Point of No Return

by Gellhorn, Martha;

  The chaplain was an officer and you never went to an officer about something until you knew the angles and besides the chaplain was busy, he had to look after the Catholics in all three Battalions so he wouldn’t have time to chew the fat with a fellow who didn’t belong to his crowd. It’ll work out, Jacob Levy thought, I better leave it a while till I see some guy I can get the dope from.

  He went back to the CP farmhouse and found Bert Hammer sitting on a bench in the sun. Bert had pulled the bench against the wall of the house, out of the wind, and was whittling another boat for his sister’s kid.

  “I bet I’m home this time next year,” Bert Hammer remarked, “drunk.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  Bert Hammer inspected the roughly carved hull of his boat. “You know something, Jake, I think I’m going in the ship building business when the war’s over.”

  “That’s a good idea.”

  “You got any plans? You figured out what you’re going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet, Bert.” Don’t know, hell, he thought with great and secret joy, I’m going to live is what I’m going to do.

  17

  It was clear that the winter would never end and neither would the war. They were still in Hackenthal. Like a taunt, Luxembourg City lay just over the squat hills, full of beds with sheets, hot water, square meals, liquor, movies, shops, girls. The Battalion held a stationary front, along a frozen river, from Hackenthal to Merk. Across the river the tank teeth and the green concrete pillboxes of the Siegfried Line coiled over the bluffs. By day, nothing moved. At night, patrols operated from both sides of the river. There was a reasonable amount of artillery, outgoing and incoming.

  The soldiers adjusted to this icy, motionless life as they had adjusted to everything else. They shot rabbits and occasionally cows, to vary their diet; those units holding wooded areas lived hopefully with the notion they would one day bag deer. They made handsome snow men and shot tin cans off their heads; they liberated children’s sleds from the abandoned houses and used them for transport; they constructed fancy improvements for the holes they lived in; they talked and talked in the meandering way of men who are bored to insensibility; they trained, worked, ate, slept and endured.

  January was a winter in itself.

  “Sometimes I just don’t believe that Luxembourg Officers’ Club can really be there,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said. He had climbed into his bedroll, fully clad and wearing three pairs of socks for warmth, and was now lying, like a khaki mummy, on the boards of a scratched fourposter which had been salvaged from the debris of Hackenthal.

  “I wonder if Havemeyer still has his apartment?”

  “Oh sure,” Lieutenant Gaylord said. “Probably Lucille’s in bed with him this minute.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought of Dotty; he could not talk about her now with anyone. There had been time, these last weeks, to build a memory suitable to his needs and his desires. He had no other raw material for memories at hand. Yvonne of Paris was too remote and had existed too briefly. Mary Jane Cotterell and Elise Rathbone, the purest dreams, always ended by stinging him with shame. The Honorable Anne Northway, though real, seemed the most fanciful of all: London was even farther away than Paris, and the Limeys, even female, were more foreign than all other foreigners. Slowly, for the last three weeks were the slowest time on earth, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers invented with love a girl named Dorothy Brock. He promised himself that he would find her again, if he had to search the entire ETO and the USA. But his plans did not extend beyond finding her, and taking her in his arms, the dark girl who knew what this war was like and would never be a stranger.

  Lieutenant Gaylord began slapping and rubbing his hands together.

  “My handwriting looks like I was drunk,” he observed. “I wouldn’t want to give anyone the impression we have liquor in this Battalion.”

  It was unusual for Bill to be writing a letter especially at night in a room where your fountain pen would freeze to your fingers, given half a chance. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers had noticed that Bill was upset about something, the last three days, but he decided not to ask questions. If it was Battalion business Bill would talk when he got ready.

  Boy, I’m high, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought. He had not taken his clothes off for over a month. If it was hot weather, he would barely be able to stand himself. It was never hot weather in Europe, only in Georgia. The sun shone exclusively on Georgia. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers felt warmer due to the Georgia sun.

  “I’m writing my wife,” Lieutenant Gaylord said. “Seems she’s divorcing me.”

  So that’s it, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, recalled from sleep. The good old home front again.

  “I’m sorry to hear it, Bill.”

  “I’m not. Let some other sucker keep her for a change.” The indifference sounded too studied. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers knew there was no law which forbade a man to love a woman just because she was a bitch and grabbed all his money and treated him like dirt.

  “That’s that,” Lieutenant Gaylord said. “Look at the dough I’ll have to spend if we ever get a leave.” He made a great deal of noise, settling for the night.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers could think of nothing to say. Maybe this was how people talked, when they were getting divorced, in those books Bill always read. Maybe, if anyone said a kind word to him, Bill would break up. They ought to shave their heads, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, the goddam whores.

  “The chaplain hasn’t been around in a long time,” Lieutenant Gaylord remarked from the darkness across the room.

  This startled Lieutenant Colonel Smithers. Did Bill want to mull it over with the chaplain? He must be taking it hard if he needed religion.

