The High White Forest

CHAPTER TWO-2

They compromised by laying out a white tape halfway across the clearing and posting an old German sign someone had thrown into the rations truck for a souvenir away back in Normandy. Every time a sentry mounted the catwalk in the big foxhole to peer across the clearing, the stenciled black-on-white death’s-head hit him in the eye: beside it the two familiar cried-out words “Achtung! Minen!”

David Kyle paused a moment in the trees, trying to calculate who would be standing sentry in the big trench now. Somebody, somewhere on the forward positions, must have got the wind up; otherwise in the absence of an enemy barrage there’d have been no reason for the general alert. If the panic had happened to begin in this particular place, then it could be important to know who was there.

It wasn’t necessarily the new and inexperienced men who were the trigger-happy ones. The new ones might start playing Glorious Fourth or, on the other hand, they might still be so full of their drill and lectures that they’d never think of shooting until they were absolutely sure what they were shooting at. The older men, particularly the Normandy men like Henry Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz—or, if it came right down to it, Sergeant Kennebec—could not be counted on to be quite so finicky. Out there alone and with an unrecognized and unexpected form moving toward them—it didn’t matter much from what direction—they were apt to shoot first and ask the questions later.

It was an admitted fact—admitted even by Ruiz—that when Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz shot Charley Bernstein through the leg last September there had been at least some doubt in his mind even before he pulled the trigger. “Of course I didn’t know it wasn’t one of our guys,” Ruiz explained logically and with a certain resentment at his conduct’s being questioned. “If I’d a known I’d a shot the son-of-a-b***h through the head. Now on when you send anybody to relieve me an hour ahead of time, tell him either to come up a hell of a lot louder or a hell of a lot quieter or I might make another mistake.” The matter was dropped and Charley Bernstein was evacuated as a normal battle casualty and awarded a Purple Heart. There were half a dozen others in the platoon—Dave Kyle wasn’t sure what he’d have done himself—who’d said they’d have done the same thing as Carmen Ruiz.

There was always another possibility, of course; the possibility that the man he was about to join in the darkness ahead might be asleep. This was by no means out of the question, but Dave excluded it from his calculations because, although there were at least three known sleeping sentries in their company and he knew their names, he’d never thought to ascertain whether they were light sleepers or heavy sleepers and without this detail the basic information would be meaningless. (Everybody who knew about them, and this included practically all the privates and corporals, kept nagging at the sleepers to stay awake out there, and threatening to turn them in, but nobody ever did; some people might have attributed this to misguided chivalry, but the fact was that the Krauts had never tried anything serious without dropping in at least a few mortars or eighty-eights ahead of the infantry, and it was largely felt that the only lives the sleepers were risking were their own. It was, besides, no minor thing to take any man’s sleep away from him.)

Dave Kyle’s own foxhole was about twenty yards to the right of and a little behind the giant foxhole. He stood in the shadow of the trees for a moment, wondering whether he should just slip into his own hole unnoticed. But he had no way of telling whether the sentry in the big trench had been told about the alert or not; probably he hadn’t. In that case he’d better announce himself somehow. The clouds were low and there was no moon or stars; all he could see was the little rise of the big foxhole’s half-roof and beyond that the dark edge of the clearing. There was no sound anywhere. He stood still for a moment and then whistled a few bars of “Are You from Dixie?” into the flat, cold night air. Almost at once a low, hand-cupped half-call came from the edge of the sentry post. He did not recognize the voice. It must be one of the new men, he thought. “FDR,” the half-voice half-called.

“This is Dave Kyle.” He bent down, hissing across the few feet of ground between them.

“FDR,” the half-voice repeated, now a trifle anxiously.

“All right for me to come in for a minute?” Dave hissed. “I’m setting up over on your right.”

“FDR,” the half-voice repeated, rising and close to fright. “FDR?” He heard a rifle barrel scrape against the upper part of the roof. Then in a swift flash of memory it came to him. “Eleanor! Eleanor, for Christ’s sake!” He seldom swore except in moments of extreme stress.

“Advance,” the half-voice commanded in a tone of relief.

Dave crouched lower, ran the few steps to the edge of the big trench and vaulted down inside.

“Hey, what about that FDR-Eleanor crap?” he whispered, angry at his own instant of fear. “That’s two weeks old.”

“Well, it’s the last password anybody gave me,” the sentry whispered self-righteously. Dave finally recognized him; a new man, as he’d suspected, recently arrived all the way from England.

“Well, listen,” Dave whispered. “Most of the time the people back there forget to give us the new one and when they do most of the people up here forget it. And even then another half-forget the countersign. You’ve got to use your head up here, boy. This is no place for playing games.”

“Who was playing games?”

“I heard you aiming at me, even after I whistled and told you who I was,” Dave answered accusingly. Then as an afterthought, “Hey! You got your safety back on?”

The other man groped at the stock of his rifle.

“God damn it, you still got it off,” Dave said. The momentary excitement had warmed him a little and he sought to keep the warmth alive with a glow of wrath.

“All right, all right.” The sentry sounded aggrieved and still far from complete understanding. Dave dropped it. “What’s been going on?” he whispered.

“All I saw was one flare, about a quarter of a mile ahead and to the left. I figured one of their patrols might have hit one of our trip wires.”

