Only The Impassioned
a NOVEL by H. C. Turk
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©2011 H. C. Turk ~ hcturk.com
Smashwords Edition
Chapter 1
Pulled Toward Paradise
In a stolen train, eleven men rode to the end of war. Confiscated by Allied forces, which had penetrated deeply into Germany by April of 1945, the Brechtesmeister passenger train was a string of six cars pulled by a quiet diesel, the sparkless engine an invention of a German mind, the same as the classical symphony and the Third Reich.
Stragglers rode in the rear.
Andrew Bower, a twenty-two-year-old draftee, reached out to touch the seat ahead. The stiff leather was cold, the pattern of the securing tacks and the joinery of the wood austere, Germanic: hard, carefully considered, devoid of humor.
Bower hadn’t seen the first nice battle in the whole country.
Turning left on the seat, he reached to the window, figuring the sliding, pivoted latch pairs with a careful look, resolving the mechanical problem as efficiently as a Panzer tank rolling over dead French freedom fighters.
Bower had seen this austere solution at the base of the Vosges mountains in late 1944. Their bodies did not pop like ticks on a hound’s back smashed between the master’s thumb and fingertip, but flattened as though a stack of fabric.
Only the living feel pain from the dead’s disdainful treatment. Only the impassioned.
Not all of those men had been dead.
Looking out, reaching past his leaning Garand for the window latches, Bower saw a mountain range, the snowy tops delightfully irregular, generously absorbing the day’s last light only to reflect the bright vision back to a young man traveling to the war’s end, perhaps his own.
“Is that still the Alps?” he asked no one.
“Yeah,” someone replied.
Two accented voices. Florida answered by New York. Bower had turned away from his peers, average young men who had survived Operation Overlord, the Battle of the Bulge, and the Second Siegfried Line. A year earlier, upon arriving at the European Front, Bower had traveled through France in a “40 and 8”: a boxcar first utilized in World War I, capable of transporting either forty soldiers and their gear or eight horses. The term had never settled well within Bower. It should be 40 or 8, he thought, the terminology resolved in his mind as though a semantics problem in journalism school. You don’t put the men and the horses together: the box car holds either men or horses.
His formal education had ended at high school. Then came the schooling of death.
Standing in a Florida train station waiting to leave with scores of other young men for Georgia and boot camp, Bower looked only at the old steam locomotive approaching. The smoke emitted from the stack seemed a type of dirty cloud, perverted from a pristine state due to some mechanical invention of mankind, such as howitzers and mortars and mines. They all made dirty clouds. As the train approached, Bower reflexively looked behind to see if his father stood ready to push him in front of it. That was an old story he would never forget.
Bower looked away from the men in their dungarees and jeans, some wearing Sunday jackets, because too many were accompanied by family. A mother hugged her son. A father smiled pridefully while fearing for his boy’s safety. Father and son clasped hands. That is not the manner in which Bower’s father applied his hands to his son, his only child. Though feeling exhilaration at being away from his own family, Bower also felt the failure of leaving a shabby life for a tour of hell. Like a bad deal at a car lot, trading in a clunker for a bomb.
Looking through that train window in Germany, he had difficulty seeing the Alps. What a great sight for a boy from Flatland, USA, but he could not help but clench his jaws and feel the grit between his teeth. Even after days, he hadn’t been able to get that mud out of his cavities. Dirt doesn’t get much more intimate than when it grinds your teeth down. But that intimate filth seemed so much cleaner than the blood of the sergeant splattered against him as they lay in a shallow foxhole in France, a 300-year-old village famed for grape preserves whose farmland was a tangle of dormant vines holding bodies of young men as the Messerschmidts and Mustangs coughed and scrambled above for dominance of the dead.
That was last year. Bower’s mud was from this April. All the men in his platoon had shoved their faces against the muddy road when the Luftwaffe came along, but only Bower had walked away.
“I hope you boys don’t mind,” Bower said as he pulled the window open. “I have to breathe.” He had the slow, secure voice of a storyteller, a man whose sound suggested meaning. People enjoyed his voice, which came rarely the more he fired his weapon.
The train car did not smell of tanned leather and varnished wood, but of human perspiration and sloughed skin cells fomenting bacterial growth, the odor perceptually depicting the chemistry of deferred hygiene. The smell was of soldiers in the field during cold weather, active men who could only bathe from their upturned steel pots when not ducking beneath the thin steel sheathes.
“Jeez, it’s about thirty degrees out there,” said the man who had spoken before, named Gupton. “I ain’t good in the cold. I’m from the south. South Brooklyn.”
Bower did not count the padded seats, but knew the car had enough room for fifty passengers. Ahead, five cars held soldiers who had not been separated from their companies, who were not the only survivors of their platoons.
Bower turned to that sound: not the words, but the slapping. Three seats behind, a private threw both arms around his body as though violently hugging himself to press heat into his freezing innards. His shivering did not convince Bower of a genuine thermal crisis.
“I’m from Florida,” Bower told Gupton. “If it drops to thirty degrees where I come from, everything you’ve been growing all year turns brown. But I like to breathe, too.”
Bower looked briefly at his companions. The train had been underway only a few minutes. Upon embarking, Bower had ignored the others. He had been walking for days, and did not much care about his companions, as long as they weren’t Krauts. They shared his feelings. The men were all different, and all the same. One soldier was perfectly shaven from scalp to chin. Most had ragged hair and scruffy beards. One had small blue eyes, another larger brown eyes. Some had big, crooked noses; some narrow, bony noses; but all of these men were peers in this war. Despite different body sizes, hair color, and facial shapes, the soldiers evinced identical fatigue. Toughened in the field, their bodies and limbs would continue to function as propelling sets of muscles, but the men were becoming spiritually depleted. Even the unattached reporter from a California newspaper looked like a straggler after one too many fire fights. Now the men had settled in the train, gaining their bearings, catching their breath, orienting their emotions. Two men slept: Sergeant Yarrow—the only noncom—snored in the rear. In the same row, a few seats ahead and right of Bower, Private Pinto leaned against the window with his shoulder and head. His mouth was open, but the man breathed silently. Beside him sat his buddy, Dixon. To their left and a row behind, three ahead of Bower, sat two Negroes. No one got their names. None of the other men sat in pairs. Though some of these soldiers were worthy of staring, Bower turned away from them all and closed the window.
