Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  The invitation was extended to the other men in the room, but only one man was interested. The others, sprawled comfortably on the floor near the piano, decided in favor of the less frenetic delights of music and liquor.

  Early the following morning the same soldier from downstairs shook me awake and agitatedly begged me to come down and talk to the girl. She’d been there all night and now was sputtering German at them and they couldn’t understand what she was saying. Bleary-eyed and unhappy, I pulled on my pants and we went down. The four anxious-faced men who were talking in low, worried tones looked up gratefully as we entered, but the frowns of anxiety returned as I walked to the closed bedroom door. Already they winced in anticipation: the girl would demand to see an officer ... she’d charge “Rape!” ... she’d get ’em all, the fifteen or twenty men who had called on her during the night, some of them more than one time. Even if she turned out to be a reasonable kind of whore, the least they could expect was a bill of staggering proportions, marked “For Services Rendered.”

  I opened the bedroom door and tried not to look at the rumpled bed as I queried. “Bitte, was willst du, fraulein?” She was a moderately attractive blonde, clothed at the moment and wearing a white blouse, gray slacks, and a blue coat. She sat wearily on the edge of the bed, her face sagging with fatigue, her skin the color of old putty. She spoke rapidly for a moment and I listened attentively. Then I turned to the anxious men standing behind me, grinned, and said, “She wants to know if she can go home now. And would you like her to come back tonight and bring a girlfriend with her?’And we laughed like idiots, the bewildered girl looking at us suspiciously and saying, “Was? Was?" Between bursts of uncontrollable laughter I told her yes, of course she could go home, and yes, come back tonight with a girlfriend. She went off, walking unsteadily but almost straight—I don’t know how the hell she could walk at all—and I asked B. how much money they’d given her. He answered in puzzled astonishment, “Not a goddamn cent! She never said a word about any money!” And we roared with laughter again.

  Several hours later came the evil news that we were moving to a little village, beyond the reach of city temptations. I wonder if she came back with her girlfriend.

  Waldorf is a small town only a few kilometers from Bonn. Signs of spring are everywhere: daffodils, crocuses, and rain. I am now officially a buck sergeant and inflated out of all proportion to the three modest stripes. But Loeb, my HQ friend who gets all the inside dope, told me something that has tormented me all day, and I look at the teeming rain and it’s a right day for my misery.

  Loeb says I am well regarded at HQ for my zeal (the word is his) in the affair at the crossroads, but the warm words are tempered by the cautious qualification that I “overextended” myself. It is said that I was supposed to have stopped at the group of houses the tanks blasted. In a very tentative fashion the buck is being passed so that it would appear that I failed to understand my orders or rashly exceeded them. My conscience is square with myself: I know what my orders were, and I know that I did not misunderstand them. But it doesn’t matter where the blame should lie, or whose was the original fault of misunderstanding: the sickness that turns within me has for source the relentless fact that I did go up there and I did draw a tank up after me. Unwitting or not, I was the instrument by which two men died needlessly, and I do not even know their names. And I cannot forget the strange and whispering silence after the shells had landed and I peered from the corner of the house to watch the dead tank, smoke-wreathed, roll sluggishly and without direction into the field.

  Still in Waldorf.

  I’m comfortable and warm, sitting here in the living room of a German farmhouse. Tonight I sleep in a bed. I can even take my clothes off.

  We share this house with women and children. There are no men in the village, not even old men. Most of the villagers were tearfully happy to see us once they realized we intended no harm to them. They embraced us and sobbed that we “freed them from the Nazis.” Maybe they even thought they meant that. But we know that the real reason for these grateful tears is that our arrival meant there will be no further bombing and shelling of Waldorf. Whatever the reason, we shrugged and accepted the gestures of friendship. And the nonfraternization order was ignored to the complete satisfaction of everyone, GI and villager alike.

  March 12.

  Still here in Waldorf, still faithfully finger-crossing every hour on the hour, praying that our luck will hold a little longer.

