bigger things.
We’re different, you and me, and we’re the same in a lot of ways.
There’s still a lot I can learn from you and maybe I need to get better about listening to you. But you need to get better about listening to me.
With all these stars overhead, all this seems pretty far away.
For a month now we’ve been dropping bombs on German cities. We aim for the factories, but we miss, too. And all the shells the Krauts fire up at us fall on their own houses. We’re killing people left and right, and while the generals tell us that’s swell, I remember how you told me once you used to count the people you killed in France. I look at the night sky with the planes loading up and I think, We’ll kill more than there are stars up there. Like I said, we’re a lot alike, you and me. Bombing was easy at first, but it’s started getting hard. You told me it would.
I got to go now. But when this is all over, we’ll sit and talk about our wars. I bet when it’s all said and done, they won’t have been too different, either. Everything else is fine. Don’t worry.
Thomas
Ben folded the page. In his own voice he’d heard his son’s, another fooling thing to make Thomas alive for one more minute. The boy retreated with the letter into Ben’s pocket.
Phineas said, ‘He sounds like a handful.’
Ben released a rueful chuckle.
Phineas spun his helmet in his hands. ‘A prosecutor cannot become a defender.’
‘No,’ Ben said.
‘You’re afraid God took him because of the blood staining your hands.’
‘Yes, Phineas. I am; And maybe the blood on his, too.’
‘Like he said, you’re a lot alike. Except for one big difference.’
Ben said nothing.
‘Sounds to me,’ Phineas said, ‘like Thomas was a little quicker than you in regretting the blood on his hands.’
‘Ours isn’t a Christian God, Phineas. He doesn’t ask us for regret. He asks for obedience.’
Phineas nodded, calculating.
‘So that’s why you’ve come back, isn’t it? You’ve found a loophole. You’ve lost your wife and probably your son. You’re angry. You can’t fight anymore, or you’ll lose God, too. But others can fight for you.’
‘Yes, they can.’
Phineas held out his own pink palm, accusing Ben with a hand unbloodied in war.
Phineas said, ‘You came back for revenge.’
‘That’s right.’
‘On the Germans.’
‘I can’t take it on God.’
Phineas stood from the stool. Even scorning, Phineas Allenby would not sacrifice compassion.
‘You came back to war as a man of God. But you’re not.’
Ben stood also. He clapped his helmet on his head, ending the session with Phineas and his barefoot stay in the aid station.
‘God wanted my son dead. I don’t know if He succeeded or not. But I’m here to find out. Me, I want Germans dead. My reasons are as good as God’s. He won’t abandon me for that.’
Ben pointed at Phineas’s hip, to the bulge of his pistol holster.
‘That’s the great thing about God, Phineas. He’s no hypocrite.’
Alone, Ben headed out of the tent. The day was blue and clean, the last smoke of the battle coiled at a distance, rising from the far side of Mont Castre. Ben paused and gazed up, hoping for a clear night, an English night, to look at the stars.
~ * ~