A Special Providence

by Richard Yates

  And the lieutenant could only lower his eyes in deference; he hadn’t, of course, been in the Bulge.

  “I agree with Covey, though,” said Klein, the unkempt and sycophantic radio man. He had washed and shaved for the party and looked almost clean, except that his white cheeks now called attention to a multitude of blackheads in his nose. When his endless agreeing with Loomis became too obvious, even to himself, the next best thing was to agree with “Covey.” “The worst part about artillery is just that,” he said. “You can’t fight back. I mean there’s no sense to it.”

  But Klein was ignored, as usual; and the next speaker was the man on the lieutenant’s left, who was rising now and gathering up his dishes – a tall, ruddily handsome staff sergeant named Paul Underwood, who was the platoon guide. Underwood rarely stayed around the house for long; he seemed to have so many friends throughout the company that he was always on the move, as if to bestow his presence on a few admirers at a time. When Prentice had first seen him stride into this house to a happy chorus of “Hey, Paul” and “Where you been, Paul?” and “Wait a second, Paul, I got something to tell you,” he had felt an instinctive, envious resentment. Nobody could be that good-looking, that charming, that much in demand. But then Underwood had strolled over and said, “I don’t believe I’ve met you, soldier; you a new man?” and Prentice had been meekly won over. He was perfect; and now, as he sidled away to carry his dishes from the table, he held everyone’s attention.

  “Well,” he said, “all I know is they can’t get the damn thing over with too soon for me. I just wish they’d keep us here on this side of the river and let the Russians clean it up; that’d suit me perfectly.”

  “Buddy,” said Ted the medic, “you can say that again.” And there were nods and rumblings of agreement all around the table. It would suit them all perfectly – all, apparently, except Prentice, who hid his mouth in the last of his wine.

  A faint, faraway buzzing in the eastern sky made them all freeze and look at each other, round-eyed; then it grew louder and lower – an aircraft engine, a lone German plane come to reconnoiter the bridge.

  Almost at once the anti-aircraft gun opened up in the fields behind the house, and the men all bolted to their feet, knocking over chairs and spilling glasses: they were clambering out of the kitchen door like frantic children, and then they were all outside and running in the field to watch it, shouting and pointing.

  There it was, the plane trying to break away out of range and pursued by the yellow tracers and the flak that burst in little black puffs against the pink of the evening sky.

  “Get the bastard! Get ’im! Get ’im!”

  “They’re firing short! Christ’s sake, bring it up! Bring it up!”

  “They got ’im! They got ’im!”

  “No they ain’t – not yet they ain’t – Get ’im!”

  The plane was still climbing, heading northwest and apparently moving away from the flak, but then it began to cough out a trail of black smoke. It described a long, graceful arc and went into a gliding fall: they saw the small black and orange burst of its crash a mile or more away, and then the sound of it came back across the flatland in the abrupt and ringing silence of the gun.

  “Wow!”

  “D’ja see that? D’ja see that?”

  “Beautiful! Beautiful!”

  “Wow!”

  “How about that?”

  Somebody slapped Prentice on the back and he felt the sting of his own hand slapping somebody else’s back; he didn’t know who either man was. He had been as wholly caught up in the spectacle as anyone else, and it seemed to have made him one of them for the first time.

  As they turned and started back to the house in a straggling group, each looking very small and individual in the wide evening landscape, he could look from one walking, talking figure to another – even the frightening Finn, with his absurd straw hat; even Krupka; even Walker; even the kiss-ass Klein – and take pleasure in the simple knowledge that they were the men of his platoon. He knew it probably wouldn’t last long, this sense of fellowship, and he knew it was probably the wine as much as the plane that had brought it on, but there it was. This was his outfit; these were the men with whom he would cross the river and find whatever was left of his chance for atonement, whatever was left of the war.

  Chapter Two

  The day of the crossing began before dawn. It began with a rude, angry jostling of men made weak by the unaccustomed weight of urgency and equipment, with a laggard company formation on the dark road, and a sullen, cursing forward march.

