Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  The enemy resolved our quandary by opening fire on us from the hill. It was hot for a few minutes. Then, while the third platoon drew the Germans’ interest, my platoon slipped quietly down the valley under the cover of trees more friendly than those in the road and made a flanking assault on the German-held hill. Score: three dead Germans, one prisoner. The others fled through the woods and escaped.

  Everyone pitched in on the road-clearing job, and it didn’t take as long as we’d feared. We reached our objective, the village of Rothehutte, at nine p.m. The town made little fuss and we cleared it easily and quickly. The lucky ones who weren’t assigned to guard duty were in bed by eleven, including me.

  April 19.

  Up early and on the move, this time riding the tanks and T.D.’s, we careened into Rübeland, a lovely and picturesque town that lies deeply cupped in a fold of the mountains. Two glacial boulders, each as large as a small cottage, guarded the entry into the village, and on one of the boulders stood the upright figure of a bear, the symbol and seal of the mountain town.

  A river bisects Rübeland—a real river, not an adolescent brook. In two places it was nearly choked by the automobiles, army and civilian, that the retreating Germans pushed into the water to keep them from our hands. A futile bit of tongue-sticking. We were lousy with vehicles—what did we want with charcoal burners?

  War hadn’t scarred Rübeland, and the houses looked clean and comfortable. I drew two decent houses for the platoon and then settled down in my own with a groan of comfort. The air was clean and sweet and scented with pine. I had a warm house, a good bed, and I could hear the sleepy gossiping of chickens behind the house. I resolved that I would have fresh eggs for breakfast or, b’gosh, I’d have chicken for dinner!

  April 20.

  After breakfast we started on a long jaunt to sweep the neighboring woods for stray Germans. The second platoon in position at the roadblock, the first and third did the woods-sweeping, each taking a different route.

  Notwithstanding the job, there was a gaiety to the expedition, a picnic atmosphere. We were like summer campers on a hike. It was a wonderful day—fresh and clean and full of spring, and the sun came out. We moved through the woods, aware of violets and edelweiss, the glimmer of tiny white star flowers, the green shimmer of new moss. Mountain streams, choked with April, murmured drunkenly between spongy banks and offered icy sweetness for the courtesy of a bended knee. Once, hearing a cry from a scout and looking in sudden stiff alarm where he pointed, we saw—not the enemy, not gray-green uniforms and scowling machine guns—nine deer on a mountainside, staring at us in wonder. In an instant every sportsman in the platoon had his rifle to his shoulder, and I shouted a hasty “No shooting!” I made lame excuses as the rifles were reluctantly lowered: “We don’t want to scare off every Jerry within hearing,” and, “Sure I’d like some venison, too, but howthehell ya gonna get it back to town, on your back?” And all the time I knew that the real reason for my order was something else: it seemed wrong, somehow, to kill these deer only for the sake of killing. It was spring and they were quick and alive and there had been so much killing. It seemed wrong in a way I could not explain to myself to use these rifles, so frequently employed for the killing of men, against these gentler beasts. Kill men? Yes. Hunt deer? No.

  I apologize to all sportsmen.

  We came home with a bag of seven wretched prisoners, deserters from the collapsing Wehrmacht. Most of them were young and tearful. For many days they’d been creeping through the woods and mountains of central Germany, trying to reach their home villages before the debacle of final surrender. One of them had only seven more miles to go when we captured him. Seven miles from his wife and children. He hadn’t seen them in three years. And we had to seize him thus rudely at the very threshold of his particular paradise and send him off to a prison camp. I wonder how many more months will pass before he finally reaches home. And what manner of greeting he will receive.

  At dusk we were sent out to relieve the second platoon at the roadblock. We spent a quiet but chilly night in the woods, picked up three prisoners, and returned to Rübeland the following morning.

  April 23.

  The past two days have been placid. I’ve eaten well, slept well, written a lot of letters, and read two books. Yesterday I saw a movie, and the night before last I had a hot bath in a wooden laundry tub.