“It doesn’t bother me,” sighed Farber, a slight man with curly hair who wore only an olive drab poncho and the type of wooden shoes seen on local peasants. He wore no shirt, no pants, no socks, only wooden shoes and a poncho. “I’m from Wyoming.”
“Wyoming? Is that in the States, the United States?” Gupton asked, his voice approaching a whine. “We guys from New York don’t know nothing that far away, unless it’s the whores in Jersey.”
“They gotta be better than the whores in Mexico,” said Private Petrowski, who sat a few seats ahead of Farber, on Bower’s right flank.
Petrowski’s twang told Bower that the two were from a similar part of the hemisphere, their homes straddling an equally southern latitude, but Bower wasn’t looking for a buddy from his part of the world.
Gupton moved to the seat behind Bower in order to be closer to the conversation—in order to be closer to Petrowski. This infantryman wore the most perfect uniform Bower had ever seen in the field, his parade shoes immaculately polished, canvas leggings crisp and clean, pants fresh, not a button missing from his jacket. His shirt could have been a napkin in a mansion, though rich folk probably didn’t use chino to wipe their lips. But Gupton was staring at Petrowski’s face, not his uniform. Petrowski wore spectacles with one lens cracked from a bullet hole in its center.
“How do you see through those damn glasses?” Gupton demanded as though in pain. “They’re driving me nuts.”
“They’re my buddy’s glasses, not mine,” Petrowski replied, his left pupil directly centered in the bullet hole as he looked to Gupton. “He gave them to me when he was dying. I don’t know why. I’ll take them off when I figure that out.”
“Pal, you’re a walking chicken outfit,” Gupton told Petrowski. “The kind where you spend so much time polishing your shoes you got no time to find a clean place to jerk off. How’d you get to be so pretty?”
Toward the front of the train, right side, sat a PFC whose facial demeanor implied nothing of warm camaraderie. He looked to Gupton as though about to spit on him.
“That was a jerkoff question,” Dixon said with a surprisingly mild voice. “Why don’t you hitch up your balls and ask him?” And he nodded to Farber.
Gupton shrugged.
“I’ll bite. Hey, poncho, what happened to your uniform? I got spare socks in my duffel bag. You can have them. Except I ain’t seen my duffel bag in a week.”
Farber was bending over a BAR, whose barrel extended into the aisle separating the two rows of seats. He had pulled the slide back and was scrubbing at the bolt with a toothbrush. Bower saw that if the weapon discharged, it wouldn’t kill anyone on the train. Everyone else was armed with M-1’s, either Garands or carbines, except Petrowski, who had two 1911 autos strapped to his waist, both on the same side: one on the hip, one covering his watch pocket. Farber was the only man who touched his weapon. Everybody else had touched them enough. The old guy in back had a rangefinder.
With Gupton’s offer, Farber looked up from cleaning his weapon, shaking his head with new energy, though continuing to press his toothbrush deep into the rifle’s chamber. Bower watched specks fly from those stiff bristles like shrapnel from a tiny bomb.
“Oh no, I don’t want no clothes,” Farber declared. “Some lieutenant colonel himself said that I was doing no fighting until I got a uniform. Socks ain’t no uniform. Leggings ain’t no uniform. A BAR ain’t no uniform. It’ll take a general to change that, not a pair of socks.”
From behind came a deep voice that sounded nearly bored. Between Gupton and the sergeant, a radioman slumped in his seat. Hallam’s T5 insignia had been sewn askew on his jacket. He wore no outer coat, like most of the soldiers. Bower knew he was a radioman from his wrists. The dials of his large watch glowed like phosphorous tracer rounds, even in the late afternoon. Not phosphorous, but radium. His bare wrist was truly bare, the skin peeling like a sunburn, the redness in the shape of a watch.
“I heard of boys selling their uniforms for wine,” Hallam said.
Still scrubbing, Farber shook his head.
“I wish I had got some wine out of it,” he said. “Two of us were on a damn draw-fire patrol. Well, we had drawn enough enemy fire for a time, so we made it back peacefully. We were bivouacked in one of these little villages. Well, the Jerry folks were real nice to us, except when you turned your back they stole your K-rations, your canteen, and your letters from home.”
“They stole your uniform?”
“No, on the way back from that patrol, I had to pee bad. Some older gent saw me and just had to look. He saw that I was circumcised and raised a rumpus. Half the town jumped on me and took all my clothes, leaving me naked.”
“What happened to the other guy?” Petrowski wondered. “The one you were with.”
“He laughed his can off. They didn’t touch him.”
“That’s because they thought you were Jewish,” Gupton added wisely. “No one likes Jews.”
“I am Jewish,” Farber admitted.
“You are? You don’t look it.”
“Judaism is a religion,” Farber scowled. “It’s not a country. A Catholic or anybody can convert to our faith. It ain’t like being Negro. A white person can’t convert to being colored.”
“No, but a white person can marry them,” Bower added. “When they have kids, it’s sort of a mix. I lived next to some of them. They were always getting beat up. Even the neighborhood dogs didn’t like them. My dad used to beat me up for playing with those kids. They were the nicest people I ever met.”
Dixon looked to his buddy, then nudged his shoulder, receiving no response. Bald, and not wearing a pot, Pinto had more hair on his face than his head. His thick eyebrows were so broad they nearly touched. Bower noticed the patch on Pinto’s jacket. Red letters against a white background, encircled by blue, like a tiny coat of arms. AA: Antiaircraft Command. Dixon looked closely to Pinto’s face, then turned to the front of the train.
Farber ended his part of the conversation by blowing violently into his BAR’s interior.
Bower recalled a relentless autumn wind on the border with France. Ugly leaves blew everywhere: orange leaves, red leaves, yellow leaves. Where Bower came from, the leaves didn’t change color when it got cold, if only because it never got real cold. But he didn’t like that change in color. Red is not the color of life. The redder a tomato, the closer it is to rotting. If a person sees red on himself, he is not seeing good health. He is seeing some kind of burn or some kind of wound. Orange is a bruise that might cause blood poisoning. People in death camps turn yellow before they get lucky and die.
“In the South, we have coloreds instead of Jews,” Petrowski said. “That’s who you’re supposed to hate there. I don’t. I don’t even hate the Krauts. I just want them to stop shooting at me. A man could get sick of this.”
