The High White Forest

CHAPTER TWO-1

CHAPTER TWO

Perhaps, David Kyle reminded himself again, it might have turned out differently if his home town had had another name. But how could you say in one breath that you were a conchie and in the next that you came from a place called Battle Creek? Some had, of course, and endured whatever extra torment it involved, but few of them could have been already reeling, as he had been doing, under a prior burden of other incongruities, other contradictions, and other doubts and convictions so finely balanced that they sometimes changed places overnight.

“Camel?” The man slumped beside him in the steamy, twilit but oddly cheerful cellar was a three-day-old reinforcement. “Oh, I forgot,” he said. “One of the guys told me you never even tasted one. That can’t be right, can it?” The man beside him—David remembered now that his name was Jones—drew back the bayonet attached to his M-1 rifle to inspect the damp sacks he’d been drying over the damp, rebellious remnants of the fire in the middle of the floor.

“No, thanks,” Dave said. That tiny indiscretion, mumbled in a moment of bored gabbiness away back on the other side of the Seine, came home to rest at the most unexpected times; not precisely to haunt him or embarrass him but rather to remind him, in a dull, stale, repetitious way of a whole complex of matters he’d rather have forgotten for now at least. Murchison, to whom he’d first made the disclosure, had left the company long ago, on his way to the hospital. Almost two hundred others had gone after him and another two hundred had come to take their places. Of his own platoon only he, Henry Whelan, Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz, and Sergeant Kennebec were still there now. Pretty soon, Henry Whelan had once prophesied, the two of them would be like his great-grandfather’s old ax that had had nine new handles and four new blades but was still the oldest store-bought ax in the United States of America, the selfsame original ax that his great-grandfather had bought in Boston about the time of John Quincy Adams. Yet though David Kyle had never voluntarily discussed the subject of his never-smoking with anyone again, this one muttered, utterly trivial boast or confession or whatever he had intended it to be at the time had been kept alive in the platoon and handed down from each of its generations to the next, like some priestly secret or family heirloom. Perhaps before this was over he would blunder into a Congressional Medal of Honor or be sentenced to life imprisonment for cowardice in the face of the enemy, or simply disappear into the limbo of an ambulance jeep, but the thing he’d still be best and solely and surely remembered for in the annals of Number Three Platoon of Able Company of the First Battalion of the 957th Infantry Regiment was that he was the one who’d never, not only even as a kid or even for curiosity, tasted tobacco. Not a single drag, no sir, not even one single drag. “I offered him one more than once myself. He didn’t like to talk about it much. In most other ways he was pretty much the same as the rest of us. No, I don’t know what happened to him. I saw him last in some kind of a stone cellar in Belgium or Luxembourg or one of those countries; the winter of 1944, I guess.”

He moved away from the fire and felt in a corner for his blanket. He squatted down and unlaced his high combat boots but did not take them off. His feet were almost dry and warm, the blanket above him was almost dry and warm, and with his scarf folded on top of his pack it was soft and easy beneath his head. They’d eaten abundantly and well, and hot, from the field kitchen. The air of the cellar, thick and gently rustling with the yawns, belches, sighs, scratchings, and reassuring smells of a dozen companions, offered a further invitation to repose. There was no reason to expect a short or interrupted night, but even though he was certain he’d heard it somewhere else, he had learned to respect and, whenever possible, to follow Sergeant Kennebec’s First Law of the Infantry: Never miss a chance to eat, sleep, or go to the can.

But he couldn’t sleep after all. The business about the cigarette had got him going a little again. Not in an unduly remorseful or self-pitying way, just going a little, mainly for the rare pleasure of employing his mind from the surface down in some wholly nonutilitarian, optional, and harmless pursuit, like plucking daisies or counting watch ticks in the dark.

Now, if they’d called the place Utopia, or Kingdom Come—but Battle Creek! No, this line of speculation was too retroactive. He’d have to watch it. These post-facto rationalizations could drive a man loony as surely as the shelling, the cold, the wet, the clock and the calendar, and the absence of any visible boundary to any of them. It had never occurred to him before he joined the shooting army that names had anything to do with it. Whether his decision had been good or bad, it had been already taken for altogether different reasons; this grabbing and grubbing around for extra reasons after it was over and done with might easily become habit-forming. Soon he’d be telling himself that he’d enlisted because of the look on young Harvey’s face when the floodlights caught him between two shell craters in the advance toward St. Lô and Harvey knew and David Kyle, miraculously safe in one of the craters, knew, too, that the Spandau had young Harvey in its sights and young Harvey had a tenth of a second left to live.

The fact he mustn’t lose sight of was that he was already in long long before he’d known young Harvey. The only thing he hoped to win any longer, aside from his survival, which he cherished and believed in, was some sort of clarity; if he got out even fuller of confusion and self-deceit than when he’d got in, he’d have lost on all counts.

“Aw right! Off those merry asses! Out!” The high voice of Sergeant Kennebec, sharpened to a tone of perpetual defensiveness by months of ridiculous demands, unappreciated apologies, and almost unheeded—almost but never quite—threats, came down to them from the kitchen like a voice from the top of a well.

Kennebec’s long legs now appeared on the wooden ladder leading downward from the wooden trap door. He had to bend anyway to keep his head below the six-foot beam-and-plaster ceiling, so he bent all the way and warmed his hands above the damply floundering fire.

