by Mark Helprin
As soon as Harry was told where he was, and was well enough to keep it in mind, he was happy. The name alone, Vierville, had made him so, because of a Radcliffe girl, Alice Vierville. He couldn’t remember how he had come to know her, but he had, enough so that they had stopped to talk on Mount Auburn Street sometime in late May of their senior year. It was burned into his memory. She was facing east; he, west. She was wearing a print sundress, and with her right hand in salute as she shielded her eyes from the light, her hair was so blond it shone almost violently. On his cot, grateful to be in Vierville, he remembered the deep crescents near the corners of her mouth when she smiled. And she had them, she really had them, and they were beautiful, as was she. Although beginning in freshman year he had wanted to, he had never approached her. Now he did, and her response was seductive, charming, and to tell him that she was about to be married. “Alice,” he said, “why didn’t you marry me?”
Her reply was kind, respectful, and perhaps wistful: “As I recall, Harry, you never asked.” Then they parted, with Harry, at least, dreaming of the counterfactual and vibrating with regret. That was one reason he liked being in Vierville, a place from which the quintessentially American Alice Vierville had undoubtedly descended, though probably through many generations. And, that summer, Vierville was as sunny as she was.
The half-dozen tents that had seen so much triage, surgery, and dying were now filled with those who would be able to return to duty soon enough so that it made no sense to evacuate them to England. There were some who had just arrived and who slept most of the time, and some about to be sent back into battle. The latter were fully healthy and had organized physical training to get into shape. It was a wonderful place, and as no one was dying there, it was unusual.
And then there was the weather, which after the storms at the beginning of the month could not have been more splendid. And then the food. It wasn’t army food, which was trundled past them by the ton in groaning, can-filled trucks on their way to the fighting. So as not to open a distraction on the route of supply, the army had contracted with the village. Four women with what was for them a nearly unthinkable budget cooked for the more than one hundred patients and staff. Just the bread, butter, and jam were almost beyond the imagination of the American soldier. The pâtés, cheeses, summer fruits and vegetables, meats, fish, and fowl were for many not only a relief from military cuisine but something they had never experienced and might never experience again.
It is most difficult to get something you want in an army rather than what the army dictates, but it can be done, and with patience and a trick that Harry figured out in his hospital bed, he did it. The trick is to be happy and optimistic. Unhappy soldiers who want or desperately need something are so numerous, and their petitions come in such a flood, that for bureaucrats to survive they must make them invisible, and they do. A joyful, confident soldier, one who is illogically cheerful, almost a lunatic, will stand out like a lighted sign. Clerks and even higher officers seem magically to seek the satisfaction of obliging him, and delight in sending him on his way as much as if they were freeing a bird by tossing it into the air. They see in him a possibility of which they might not have been aware but that they wish to nurture and support. They see him as an emissary from a place that holds the potential of their own happiness, which is how and why it works.
He needed to know about his pathfinder team—Rice, Bayer, Johnson, Hemphill, Reeves, and Sussingham. He wanted to hear their stories and tell them his own, but above all he wanted to know that they were alive and well. As an army in combat is a very hard thing from which to pry information, he would need help, so he went to the physician in command at Vierville.
“Sir,” he began.
“Doctor sounds better to me,” said the physician, a major who, like all practicing physicians in the army, was not quite in the army, if only because keeping people alive is different from killing them. And an army doctor was also supposed to be a kind of shelter from the army itself, as anyone, including illiterate privates, knew well.
“Doctor, sir.”
“Just Doctor, please. Get out of the habit,” said the doctor, who wore round wire glasses and had an unfolded surgical mask hanging over his chest, like a bib.
“Yes, sir, I wonder if you might be able to help me find out if the members of my unit are all right. I’m really happy about that.”
“You’re what?”
“I’m happy to imagine that they’re all fine.”
“Well that’s good.” The doctor looked down at his blood-spotted campaign desk and said to himself, under his breath, “Jesus Christ.”
