There Won't Be War

But my division—we'd get a crack at glory, oh yes. They shipped us over on the British tub Magnolia and dropped us down near the front line a mile west of a jerkwater Frog village, General Robert Bullard in charge. I’m not sure what I expected from France. My buddy Alvin Piatt said they’d fill our canteens with red wine every morning. They didn’t. Somehow I thought I’d be in the war without actually fighting the war, but suddenly there we were, sharing a four-foot trench with a million cooties and dodging Mieniewaffers like some idiots you’d see in a newsreel at the Ziegfeld with a Fairbanks picture and a Chaplin two-reeler, everybody listening for the dreaded cry “Gas attack!” and waiting for the order to move forward. By April of 1918 we’d all seen enough victims of Boche mustard—coughing up blood, shitting their gizzards out, weeping from blind eyes—that we clung to our gas masks like little boys hugging their Teddies.

My keeper marches south, his bayonet cutting a straight incision in the summer air. I wonder if he’s ever used it. Probably not. I used mine plenty in ‘18. “If a Heinie comes toward you with his hands up yelling ‘Ka-merad,’ don’t be fooled,” Sergeant Fiskejohn told us back at Camp Sinclair. “He’s sure as hell got a potato masher in one of those hands. Go at him from below, and you’ll stop him easy. A long thrust in the belly, then a short one, then a butt stroke to the chin if he’s still on his feet, which he won’t be.”

On May 28th the order came through, and we climbed out of the trenches and fought what’s now call the Battle of Cantigny, but it wasn’t really a battle, it was a grinding push into the German salient with hundreds of men on both sides getting hacked to bits like we were a bunch of steer haunches hanging in our barns back home. Evidently the Boche caught more than we did, because after forty-five minutes that town was ours, and we waltzed down the gunky streets singing our favorite ditty.

The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from gay Paree, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from gay Paree, She had the clap and she gave it to me, Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?

I’ll never forget the first time I drew a bead on a Hei-nie, a sergeant with a handlebar moustache flaring from his upper lip like antlers. I aimed, I squeezed, I killed him, just like that: now he’s up, now he’s down—a man I didn’t even know. I thought how easy it was going to be shooting Harry Hines, a man I hated.

For the next three days the Boche counterattacked, and then I did learn to hate them. Whenever somebody lost an arm or a leg to a potato masher, he’d cry for his mother, in English mostly but sometimes in Spanish and sometimes Yiddish, and you can’t see that happen more than once without wanting to shoot every Heinie in Europe, right up to the Kaiser himself. I did as Fiskejohn said. A boy would stumble toward me with his hands up—“Komerad! Komerad!”—and I’d go for his belly. There’s something about having a Remington in your grasp with that lovely slice of steel jutting from the bore. I’d open the fellow up left to right, like I was underlining a passage in the sharpshooter’s manual, and he’d spill out like soup. It was interesting and legal. Once I saw a sardine. On the whole, though, Fiskejohn was wrong. The dozen boys I ripped weren’t holding potato mashers or anything else.

I switched tactics. I took prisoners. “Komerad!” Five at first. “Komerad!” Six. “Komerad!” Seven. Except that seventh boy in fact had a masher, which he promptly lobbed into my chest.

Lucky for me, it bounced back.

The Heinie caught enough of the kick to get his face torn off, whereas I caught only enough to earn myself a bed in the field hospital. For a minute I didn’t know I was wounded. I just looked at that boy who had no nose, no lower jaw, and wondered whether perhaps I should use a grenade on Harry Hines.

Click, click, my keeper turns to the left. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle, waits. The Old Guard—the 3rd U.S. Infantry—never quits. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: can you imagine? Three a.m. on Christmas morning, say, with snow tumbling down and nobody around except a lot of dead veterans, and here’s this grim, silent sentinel strutting past my tomb? It gives me the creeps.

The division surgeons spliced me together as best they could, but I knew they’d left some chips behind because my chest hurt like hell. A week after I was taken off the critical list, they gave me a month’s pay and sent me to Bar-le-Duc for some rest and relaxation, which everybody knew meant cognac and whores.