Petrowski’s words encouraged Gupton to lean into the aisle and call out to the front.
“Hey, colored soldiers, where you boys from?”
The two men ahead did not respond, continuing to sit placidly, looking nowhere.
“Hey, Mister Negro and Mister Negro,” Gupton said more loudly. “You gents gonna tell us where your home is?”
Dixon stared at the men, who sat nearly beside him, separated by that aisle, like a tunnel.
One of the Negroes turned, speaking over his shoulder. No one in the train understood him. He spoke clearly, but in a foreign language: not German, not French, not Italian, not Spanish. The last word sounded like “Inglich.”
Gupton rapidly shook his head and slapped his temple with one palm. He looked down as though to see what had been dislodged.
“Some of those boys can really fly,” Hallam said. “Some of them have their own squadron.”
Now sighting along his rifle’s bore, Farber spoke quietly, his sound a conspiracy.
“I thought coloreds were supposed to have their own train.”
“We’re all going to the same place,” Bower told him.
“Wherever you live,” twitching Petrowski declared, “there’s someone you’re supposed to hate.”
“Everybody hates Nazis, or ought to,” Farber said. Then Bower announced:
“Everybody gets hated and loved. Somebody loves even rats and Nazis.”
“Yeah, they love each other,” Gupton scoffed loudly, smirking. “The Krauts love each other, and hate everyone else. Jews, Serbs, Gypsies. You name ’em, they hate ’em.”
“I never seen a Gypsy,” Bower admitted. “I don’t know anything about them.”
“They steal chickens and tell fortunes,” Gupton stated sagely. “They’re real good at both.”
“It sure would be nice to have a chicken right now,” said Hallam.
Upon replying, Petrowski scornfully poked a finger into the hole of his lens, his feet twisting against the floor as though trying to dig through.
“My family has Gypsy blood in us. And the word is ‘Roma,’ not Gypsy. Gypsy is a stupid fucking word. It’s a stupid fucking word the goddamn Nazis use.”
Despite Petrowski’s tidy uniform, his nails were ragged, caked with reddish dirt.
Gupton leaned away from Petrowski, defensively holding out both hands.
“Hey, Mac, don’t yell at me. I ain’t the one sending Gypsies and Jews—and probably New Yorkers—to death camps. Tell it to Jerry.”
Dixon turned to Gupton with a glare that suggested Gupton needed to be slapped into line.
“There ain’t no such thing as death camps. There’s enough killing going on without that bullshit.”
Nine men in the train then gave their attention only to a superior who stepped right in their faces. But, no, that was no colonel who walked forth and confronted his boys, his subordinates. Bower had risen from his seat as though pulled toward paradise by the spirits of righteousness. Of all the men in the train, Dixon seemed the coldest, hardest, toughest, and meanest. Bower strode to him as though a daddy about to horsewhip his son. He bent over Dixon and called out like a preacher speaking the word of God, known not through memorizing some scripture, but from direct experience with death.
“I walked through Landsberg,” he said, staring into Dixon’s eyes, into his soul. “I’ll smell that place in my grave.”
Dixon didn’t mind confrontations, but the look he returned to Bower—the men separated by inches—was not of anger. Bower slowly straightened, and Dixon looked away.
“Jeez, I heard they do sick things to people,” Petrowski said to Bower. “Was it really stacked full of dead bodies?”
“I only saw two people alive,” Bower replied, “and I killed one of them.”
Even the sergeant awoke to stare for a moment before returning to sleep.
He had walked through Struthof.
Chapter 2
Rush And Roar
Bower returned to his seat and looked through the window. Dixon began pulling at his web equipment, coming away with a compact skeletal stove. He sat in the aisle, opening a small metal container with a screw-top, like a miniature canteen. He sat the stove on the train’s floor, filled the fuel chamber, pumped a knurled shaft, then lit the burner with a book of matches that had been waterproofed with a latex condom. The circular flame of blue and green was so lovely that Bower could not look away.
He didn’t like the floor: riveted steel. Bower hated cold, hard floors. His parents’ home had no carpet, only bubbling linoleum, split wood, and painted concrete—painted grey. Couldn’t even make it blue, like the sky, something above, something better. They had to paint it like dirt.
In the corner, he saw small, brown particles. Rat droppings. He had seen plenty of that at home. His parents’ home.
The steel floor in this train had been painted the color of steel.
“My buddy and I ain’t eat all day,” Dixon said gruffly as he removed a piece of meat wrapped in tin foil from his mess kit. “I don’t know what this is, but I’m eating it. Don’t even ask. I only got enough for me and Pinto.”
Dixon did not look to Pinto when speaking to his friend. Bending, he tended his meal.
“I’ll get you warm, buddy. You need some meat in your belly.”
As soon as the smell came to Bower, he turned to the window and opened it again, thrusting his head through and retching once deeply, ejecting nothing tangible from within, tasting acidic bile.
It smelled like Landsberg.
Swallowing, wiping his lips on his sleeve, Bower closed the window and settled. Now he recognized the smell. Mutton. He didn’t give a damn. It was just a piece of meat.
No one looked at Bower. Pissing and puking were things soldiers needed to do on their own.
Trains impart the finest sensation of floating, connected to the world with metal, but gliding instead of pounding, like tanks. Even military passengers can relax and enjoy the sensation, if they are not heading for a rougher ride.
The oldest man in the train then stood. His medium length hair was greying at the tips, like a general or a banker. Cornack wore a knee-length blue jacket not of the military. Neither was he, despite his GI steel pot. But this helmet was from the wrong service, the wrong side of the war, the world. Marines wore that type of pot in the tropics, the exterior covered with a fine net. To make ad hoc camouflage, insert some twigs and leaves. Cornack’s net was full of flashbulbs.
He walked as though wounded, each stiff movement deliberated by his skeleton. Still, he moved unobtrusively, not calling attention to himself. He held a small, elegant camera hanging from his neck by a leather strap cracked at the points of flex. As Cornack walked along the aisle toward the men speaking, Bower read the graceful script engraved on the camera’s front plate: Voigtländer.
Gupton looked him up and down before speaking.
“Hey, Mr. Reporter, why are you in with a pack of stragglers?”
“Why are you in with a pack of stragglers, Mr. Entertainer?” Hallam, the radioman, asked from behind.
Gupton shrugged theatrically.