  The sky and the land were turning blue by the time the column reached the bridge. The crossing itself was a matter of trying to keep from slipping down a hill of loose dirt that led to the waterline, then of treading carefully and for what seemed a great distance on the steel cleats of a footpath whose shuddering pontoons rode low in the loud black and silver flood of the river, and then of climbing another hill of dirt on the opposite shore.

  Soon everything was green and gold. They were walking on a neat macadam road through woodland, and the only sound except for their rubber-heeled boots was the song of birds high in the trees.

  Lieutenant Coverly, in what appeared to be a burst of nervous energy, was making his way down the platoon to have encouraging little talks with his men. Prentice saw him up ahead, chatting with Finn. Then he dropped back to spend some time with Mueller, walking with his hand on Mueller’s shoulder, and then he exchanged a few words with Walker, who said something that made him laugh.

  “And how you doing, Prentice?” he said, still smiling from Walker’s joke.

  “Okay, sir.”

  “I imagine this is quite a change for you, after the hospital. Well; keep it up.”

  They marched all morning, with five-minute breaks every hour. At noon they stopped in a clearing beside the road – a clearing that contained two dead German soldiers – to eat their K rations. Most of the men stayed as far away as possible from the corpses, but Krupka seemed to enjoy them. He kicked them in the ribs and stood on them; then, finding a pair of black-rimmed eyeglasses in the grass near one of them, he fitted them back onto the dead man’s face as carefully as a little girl playing with a doll.

  “Hey, you guys,” he called. “I betcha none a ya’s got guts enough to sit on one of these bastards and eat. Five bucks. I got five bucks says none a ya’s got guts enough.”

  Nobody took him on, so he did it himself: he sat on the chest of the bespectacled corpse and spooned up his can of dehydrated eggs, which were almost exactly the color of the dead man’s flesh.

  Then they marched all afternoon. They passed occasional barns and farmhouses, all of which appeared to be abandoned, but for the most part there was nothing in sight but trees and fields and endlessly unwinding road.

  Once Prentice looked up to find the jaunty, handsome figure of Paul Underwood walking beside him. “Here, Prentice,” he said. “Present for you.” And he gave Prentice a hand grenade from which the pin had been removed.

  “Jesus!” Prentice held it in one tight, trembling hand while Underwood laughed.

  “What’s the matter? Hell, it’s safe as long as you hold the spoon down.”

  And Prentice realized now that Underwood, for all his apparent carelessness, had pressed it into his hand in such a way that it couldn’t have dropped. “Well, but I mean where is the pin?”

  “Nobody knows, that’s the funny part. Guys’ve been passing it up and down the column all day. Here, I’ll take it back. Careful, now.”

  And Underwood moved gracefully away up the column to find another victim for his practical joke. A little later Prentice saw him leave the road and go trotting out into a field. When he was about a hundred yards away he stopped and crouched, and Prentice figured out what he was doing: he was burying the grenade, packing earth or rocks around it, and this struck Prentice as an appallingly rash thing to do. What if some farmer – or, for God’s sake, some child – should come and stumble over it? But the
n, what else was Underwood to do with the thing? He certainly couldn’t keep it, and he probably couldn’t throw it because the enemy might be close enough to hear the explosion. In any case it wasn’t something Prentice could afford to think about; all his mind was occupied with walking, making his swollen feet rise painfully and fall, rise and fall, and matching his breath to their rhythm. He had a pain in his chest, but couldn’t tell if it was the bad lung or the weight of the bag of six rifle grenades that rode over it. Where the hell did Underwood get the strength to run out there and back?

