Gone to Soldiers: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  Suddenly Rinso grunted. “They got a tank there, trying to go through. Let’s go, lads.” He rose. Jack and Murray looked at each other and slowly, slowly keeping low went after him. At some point an amphtrac had made a hole in the seawall and then been blown up on the far side, offering some shelter. A Sherman tank that had managed to get ashore was going into the breach with a sergeant whipping a motley group of marines on after the tank. It was dusk now. Murray stumbled and fell over a half buried leg. Jack grabbed at him suddenly and pulled him down flat. As he lay on his face, on the other side of the seawall the tank was struck dead-on by a shell. The men who could make it scrambled back, but they could hear the crew screaming inside the burning tank. Jack and Murray crawled back to the foxhole they had dug. Rinso didn’t come back. When it began to be dark, they ate some of their rations.

  “I’m not hungry,” Murray said, “but I got the great-grandfather headache of the world.”

  “Eat anyhow,” Jack urged, chewing methodically, staring up at the red-streaked sky. “Sometimes that helps a headache. Who knows when we’ll get to eat again?”

  They curled up together in their little foxhole behind the wall and in all the chaos and noise, they slept. Lying against Jack, Murray called up his old bedroom at home, his bed, his blanket, his blue flowered curtains. Jack was there with him, in the safe room of his childhood, not even the real room in the house where his parents now lived. He and Jack were in his old room in the country, the turkeys gobbling in their run outside.

  In the middle of the night, they woke to machine-gun fire from the sea, the sea, damn it, raking the beaches. Some of the Jap marines had swum out to the wreckage of a maru that lay in the lagoon and to the blasted amphtracs that littered the shallows. Still the attack Murray and Jack expected never came. The air remained heavy and hot, thick with fumes from burning fuel.

  The next day was hotter. The fucking tide finally rose and boats hit the beach. Tanks landed, flamethrowers, heavier guns, reinforcements, ammunition, water, rations. Wounded were taken off. They formed up and began crawling inland.

  He was past exhaustion into the nightmare state when everything felt at once raw, vivid and numb. Jack and he had come upon the remains of their platoon, the guys who had landed if that’s what you’d call it in adjacent amphtracs, minus the guys in the squad whose amphtrac had blown up in the shallows. They were commanded by the one surviving and functional sergeant, Zeeland, a grizzled tubby man who always seemed to know what to do. They lay in the scrub beside an airstrip firing at enemy positions as a tank knocked off the pillboxes one at a time. The fighting was fierce and casualties were high, but they were no longer pinned down on the beach. At least what they did made more sense than simply to stand and die.

  “Poor bastard,” Murray said suddenly, thinking of Harvey and not even realizing he had spoken.

  Jack nodded, understanding at once. “At least he went like that. Miller was dying for two hours.”

  So? Dead was dead. Dead was the majority and didn’t matter. Living was what was temporary.

  The Japs were really dug in, so it was a matter of blasting each emplacement, each dugout, each pillbox one at a time. If they couldn’t blast them open, they’d try to seal them, get up on top, toss in some grenades or TNT or pour gasoline in the vents and set it off.

  So it went. Hardly anything vertical stood and the stench of burning bodies hung in the air. Jack heard they had taken only seventeen prisoners and eighty Korean laborers. Marines vs. marines. The Japanese marines wore chrysanthemums on their helmets. He picked up one of their helmets but then he threw it away. Who cared? Jack nodded, saying, “Just one more piece of shit to haul around.”

  By Tuesday afternoon Betio was taken and Tarawa was secured. For what? In five years, he thought, there’ll be nothing here but rusting machines, a few bones and some unexploded shells. To have survived this place was something. He had never felt closer to anyone in his life than he felt to Jack. Harvey was gone, but the two of them were still together. He couldn’t count the number of times they had saved each other in the last three days. They would get each other through. If I live to be a hundred, Murray thought, and grinned sourly because the odds were so slim, I’ll never know anybody by blood or marriage, no mother, no son, not even Ruthie, the way I know this guy, my buddy I share my foxhole with.

