Collected Fiction

by Irwin Shaw

  The noise of the bagpipes sounded wild and comic and pathetic in the open, deserted country. Michael drove very slowly toward the approaching troops. They were walking heavily, sweating dark stains into their heavy battle dress, loaded down with grenades and bandoliers and boxes of machine-gun ammunition. In front of the first Company, just behind the bagpiper, strode the Commanding Officer, a large red-faced young Captain, with a swooping red moustache. He carried a small swagger stick and he stepped out strongly in front of his troops, as though the crying, thin music of the pipes were a joyous march.

  The officer grinned when he saw the jeep, and waved his swagger stick. Michael looked past him to the men. Their faces were strained under the sweat, and no one was smiling. Their battle dress and equipment were fresh and neat and Michael knew that these, men were going into their first battle. They walked silently, already weary, already overburdened, with a blank, wrenched look on their crimson faces, as though they were listening to something, not to the pipes or to the distant rumble of the guns, or the weary scuffle of their boots on the road, but to some inner debate, deep within them, that reached them thinly and to which they had to pay close attention if they wished to catch its meaning.

  But as the jeep came abreast of the officer he grinned widely, a twenty-year-old athlete’s, white-toothed grin under the ludicrous and charming moustache, and boomed out, in a voice that could be heard for a hundred yards, although the jeep was only five feet from him, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”

  “Good luck,” Pavone said, in the simple, not overloud, well-modulated tone of the man who is going back from the fighting and can now control his voice, “good luck to you all. Captain.”

  The Captain waved his stick again, in a jerky, friendly gesture, and the jeep slowly rolled past the rest of the Company, brought up at the rear by the Medic, with the red crosses on his helmet, and a young, listening, thoughtful look on his face, and the aid kits in his hands.

  The music of the bagpipes died down into fragile, gull-like echoes as the Company turned off into the wheatfield and wound deeper and deeper into it, like armed men marching purposefully and regretfully into a rustling, golden sea.

  Michael woke up, listening to the growing mutter of the guns. He was depressed. He smelled the damp, loamy odor of the foxhole in which he slept, and the acid, dusty smell of the pup-tent dark over his head. He lay rigid, in the complete darkness, too tired to move, warm under the blankets, listening to the sound of guns that was coming closer each moment. The usual air raid, he thought, hating the Germans, every goddamn night.

  The sound of the guns was very close now and there was the soft deadly hiss of shrapnel falling near by and the plump, solid sounds as the steel fragments hit the earth. Michael reached in back of him and got his helmet and put it over his groin. He pulled his barracks bag, which was lying next to him in the hole, stuffed with extra longjohns and pants and shirts, and rolled it on top of him, on his belly and chest. Then he crossed his arms over his head, covering his face with the warm smell of his flesh and the sweaty smell of the long sleeves of the wool underwear. Now, he thought, as this nightly routine which he had worked out in the weeks in Normandy was completed, now they can hit me. He had figured out the various parts of himself which were most vulnerable and most precious, and they were protected. If he got hit in the legs or arms it would not be so serious.

  He lay there, in the complete darkness, listening to the roaring and whistling above his head. He began to feel cozy and protected in the deep hole in which he slept. The inside of the hole was lined with stiff canvas cut from a crashed glider, and he had put down as a ground cloth a luminescent silk signaling panel that gave an air of Oriental luxury to the neat underground establishment.

  Michael wondered what time it was, but he was too tired to try to find his flashlight and look at his watch. From three to five in the morning he was to be on guard duty and he wondered dully whether it was worth while to try to go to sleep again.

  The raid went on. The planes must be very low, he thought, they’re firing machine guns at them. He listened to the machine guns and to the patient roar of the planes above. How many air raids had he been in? Twenty? Thirty? The Luftwaffe had tried to kill him thirty times, in a general, impersonal way, and had failed.

  He played with the idea of being hit. A nice, eight-inch gash in the fleshy part of the leg. With a nice little fracture of the thigh bone thrown in. Michael thought of himself hobbling bravely up the ramp of Grand Central Station in New York, fully equipped with Purple Heart, crutches, and discharge papers.

