by James Jones
The new company began to grow and take form as an embryo grows and takes form in its mother. But in this case the mothers hated the offspring. The men hated the company, the administrative staff hated the company, even the Jewish company commander and the Scotsman hated the company. Johnny hated it completely, but he nurtured its files like a midwife, worked like a maniac—as they all worked who actually had any work to do. The two platoons of men, sections as they were called here, hated it the worst, because they did not have the sanctification of unending work. Everybody hated the company, but it imperceptibly became the Company, instead of just the company. It became their pride, their place, their home—as near as soldiers can be said to have a home.
To the surprise of all the men who had known him in the 26th Division as a malcontent, Johnny became a sort of sparkplug, a dynamo of energy that you could attach your own plug-in to. His drive for speed and more work carried over even to his meals, so that he gulped his food down almost without chewing, even when he had no work in particular to do after the meal was finished. It was mostly for this drive that he got his sergeant’s rating, when the TO called only for a corporalcy for the company clerk. He immersed himself in the life and work of this company until he had forgotten the existence of any world outside.
This attitude was apparent in his letters. Sandy was puzzled by the change in them. They were more infrequent. They seemed very preoccupied. His typing fingers seemed not able to keep up with his racing mind that flew from one furious thought to another with such speed and cramming that the letters were hard to follow. He told her his new address and that he had a new job, but he didn’t have time to explain it in detail. His letters pounded the theme of work; work, work, work; a man’s life must be dedicated to work. Sandy was puzzled by the letters, but also less worried. He seemed to have made a contact with something. As the company began to take shape out of chaos, a new property began to show itself. The rating situation had finally been straightened out, not without great upset. Big Red ceased to be “acting” and became actual first sergeant, and acquired that subtle touch of authority that is so lacking in an acting non-com. A number of men had to be busted to get the TO back to normal. This caused a big stink, and the blame was placed by the men upon the company commander. The usual procedure is to absorb ratings—that is, if a man is broken because of inefficiency or insubordination, a new rating is not made, and the old extra one is absorbed. But Harry Weidmann, the Jewish first lieutenant, received explicit orders from higher up to get his ratings down, as soon as possible even if it meant breaking men who had done nothing wrong. This was where the new weight first began to make itself felt.
The effect on the company morale was bad and immediate. Several of the busted non-coms went over the hill for a week’s vacation. At night Johnny sitting in the Orderly Room working, with Weidmann across the room working, could hear some of the boys coming back from the PX 3.2 beer garden, drunk, and singing in close four-part harmony: “Oh, I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me!” and “My vild Irish R-r-rose, dah sveet-iest flour det grows.” Sometimes they even sang it: “My vild Jewish Rose.” Weidmann would look up and grin a tight painful grin and murmur something about thank God men have a sense of humor for a safety valve.
The company was under administration of the local Second Army headquarters, whose main headquarters was in Memphis. The Second Army headquarters in the camp controlled all the auxiliary troops, quartermaster and separate companies, under a “Provisional Headquarters.” Johnny, being in the office, was able to see and hear all this new force that was being directed at the company. Weidmann was given orders that he could issue no three-day passes. Other companies around them were giving them out. As a result, more men went over the hill and took their three-day passes. Weidmann was called up on the carpet because he couldn’t handle his men.
Weidmann was given orders that he could not give furloughs longer than four days. Other companies around them were giving ten-day furloughs. As a result, men from the company deliberately overstayed their furloughs by four or five days. There were several summary court-martials. Weidmann was called up on the carpet because he couldn’t handle his men, and warned that his inefficiency, if continued, would cost him command.
Reports began to be sent back because of misspelled words or small typographical errors or misplaced punctuation. Things that occur often in all outfits and are usually disregarded. Johnny was forced to redouble his efforts at perfection; nothing less was acceptable. He worked superhumanly, checking every paper that left the office. He had constantly to check and recheck the two men working with him for insignificant errors. They had to do a lot of work over two or three times, and they naturally resented it. Only Johnny’s force of drive kept them in line.