  The war is far removed from Rübeland. Each afternoon the German girls appear, usually in couples, and stroll slowly through the town, twitching their rumps provocatively when they pass a group of soldiers. Giggling and whispering, they loiter on the bridges that span the river and spend long hours leaning on the iron rail in studious inspection of the swirling brown water they’ve known all their lives. They pretend a careless unconcern for the men who pause hopefully, but it’s obvious they’re not unmindful of the nudging of American elbows, the hinting pressure of American thighs and buttocks.

  It is difficult to imagine the thunder of battle now taking place in Berlin and Leipzig. Here in this remote village the war is tapering off, a phonograph that’s winding down and the record not yet played out. Rumors are thick: “The Russians are in Berlin” ... “The First Army is through fighting” ... “We’re going to be pulled back for a long rest.”

  If peace came now, I think there would be little hilarity here. At this moment an announcement of peace would seem a feeble anticlimax, a third act “curtain” after the audience had fallen asleep.

  Rumors, hopes, prophecies too warm for belief—all I know, all I am certain of, is my own sick heart. Let it be the end, let it be now! Let us go home!

  From a letter, written April 23:

  Thanks for the summary of that recent magazine article concerning the attitude of German civilians. You ask if the article seems accurate, if its claims stack up with my own observations. My answer is yes, for the most part. Joy is the first reaction of the civilians, wild and hysterical joy because our coming means there will be no more bombs, nor more shells. That is reason enough for celebration and we don’t despise them for it. Today Dettman bandaged the hip and thigh of a six-year-old girl who had been injured by flying masonry. From hip to ankle her leg was a single livid bruise, and high on her thigh was an ugly open wound. Although Dettman’s hands were gentle, the child wept bitterly, a bowel-twisting misery of sound, and we hated ourselves and could not talk after she had gone.

  I cannot tell how much of the anti-Nazi talk is truly sincere and how much a matter of simple expediency. I think that there has been a large-scale reversal of feeling toward the Nazi hierarchy of late, and many civilians seem honest in their protestations of repugnance. But—and this is the clincher!—if the Nazi chieftains are now tribal outcasts, it is only because they continue to hold Germany to the waging of a war already lost. I have heard no one speak out against the ideology of National Socialism; I have met no one who reflects an intellectual rebirth, no one whose eyes admittedly see Nazism for the thing it is. Whatever this revulsion of feeling, it springs from the sensible reluctance of the German people to suffer further hardships for the sake of a war already conceded.

  Even those who profess the most intense hate for the Nazis are uncomfortably aware that our eyes have taken note of the cleft stick in which they wriggle. Everyone in Germany has a husband, a son, a brother, or some other male connection in the army, possibly still fighting. And so they dissemble. And, with the exception of the children (who succumb to gum and candy) and frauleins (who succumb to soap, chocolate, cigarettes, and healthy male flesh), they do not like us. Why, indeed, should they? We are devastation. Where we have passed, little remains—no cameras, no pistols, no watches, very little jewelry, and damn few virgins. We leave behind us a spoor of broken dishes, emptied fruit jars, and plundered, dirty houses. And our general attitude (which I am inclined to share) is: So you wanted total war? You believed in it, boasted of it? Well, this is it!

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “I want to go home ... I want to go home ...”<
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  April 24.

  We are in Beyemaumburg, sixty miles from Rübeland, near the Czech border. The house in which I have my C.P. is a very small, very poor affair consisting of a kitchen and a bedroom. That’s all. The bathroom is a one-holer on the far side of the courtyard. We share the house with five civilians: a young woman, her three sons, aged from three to six, and a middle- aged aunt who is a refugee from Breslau.

  The situation here is damn uncomfortable and I’m not happy. We live better when we capture a town and just grab a house that looks good. When a town has been secured before we move into it, as this one was, that ol’ army SOP takes over and everything is done according to a system. And no one is happy.