  JEFF 6

  A Leader of Men and a Would-be Leader of Women

  He fell from heaven into a dense net of lives, Jeff thought, but crouching in the unpressurized rattletrap Halifax on a pile of explosives and weapons being delivered with him, expecting to be shot down any moment, was not his idea of heaven. No, heaven was what he arrived at, crashing painfully through the branches of a tree. He had been dropped too late and had landed badly, all his hard learned lessons from his two courses in parachuting, the American way and the British, deserting him in midair as the dark air rushed past him. He was embraced like a victorious hero, patched up, fed a duck and bean soup, plied with wine and marc.

  He had forgotten how much he loved southern France, although this was not an area he had visited, as Toulouse was off the standard tourist routes. The nearest they had brought their charges was Carcassonne, to the restored ramparts. At once he began to notice the skies over the brick city, which seemed to breed huge dramatic-looking clouds and splendid lighting effects. Now he was supposed to establish himself and set up an intelligence network, making contact with a previous agent sent in by submarine from Algiers.

  It did not take Jeff long to learn what had happened. “The Gestapo got him the first week,” Lev told him. Lev had a bold swarthy bearded face, a hawklike nose and sharply amused dark eyes that judged quickly what they saw.

  Nothing Jeff had been told about what he was to do seemed to gibe with reality, now that he was in Toulouse. “But he’s been sending back reports.”

  “Not him.” Lev grinned, his black beard sticking straight out as he flung his head back in silent amusement. A Daumier, Jeff thought.

  “Long detailed messages on German troop positions.”

  “Of course the Gestapo can send long messages. They aren’t in danger of being caught when they’re transmitting.” Lev put his arm around Jeff’s shoulder. “I’m telling you, that little man walked right into them. You guys waltz in and they grab you right off. You don’t know how to make it here. It’s tough.” Lev squeezed his shoulder till Jeff winced and only then let go. They had improved on his papers, so that he was identified now as working for a local wine merchant who gave them money; that would cover much traveling in the countryside. “Lucky for you that you’re with us.”

  He wasn’t supposed to be. He was to fade into the population, set up his agent network, transmit through his radio operator and keep a low profile. According to the British model followed by OSS, escape nets were one department, intelligence another, sabotage another and preparation for armed combat yet another. Here he could not locate those fine distinctions.

  He had fallen into a group of Jewish hotheads, some of whom had been at war since Spain, some of whom had never surrendered their weapons when the French army was defeated. The few arms he had brought in had increased their arsenal by fifty percent. They didn’t have a rifle per soldier. They didn’t have one weapon for every three. Most of what they used had been taken by force or stealth from Wehrmacht soldiers or the Milice, the French terror squads set up to fight the Resistance.

  Lev was a roughneck, almost a corsair type, Jeff thought. He did not know why he liked him as much as he did. At times Lev tried to lean on him to see if he could be pushed. Perhaps he worried Jeff would threaten his position of dominance. Jeff, who had never before thought of himself as a potential leader of men, was amused. But his prestige stood high in spite of his mending ankle. He had brought them weapons and plastique, keeping secret what an afterthought the drop had been. Somebody in OSS had had the idea that since Jeff was being dropped to a local Resistance group for help in getting started, although it had not been for
eseen he would work with them, a present of what they were clamoring for would grease the wheels.

  Further he was American. By and large, these resistants mistrusted the British. Lev had actually fought against the British in Palestine and expected to do so again. “We should tell them this is the Jewish Resistance? You’ve got to be crazy. They’d probably bomb us.” Lev shook his head over Jeff’s folly.

  His prestige as American officer, purveyor of weapons, official emissary to these ragtag Jews, did not dim the contempt for him shown by the girl Gingembre—Ginger, in English—aka Jacqueline, who had been assigned, over her loud protests, to take care of him. Lev had bribed her by promising her lessons in shooting the rifle and Sten gun.