Every day or so, inspectors from Second Army would come around to inspect the company—the barracks, the area, the Orderly Room, Supply Room, company administrative and supply records, the mess hall, the menus—everything there was to inspect. They invariably found a great deal wrong, as an inspector can always find something wrong if he refuses to allow for the human element, which does exist, even in the army.
A new officer had been added to the company, a quiet meek older man named Bird. He was a graduate lawyer and had studied international law. He was a second lieutenant. He was placed in charge of the motor pool. The inspections of his motor pool were invariably masterpieces of derogation, no matter if Lieutenant Bird spent the whole night before checking his motor pool. Bird complained to Weidmann that he didn’t know a carburetor from a head gasket, but Weidmann could only shrug. Second Army refused to have him shifted to another job.
It went from bad to worse. The inspections became more frequent and much stiffer. Weidmann and Bird and Thompson, the Scot, held consultations in the Orderly Room at night, they could decide on nothing. There was nothing they could do but sit and take it. You can’t talk back in the army. Johnny, working late and being in the Orderly Room all day long, began to divine a form emerging from this heavy weight.
One day a colonel came into the Orderly Room to inspect the company fund record. This was another thing Johnny had shown Weidmann how to handle, using a few old Regular Army tricks; in the Regular Army, the company fund is one of the most used and most important clerical items. Johnny and one of his assistants were working away hard. Both were wearing field jackets because it was cold. Neither looked up when the colonel entered. The colonel slammed the door and walked loudly into Weidmann’s office. Neither Johnny or the other clerk, being engrossed in their work, looked up or paid the slightest attention. The colonel came back into the outer office.
“What’s the matter with you, Sergeant?” he asked. Johnny looked up absentmindedly without speaking. “Haven’t you learned yet, Sergeant, that you are supposed to call attention when an officer enters?”
Both Johnny and the other snapped up to attention, dropping their work.
The colonel looked at the private and then back at Johnny. “Who’s in charge here, Sergeant? You?”
“Yessir,” said Johnny.
The colonel was gray-haired and small. “I don’t want you boys to think I’m unduly harsh,” he said. “I’ve been in the army a long time. The army runs on discipline—unfailing, automatic discipline. Without it, the army wouldn’t be worth its salt. Your outfit is getting ready to go overseas. When you men get overseas, you will find you must be trained to instant discipline. You must act automatically upon an order. An instant’s hesitation may mean death to a thousand men. It’s different overseas than it is here,” he explained in a fatherly tone. “Overseas the war waits on no one. If you don’t learn to obey quickly, it may get you killed. You’re no good to the war effort dead. That’s why we insist upon these things. We want you to be trained right when you get overseas.”
“Yessir,” said Johnny when the colonel finished.
“All right,” said the colonel. “Carry on.”
Johnny and the assistant went back to w
ork. The colonel went into Weidmann’s office. Johnny could hear him in a low voice giving Weidmann holy hell about Military Discipline. While the colonel was in the office, Johnny took his field jacket off and hung it over the back of his chair and went back to work.
When the colonel came out, Johnny called out “Attention!” and he and the other clerk leaped to their feet. Johnny stood with his chest stuck out, gut sucked in, eyes staring straight ahead, the position of a soldier at attention. As the colonel passed him, the colonel saw the ribbons pinned to Johnny’s shirt. Just the two main ones were all he wore in camp; the Purple Heart, and the Asiatic-Pacific with its three stars. The colonel stared and stopped, for a second, but he didn’t speak. Weidmann was watching from the doorway, and Johnny saw his eyes develop a twinkle. Johnny winked once, swiftly, with his off eye. The colonel left without saying anything else. The clerk broke out laughing but stopped when Weidmann stared at him. A suggestion of a smile flickered over Weidmann’s face; Johnny kept his face perfectly deadpan. Weidmann went back in his office and shut the door. Johnny went back to work, and the other clerk collapsed into his chair shaking with silent laughter. Johnny never referred to the episode, because Weidmann was a man for discipline. And neither did Weidmann mention it. Neither of them needed to.