  I’ve been sitting in the kitchen, talking with the women. They are openmouthed with envy of everything American, and their questions about that golden land are many and eager. They are truly astounded—and a little disgruntled, secretly—to learn that America was never bombed, in spite of what the Nazi propagandists assured them. They try to remember the time when they, too, accepted safety as a matter of course, but the days of terror and the nights spent in the cellar are still fresh.

  When I casually mentioned that my wife and children receive a hundred dollars a month from our government, they were momentarily speechless. The German government gives them nothing, they said. Then they asked wistfully about clothing, women’s clothing. Could it still be bought in America? “Yes,” I replied, and they sighed in unison. Even stockings? I considered hastily—I’d heard about the nylon lines—and then said firmly, “Yes, even stockings. Silk stockings!” That finished them, and I didn’t have the heart to continue. They arose heavily and with somber faces began to prepare the thin soup of cabbage and turnips that was their evening meal.

  It’s a bleak and comfortless world these women have known since they signed over to their blasted führer. Perhaps the large cities—Berlin, Hamburg, Munich—still throng with gowned and groomed women (I recall the photographs of Frau Goering, lumpily elegant in white satin and sable), but these women in the kitchens of Waldorf and Drove and Soller were the ones whose destiny was decided in the pronouncement of the three K’s for German women. Kinder, kuche, und kirche: children, cooking, and church. From this barren today, those who can remember the Empire, or even the Weimar Republic, lean backward in a golden nostalgia.

  Now that I’ve had a little sleep I’m beginning to hanker for a world less exclusively masculine. I don’t mean that I’m having trouble keeping my pants buttoned—or maybe I do mean that—but I hunger for the feminine attributes of the normal world. Our existence is so goddamn male—male voices, male shapes, male smells. I’d like to smell perfume again and see a woman walk across a room ... feel silk between my hands. I’d like to hear women laughing. The peasants in this house have thick bodies and their clothes are shapeless. Their faces are scrubbed and shiny and unexciting; they stride like men, and their voices are admirable instruments for the calling of pigs and cows. At this moment, if a woman strolled by... just strolled by, the scent of Chanel No. 5 an insolent veil over her shoulder, I think ... yes, I think I could be led by my nose.

  March 13, Waldorf.

  We started a training program today. Manual of arms, saluting, and close order drill. It’s a tough war. But we’re comforted with news of movies soon, and showers and clean clothes. And the Red Cross doughnut wagon is due.

  From a letter to Ree:

  I think your loneliness is even more poignant than mine. You follow old routines, familiar patterns, and because you must do alone the things we used to do together, my ghost haunts you at every turn. Here there are no evocative symbols; there is nothing that says to me, ‘This is where she walked... this is where we used to meet... here she sat in the evening, where I could see her when I looked up from my book.” I am spared these small reminders, and grateful for that mercy. I have learned, too, that rest periods are bad for my peace of mind. When I am busy, when there is action, movement, danger, I forget you entirely, and return to you only when there is time for remembering. Sometimes I cannot find you at all, cannot bring you near. You remain just beyond my fingertips, misty and not real. Curious how strangerlike you are to me then ... and I to myself.

>   In my mail today was a letter from the Lion’s Club in Syracuse, a reminder to attend the weekly luncheon meeting at the Hotel Syracuse on Friday, February 8. Sent to Camp Wheeler, it trailed me to Fort Meade, then to Camp Shanks, across the Atlantic, through Belgium, across the Roer, and finally to Waldorf, Germany. Reserve a place for me, O Brother Lions!

  Shorty and I are having a small feast tonight. He owns a can of sardines, and I have cheese and assorted tidbits from the Christmas boxes I’ve just begun to receive.

  Of the replacements who joined the first platoon in the Hurtgen Forest, only four remain: Shorty, Greg Luecke, Leo Allen, and myself. Greg and Shorty received their buck stripes when I did and are leaders of the first and third squads, respectively. Leo is the platoon runner now. Our rapid advance is not so much a tribute to our abilities as a commentary on the number of casualties the platoon has suffered since November.