  Her friend Daniela was shorter, plumper, with dark curly hair and a serious maternal air. Her dark eyes brooded on Lev with an air of furtive concern. She treated Jeff with impersonal kindness, after setting his ankle. He had been shocked to learn she was only a nurse. Obviously she should be a doctor. She was smart, observant, cautious. He thought she was in love with Lev but for some reason suppressing those feelings.

  Jacqueline’s hair, which she wore sometimes in braids, sometimes pinned up in a French knot on top of her head, sometimes loose in bristling waves, was a subtle light brown that in the sun had glints of gold and even of green. Sometimes it looked metallic. Sometimes it looked soft as cat’s fur. Her eyes were large and hazel, her cheekbones high, her brows arched as if in perpetual surprise at the folly and stupidity of those around her. She was tall for a Frenchwoman, small-boned, long-legged and slender but with an ample bosom for the amount of flesh she carried and with a pronounced arch to her hips. She moved fast and well with a surprising authority, as if she had more confidence in her body than was common in a woman.

  He found her first oddly attractive, then pretty and finally maddeningly beautiful, while remaining quite sure she did not give a damn—neither about her beauty nor about him. She dressed totally helter-skelter, in whatever clothes she found at hand. She and her friend Daniela seemed to share a common pool of old clothes—outsized shirts, baggy wool sweaters, sensible dark dresses—that they wore in turn, fitting neither of them. Yet when he saw her on her bicycle pedaling hell-bent down the twisting brick street in a mended black skirt and sloppy maroon sweater with an emblem of some sporting club on the back, a cap crooked on her head, her braids flying out, she looked outrageously smart and captivating.

  If he had brought many images in his head of what his life would be like as a spy in occupied France, he had never imagined that the mainstay of activity would be the bicycle. Oh, they had access to two gazogène trucks (trucks modified to burn kerosene), an ancient Citroën and one fast Renault whose engine had been rebuilt. But seventy percent of their business was conducted by bicycle and most of the rest on foot. He remembered the moment he had realized that the weapons and explosives were being loaded in farm carts drawn by horses. Horse-drawn plastique. No, nothing here was the way they had laid it out in London or the way he had imagined.

  She was just a kid, he told himself, self-righteous, dogmatic, naive: a kid who thought it would be chic or exciting to play with guns. But kids, he learned, grew up fast here. The Boy Scout Larousse, who would be nineteen at the very outside, had personally led at least one hundred children over the Alps or the Pyrénées to safety. A thin gnarled quiet-spoken boy, he had walked over most of France. He knew the railway system as well as the cheminots who worked on it. He knew the passes and byways and mountain shelters. His parents had been deported with his baby sister. His little brother he had hidden in Le Chambon, the Protestant village of refuge in the Alps.

  Larousse startled him by speaking of Jacqueline with marked respect. “She keeps her head. She calls it eyes on stalks. She and Daniela have worked together since ’42. Everyone else in their cell in Paris was caught. She saved my skin once when I was herding children into a trap and she has never lost a child. But the Milice have her description all over the border towns now, so it’s better she stays here for a while.”

  Daniela was not only a nurse but a counterfeiter. Daniela and Jacqueline had both taken part in violent actions, including one in which a local collaborator who had fingered a number of Jews and resistants, had been gunned down right in the Place Capitole in the middle of downtown Toulouse, to make an example.

  Then he began to see that fierceness in her, a catlike capacity to strike; instead of being repulsed, he imagined its expression in sexuality. Did he have an answering courage? That was the question. He had begun his spy work, which turned out to consist of telling the local people what he wanted and waiting for them to provide it. Plans of the chemical company? The airplane factories? Munitions dumps? The Waffen SS chain of command? Railroad schedules? Troop concentrations? It came to him and he had his operator Raymond transmit it to London. Raymond was in the Lacaune Mountains near the end of a railroad spur. While in a cast, Jeff had to rely on couriers who were almost always women. London seemed pleased with the information he was sending, but he felt like a fraud. Other people were taking all the chances.

  Then came the Friday when Daniela announced that his cast could come off. Neatly she broke it and there was his ankle, dead white and extremely hairy, with a kind of dandruff of the skin and a sour smell. When he tried to stand on it, he toppled. Daniela prescribed a regime of exercise, but he was determined to get back on his feet at once. Here he could show some energy to Jacqueline, who treated him as an overgrown and underbrained baby.