  He moved a little under his blankets, and the barracks bag shifted slightly on top of him, in a warm, almost living movement. It was almost like having a girl lying on top of him. Suddenly he wanted a girl fiercely, imperiously. He thought of the girls he had made love to, and the places it had happened. His first girl, Louise, sixteen years old, but knowing exactly what she wanted. On a Saturday night, when her parents were out playing bridge three blocks away. Her schoolbooks on the desk next to the bed and the fearful listening for the key in the front door all the time. The other girls by the name of Louise. Somehow, he had seemed to know a great many girls by the name of Louise. The Warner Brothers starlet in Hollywood, who had lived with three other girls in the Valley, the cashier in the restaurant on 60th Street in New York, Louise in London, during the air raids, with the electric heater making the warm red glow in the room. He loved all the Louises now, and all the Marys and Margarets, and he moved heart-brokenly on the hard ground thinking of the way they chuckled and the smooth skin of their shoulders and legs and the things they said when he made love to them.

  He thought of all the girls he might have had, whom, for one reason or another, he had abstained from. Helen, ten years ago, tall and blonde, who had significantly touched knees with him in a restaurant and who had whispered to him when her husband had gone to get a cigar. But her husband had been Michael’s best friend in college, and Michael, half-shocked, half-noble, had pulled away. He thought of the tall, full body of his friend’s wife, and moved agonizedly in the dark. Florence, who had come to him with a letter from his mother, because she wanted to go into the theatre. Florence had been very young and awkwardly blunt. Michael had discovered she was a virgin, and had felt, sentimentally, that it was not just that a virgin should give herself so casually to a man who did not love her and would never love her. He thought of the slender, slightly awkward girl from his home town, and twitched sorrowfully under the barracks bag.

  Then, the modern dancer with the pianist husband, who had pretended to be drunk and had fallen into his lap at that party on 23rd Street, but Michael had been occupied then with a schoolteacher from New Rochelle. And the girl from Louisiana, who had three enormous brothers, of whom Michael was frankly afraid; and the woman who had looked back with calm invitation on 11th Street, on the winter night in the Village, and the wide-hipped young nurse from Halifax the time his brother broke his leg, and …

  Michael thought despairingly of all the fair, offered, declined flesh, and gritted his teeth under the wet canvas, mourning for the insane fastidiousness of days gone by. Ignorant, he thought, oh, you ignorant, pompous bastard!

  And then the girls he had gone to bed with, and then neglected—Katherine, Rachel, Faith, Elizabeth—all the dear hours of lightly lost pleasure, never to be found again. He moaned miserably and seized the barracks bag with clutching, furious anger.

  Still, he comforted himself, finally, there had been quite a few he hadn’t declined. In fact, when you looked back on it this way, you were ashamed there were so many others, but you were glad that you hadn’t been ashamed then, and had not let it stand in your way.

  Still, when he got back, if he got back, he was going to change. That part of his life was over. Now he wanted an orderly, decent, well-run, faithful, valuable life. Margaret. He had avoided thinking about Margaret for a long time. Now, in the damp, rough hole in the ground, with the shrapnel raining softly down; he couldn’t h
elp but think about her. Tomorrow, he decided, I will write her. I don’t give a damn what she’s doing now. When I get back, we must get married. He convinced himself swiftly that Margaret would swing back to her old affection for him, marry him, they would take a sunny apartment downtown, have children, and he would work hard, stop wasting his life. Perhaps get out of the theatre. He probably wasn’t going to amount to a hell of a lot in the theatre, if he hadn’t yet. Perhaps politics. Maybe he had a talent for it. Finally do something useful, useful for himself, for the poor devils dying on the crust of the front lines tonight, for the old men and women lying on the straw in the church at Caen, for the despairing Canadian, the moustached Captain behind the bagpipes who had roared, “Lovely day, isn’t it?”, for the little girl who had asked for sardines … Maybe a world in which the common element was not death, a world in which you did not live among the growing cemeteries, a world not governed finally by the Graves Registration Sergeant.