“Nothing else?”

“Not a thing that I saw.”

“Oh, Christ. It was probably only Bed-Check Charlie. Did you hear anything that sounded like a small plane?”

“Who’s Bed-Check Charlie?”

“Guy that does a low-flying recon most nights when there’s any weather at all for him. He drops a flare or two and disappears.”

“I didn’t hear a plane.” The other man, who had been whispering, now spoke aloud too, but less querulously; it was always good to have company up here. “Hey, you say your name’s Kyle. Mine’s Colhurst.”

“That’s all right.” Dave spoke grudgingly, as though making a concession. He was still pretty indignant, but more so now at the ubiquitous, unfailing thickheadedness of Them than at the casual and just possibly amendable thickheadedness of his companion.

“Say, why don’t you stay in here?” Colhurst suggested.

“No. I’m supposed to go over to my own foxhole and cover you from there.” He was aware of sounding very soldierly, very stiff and pretentious, and unduly respectful of authority. With Whelan or Ruiz he’d simply have told the truth: “This place gives me the creeps.” The sentry Colhurst sensed it anyway.

“Why the hell didn’t we fill this thing in and be done with it?” Colhurst asked. “It seemed like such a hot-shot idea when that bastard corporal had us up here digging. But holy God, it gives you as much privacy and shelter as Piccadilly Circus. You been there lots of times, I guess?”

“Lots.”

“Once I laid a broad in the blackout right beneath that round little platform where they say the statue of love used to be. Another broad stumbled across us and started counting.”

Dave said nothing. “Of course,” the other man added hastily, “they were both hookers and I was drunk.”

“Lots of funny things have happened,” Dave responded vaguely, trying not to sound priggish.

“Well, anyways,” the sentry said, “this is one son-of-a-b***h of a lousy foxhole. Look out in front and you see that sign with the skull on it. Look out either end and you hear noises in the other end. A whole platoon of the bastards could crawl into one side of it and cook their breakfast while you were watching the other side.”

Dave thawed a little more. He laughed faintly. “What we should do is declare it an open city. Well, see you later.”

“Sure you don’t want to stay here? You could cover one end and me the other.”

“No. I’ll be over there. You watch to the left of the mine field and I’ll watch the right. It’s a false alarm anyway.”

“O.K., then. Want to split a cigarette before you go? God knows we can get down far enough so nobody will see. We could take turns.”

“No, thanks.”

“Hey, you’re the guy that doesn’t smoke at all, aren’t you? That never even tried it.”

“That’s right.”

“How come?” the sentry asked, genuinely puzzled.

“No particular reason,” Dave said. “I just never got around to it.”

“I bet you took one of those pledges when you were a school kid,” Colhurst speculated sympathetically. “They bullied me into signing one. I was never going to taste tobacco or liquor or shack up with anybody I wasn’t married to. But what the hell! they caught me when I was eleven years old, away under the age of consent and I figured it wasn’t legal.”

“Go ahead and grab a couple of drags,” Dave said. “But don’t be long.” The other man disappeared beneath the roofing and was back within a minute.

“Thanks.”

“O.K. I’ll be over there.”

Alone in his own well-fitting little box of earth, he squatted on the empty ammunition box he had brought up earlier, checked his rifle, and prepared to sit there until some authority or some event should permit or require him to stop sitting and do something else. His resentment of the unnecessary alert and the unnecessary discomfort it had caused had not been forgotten, but he pushed it aside for the time being. Back there in the cellar before the rude advent of the sergeant he had been on the verge of one of those mellow little inner dialogues that, once broken up—as they almost always were before they got anywhere—could take days or weeks to get going again. Conversation in the Army, even conversation with yourself, was hedged with its own special rules and handicaps. It was something like a Berlitz school, where the French class spoke only French, the Russian class spoke only Russian, the Spanish class spoke only Spanish, and the newcomer to the class was never allowed to speak or hear a single word in any other language that he might already know. Throw them in and they’ll swim. In the Army you spoke Army. Maybe if you got off into a corner with some other expatriate from your part of the universe of words, you could risk a few sentences in something besides Army. In these circumstances books, theater, and music were permissible, but if there was any danger of being widely overheard, it was dangerous to go past Gone with the Wind or Raymond Chandler or, at the most extreme, Hemingway or the relative sleepability-with of the pinup girls. Philosophy was absolutely out, except as a semiunderground affair preferably pursued in a dark corner of a dark pub while on leave. Religion O.K. so long as you stuck to exalting God’s name whenever ordered, instructed and led by a chaplain and profaning it whenever not; arguing about religion forbidden at any time. Politics permitted but only under the headings Democraticwayoflife, Fascistoppressors, Toughrussianallies with Formercommunistmenace in strict abeyance and Republicans vs. Democrats clearly labeled Dangerous, especially in the presence of officers. If you were particularly discreet and unshowy, the Army Berlitz system permitted partial, though not total, abstinence from the standard obscenities. But these set the normal form of conversation just as the subject matter was set by baseball, boxing, movies, radio, s*x, food, leaves, the digestive system, and the professional shop talk of life and death. One of the advantages of talking to yourself was that you could choose your own topics and your own vocabulary.