“I was taking a crap in a ditch when the Kraut cannon fire started coming in. Three guys in my squad walked away, and two didn’t make it.”
Gupton turned to the reporter again.
“What happened to you? All your buddies with their pencils and shit get blown up by a printing press or something?”
While walking, Cornack inserted a bulb into the flash gun on his camera. To Bower, the polished, segmented reflector suggested a funnel for decanting light, a silver, perfect illumination that would not singe a fly’s wings, unlike the flashes of artillery, tracer rounds, mortar shells, and bombs.
Before replying, Cornack casually focused on Gupton and tripped the shutter. After the flash, Gupton shook his head with a circular motion, a false, dumbfounded look on his face.
Sgt. Yarrow’s eyes flew open and he leapt to his feet, bayonet drawn. He focused on the reporter, then sat, seeking the source of that bright ambush.
Leaping from sleep ready to kill or die was nothing new to the men on that train. Besides, Yarrow was a noncom.
“You all right, Sarge?” Gupton asked.
Yarrow turned to the source of his discomfort, staring at Gupton. Staring at all of them.
“Don’t give me no shit, because this ain’t my outfit, and none of you is in my outfit. If it was, I’d take your shit only to cure you of it. Here, I’ll slap your ass down. I’ll have you on the roof of this train drawing fire away from me and my men, and they ain’t even here, so don’t give me no shit.”
Yarrow leaned back and closed his eyes, adjusting his pot a bit as though to shield his face from the sun. Instead of sheathing his knife, he left it on the seat.
As though never interrupted, Cornack lowered his camera to his chest and replied. The same as Yarrow, he looked to Gupton, but spoke to them all.
“Part of my story is to show how soldiers die,” he began. Bower believed that he saw a pleasant demeanor mixed with Cornack’s fatigue and stress. Of course, Cornack was only required to shoot people with his camera. “I was assigned to a company whose captain found it objectionable that I was primarily photographing his dead ‘boys.’ He sent me along to this train under armed guard.”
Bower heard a hiss as Cornack licked his fingers and removed the spent, darkened bulb, which he placed into his coat pocket. Then he reloaded his weapon of light.
Light weapons: 1911 auto, grease gun, .30-caliber carbine, 10-inch bayonet, farm boy, city boy….
The sergeant had awakened again. Still seated, not even leaning forward, he glared at the reporter.
“You’re the guy who shoots dead men. You shoot me and I’ll come back from Hell to cut your throat.”
Yarrow closed his eyes again. Unperturbed, Cornack turned and focused on Bower.
“Why wouldn’t you photograph us when we die?” Bower asked, looking right into the lens. “Is somebody trying to hide the fact that boys on both sides are being slaughtered out here?”
After taking a photograph of earnest Bower, Cornack replied while changing flashbulbs. The car briefly shook, but the jerk was just a shrug in the train’s ongoing vibration. Maybe they ran over something dead in the road.
“The captain objected to the fact that my photography was oriented toward accuracy rather than heroism. The men in this war don’t die pretty. German 88’s don’t shoot out nice little pieces of shrapnel that find a man’s heart and kill him immediately and neatly. You know what death looks like better than I do, and that’s what I show with my camera. I show men dying in fear and pain.”
Bower then became insistent, but not irascible.
“I am dying happy,” he announced. “Somehow, I am smiling with my last breath, and I’m taking it with me.”
“Hey, make sure you’re really dying,” Gupton told him. “If you got a big dumb grin on your face because you stubbed your toe, they won’t give you any morphine. You don’t want to miss that.”
Cornack made another exposure of Bower, who smiled just before the flash went off. Of all the people captured on this roll of film, Bower would be the only one looking to the camera, laughing. His expression was wholly artificial, the following, flat look appropriate for a fatigued warrior.
They called them clothes fatigues.
Seated directly behind Bower, in the line of fire from the reporter, Gupton covered his eyes again, like a kid hiding.
“Jeez, that’s like a flare. The Krauts killed us with them. We were right at the base…. Oh, bullshit. War stories in the middle of a fucking war.”
“This ain’t the middle,” Petrowski said with more anxiety than certainty. “This is the end.”
“What do you know, soldier,” amazed Gupton asked, eying Petrowski’s outfit, “when you’re a walking haberdasher or something?”
Gupton then turned to Cornack. “Isn’t that the word? A clothes store full of everything?”
“A haberdasher is someone who sells items for men like shirts, ties, and gloves,” Cornack explained.
“Close enough for government work,” Gupton retorted, turning again to Petrowski. “Hey, soldier, you got the best looking uniform I ever seen. You got no blood on it from any Kraut or a real soldier. I bet you ain’t even pissed them pants from being scared to death. I done that so many times I don’t wear shorts no more. I just let it run down into my boots. It keeps my feet warm.”
Looking down, Petrowski began shaking his head. His ankles twisted as though he needed to go somewhere, but the man had to stay and speak.
“I got me a brand new uniform and ain’t had to kill nobody with it yet. I ain’t shot a man since France. And that was the second looey.”
The sergeant snapped to attention directly from sleep.
“That may not be fucking funny,” he squawked, having opened his eyes without bothering to sit upright from his slump.
“That may be a pretty poem,” Gupton replied mildly, trying not to grin.
Petrowski’s reply had the tone of a confession, to the police or a priest.
“I didn’t kill him! He jumped out of the hole right in front of six Garands. He’s the one who ordered fire. It was only a wound. I won’t ever have to do that again, because the war is almost over.”
Yarrow closed his eyes. Gupton was looking down to kneeling Dixon, who had turned the piece of meat over on his folding stove. The smell was appealing to nearly everyone in the car.
“You sure you ain’t got enough of that for a hungry soldier who loves your family better than you do?” Gupton pleaded.
Dixon answered without looking up.
“I got enough for me and my buddy. But I sure could stand a smoke. I ain’t had a butt since Remagen.”
“I sure could stand a shot of morphine,” Gupton told Dixon. “That’s better than tobacco.”
Dixon then looked up to Gupton with anger. In that moment, he seemed a cache of cold fury.
“Quit grousin’ all the damn time! You always got something smart ass to say.”
“Better a smart ass than a dumb ass,” Bower said, still peering through the window. Perhaps there was something to see.
Ignoring Dixon, Gupton looked over his shoulder to the sleeping sergeant before speaking more quietly to his peers. He placed his hand into a pocket of his outer coat.