  By dusk, which brought a chilly wind, a number of men were falling behind: the column was bedraggled on both sides of the road, and Prentice kept passing the dim shapes of men sitting on the ground or lying down. The man directly ahead of him, Walker, was showing signs of weakness, sometimes drifting back to within a boot or two of Prentice before he pulled himself forward again. But Mueller, with more to carry than anyone else, was doing well: the steady motion of his plump, baby-shaped back had begun to serve Prentice as a goad. Once Mueller stumbled and fell but clumsily righted himself, using his B.A.R., barrel down, as a crutch to help him back on his feet. The muzzle was probably plugged with dirt after that, but that didn’t spoil his performance in Prentice’s eyes. If he can make it, Prentice told himself, I’ll make it too.

  They spent the night in a barn, with guards posted around its yard. Most of the Second Platoon was assigned to the loft: they had to climb a wooden ladder to get there and use cupped matches to find their way around in the darkness, but once they were settled they found it very comfortable to stretch out under their raincoats for sleep. It could have been minutes or hours later when they were jolted awake by a Shriek-Slam! It might not have been a direct hit on the roof but it sure as hell sounded like one, and so did the three explosions that came rapidly after it. By the time of the second shell the barn loft was a madhouse of shouting, stumbling, colliding men, all heading for the ladder and struggling to climb down.

  “Lemme outa here …”

  “Get outa the fuckin’ way …”

  Prentice felt a squirm of fingers under his boot on one of the rungs and heard a scream; then another boot crushed his own fingers and someone’s swinging rifle butt cracked him across the head. He lost his footing halfway down the ladder and fell scrabbling, hit the concrete floor and rolled, and another man fell heavily into his arms.

  “Easy!” Sergeant Loomis was calling. “Take it easy, for Christ’s sake …”

  Then it was over, and there were no more shells. But nobody wanted to go back to the loft, and the ground floor of the barn was impossibly crowded. A standing man could hardly move without stepping on someone’s wrist or ankle, and there were many curses and yelps of pain. But at last, somehow, room was found for everyone to lie down and a kind of peace descended once again.

  When Prentice’s turn for guard duty came, some time after midnight, he stepped on three men in making his way outside the barn. And when it was over, after two hours of peering into the darkness with the wind in his face and his head ringing from the bruise of the rifle butt, he knew he couldn’t find his former sleeping place. Instead, he felt his way along one wall, then went down on his knees to feel along the floor. His hands sank into a heap of straw, or silage, and he lay down in it with a sense of unexpected luxury. Someone else’s warm, broad back lay close beside him, and he nestled gratefully up to it. Only when daylight came did he discover that he’d been sleeping in a straw-covered mound of pig manure, and that the back he had pressed against was that of a sleeping pig.

  “Where the hell are we going?” the men kept asking each other on the second morning’s march. “What the hell’s the deal?” But by noon everyone knew what the deal was. Three small towns lay ahead of them within a space of several miles. If they found no enemy resistance in the first town they would go on to the second, and if that town too was evacuated they would take the third.

  “Be one damn long walk, that’s all,” somebody said, “and they’ll be laying back there lobbing eighty-eights at us all the way.”

  Soon they left the road to move out across open fields, and the column was re-formed into a wide, intricate attack formation. Each squad was formed with the two scouts going first, then the B.A.R. man with riflemen on either side of him, then the squad leader flanked by other riflemen, with the assistant squad leader bringing up the rear. That was the way they approached the first town, moving up over the slope of a newly plowed field, with the Second Platoon leading the company and Finn’s squad leading the platoon.

  “Spread it out, now,” Finn kept calling. “Don’t bunch up, now. Spread it out.”

  Moving stealthily along on Mueller’s right flank, his rifle at port arms and his finger on the safety, Prentice felt his face twitching in an uncontrollable little tic. The distant line of houses ahead might well be filled with German machine gunners, crouched and waiting for these small green and brown figures to come a little closer across this field; they’d be taking aim now, telling each other to hold their fire, and Prentice himself would be one of their three or four primary targets.

  But nothing happened. As they came closer they could see that nearly all the houses had white flags hanging from their windows, and then they saw a cluster of black-clad civilian men coming out into the field with a white flag held high. Two of the civilians broke into a stumbling run to meet the soldiers, calling and gesturing. One of them wore a chain of office over his dusty frock coat: he seemed to be the mayor of the town.