The form Johnny saw beginning to take shape behind these unduly rigorous inspections and pass restrictions became more and more apparent as time passed. Weidmann, Thompson, and Bird had gotten their orders to take over the company from Washington, direct from the War Department. Such orders naturally superseded any plans or orders of the local camp Second Army headquarters. Weidmann was a Jew. Both he and Thompson were “nigger” officers. Bird was a Casper Milquetoast, and intellectual, a natural affront to any old line officer. Host of the gray-headed officers in Second Army were old Regular Army men, West Pointers, as near to a Junker class as America has allowed itself to come. And they all thought of themselves as being much more similar to that ironbound Junker class—ironbound both socially and physically—than they really were. Like anybody else they had their friends, their favorites. They were well schooled in that old game of putting straws on camels’ backs, army politics. They had absolute dominion over every company that fell under their jurisdiction, and like the Junker class they tried to emulate, they had come to believe in the divine superiority of their iron sway, thus absolving themselves from any necessity for conscience, or association with the “Ninety-Day Wonders.” Behind their superiority was the means by which they kept it. When they didn’t like a man, good or bad, strong or weak, that man hadn’t a chance in the world to make good. These men would have been surprised and insulted if they had found out at the same method they used in the officer caste was the identical one used in the higher non-com caste in most companies. To Johnny, who had seen the same situation among non-coms a number of times, the nonpareil attitude of these men should have been a constant source of amusement. But it was a hard thing to laugh, while seeing Weidmann, Thompson, and Bird as victims of this power.
In spite of everything, the work went on in the company, at a furious pace. In the 26th Division, Johnny had been very near going over the hill a number of times. In the new company, the thought would pop into his head now and then after some especially pungent edict. He thought about going over the hill as an antidote to the very bad taste in his mouth. But he never had time to think about it long because his thoughts were too much needed elsewhere.
Most of his spare time, when there was not work of a more pressing nature, was spent on Service Records. The Service Record is the most important part of a man in the army—as a chief clerk had once stated. Practically everything a man did or did not do was recorded in his Service Record. The Service Record of each man had been sent down with the men from the 26th Division, and they were in terrible shape, filled with errors of both form and information. And there was an adjutant general’s inspection due in a month. Johnny had to do all this work himself, because Weidmann would not let him trust it to either of the other clerks. He worked himself to sleep several nights and the CC would wake him up so he could go to bed.
Weidmann was fighting his fate with clenched teeth. He had to fight not only local Second Army, but he had to fight the men in his own company. His men couldn’t understand why they had no passes, why they had no longer furloughs, why they invariably spent several more hours of duty every day than the other companies around. The men blamed it all on Weidmann who was, they said, a driver. Johnny and Red, the first sergeant, were two of the very few who took Weidmann’s part.
Johnny would sit evening after evening working in Weidmann’s office, checking Service Records with Form 20s. There was a small white church across the street from the Orderly Room, and at this church during the week were held the Jewish services. There was a frail, sallow, hook-nosed, sensitive-mouthed Jew in the company named Isaac Rabinowitz, who had been a well-known actor on the Jewish stage. He had come over from Russia in Chekhov’s special troop. The trip didn’t make money, Isaac had stayed in New York when it broke up. Isaac was the cantor for the Jewish services.
Isaac had a magnificent tenor voice, and Johnny would sit in the Orderly Room at night and listen to him from across the street. There was a deep melancholy of the earth in Isaac’s voice, a song of infinite pain and degradation—brought to God’s Chosen People because they, too, had been arrogant and once tried to conquer the world. The chants were plaintive with a sort of puzzled sorrow, an anguish that could not understand the reason for its own existence. The chants were sung in wrenching minors, one piled upon another, going up and on up until there seemed to be no ending to their wail of unhappiness. The shouting, singing, and laughing in the nearby PX made an incongruous backdrop to the haunting sound of Isaac’s voice.