  “I’m out of books,” Lieutenant Gaylord went on. “There’s nothing to do in this ice factory but read.”

  He had found that the books would not bear reading twice. The bloom was gone; you looked at them with a knowing eye. He sought refuge, only; and he did not want to lose the last one. Everything panned out badly, war and peace; nothing was ever enough, shiny enough, fast enough, never as gallant, exciting and stylish as he wished. How could you be interested in a life which led straight to the career of desk clerk at the Lincoln Hotel in Harrisburg, Pa.? How could you keep your illusions in a two room apartment with a woman who sulked and quarreled and lived like a slut and blamed you for not being rich?

  And this war was the final sell. Those movies, Lieutenant Gaylord thought, it’s a wonder I don’t believe in Santa Claus too. When he was a child he had been dazzled by the screen romances of another war, and even years later he did not doubt them entirely. War, as he had seen it in the moving pictures, had its points and he thought he had missed that glamor as he missed everything. When he enlisted, he still remembered the haggard young actor-pilots, flying planes with open cockpits and their long white scarves waving behind them in the wind. At night they returned to dine in a mess, lighted by crystal chandeliers. They were reckless and cynical, alternating between single combat high in the sky, gay conversation that concealed meaningful undertones in their châteaux billets, and swift but tragic love affairs with sequin-covered girls in Paris. I bet, Lieutenant Gaylord told himself. That war was probably no better than this one.

  Unlike Lieutenant Colonel Smithers, he had never been able to see Paris as the promised land. For he wanted so much more: streets of silver, houses of gold, and himself another man, a sure, casual, polished man who had been born to the pleasures of the world. Nothing was good enough and everything became worse; life was stifled in boredom. He needed books to keep his mind from it.

  “People make too much fuss about being knocked off,” Lieutenant Gaylord said. “Why in the hell do they care?”

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers listened. He did not like this at all. He had seen men blow their tops before and if they didn’t do it suddenly—in action, screaming or crying or passing out—they often started with a darkness in their
voices and in their minds. I got to get Bill another job, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, back at a Headquarters somewhere.

  Jacob Levy had cut a hole in the beaverboard that covered their window. Through this hole, he was now attempting to ease a bent length of stovepipe. This was a private operation of his and Bert’s; they had been engaged on salvaging, repairing and cleaning a stove, and on scrounging pipe, for six days. If there was nothing else in Hackenthal there was at least plenty of wood to burn.

  “We’ll have this room fixed up nice and comfortable by spring,” Bert Hammer said. “How’s it going?”

  “It looks okay to me.”

  “Let’s try it.”

  They piled in paper and wood, lit the fire, shut the rusted iron door, and waited. When they heard flame crackling inside their lopsided stove it was a moment of triumph like launching a ship.

  “Pull up a chair,” Bert Hammer suggested. “If we had something to drink, this would be as good as home.”

  Jacob Levy dragged a stool, made of mortar shell containers, close to the stove. The heat relaxed them; the heat spread a pleasant evening atmosphere, ripe for confidences.

  “You got a girl, Bert?” he asked suddenly.

  Bert Hammer flushed and stared at the stove as if it were likely to get up and leave the room. He did not have a girl and he had never had a girl; he was too shy to start; and he was ashamed of being, as far as he could tell, the only virgin in the U. S. army.

  “Not right now,” he said. His voice sounded gruff or angry. Bert must have had some trouble, Jacob Levy thought, maybe his girl gave him the brush-off.

  “I guess you fixed yourself up all right in Luxembourg,” Bert Hammer said, “driving the Colonel in, every night.”

  Now they would talk about women, technically, and he would pretend he knew it all. He would laugh at the right time and make wise remarks and wear an experienced, conniving look. And all the time he would feel nervous of his turn to lie, and try to avoid it.

  “Pretty hot jobs, those Luxembourg girls.”

  Jacob Levy was distressed by this turn in the conversation. It wasn’t like Bert either; he had imagined Bert was faithful to a girl at home.

  “I don’t know about that,” Jacob Levy said. “I didn’t run around any. I didn’t see anybody except my fiancée.”

  There was that wonderful word again. Jacob Levy smiled at the stove. My fiancée, he said to himself.

  “Say, congratulations, Jake! I didn’t know you planned on getting married.”

  “Yeh, that’s about it,” Jacob Levy said with calm pride. “We’re going to get married as soon as the war’s over and then she’s coming home to the States.”

  “Well, congratulations! You got it all fixed up.”

  “Yeh, her folks agreed and everything. I guess it’s all fixed. We’re going to live in a little house I got down in the Smokies.”

  “I never knew you lived down there.”

  “I don’t. It’s just a little summer place but me and Kathe plan to fix it up.”

  “Well, that’s really nice,” Bert Hammer said. “It’s really nice to have everything settled for after the war.”

  The words had surprised Jacob Levy, even as he spoke. He felt he had talked for hours and that Bert now knew everything about his life. It was allright for Bert to know; it was good; it sort of gave him and Kathe a family friend. And he hadn’t been telling lies exactly and someday he would explain to Bert. It was a little previous, but not lies. Saying it like that, out loud in words, made it true.