  Helmuth, Josef, Maria, Johann, and Margarita are engaged in a screaming game of tag, centered around the table where four of us are trying to write. We know, and the kids know that we know, that a handful of candy will buy peace and quiet for a while. A daily gambit Wonder if my kids are such artful creatures. Wonder what my kids are like.

  Daily we encounter more and more slave laborers. On their clothing they wear labels, stitched or painted, that identify them according to nationality and pronounce their serfdom.

  Like a tag on a dog: ‘This is Rex, Property of ----.” The labels on the Russian and Polish slaves are very large and conspicuous. We are told that Russian or Polish slaves who ran away were not captured alive. Pursuit of a Russian or a Pole was considered an inefficient expenditure of German energy: the order was to shoot on sight. The labels made identification easy, you see, and there were so many Russians and Poles….

  We tell the slaves that they’re free and will soon be back in their own countries. They’re happy, but bewildered and uncertain. Many have had no word from home in several years, and they’re afraid of what they may find when they return. Some have no destination: they saw the firing squads and the gallows, the torches, the evacuation vans for women and children, and they know that nothing remains of their native villages.

  March 15.

  Spring, boring from within, has taken possession of Waldorf. The day is unashamed blue and gold, crocuses blow cool flames across the tender green grass, and butterflies waltz in loving pairs through the orchard. Today I watched the unfolding of yellow and purple pansies. Summer is icumen in.

  In many ways “resting” is worse than combat. When you’re on line or pushing, you know you have a job to do, it’s likely to be unpleasant, and you settle down and face it But here every day is more poignant than the one preceding because you know it may be your last, because this can’t last forever and why the hell don’t they alert us and get it over?

  Tonight the regimental orchestra played an open air concert in the street. It was good to hear American jazz again. The civilians came to listen, too, keeping a respectful distance away. I watched the German faces as they registered the impact of this strange American music ... faces that showed delight, bewilderment, distaste, contempt, and even a kind of fear. American jazz is rough, vigorous stuff for ears accustomed to the sugary banalities of German popular music.

  One child caught my eye and I returned to her again and again, studying her covertly. A fairy-tale child... eight years old, silvery blond and pigtailed, superbly Nordic. She listened gravely and her face had a purity, a delicacy of modeling, that set her apart from the lumpy, wriggling kids around her. But though she’ll grow up and be lovely still, the odds are against her in this racked and unhappy country, and embittered, race-conscious sons will be bred on her warm silver body by an embittered, race-conscious German male. And—maybe because it was spring—the fun went out of the music for me, and I walked soberly back to the house.

  March 16, Waldorf.

  Another spring day, lucent and pale gold. Margarita gave me a bunch of violets and the scent fills the room.

  There shouldn’t be a war on…. I can’t believe there’s a war on. Outside the kids are yelling, fevered with mysterious games. Some of the men are playing catch in the cobbled street, and American voices are calling the same happy vulgarities Americans always call when they have a baseball and a couple of gloves.

  I’m getting into a bitch of a mood with this interminable waiting, this expectancy that’s never resolved.

  In some forgotten town I picked up a pocket-size English-German dictionary. It is an astonishing volume. Compiled by a German and published in Leipzig, it purports to be a scholarly work, and perhaps it is. But I’d like to know where and in what fashion the guy acquired his knowledge of English. On every page are scattered words that sound like double-talk to me: “bewet... cavesson ... civism ... diluviate ... edacity ... fulgurate ... ogganition.” These are solemnly avowed to be in good English usage—“part of every cultured Englishman’s vocabulary,” says the preface—but good English usage where? In what high circles?

  The personnel of my squad having changed many times over, I’ll call the roll again:

  Bill Bowerman, the assistant squad leader, from Niagara Falls. Originally one of the scouts. I’ve mentioned him before. Not quite twenty, a helluva nice kid with an ingenuous grin. Bill is levelheaded and mature, betraying his age only occasionally with adolescent horseplay and unexpectedly youthful guffaws. He’s all right.