“I mean, I just want to know that they’re okay. I’m sure they are, and that makes me happy.”
“So why don’t you just go with that?”
“I want official confirmation.”
The doctor pursed his lips and looked down once more. “You and everyone else. Do you realize,” he asked, “that almost without exception, everyone, of every rank, asks the same question? When they wake up, they ask where they are, how they got here, can we notify their families that they’re all right, and where are their—I hate the word—buddies, if they’re enlisted. Their men if they’re officers.”
“I don’t like the word buddies either,” Harry said. “It sounds like they’re potatoes, but, whatever they are, I’d like to know that they’re safe. Their names are Rice, Bayer, Johnson, Hemphill, Reeves, and Sussingham.”
“I can’t help,” the doctor said, as, even so, he was counting on his fingers and then silently reciting the names he had just heard. The study of medicine had sharpened his memory. “Six, right?” he asked.
Harry didn’t have to count on his fingers. “Six.”
“They were here. Soon after you were admitted, I was in your tent when a truck pulled up and a bunch of rude, unmanageable pathfinders disrupted my ward. They were looking for you. They were a real pain in the ass, but fortunately they didn’t stay long. And there were six. They took chairs without asking and arranged them at your bed, three on a side. It was like the bloody Last Supper. We don’t keep records of visitors, of course. I don’t know who they were, but given your probable social circle, will six pathfinders who had the unmistakable air of delinquents do it for you?”
“That’s us. They were all alive,” Harry said, not quite as a question.
“They were walking around. They weren’t zombies.”
“I wasn’t asking, sir. I’m just . . . happy.”
“Yes, be happy, and bless those of us who are alive, who are no different from those who are dead, except that we’re not dead yet.”
“In light of that,” Harry asked, “when can I leave?”
“When you’re fit.”
“Who decides?”
“I do.”
“The criteria?”
“Wounds healed, with no constrictions, no loss of normal movement, no infectious disease. Mental soundness; normal blood pressure, pulse, respiration, and muscle tone. The decision’s mine. If you’re going back into combat, ideally you should be as fit as when you went in. It takes a lot, but we’ll send you back. That’s what we do now. Those who are too eager slow what would otherwise be a natural recovery. Start gradually. Pace yourself. You’ll get further, go faster, and join your unit more quickly if you don’t push too hard.”
Harry commenced his recovery by sitting in a canvas chair in the sun. In hours of silence his strength began to come back. He positioned himself at the edge of a field of hay that he watched thicken and grow until, as the wind swept through it, it undulated like the sea.
Ready for neither calisthenics nor marching, he started to take short walks that he lengthened by half a kilometer each day, until by the beginning of July, slowly becoming his old self, he reached the Channel, having passed through Ste. Marie du Mont many times and, with discipline, turned back. But finally he came to the edge of La Madeleine, right on the water, the horizon as open as that of a broad ocean. Throwing over his self-im
posed limits, he didn’t turn back but went straight for the beach. He ran to meet the waves, carbine bumping against his side, and when he bent down to touch their most advanced guard, upon which a necklace of foam was taking its very last ride before sinking into the sand, he felt strength welling up in him as before.
There can be in a soldier’s heart many things that sometimes others fail to know, impressed there by sudden, irrational, clarifying fire, and that for the rest of his life will call forth loyalty and emotion that cannot be countermanded. In this place, memory knits together improbably a love of life and the acceptance of annihilation, and the great charge between the two will from time to time light the world in strange ways. When Harry stood, he looked over the beach to the northwest. There, beneath clouds scudding in strong wind the invasion fleet rode at anchor offshore, steady in the blue. Onshore, the detritus of the assault—barges, piers, bulldozed berms of sand and tangled wire, vehicles gutted and overturned—looked like the rough-hewn outskirts of New York. Storms had smashed the Mulberry Harbors and tossed ships and barges into islets of contorted steel. It looked as vacant and industrial as the piers of Weehawken or the Bayonne marsh across which were stretched the blackened girders of the Pulaski Skyway.