Bower hated that wool. Crude, rough, like a horse blanket. He wore the same.
“I got a Luger for anyone with morphine. I had about thirty shots stashed away, but we pulled out before I could get to it.”
Dixon’s anger was louder when he snapped:
“What good is a fucking pistol unless you’re fighting in a boxcar?”
Bower looked to the ceiling. Seeing this, Farber stopped scrubbing his BAR. He flushed. All of his concentration went to listening for aircraft, but he heard no props ripping toward him. Gupton was still talking with Dixon.
“Look, soldier, a Luger is a war treasure, not a weapon. It’s not like them ugly Kraut guns, Walthers and them crappy little broom things. A Luger is like a dame. They’re so sleek and curvy you can’t keep your hands off them.”
Gupton still squeezed his hand inside his coat, but revealed no aesthetic weapon.
“I ain’t got no morphine,” Dixon growled, poking the piece of mutton with his mess kit knife as though trying to kill it.
Cornack’s flash went off again. Looking through the window, dusk approaching, Bower saw a building that made him stare. He had been looking for that. The building’s walls were high, like a skyscraper, and made of stone, not concrete. Stone perfectly cut into huge blocks, each an achievement. Bower could not imagine how long it took to cut one stone the size of a doghouse. And how do you lift them? That building was old, ancient. The sun’s low light was not responsible for the building’s impressive countenance, as though a solar flash bulb revealing more detail than common vision could observe. More than the texture of the stone or the shape of the window openings or the roof projections that suggested towers, the building cast an attitude of opulence, a regal mien.
“Is that a castle or something?” Bower wondered aloud.
After bending to look through the window, Cornack replied.
“It might be a manor house, but I think it’s a monastery. I know there’s one in the area.”
“I’d like to live in a castle,” Bower said, looking toward the building’s arches. “But you have to be special even to walk through the door.”
“The people who live in mansions and shit are the damn snobs who are paying for this war,” Petrowski growled, “paying for it with our asses.”
Bower imagined royalty looking down from those deep windows as vandals helplessly attacked the impenetrable walls.
“There might be buildings that beautiful in America, but I’ve never seen them,” Bower said.
“America has the best of everything,” Gupton retorted. “America is heaven.”
“Not exactly,” Hallam said. “America is the best, but that’s sort of sacrilegious.”
Shaking his head, his feet twitching, Petrowski shot back to Gupton:
“If America was heaven, we wouldn’t be in this fucking war! Jesus didn’t send you to Ardennes—Roosevelt did.”
In a castle, Bower believed, even the servants lived in peace and refinement. Despite their arduous chores, they were not beaten or screamed at by their superiors.
“I’d like to live there,” he mused.
Gupton’s eyes flew open.
“In a damn monastery? You want to fuck a bunch of nuns?”
“It might be a castle.”
“That’s a monastery. It’s like a cave inside. It’s cold and damp and you have to be a monk to live there. You know what they fuck? Old pieces of mutton.”
Farber shuddered once, looking through the window past Bower. His skin was covered with chill bumps, but he did not shiver as he looked to the darkening sky. Petrowski was the dough complaining.
“It’s getting cold again. I hope it doesn’t snow. The Cactus Brigade trained in the damn swamps and the damn desert, and here I am in the damn snow. I hate fighting in the damn snow.”
Farber set his BAR on his lap in order to concentrate on speaking.
“There ain’t gonna be no more fighting. Everybody knows that.”
“Bullshit,” Gupton said.
The soldiers looked to him, not due to his word but because of the smell, the fragrance. Slumping Gupton had just lowered a glass bottle from his lips. He dropped the empty bottle of shaving lotion onto the seat, looking only to Dixon.
“That’s gone,” he said, quickly waving his hand over the bottle. “You got no meat for me, I got no drink for you.”
Cornack was moving so unobtrusively that he seemed invisible. But the flash continued to pop.
“And you’re trying to bum shit from us?” Petrowski complained.
“I never smoked before the Army,” Farber sighed. “I don’t like the taste, but I think it calms me. I think. I could stand one right now.”
He reached into his poncho and removed a piece of paper. A photograph. Still standing, Cornack was first to look and smile; then he made an exposure of Farber holding a photograph of a nubile, nude woman. Petrowski passed the photo around. The sergeant didn’t awaken for it.
“I seen better,” Gupton said, staring at the photo, “but this ain’t bad.”
Farber looked to him with disappointment.
“My wife sent me that.”
“You got a great wife,” Gupton said, and passed the photo to Hallam. “She looks like my wife, but my wife is ugly.”
“She looks like my wife,” Hallam mused, “but my wife thinks it’s a sin to be naked. We are Christians.”
Petrowski stared the hardest, looking over the top of his spectacles, his feet twitching again as though from the cold.
“She looks like my wife,” he said, “but my wife is fat. She turned fat right after I married her.”
After looking at the photo, Bower passed it to the Negroes ahead. They chatted quietly between themselves, studying the pulchritude. Cornack continued to pop.
“She looks like my girlfriend,” Bower told the men. “My girlfriend has a great figure, great face, great personality. But I never had the guts to talk to her. I won’t let that happen again.”
Bower reached into his jacket and handed a pack of Chesterfields and a pack of Old Golds to Farber.
“Thanks for sharing,” he said. The other guys almost stood at attention to stare at the cigarettes Farber now held. “I don’t smoke. Pass them around. But first, you guys all owe me.”
“Owe you what?” Gupton demanded, drooling. “Our dick, our balls—what?”
“Here’s what you owe me: when this train gets strafed by Messerschmidts and we run out and we’re all in a ditch covering our asses and I get wounded, no one jump up to get the medic because the phone lines got cut and you can’t call in. That’s what a guy did for our sergeant in Aachen and an 88 hit him direct in the neck without blowing. He ran ten more feet, but his head dropped right down into the foxhole beside me. I still see him looking at me, and it was dark, so enjoy your cigarettes.”
Hallam spoke as Farber tore the pack open without hesitating to contemplate Bower’s story. They all had stories.
“That’s the demon’s number. It’s not ‘999,’ but ‘88.’”
Soon the car was filled with smoke. Even the Negroes and the sergeant woke to have a cigarette. Only Bower was not dragging on a butt and inhaling pure pleasure. He coughed, but didn’t puke or complain.