  The advance detail that preceded us into Beyemaumburg was required to examine the houses, divvy up the town, and guide each arriving unit to the sector assigned to it. G Company drew the poorest portion, a sector in which all the houses are small and wretched, many of them damaged by shells, and every building overflowing with civilians.

  To add a new woe, the current nonfraternization policy, as defined by Division Order, prohibits German civilians and GIs from sharing the same building. If the army wants a certain house, the inhabitants must leave. The civilians were still in possession of their homes when we arrived in Beyemaumburg, and it became our painful duty to evict them, a task that should have been handled by the advance detail. It’s a brutal business, a misery of tears and desperate pleading. For me the job is always double pain because my German, though crude—and mostly sign language anyway—is still the best in the platoon, and I’m forced to do the dirty work for each squad. When the civilians pathetically assure me that they will be no bother to us, my fumbling German is not equal to the task of explaining why their promises can make no difference and they must go in any case. (Yeah, I know: “You don’t explain, Sergeant, you just order!”)

  It was like that today—tears and more tears, particularly in the house next door. Besieged by the sobs of its inhabitants, I pleaded with the captain and finally won his permission to let the civilians stay—if there was room and if they didn’t crowd us. To the three civilians already living there, I added the five from my own house—making a total of eight people who were to sleep in one room!—told them they could use our kitchen for cooking, and settled back with a sigh of relief. But it remains an uncomfortable situation, and I don’t like it A minor irritation is their serene assumption that I understand their language perfectly, even though I speak it with something less than the purity of Schiller. They pound me with questions and will not cease fire. I have no peace. And the men in the platoon—who stoutly refuse to learn a word of “this bitchin’ language”—delight in making remarks to the civilians in English, knowing I will be asked to interpret, and I can’t explain, and—like Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby—the harder I struggle, the more I am held.

  For example, today we carried our hall mess kits from the chow line, planning to eat in comfort in our house. As we finished eating, the mother of the three boys put their lunch on the table. It was boiled rice. Just that, boiled rice, flavored with a few grains of beet sugar and a dash of cinnamon. The kids toyed disinterestedly with their food: their appetites had been blunted by tidbits from our own lavish meal, plus the candy with which we’d been stuffing them all morning. As their elderly aunt salvaged the scarcely touched plates, Dettman, knowing damn well that she wouldn’t understand, said that the kids had eaten too much candy to have any appetite for lunch. Inquiringly she turned to me, and in sign language and bad German I tried to say that “their eyes were bigger than their appetites.” Pointing to the kids, I rolled my eyes dramatically, patted my stomach, and made what I thought were appropriate German sounds. To my dismay, the old lady’s eyes filled with tears and a look of mortal hurt came over her face. Five painful minutes later I understood from her sobbed remarks that it wasn’t nice of me to criticize her niece for having three children! And their father a soldier, too!

  While Dettman and Joe rolled on the floor in heartless laughter, I squirmed in this morass of misunderstanding, getting in deeper and deeper. For fifteen minutes I sweated and stammered, with the old lady getting angrier and bolder, sputtering at me like a wet firecracker. I doubt that she ever understood my original statement, but I finally made it clear that I was not suggesting that her beloved nephew ought to cut it off!

  Amusing, huh? But maddening, too. They won’t let me alone. I can have no rest, no peace, no place of retreat Even when I sit down to write a letter, someone is sure to burst in and pelt me with idiomatic German.

  Incidentally, the citizens of Beyemaumburg were horror-struck to learn that the Russians are in Berlin. They had been hoping the Americans would capture it and thus save it from being a Russian prize.