  Bob Berthot, first scout. Bill’s pal—same age, same hometown. Bill and Bob met for the first time when they were drafted, and they’ve been inseparable ever since training camp. Bob’s a good kid, but he’s a little given to puffing himself and assuming what he believes to be the “combat soldier manner” when he meets a replacement greener than himself. He does the dangerous work of a scout without demur, but his imagination needs throttling down on occasion.

  “Red" Hull, BAR man. From Missouri, I believe, though he’s not unknown on Chicago’s Clark Street More than six feet tall, deceptively lazy in his movements, given to the spinning of tall yams that delight everyone and fool no one. His rich, booming bass voice is unforgettable once you have heard it A former truck driver, it’s easy to picture him in the cab of a truck, disarmingly insolent grinning, and completely sure of himself. Redheaded, of course.

  Ellis Herrington, Red’s assistant on the BAR. A Tennessee farmer with a refreshing twang to his voice. Black hair, black eyes, quiet, serious, likable. The quality of his silence endows him with a striking virility.

  Joe Hornung, bazooka. A house painter from Peoria, Illinois. Joe is the man who rushed to Ketron’s aid when the Jerries counterattacked in Drove. Joe is always late, always slow, always forgetting something. Warmhearted and friendly, but given to rare, nervy bursts of temper. He tenses up too much for his own safety when things get rough.

  Frank H., a discard from Shorty’s squad. Frank has now made the rounds of the squads, being transferred from each one just in time to save him from a violent and unheroic end. He’s on the last go-round now and will be shipped out of the company if, after fair trial, I find him too hard to handle. He is insolent, lazy, disobedient, and slovenly, and there are low murmurs among the men of a wide saffron streak. The captain is trying to give him every possible break, but I think the gesture is wasted. He has been in the army for three years, but landed overseas less than a month ago, having been escorted across the Atlantic under guard and regarded as a prisoner until his assignment to us. (Assignment to a combat outfit was frequently the justice served on chronic f--- ups.) Frank boasts of his many sentences in the stockade back in the States. In the short time he’s been with us, it’s been noted that his equipment gets “too heavy” for him when we’re on a forced march, and he throws it away, piece by piece, arriving at our objective nearly empty-handed. I’ve made him Joe’s assistant on the bazooka. If he can’t get along with slow, easygoing Joe, it’s a damn sure thing he won’t be able to get along with anyone else in the squad.

  John Basile, rifleman
and grenadier. Twenty-nine years old and from New Jersey. A former buck sergeant in antiaircraft, he’s been in the army for more than two years but was transferred to the infantry only a short time ago. He doesn’t think much of it Arrived overseas three weeks ago. I think he’ll be okay, but at the moment he’s being dramatic about a blister on the bottom of his foot He limps pathetically and heaves agonized sighs at every rest halt but I’ve seen a lot of blisters, and histrionics don’t move me. My feet hurt too. He forgets that blisters are hardly the novelty to an infantry outfit that they might be to an ack-ack crew. But I sympathize with him secretly: it is a whopper of a blister and perhaps his feet are too soft to take this punishment.

  John Albert, our newest member, eighteen years old and fresh from the States two weeks ago. I’ve tentatively assigned him as second scout. He’s a good kid and he’ll be all right, although at the moment he’s a little nervy at the contemplation of combat.

  So there they are, a typical rifle squad. Young and not so young, single and married, bold and timid, the sober and the simple. Men in uniform.

  March 17, Waldorf.

  And a chilly and unjoyous St. Patrick’s Day it is. I’ve been sitting close to the kitchen stove and talking to Maria. She’s a modestly attractive young woman nearing thirty. (I’m guessing at her age because she gets kittenish when we ask her how old she is. The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady ...)

  Maria and her mother share this house with two other families. Most of the work falls on Maria’s narrow shoulders—the housework, the gardening, the care of the chickens and rabbits. Not any more work, surely, than our farm women perform at home, but Maria’s equipment is unbelievably primitive. Her “washing machine,” for instance, is simply a huge iron vat mounted on legs. A fire of briquets on the grate under it heats the water and a scrubbing board completes the “machine.” There is no soap.