Dixon nudged his buddy, but didn’t try hard to awaken him; so Pinto remained unconscious.
“Thanks, pal,” Gupton told Bower. “So, you got a girlfriend you never met? Them’s the best kind. You can do anything you want with them.”
“I got close to her, at church,” Bower described. “She was perfect. She had the prettiest little feet and wore the tiniest little pointed shoes. The closer I got, the better she looked, and smelled. She smelled like the nicest flower that was never made. It’s funny about smells. They’re different because of the way they settle in your soul.”
“Or in your psyche,” Cornack said, smiling to Bower.
No one asked the reporter of that word. He puffed a cigarette, too, but had not spoken in minutes.
“It’s the nicest feeling being with a gal you really like,” Bower added, looking toward the mountain shadows. “It just fills your life. She always had her hair up. I never knew how long it was. She was younger than me. Maybe I shouldn’t have liked her so much. The nicest feeling.”
“Fucking feels better,” Gupton had to add.
“Sex feels great,” Bower corrected him, “but it don’t feel better.”
“Hey, I ain’t talking about jerking off,” Gupton insisted.
“You are a jerkoff,” Dixon grumbled, speaking as though gifting Gupton with a suitable revelation.
Dixon poked his meat again as though stabbing a Nazi to death.
“I hate it rare,” he mumbled.
Sgt. Yarrow was sleeping again, and the Negroes had also dozed off. Not too long and it would be dark. Time for sleep.
Yarrow began mumbling. His four words were barely recognizable.
“Sound off. Able, Baker….”
Gupton responded, his words more quiet and clear than the sergeant’s unconscious utterance.
“Chickenshit, Dogbreath, Egghead, Fartface, Gonad….”
Gupton only amused himself.
“That’s a nice piece of gear,” Hallam said to Cornack as the reporter changed film.
“German engineers are the most brilliant,” Cornack replied while closing the camera and cocking the shutter. Then he knelt, five feet from Dixon in the aisle, reaching into his civvy coat, coming forth with a small, metal doll, which he sat on the floor. After Cornack slid a switch on the doll’s rear, the toy began scurrying across the floor. It was dressed like an SS officer. Above the mild buzzing, as the toy whisked its tiny arms up and down while marching, came a minuscule voice.
“Heil Hitler!”
“That thing ought to be shot,” Bower said.
“Where did you get it?” Hallam wondered, bending over the doll as it passed.
“Our guys bombed a factory in Leipzig. Intelligence had reported that munitions were being manufactured there, but it was a toy factory.”
“The Jerries are geniuses,” the radioman said, his radium watch glowing above the marching doll. “They invented the buzz bomb, the V-2 rocket, and they have fighters with no propellers. The Good Lord alone knows what else they’re working on.”
“If they don’t use propellers,” Petrowski scoffed, “what do they use? I’m getting sick of this war shit.”
“They’re like them buzz bombs,” Farber explained. “They spit fire out the back and that makes them shoot ahead faster than any propeller. Without that prop, they’re as sleek as a Luger. Sleek as a dame’s thigh.”
“My wife’s thighs are about as sleek as a B-24,” Gupton said. “’Course, she don’t spit fire out the back, neither.”
Bower looked at Hallam’s insignia. Those chevrons pointed to the sky like a rocket aiming for the clouds, curving over castles, traveling to another land.
“One day,” Cornack submitted, “wars will be fought by machines. Men will control them from a distance by radio. No one will die but machines.”
“Except where the bad machines beat the good machines and slip into a city and kill the people, don’t you think?” Bower scoffed.
“I hope not,” Cornack smiled, and his flash popped again.
“Yeah, the Geneva Convention can make it all a law,” said Petrowski.
“When I’m king of the world,” Gupton bragged, “I’ll see to it personal.”
Finally through cleaning his weapon, Farber set the BAR aside, pressing it away with no affection.
“None of that will happen in time for this war—I already told you. This war is almost over. The 411th is pushing toward Berlin. The Siegfried line is busted. Where we’re going, there ain’t gonna be no Krauts. They’re running asshole over elbow to Switzerland. We only have to hold on a couple of days, and we’ll be in like Flynn.”
“I did hear a rumor only today,” Cornack mentioned, “that Hitler had committed suicide, and Berlin would fall to the Allies within a few days.”
“That is garbage, that is garbage,” Petrowski piped. “Hitler is too chicken to kill himself.”
“I heard the same thing,” Farber insisted.
“I ain’t gonna make it, even a couple of days,” Dixon said as he rose with his cooked mutton still on the stove. The doll had neared only to run out of spring power and halt, arm uplifted. “Before I go, I want to kill the brother of the Heinie who’s going to get me. As I’m dying, I want to tell him it was me who killed his kid brother. It was me.”
Dixon sat beside his unconscious buddy as Hallam prayed.
“I am going to make it, praise Jesus. The Krauts had their chance with me, plenty of times. The Lord wants me to survive this war. I don’t know what for, but I believe Him as I never did before.”
“I’m telling you,” Farber insisted, “the reporter knows what’s going on. The war might be over before this train stops, if no one up high doesn’t do something stupid.”
Looking down as though seeking guidance from the toy, Petrowski shook his head, doubting the sermon.
“I can’t believe what I done…. All of us.”
Gupton snorted before speaking.
“Yeah, the war is almost over, but it ain’t over. We’re in a fucking boxcar in Germany with Jerry shitting his britches. The Russians are nailing him from the right, the Brits from the top, America from the bottom. You think the Krauts are just gonna roll over and show their bellies? Hell, no. They’ll fight just like we would in our country.”
“You’re damn right,” Dixon growled. “They’re gonna fight like men at their end. They’re gonna take a lot of Americans with them to their graves. They’re taking me, and I’m taking them.”
Bower looked up. Farber jerked his eyes toward the ceiling, then down to Bower, panic showing in his vision. Bower remained calm, and no propellers cut the sky above.
Poking at his glasses, Petrowski looked to the other boys, twitching as he spoke.
“If the war ended today, you think they’d stop this train and we’d all step off to see our families waiting?”
“I’d rather meet the Nazis,” Bower had to say. Then Petrowski continued.
“The frontline troops keep dying until the politicians catch up with them, when they get around to it.”