  London did not understand the situation in the field. They wanted an underground army created without bothering to send weapons, an army that would function only when called into action, presumably just before the Allies invaded. He knew that was scheduled for spring, but he wasn’t vetted to know more. Now he saw that he could not expect recruits to sit about waiting for some future miraculous date of Allied arrival, when every day they were in danger from the Germans and the French collaborators, when every day they lost people they knew, when their very existence was against the Nazi and Vichy laws.

  Up in the mountains he was told maquisards were encamped. Now it was fall but soon it would be winter in the mountains, and most men had arrived in light summer clothing without coats or boots against the snow that would come sooner than any of them wished.

  There was much to be done to equip and train this local assortment of hotheads and politicos, refugees and petty criminals, teachers and professionals and factory workers and a surprising number of women who fell into all the categories. His arrival had given them hope and plunged them into action he thought precipitous. He must get involved, whatever London thought. He was responsible, whether he wished to be or not, a new sensation. Did he feel trapped? No, surprisingly. He monitored his emotional state as if it were a bum heart, but heard no murmurs of discontent. He had felt far more trapped in London, with Zach.

  He began to see that as ill assorted and disorganized as they appeared at first, they were connected into a large organization. They had close communication with the railroad workers, the cheminots, so that they always knew exactly when trains with troops aboard or essential war materials were going through. Sunday night a train laden with high explosives and artillery shells was departing the Toulouse yards at midnight.

  He had lectured on the use of plastique, but he thought the best pedagogy would be to use it on that train. Gilles, a Jewish cheminot, let the other workers know that they were blowing that train, after the engine had passed. Gilles would tell Lev the order of cars out of the yard, so that they had the maximum opportunity to blow the high explosives. Because of the large blast they might set off, they had to pick a spot where the tracks were not bordered by houses.

  Jeff knew he was exceeding his orders, but he had been trained to work with guerrilla and sabotage groups long before he had trained as a spy. And he turned out to be useless in collecting information. He was merely a coordinator of the work done by dozens of ordinary people who had jobs in sensitive areas—cleri
cal and factory workers, scientists, engineers, even Thibaud, a spy in the mairie, and Margot, a secretary in the Milice headquarters. He sat down with Lev and they planned Sunday night’s attack.

  The train would move out on the line that headed toward Gaillac. They would hit it near Gemil, where they had people. Lev, his lieutenant Roger, Gilles and Jeff would travel Sunday to Gemil, where they would stay in the countryside with a family whose sons would take part in the attack on the train. Gilles had the day off. He worked in the yard at Toulouse, where his usual method of sabotage, he told Jeff as they lay in the back of a truck under a tarpaulin, was to drain oil from a gearbox. Sand and gravel could be effective too and impossible to trace.

  They rode in a gazogène truck delivering wood, their bicycles hidden under the logs, but the last twelve kilometers, they had to pedal. Jeff’s ankle pained him sharply before long, and he had to beg them to stop frequently and rest. He hated to appear weak, but Gilles was sympathetic. He said that the first thing he wanted after the war besides a new suit of clothes and shoes with rubber soles was a motorbike.

  Jeff, who had never owned or used a motorbike, could not follow the heated discussion that followed between Lev, Roger and Gilles about the merits and faults of the different makes and models. It was like Americans arguing about cars, a subject from which he had always been alienated as it featured in the animated talk to his male peers, since he’d never owned one. Instead he sketched the plane trees along the white dusty road, dark gold leaves against the mottled bark. Sometimes the French attacked the beautiful plane trees, chopping off their crowns so they looked maimed, dismembered; then they sprouted to huge lollipops, phalli anointed with green pubic hair. Fortunately these had not been attacked. This direction was not particularly interesting countryside, but south from Toulouse lay the plains and then the Pyrénées. He longed to explore every direction, but he had not yet even got to the mountains of Lacaune or those of Montagne Noire, where maquis were holed up.