Ships were unloaded silently to feed the expansion of the armies as the front moved forward on the fuel of good lives fed to war as steadily as coal conveyed mechanically into the fire of a boiler. But here the sea was still cobalt and gray, the clouds as rough and full of life as in a painting by Boudin, the regimental pennants that flew from whip-like radio masts as colorful as the racing silks in a Manet. The movement of vehicles crossing the beach and dutifully accelerating to battle kept Harry transfixed. For all who, like him, were caught up beyond the power of will in such a wave, the likes of which had been repeated again and again over thousands of years, there was a compensatory light that at times allowed to even the simplest soldiers a penetrating and commemorative vision, which, were they to survive, would give them a quality unmatched in artists, philosophers, or clerics—a holiness now and then brought forth in sudden patches of memory that could ambush even old men with trembling and tears.
From the north over the Channel a flight of three Spitfires was coming in low and level. As they approached the beach they pulled up, showed their blue-and-white undersides, banked southeast, and in respect to what had happened below them not long before, dipped their wings in salute to the living and the dead. These planes and others like them were as deeply loved by infantrymen as if they were sword-bearing angels. It wasn’t only that the infantry cheered them when they appeared above a battle, but that they loved them. Their startling presence and immense roar were salvation and vindication at once. That they moved so beautifully through the air, uniting power with grace, hardly slowed the racing hearts of those saved by them. Usually they came thundering from the back and were not seen until just before they went into action. They were watched closely and with great excitement as they fought with the grounded enemy, turning and diving like hawks, and as they did battle in the ether, flecks of light that could not be heard. Harry had watched the three planes for almost a minute as they skimmed like swallows over the sea, and, as they passed over the bluff, they flexed and turned in the sun.
He walked every day from Vierville to the sea and back, and the beach soon became familiar. The wind leveled the smoke of hundreds of ships and slapped taut their flags and ensigns from halyards and masts. Harry’s round trip of twelve miles, sometimes leaving the road, had by the middle of July become a run that, if difficult and slow, and sometimes requiring a nap in the dunes, was a run nonetheless, made unavoidably unpleasant by the carbine (not the near-perfect one, which had been lost) bouncing against his back. Most mornings and late afternoons he would exercise with soldiers about to return to the front, and sometimes, overcome with fatigue that said he was not yet healed, he would go to his cot to sleep. Only when dinner was over, after a day in the sun or, sometimes, a swim in the Channel, the frigidity of which was both bracing and exhausting, did he seek his canvas chair at the edge of the now harvested hayfield to sit and read. On a little folding table that he had carried out, he would write letters and do paperwork by the flame of a candle after darkness fell. The fat homemade candle was set in a glass jar that protected it from the occasional breezes that had swayed the hay before it was cut. He discovered that not only could he work by the light of one wick, with no pantheon of mirrors, refracting crystals, or candelabra, but that this was comforting as well as sufficient. He would put the jar right on the page, and in its warm flickering light, center stage, surrounded by dancing shadow, his pen worked in a world of its own, sheltered and tranquil, yet active and free. And though the war, the past, and the future were stilled in the summer night, he knew it would not be long until he was carrying his carbine through the snow.
In Vierville he lived magnificently in the present, but the gorgeous summer embraced a continent in which every conviction and expectation were tested by emotions and tragedy that exceeded the human capacity to endure—children deprived of fathers and mothers, parents whose children perished before them in both senses of the word, whole families extinguished in an instant, on either side of the line, in suffering beyond imagination. Which was more true, that France, though ravishingly beautiful, was burning before his eyes, or that France, though burning before his eyes, was ravishingly beautiful?