“This ain’t the first war ever fought,” Bower said mildly. “Everybody knows that World War I caused World War II. You think this will be the last? Most of the fighting might have already stopped, but the whole thing might drag on for years. If I get back and go to school, I think I’ll learn how to end this war. I could have gone to school, except for this. I talk like my dad, but I don’t think like him.”
“If you had gone to school,” Gupton smirked, “then you’d be a looey, and Petrowski would have shot you.”
Only Gupton laughed.
Cornack peered through his viewfinder at the backs of the Negro soldiers while speaking to Bower.
“Don’t you think that all the nations involved are trying to determine how to end this war?”
“No, I think they’re trying to learn how to fight it.”
“They’re trying to learn how to pay for it,” Petrowski scoffed. “Where is all this money coming from?”
Cornack spoke after cocking his shutter.
“Do you know that some of the biggest corporations in America were making deals with the Nazis right until Pearl Harbor?”
“I don’t believe that shit,” Dixon sneered. “You’re taking about Americans.”
“He’s talking about money,” Farber returned.
“That’s like talking about God.”
Gupton looked around for another cigarette.
“You’re talking about politics,” he said, “and it’s all a ration of shit. You wanna end the war, get the Indian chiefs in the middle of the battlefield, let ’em duke it out. They send Hitler, we send the President.”
“That’s no fair,” Bower said. “Hitler is the devil.”
“Then we’ll send Jesus,” Hallam returned. “God made Jesus so He could whomp the devil for sure. This is a good time.”
Gupton’s smirk was ended by Dixon’s oath.
“Jesus Christ.”
The expression was impassioned: not a prayer, but a cry for help.
“He’s dead.”
Dixon was looking down to his buddy, staring at his unconscious form. Pinto’s lifeless form.
None of the soldiers approached in order to corroborate Dixon’s interpretation of his friend’s condition. Gupton stood, but only to retreat.
“Hey, get him out of here,” he wheezed, devoid of humor as he began stepping backwards. “I’m not riding with a dead man. I don’t even have to do that in the field.”
“Go to hell, you bastard!” Dixon cried, still looking to his friend. “This is the best man I ever met, and I’m gonna send him back home.”
“The best boy you ever screwed don’t make him the best man in this army,” Gupton snapped. “There’s nothing worse for a soldier than to ride with the dead. That means you’re heading for the same place. Get him the fuck out of here!”
As Dixon rose and whirled to Gupton, Bower stood decisively, stepping between the men. He cut their vision off as though an intervening wall, but neither opposing soldier tried to look past. Bower sat behind the dead man and his friend.
Hand grasping the wooden seats, Gupton retreated along the aisle.
“I ain’t staying on no train with a dead man.”
“Then get off,” Bower said, and placed his hand on the dead man’s shoulder.
“The next time you jerk off,” Gupton wheezed, “think where your hand was.”
The sergeant woke again. Now he stood.
“What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
Dixon looked only to Cornack with a murderous expression, teeth showing like a dog about to attack mulatto kids. The reporter allowed his camera to dangle from his neck. He turned to Yarrow.
“Sergeant, how far do we have to go?” Cornack asked.
“I don’t know where the hell we’re going,” Yarrow said as he pushed past Gupton, heading toward the front. “They’re redeploying us south, that’s all I know.”
“South, what’s south?” Farber asked.
“Switzerland,” Petrowski said, that first word having a fond sound. “Just over the Alps. Jeez, I’d love to go there. Neutral. No war. No fucking war.”
“They’d take stragglers, even fighting men.”
“I heard stragglers are going to clean up the death camps.”
Snatching his hand away from Dixon’s buddy as though revolted by death, Bower threw himself to his feet. Now five of the men were standing.
“I’ll desert first,” he called out as though giving drill instructions to his troops.
Bower again looked up to the ceiling, metal embossed in a severe, geometrical pattern a foot above his head. Then he grabbed his M-1 and ran to the door.
Before his father had taught him to despise trains, Bower had loved their rush and roar, and their whistle, that long sound a comforting croon. But the whistle of this train seemed a screech, a call to war.
The men pitched to the front as the train began slowing rapidly, the wheels screeching as though tortured and crying for relief. Though rocking laterally, the car remained on the tracks as the sound of propellers cut through the sky above. This cry was followed by bullets, and bombs.
Chapter 3
Stories About The Truth
Bower felt no release from leaving the constricted train for the expansive air outside. Though the train was being assaulted from the air and ground, Bower was not fleeing those shells and bombs, but running toward their source. By escaping that tough cave, he only exposed himself as a definite target. Rushing from the rail car, he entered a festival of fireworks spread across miles whose results were so intense they seemed immediate. All the artificial ambient sounds seemed more consequential because they filled the entire sky. Bower heard nothing of himself: his hard breaths as he ran, the clomping of those damn rubber boots that hold your sweat when you run and turn it to ice when you stop, but he was not stopping.
The indistinct shouts of the two hundred soldiers fleeing the train for those buildings beyond seemed another type of target. But these sounds were not definitive of the situation, only human accents on the mechanical production of warfare. Aircraft cut the sky until it screamed. Shells from strafing planes bored through the rail cars and fleeing men. The bombs’ explosions were the mad shouts of demons who could only find peace in destruction. This all seemed so insane to Bower. How crazy for an object to rush to a man only to wastefully destroy itself in the hopes of harming a stranger.
A concussion from behind blasted against Bower’s back with a pressure that shoved him forward at superhuman speed for several steps, but the blast was not accompanied by shrapnel. The greatest tangible result was a slapping against Bower’s shoulders and head as a bloody poncho fell. First sensing the warmth of blood, he reactively felt satisfaction in this localized relief from the cold. But the blood had belonged to a friend, and was accompanied by skin and flesh that Bower touched as he reached to jerk the poncho away, for it impeded his running, his retreat.
Holding his Garand angled across his body, sling wrapped around his wrist, he ran toward the screams of people and animals, a madman fleeing danger by journeying to destruction. The train had reached the outskirts of a town when the assault began. Though not looking behind, Bower could hear the cars falling from the tracks with thuds that caused the foliage beside him to shudder. Aware without counting the shells or aircraft or bombs that the greatest attack was against the train, Bower ran across the crisp, brown grasses of spring to a burning town. In the realm of attractive light where soldiers shun the brilliance of explosions for dim illumination, the grandiose flashes from behind overwhelmed the fires ahead, flames from burning houses and bodies. Only during moments of erratic awareness when his perceptions were reconciled with normal sensation did he feel the cold wind generated by his running. Only upon leaping over a soldier with his buttocks thrust toward the sky did Bower stumble, regaining his balance without a hand touching the ground or the accumulating people at his feet.