Often, for the first time since he had left Endymion, Johnny would find himself listening to Isaac and thinking of Al, what had happened to him, where he was, how he was making out. It was hard to associate the existence of Endymion and Camp Campbell on the same planet. He and Al had become very close, particularly on their trip to Evansville and their mutual sympathy for Freedie, who hated. There seemed a close similarity between the haunting voice of Isaac Rabinowitz and the haunted eyes of Al Garnnon. It was as if Isaac, who had lived through the last war in Russia, was singing of and for Al Garnnon and those like him who needed succor from their own kind and from the earth. Every man needed a friend—such unspoken implications as were in that simple word—a friend to whom he could turn, in whose company he could find the understanding that he needed, without explanations or questions or answers. And Johnny felt he was Al Garnnon’s friend—as Al was his. Johnny would shake the obsession of Isaac’s voice from his brain and go back to work.
In his new job, Johnny’s brain had seemed to awaken from its torpor, and in his scattered moments of free time, he did a lot of thinking. The things that had happened to him since he left Endymion seemed inextricably wound together. The people of Endymion, the pinch-faced Infantry captain, latrine orderly, Weidmann and his persecution, the new job as clerk, Al Garnnon and Isaac Rabinowitz. They all went together, each a panel in the same door, and for that door there was a hidden key, a special significance in all these facts that he could not quite grasp, even knowing it was there. If he could find that key and unlock that door, he would learn some general conclusion that fit them all and explain them and was what he was seeking to learn.
The obvious yet subtle persecution of Weidmann was a focus of his thought, because it was always present. The voice of Isaac Rabinowitz coming distinctly from across the street seemed to be an extension, an underscoring of Weidmann with his silent bitter smile, his fighting with clenched teeth. In those evenings in the Orderly Room working alone with Weidmann, the two had come to do a great deal of talking, each about himself. It was pleasant to lean back from your work and relax your mind in idle intelligent conversation for a little while before plunging in again. But in all this talking, never once was the predicament of W
eidmann mentioned, or the reason for it.
Surely, Johnny kept questioning himself, surely, it could not be simply because Weidmann was a Jew? The stopping of such persecution was one of the planks in the platform of this war which the Second Army was—in its abortive way—helping to fight. Such persecution with whips, torture, and murder was a universally acknowledged evil. But the same persecution enacted without physical violence was ignored. It was the ancient difference in the Bible between the Old Law and the New Law. Any savage could understand the meaning of Thou shalt not torture with whips, but how many civilized men could understand the meaning of Thou shalt not torture with guile? Who will admit as a proved fact that you can kill a man just as easily with politics as you can with a rifle? And are not the two evils equally bad? Nay, isn’t the subtler evil more dangerous, simply because of the difficulty of understanding it? Wars are never fought against subtle evils. Hitler was being fought because he openly used whips and so was obviously a danger, but what of the subtle forces that fostered Hitler, backed Hitler, gave Hitler power he could never have gained without their aid. No whips, no violence, and because of that more dangerous. Who had the vision to conduct war against these subtle powers? And where could they be found? Their origin could be found in social forces, but who was willing to fight to change these social forces?
In America, there was certainly discrimination and it existed likewise in the army. Everybody knew that and accepted it. But how about when it came to a showdown? when efficiency and work accomplished must be sacrificed in order to propagate the persecution? Was it allowed to exist even then? It seemed it was.
At times, Johnny felt like angrily grabbing Weidmann by the shoulders and asking him if he was blind, if he didn’t know, and telling him to do something about it, to write Washington, or to go to Second Army Memphis, to fight back without suffering pointlessly. But the immense reserve Weidmann kept wrapped about him forced Johnny to be silent. Washington and Memphis were pipedreams anyway, and Johnny knew it. Occasionally his sense of injustice boiled over into anger, and he would quit work and spend the rest of the evening in the PX distending his stomach with 3.2 beer in a fruitless effort to get drunk as hell. But he never went on the evenings Isaac sang.