On the eleventh of July, the entire 82nd Airborne departed for England via Utah Beach, leaving behind so many killed, wounded, and missing that it made the boats metaphysically light. Not officially recovered, Harry had obtained permission to remain at Vierville, and would not rejoin his unit until shortly before they were parachuted into Holland. There, though fully expecting to die, he would fight calmly and efficiently, for a great deal had been driven out of him and he was able to look upon things with a disturbingly neutral eye.
36. Snow
FROM THE HALF-INUNDATED, sometimes wooded country south of Nijmegen in Holland, where the 82nd landed and fought through insistently arising chaos and then into the winter Ardennes, Harry Copeland’s stick of pathfinders was bounced from battalion to battalion and company to company supposedly according to need, but often it seemed according to someone somewhere rolling dice in a cup. Unattached to any unit on a permanent basis, they never knew where they would be going and with whom.
After the invasion, the immediate objective in the minds of the troops, if not the generals, was Paris. This imposed upon the constant improvisations of combat not only a direction and a plan but an artful theme with weather to match. Though hardly as glorious as France, cooler, and quite dark even in September, Holland still had the feel of summer’s end. Like France, it was to be liberated; it had a definitive character that everyone knew, and a mild, waterlogged landscape.
After weeks of fighting there, the 82nd was withdrawn to Rheims for rest, but in December, in response to the German counterattack in the Bulge, they were trucked to Belgium to fight as never before. They struggled not only with the enemy but against cold, darkness, hunger, and filth: the countryside was so bleak that to be alive in it was torture. And the forward momentum they had enjoyed as liberators in the light of summer disappeared as they retrenched to hold the onslaught of German troops fighting for their country’s survival.
The greater theme of the Allied armies was to reach and conquer Germany, and this they did in one broken step after another, in thousands of sharp engagements and occasional sprints forward where a line had collapsed or a town was left undefended. But the nature of the terrain, the fact that to the east the land did not end until the Pacific, and, most of all, the winter itself made this fight the closest thing to the infinite that the soldiers of both sides had ever known. A short time in the winter forests and fields, steadily watching men die after they had lived in cold and squalor, was enough to make anyone believe he had been and would remain there forever.
The closer the armies came to the German heartland, the mo
re certain they were of victory, and the more slowly they moved. Their progress from Georgia, Louisiana, New Jersey, Massachusetts, across the Atlantic, across the western half of North Africa, in Sicily and through France, Holland, and Belgium; the passing of years; and the seas, deserts, forests, cities, plains, and not least the oceans of air through which they had fought were to what remained of Germany what the left nine-tenths of a book are to the remaining tenth on the right. They still could call upon the esprit de corps that in battle gave them powers they never thought they had, a determination unmatched by any they would ever feel again, a lightness of being that at times seemed to remove them from contact with the ground. They still could summon a willingness to leave everything behind, even life, in satisfaction of the imperative that takes hold of a mass of men in war. They had this despite their familiarity, in the lee of engagements, with the fields of the dead and the cries of the wounded.
The closer they came to war’s end and the surer they were of victory, the more pointless both seemed. If by spring Berlin would fall and if in a year the armies dissolve, why die now? Worse than dying before one knew the outcome, was dying when one did. Not only did they pity the last man to be killed, but as each day passed they felt more and more like him.
They had practically nothing but snow—the feel of it, the silence it imposed with an almost beneath-the-threshold-of-sound hissing as it fell, the way it lit the darkness even as it smothered sight. Snow was God’s scolding of the world for war. It suppressed and conquered legions and nations. It quieted continents, forced branches to bow in submission, and broke those that would not. It made a mockery of military power and pride in numbers, throwing into the world inexhaustibly its own soldiers, tiny crystals each with an inimitable identity, each fragile, temporary, frozen, resigned, but in such endless profusion that they could slaughter entire armies in absolute silence and bury them until spring. Snow muffled the sounds of soldiers who fought across it or waited in it; it sent them messages in its glistening whirlwinds; and like a wrestler who need not expend energy or breath, it effortlessly pinned them to earth.