  And so there was nothing to do but move on into the streets, which were littered with cast-off German Army equipment – packs, helmets, even rifles – and to make token checks of houses here and there to look for enemy troops. Civilians clustered around them as they entered each house: one old man clutched Prentice by the sleeve and showed him a grubby document, pointing to each printed line of it with a trembling forefinger – it seemed to be legal proof that he was a citizen of some country other than Germany.

  “Some of these bastards are Jerry soldiers in civilian clothes,” Sergeant Loomis said. “They probably changed ’em ten minutes ago.”

  A brief artillery barrage came in as they made their way through the town, and Prentice found himself sitting wedged between Mueller and a weeping old woman on the floor of a cellar, but soon the sky was quiet again. Then it was time to move on to the second town, and the second town was so much like the first that the two became blurred in memory. By the time it was cleared, a heavy fatigue had settled over the men. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but Prentice wanted nothing more than a chance to sleep. He didn’t even want to eat until he’d slept, yet to think about food was to realize he had never been so hungry in his life.

  “The third town’ll be the bitch,” someone was saying. “That’s where they’ll be holed up and waiting for us.” And the third town was another three miles away.

  “Spread it out,” Finn kept calling. “Don’t bunch up, now. I said spread it out, Prentice …”

  They were approaching the third town across a long meadow that led up to a wooded ridge. The town was said to be close on the other side of the ridge, and the word was that “B” Company, moving in from somewhere on the right, would make the initial assault. Finn’s squad had gone less than a third of the way across the meadow when the earth was shaken by a great explosion behind them – and whirling around, Prentice saw a spire of dirt and smoke and clutter rising straight up, more than fifty yards high, from a part of the dirt road they had just crossed. It was a mine; and now, among the spinning, falling fragments, he could make out the shape of a pair of automobile wheels. It was a jeep – the company runner’s jeep, he heard later – and both jeep and driver had been blown to bits.

  Was this the kind of mine that Quint had stepped on? No; probably this was a bigger one. But the mine – the two mines – that had killed Quint and the medics must have gone off with this same shocking abruptness, filling the air with this same brutal flavor of chance.
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  “Keep it spread out, now,” Finn was calling.

  Climbing the ridge was an arduous job: there was a thick entangling underbrush, and there were twigs to catch at your equipment straps and whip your face. On top of the ridge they moved cautiously toward the brink of the opposite slope until they could see what lay ahead: a deep flat field, perhaps two hundred yards across, and then another, treeless hill leading up to the densely packed houses of the town – a town in which no white flags were hung.

  The two scouts, Drake and Krupka, were crouched in the brush and waiting for Finn, who went forward and began arranging his men in a line across the crest, five or ten yards apart. The second squad was forming a similar line on their left, and the third was in reserve, somewhere behind them in the trees. The platoon command group was over on the right, where the ridge was considerably lower: looking down in that direction Prentice could see Loomis’s profiled head and another helmet that was probably Coverly’s. Just ahead of them, at the base of the ridge where the field began, there was a small industrial brick structure – an electric power station or something – and Paul Underwood was standing in its shelter, turning back to smile and say something to Loomis.

  “Keep it low, now,” Finn was saying. “Keep low in the brush. Heads down.”

  Prentice deepened his crouch and ducked his head lower; then he saw that Walker and Brownlee, on either side of him, were getting into a prone position, and he lay down too, gratefully letting himself relax against the earth. It meant he could no longer see Finn, or Loomis, but he could still see Walker, and Walker could see them. When Walker moved, he would move too; and Brownlee and the others would follow him. In the meantime he would simply lie here, switching his gaze between Walker and the gray, silent town across the field. But he found that when he looked at the town the shapes of its houses tended to swim together in a drowsing mist. Lying down was too damned comfortable: it was all he could do to keep his eyes from closing.