  From a letter home, written April 25:

  Do you remember the letter in which I commented gloomily on the unexploded shells, the forgotten land mines that lie scattered over this doomed continent or hide half buried in the earth? I made morbid prediction of kids not yet born who would be maimed by the explosion of rusty grenades long after the men who threw them had died of old age, farmers whose plows would stir sleeping mines from a long nap. Today we saw the first bitter coming-to-pass of that prediction. I was writing a letter in the kitchen when I heard the unmistakable BLAM of an exploding grenade. It sounded very near, and I leaped out the window and raced up the lane behind the house. I didn’t have to run far. Two small boys had been playing in the lane near the house. One was about eight years old, the other hardly six. Their toy was an American hand grenade they found somewhere, and one of them had succeeded in pulling the pin. We carried the smaller one away, but he was dying, his head and chest sieved by shrapnel. There was no need to pick up the other child. A quiet village lane spattered with the bright blood of children ... so much blood from such small bodies.

  The village women hung over their fences and moaned as one of the men ran down the hill to the battalion aid station, the bloody body of the dying child in his arms. We threw a blanket over the small huddle in the sticky grass.

  We’re oppressed by a sense of guilt, but surely we are not to blame? Who is to blame? Where does blame start? We tell ourselves that we are innocent: war swept through this village long before we arrived, and no matter how painstakingly we police the area, we cannot possibly clean up all the dregs of earlier violence. We say, “Accidents like this are going to happen for years to come, and kids will die like this—in Germany and in France, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, England, Poland, and Russia.” But such assurances are small comfort. I turn away, wincing, from the too bright vision of Geoff struggling with the ring of a hand grenade, sleeping death in his hands, and on his face the serious “this is man’s work” expression that turns my heart.

  I hope we leave here soon. I want to be moving again. The men are restless and so am I. There’s too much time, too many free minutes, free hours, and the old litanies start again: “When will it end? When will it end? I want to go home... go home... April twenty-fifth... when will it end I want to go home ...” A dreary song ... no cadences, no resolutions—it gets nowhere. Like hillbilly music, banal and nerve-grating. Gray in color ... muddy gray and dingy brown. No meter changes and only one chord. Endless and eternal and no intermissions.

  * * *

  Peacetime noises bother me. The familiar accompaniment of shell and bullet being absent from my daily routine, I am disturbed and irritated by the ticking of clocks, the simmering of a teakettle, the chirping of a courageous cricket in the wall, the distant hum of the generator at the company C.P. How will it be when I get home—the sound of cars, voices on the street at night, radios blaring, cats howling, dogs barking? Will it be all right with you (and the neighbors) if, the first few nights I’m home, I get up at two a.m. and do a little target practice in the backyard, light a few giant firecrackers? You don’t want me to be homesick, do you?

  April 26.

  We’ve begun a rear area training schedule
: manual of arms, drilling, instructions in the proper way to salute, and so on. A helluva way to spend the hours, but better than brooding, I guess.

  Looks like I’m being put in for a field commission. Today as I worked the platoon on the drill field, Captain Wirt and Major Smith, the battalion executive officer, approached and stood for a moment, watching. Then Captain Wirt came over to me and said the major wanted to talk to me. As we walked toward the senior officer the captain grinned sideways at me and said out of the corner of his mouth, “Put your best foot forward now, Gantter.” The first few questions from Major Smith illuminated this puzzling directive, and excitement made me fumble-tongued and awkward. Perhaps I should be scornful of the whole business, mask my pride with the common soldier’s traditional contempt for the officer caste, but some fundamental strength is obviously lacking in my character because I am openly puffed up about it, ready to burst my buttons. Snob value? I suppose so. But it’s more than that, too. If this commission really happens, the manner of its occurrence will give me courage for the rest of my life in situations where I’ll need courage, will stiffen my backbone in the moments when I’m most oppressed by the sense of my own weakness. Because it came this way. I’m glad it came this way. I feel honest about it as I never could had it been the customary diploma from OCS. And there’s a special bittersweet satisfaction because my rejection for OCS at Camp Wheeler on the basis of poor eyesight has always rankled. I have a thoroughly sophomoric impulse to return to Camp Wheeler one day, waggle my fingers, and say, “Look, you sonsabitehes! So I can’t see good enough, huh?”