“Is it an alert, Sergeant?” Henry Whelan knew the answer as well as any of them. He put the question with innocent venom. But Whelan was already on his feet, moving briskly toward the ladder. The company hadn’t had a casualty in a week and all the contact they’d been able to get from his patrols indicated that the enemy was, for the moment, as thin on the ground, unbloody-minded, and even companionable as they were. Six nights ago, Whelan and Carmen (the Hood) Ruiz had found themselves staring down across a row of snow-covered sandbags into the barrel of one big machine gun and at least three Schmeissers. They hadn’t even had a chance to lift their M-1’s, but had done the next best thing and turned and run for the trees. The Krauts hadn’t fired a single shot, just shouted gleefully and mockingly, and when Whelan and Ruiz were two hundred yards out of sight one of the Krauts was still hollering after them, half-choked with laughter, “Raus! Raus! Yankee jerk! Jerk Yankee!” Two nights later, in an almost exactly reversed situation out beyond the BAR emplacement that they called the Northwest Haystack, two men from Seven Platoon lined up a solitary German who’d lost his patrol along with his way, gave him a yell of warning, and peppered him with frozen cow turds they’d gathered to take back to the fireplace at company headquarters. Perhaps the Germans had caught the same scuttlebutt about an already-arranged ending before Christmas, and Christmas was less than two weeks off. Certainly nobody seemed to be trying to make any kind of a major move, or getting ready to make one, not in this sector at least. But they all knew you couldn’t count on anything at all, and no matter how gratifying it might be to know that another alert at this time and place represented a brand-new pinnacle in stupidity and useless mortification of the flesh, you couldn’t do much but go on complying with and secretly reveling in the continued mindlessness of the Great God They. Henry Whelan, blaspheming only mildly, was halfway up the ladder, closing up his field jacket and hauling on his gloves. David was right behind him. Suddenly remembering that you never knew how long you might be out there, he darted back and scooped up his blanket before he went up and through the kitchen and out in the yard, where it was now thick night.

He had only two or three hundred yards to go. Other dark figures flitted ahead along the line of the wire fence before the barnyard and groped, disappearing one by one, toward their forward foxholes in the trees. No one kept particularly low or made any particular attempt to use the shadows. A cold wind was swinging down the frozen roadway and it felt all the colder because of the abrupt transition from the fetid, stagnant, lovely air of the cellar. Everybody was hurrying to get back beneath the hostile crust of the essentially friendly earth.

David Kyle slowed a little when he came to the edge of the small clearing covered by their platoon’s main sentry hole. This hole was far more than just another man-sized excavation. Compared to other sentry posts that they’d dug, maintained, and swiftly left behind in their comparative dash across Northwestern Europe, this one had grown, during the last ten days, into a veritable Fort Knox. As much as anything to relieve the boredom and thaw their stiffened limbs, its rotating tenants had fallen into the habit of making gradual improvements during each of their four-hour terms of occupancy. On one particularly bright and shiny and peaceful day half a dozen men from the platoon had come out voluntarily and all had begun digging together, driven by some sudden obsessive impulse to create the deepest, longest, widest, most spacious and splendid foxhole in the annals of the U. S. First Army. It was almost six feet deep and twice that long and half that wide before Sergeant Kennebec, drifting up in the late afternoon to see what was going on, commanded them to desist. “Yah, you smart bastards!” he shouted over their angry protests. “She looks great in broad daylight while you got a convention going and a jug of schnapps to pass around. Wait till you’re all alone in her, rattling around in her all alone in the middle of the night.” They had an uneasy premonition that Sergeant Kennebec, as frequently turned out to be the case, knew what he was talking about. “Wait till the screaming meemies start floating in,” he demanded as a clincher. “What do you do then—start diggin’ foxholes in the foxhole?” Muttering, they’d filled it partly in with the earth they’d already taken out. They found some old timbers around the farm and made a kind of catwalk along the front and tore a big piece of rusty corrugated sheeting off a storage bin and made a roof to protect the rear half from air bursts.

Unwilling to give up the notion that they were creating something special and even moderately historic, the instigator of the project, a squad leader named Williamson, had found a coil of fencing wire, strung it out along the bases of the trees on the far side of the clearing, and at considerable personal risk fastened three half-unpinned hand grenades to the wire with loops of finer wire borrowed from the signalers. It was very delicate work, but, as Williamson kept shouting back over his shoulder to the fascinated spectators gathered in the shelter of the foxhole, it was a very delicate war. It was Williamson’s perfectly sound theory that any Kraut who came in contact with the wire would shake the pin loose from at least one of the grenades and complete the mechanism’s intended cycle, thus killing or at the least wounding himself and any nearby companions. When the sergeant objected that Williamson had created a hazard almost as dangerous to their own night patrols as to the enemy’s and demanded that the apparatus be dismantled forthwith, Williamson flatly refused. The sergeant backed away a little, knowing full well that Williamson had already used up all his luck in getting the grenades planted. It would have been easy enough to explode the grenades with a rifle from the giant foxhole. The grenades were all quite visible, hanging from the wire, but the sounds of war had grown so rare during the last few days that the sergeant was unwilling to take the responsibility of starting them up again.