  Still, if you wanted to be listened to later, you had to earn that right. You could not merely spend the war being a chauffeur for a Civil Affairs Colonel. Only the men who had come back from the frightful, sickening crust out in front of him would be able to speak with authority, with a sense that they had really paid for their opinions and owned them, irrevocably, once and for all …

  Must ask Pavone tomorrow, Michael thought drowsily, to have me transferred, must ask. And must write Margaret, she must know, she must prepare …

  The guns stopped outside and the planes droned back toward the German lines. Michael slipped the barracks bag off his chest and rolled the helmet away from his groin. Ah, God, he thought, ah, God, how long is this going to last?

  Then the guard he was to relieve poked his head into the tent and pulled Michael’s toe under the blankets.

  “On your feet, Whitacre,” said the guard. “You’re going for a walk.”

  “O.K., O.K.,” Michael said, pushing back the blankets. He shivered and hurriedly put on his shoes. He put on his field jacket and picked up his carbine, and, shivering badly, stepped out into the night It had clouded over and a fine drizzle was falling. Michael reached into the tent and got out his raincoat and put it on. Then he went over to the guard, who was leaning against a jeep, talking to another sentry, and said, “All right, go on back to sleep.”

  He stood leaning against the jeep, next to the other guard, shivering, feeling the drizzle filtering in under his collar and rolling down his face, peering out into the cold wet darkness, remembering all the women he had thought about during the raid, remembering Margaret, and trying to compose a letter, a letter so moving, so tender and heartbreaking and true and loving, that she would see how much they needed each other and would be waiting for him when he got back to the sorrowful, chaotic world of America after the war.

  “Hey, Whitacre,” it was the other sentry, Private Leroy Keane, who had already been on duty for an hour, “do you have anything to drink?”

  “No,” said Michael. He was not fond of Keane, who was garrulous and a scrounger, and who had, to boot, the reputation of being an unlucky man to be with, because the first time he had left camp in Normandy, his jeep had been strafed and two of the men in it had been wounded, and one killed, although Keane had not been touched. “Sorry.” Michael moved away a little.

  “Have you got any aspirin?” Keane asked. “I got a terrible headache.”

  “Wait a minute.” Michael went back to his pup-tent and brought back a small tin of aspirin. He gave the tin to Keane. Keane took six of them and tossed them into his mouth. Michael watched, feeling his own mouth curl in distaste.

  “Don’t you use water?” Michael asked.

  “What for?” asked Keane. He was a large, bony man of about thirty, whose older brother had won the Congressional Medal of Honor in the last war, and Keane, trying to live up to the glory of the family, put on a very tough front.

  Keane gave Michael the aspirin box. “What a headache,” Keane said. “From constipation. I haven’t been able to move my bowels for five days.”

  I haven’t heard anybody use that expression, Michael thought, since Fort Dix. He walked slowly beside the line of pup-tents along the edge of the field, hoping Keane wouldn’t follow him. But there was the clumsy scuffle of Keane’s boots in the grass beside him and Michael knew there was no escaping the man.

  “I used to have a perfect digestion,” Keane said mournfully. “But then I got married.”

  They walked in silence to the end of the row of pup-tents and the officers’ latrine. Then they turned and started back.

  “My wife stifled me,” said Keane. “Also, she insisted on having three children, right away. You wouldn’t believe it, that a woman who wanted children like that was frigid, but my wife is frigid. She can’t bear to have me touch her. I got constipated six weeks after the wedding day and I haven’t had a healthy day since then. Are you married, Whitacre?”

  “Divorced.”

  “If I could afford it,” Keane said, “I would get divorced. She’s ruined my life. I wanted to be a writer. Do you know many writers?”

  “A few.”

  “Not with three children, though, that’s a cinch.” Keane’s voice was bitter in the darkness. “She trapped me from the beginning. And when the war began, you don’t know what a job I had getting her to allow me to enlist. A man from a family like mine, with my brother’s record … Did I ever tell you how he won the medal?”