Bower had no interest in, or influence over, the men running beside him, ensconced in war’s alliterative enterprise of bombs, bullets, and blood. Ahead, he saw sturdy European buildings constructed in previous centuries of dense stone. He passed a wooden barn whose blazing walls contained searing pigs, their hides perversely tanned, their bellows more ugly than average, incendiary explosions. The stench came to him as the smell of cooking mutton those minutes past, and bile filled his mouth and nose, causing him to choke and cough, but the madman did not slow his running.
Arriving at the town’s streets, he saw men and women wearing wooden shoes fleeing their homes, which the soldiers proposed to inhabit. Bower saw a lovely Fräulein leaving a pub—the ambience cigar smoke and cut glass—her breasts exposed by her blouse’s square neckline. Her bouncing bosom was a lovely sight spoiled by that visage above, uninhibited terror crimping her face, squeezing like a cruel mechanical hand.
He ran past a small automobile with its roof blown away. Bower had always wanted a convertible. He only stopped upon rounding a corner to see a naked baby crawling along the street, its whimpers lost in the shouts of soldiers, the roar of artillery, the screeches of dying livestock.
In the objective world of greater nature where all bodies are equal in being organic mass, the fumes of burning humans disrupt no more molecules than goats on a spit at a festival.
Abruptly changing directions, feeling his eyes widen at the unacceptable sight, Bower ran toward the child as a young man of the town bent to firmly lift the infant and continue into the shadows.
Returning to his original route, heading for a sturdy building beyond, Bower ran beneath a fruit tree dropping small blossoms, seduced into blooming by a warm interval disturbing late spring’s cold. Was this a cherry, a plum? Bower only knew citrus. He smelled a rich, sweet odor, a stench: not fruit blossoms, but burnt powder. Some smells he could not stand.
Bower entered a boring, two-story building of a type he had seen in three nations. The steep, discomforting roof—discomforting to a teenage boy who had to patch the roof of his folks’ home—afforded no shade, unlike homes in the Deep South with porches. Though without overhang, veranda, or ornament, stone stacked like brick, this building was a beautiful refuge to Bower, who threw the door open and fell inside.
Stumbling to the floor, Bower saw three other soldiers huddled near a smoldering fireplace. They were infantrymen: two doughboys from another outfit, and Hallam. In the diminishing light, the radioman’s watch glowed like a flat firefly. Bower’s entry frightened one private so much he swooned, like a teenage girl. Another posed a social question.
Exhausted, Bower crawled on his knees until he was away from the windows. No part of his rifle touched the floor, but he heard the tinny sound of shaking metal. Was that his mess kit or his dog tags?
“Why do the stupid Krauts run outside?” the soldier demanded. “Where are they going?”
“I don’t know,” Bower wheezed, catching his breath. “Neither do they.”
Bower had never seen a fireplace in Florida. The smell of burning oak seemed so clean and natural compared to the stench of burning swine in that barn behind, or burning humans in Landsberg. On his hands and knees but not settled, he imagined crawling to that hot box and slumbering in a fart sack before those glowing logs.
Half-peeled potatoes waited on a table for the cook to return. On the fireplace’s mantle sat a stuffed fox so awkward in its stiff pose that it seemed artificial, a doll. Bower understood that the soldiers had entered a house, a home abandoned by its family. He would not have abandoned his parents’ home for this one. Bombs are not the type of beating a man can handle.
Hallam looked up to the ceiling, which was shaking. But so were the floor and walls. The ceiling showed no cracks, no dust, and was supported by heavy timbers. Bower looked once, then looked away.
Through the nearest window—both glazing and shutters missing—he saw smoke with no source, smelled foliage burning, and heard aircraft in the distance. Then the entire house shook from a bomb’s concussion, but the soldiers did not flinch. That bomb had fallen on the far side of the town, perhaps near the train. Bower then noticed the land behind the house.
In a pasture with sparse patches of intensely green grass untouched by animals, a herd of exquisite palominos galloped from fence to fence, fearful of the war but unable to flee. A cowboy out of place, a man in olive drab, chased a horse, trying to mount the animal and ride away. Gupton wouldn’t make a good range hand.
Bower began noticing the cries of humans—the weeping of children, the sobbing of elders, the shouts of adults—discernible as German, but terror translates well.
Then came the demon’s silent visit.
Beyond Gupton—who continued chasing the graceful palominos like a kid grasping for goldfish in his father’s pond—in the foothills of the mountains with white peaks imperious in the background, a brief flash—like a reporter’s foreign camera—popped between trees. Then the four soldiers in the farm house fell to the floor, along with the ceiling, the collapse a sudden rush of thin plaster and heavy beams, dust at once inciting a coughing in those who survived.
Projectiles from the German 88, a flat-trajectory artillery piece with a long, accurate range, were never heard until striking.
Bower knew that eighty-eight millimeters was the width of his palm. Furiously whisking away the dust settling before his eyes, he watched human movement in the debris. Leaving a smooth trail in the white dust, prostrate Hallam slid one hand along the floor, reaching for his opposite hand, which was no longer attached, the radium watch glowing in the grit between those hands like a star that separated them.
In the dim light, the man’s blood could have been oil from a broken machine.
The second hillside flash popped as Bower crawled through the window, which collapsed along with the wall and upper story and roof, crushed by an intense, expanding sound that slapped Bower deaf for a moment. Pulling himself past an ox cart, the straw within smelling of apples and pears, Bower ran from the dusty thud behind, continuing along a virtual thoroughfare in the town. Civilians ran through the streets with their hands waving toward no one as soldiers slipped along the buildings, their passage experienced and discrete. One soldier stood in a small cobblestone square, another familiar of Bower. Leaning against the edge of a stone fountain, Petrowski triggered Farber’s BAR toward the sky, the heavy auto weapon jerking Petrowski’s upper body, his spectacles shaking but remaining on his face. After eight loud rounds, the weapon jammed. With no frustrated cursing, Petrowski dropped it into the water as though adding a fish to entertain kids. Then he noticed Bower, and ran behind.