  “Yes,” said Michael.

  “Killed eleven Germans in one morning. Eleven Germans,” Keane said, his voice musical with regret and wonder. “I wanted to join the paratroopers, and my wife threw a fit of hysterics. It all goes together, frigidity, lack of respect, fear, hysteria. Now look what I’m doing. Pavone hates me. He never takes me out with him on his trips. You were at the front today, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know what I was doing?” asked the brother of the Medal-of-Honor winner bitterly. “I was sitting here typing up rosters. Five copies apiece. Promotions, medical records, allowances. I’m really glad my brother isn’t alive, I really am.”

  They walked slowly, in the rain, the water dripping from their helmets, the muzzles of their carbines held low, pointing groundward, to keep the wet out.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Keane said. “A couple of weeks ago, when the Germans nearly broke through here, and there was talk about our being set up as part of a defensive line, I’ll admit to you, I was praying they would break through. Praying. So we would have to fight.”

  “You’re a goddamn fool,” Michael said.

  “I could be a great soldier,” Keane said harshly, belching. “Great. I know it. Look at my brother. We were full brothers, even if he was twenty years older than me. Pavone knows it. That’s why he takes a perverted pleasure in keeping me back here at a typewriter, while he takes other people out with him.”

  “It would serve you damned well right,” Michael said, “if you got a bullet in your head.”

  “I wouldn’t care,” Keane said flatly. “I wouldn’t give a damn. If I get killed, don’t give my regards to anyone.”

  Michael tried to see Keane’s face, but it was impossible in the dark. He felt a wave of pity for the constipated, brother-and-hero-haunted man with the frigid wife.

  “I should have gone to OCS,” Keane went on. “I would have made a great officer. I’d have my own company by now, and I guarantee I’d have the Silver Star …” His voice went on, mad, grating, sick, as they walked side by side under the dripping trees. “I know myself. I’d have been a gallant officer.”

  Michael couldn’t help smiling at the phrase. Somehow, in this war, you never heard that word, except in the rhetoric of the communiqués and citations. Gallant was not a word for this particular war, and only a man like Keane would use it so warmly, believing in the word, believing that it had reality and meaning.

  “Gallant,” Keane repeated firmly. “I’d show my wife. I’d go back to London with the ribbons on me and
I’d cut a path a mile wide through the women there. I never had any luck there before because I was a Private.”

  Michael grinned, thinking of all the Privates who had done spectacularly well among the English ladies, knowing that Keane could arrive any place, with all the ribbons in the world, and stars on his shoulders, and find only frigid women at all bars, in all bedrooms.

  “My wife knew it,” Keane complained. “That’s why she persuaded me not to become an officer. She had it figured out, and then when I saw what she’d done to me, it was too late, I was overseas.”

  Michael was beginning to enjoy himself, and he had a cruel sense of gratitude to the man beside him, for taking his mind off his own problems.

  “What’s your wife like?” he asked maliciously.

  “I’ll show you her picture tomorrow. Pretty,” Keane said. “Very well formed. She looks like the most affectionate woman in the world, always smiling and lively when anybody else is around. But let the door close, let us be alone, and it is like the middle of a glacier. They trick you,” Keane mourned in the wet darkness, “they trick you, they trick you before you know what’s happening … Also,” he went on, pouring it out, “she takes all my money. And it’s awful here, because I just sit around and I remember all the things she did to me, and I could go crazy. If I was in combat I could forget. Listen, Whit-acre,” Keane said passionately, “you’re in good with Pavone, he likes you, talk to him for me, will you?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Either let him transfer me out to the infantry,” said Keane, and Michael’s mind registered, This one, too, and for what reasons! “or,” Keane went on, “let him take me with him when he leaves camp. I’m the sort of man he needs. I’m not afraid of being killed, I have nerves of steel. When the jeep was strafed and the other men were hit, I just watched them as coolly as if I was sitting in a movie looking at it on the screen. That’s the sort of man Pavone needs with him …”

  I wonder, Michael thought.