  “I didn’t have a chance to get her a ring,” Jacob Levy said. “That’s the only thing. I sure wish I could get back to Luxembourg so I could buy her a ring.” A fiancée wore a ring with a diamond; you could buy it on the installment plan if you had to.

  February was no better.

  They had returned, through waist deep snow, fighting their way in the similar villages, across the narrow rivers and over the ugly wooded hills. They were back in the forest, though far to the east of where they had gratefully left it. Time had not improved the forest; and now in February you could feel how it would be when the snow melted and the mud came back.

  “What’s the name of that measly little river?” Lieutenant Gaylord asked.

  “Klemm,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said.

  They were kneeling in the Battalion OP, a slit trench on a bluff above this river. Below them lay the river, no more than a stream by decent American standards, and a plain, and a brownish town, carved by artillery fire into a strange stalactite formation.

  At the other end of the trench, the artillery forward observer was carrying on a conversation, over the field telephone, with Fire Direction. This conversation consisted almost entirely of numbers. Occasionally the artillery observer would say, “no!” in an exasperated voice, and occasionally he would say, “okay that does it.” From the ruined town, the sound of the shells he was adjusting travelled back, round and muffled, and they could see thin grey smoke from the explosions.

  A corporal from Lieutenant Gaylord’s section, who had been shivering up here since daybreak, offered the information that there wasn’t a damn thing to see.

  “What do we do?” Lieutenant Gaylord asked.

  “Sit,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said.

  No matter how bad a place had been, you always had reason to grow homesick for it. Obviously Hackenthal was preferable to the freezing twilight of this forest. The war seemed to be congealing; it was too cold, the winter was too long; maybe everyone would get enough energy to fight again, in the spring.

  “There comes a time,” Lieutenant Gaylord said, “when a man has to take matters in his own hands.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers had finished checking over the supply situation with his S-4 and had decided to shave, as the night seemed quiet enough.

  “If we don’t look out,” Lieutenant Gaylord continued, “we’ll get in a rut.”

  “Me for a nice deep rut,” Captain Martinelli said.

  “Colonel,” Major Hardcastle said, “if you haven’t any objections to moving the CP, there’s a pretty good kraut pillbox about 100 yards west of here, we could take over. It would be drier than this.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers looked around the crowded dugout and thought, I ought to say yes right now; but he did not care enough to decide. Maybe they wouldn’t be here much longer. It was a lot of trouble to lay the telephone wires again.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Goodnight, men,” Lieutenant Gaylord remarked and stepped over their legs and set out in the drizzling dark.

  “He’s full of pep, all of a sudden,” Captain Martinelli said.

  No one bothered to go on with this; it was also too much trouble to talk.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers did not know whether he approved of Bill’s new cheerfulness. On the other hand it was better for morale, even though it irritated everybody, for Bill to act so energetic. No one at Regiment seemed interested in getting Bill a job out of the line, so probably he should accept Bill’s good humor and hope Bill had pulled himself together and was going to be allright.

  Bill was going out every night with the patrols; it wasn’t his business to take them that often but Bill was good at the job and the men had confidence in him and felt the work was more important if Lieutenant Gaylord handled it himself. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers had a suspicion Bill was up to something especially fancy: if he wasn’t out on patrol, he was up in the OP studying the town of Griesling across the river.

  At three in the morning, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers waked, cramped and short-tempered, and saw Lieutenant Gaylord coming in the dugout door.

  “Where’ve you been?”

  “Out with the boys,” Lieutenant Gaylord said. “We had a fine time. They’ve relieved that Regiment over there; we got two prisoners. It’s the 540th Volksgrenadier now. Nothing much.”

  “Casualties?” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers asked.

  “Oh no. Easy as rolling d
ownhill. We had a little fight but nothing came of it. They screwed off.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was not satisfied. But he was tired, and he was not supposed to be Bill’s nurse, and as long as Bill did his regular work there was no reason to order him to stay away from patrols.

  “Let’s get some sleep around here,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said.

  The Intelligence Sergeant, Louis Black, knew more about Lieutenant Gaylord than he had ever known about his own wife, and perhaps more than he knew about himself. Sergeant Black was a year older than Lieutenant Gaylord. Sergeant Black thought of himself as a balanced responsible older man of twenty-six, committed to the service of a brilliant but unsound young officer. Sergeant Black was proud of Lieutenant Gaylord and he hid his pride, because it would have been ridiculous for a sergeant—the only important rank in the army—to go around bragging about his officer. Sergeant Black permitted himself to say, to his closest friend, Sergeant Follingsby in the message center, “That guy Gaylord tickles me.” He never said the things which you could think but which would sound sappy in words. Right now, he was thinking: I’d die for that goddamned man. And he was deeply worried, for he knew what Lieutenant Gaylord planned.

  Sergeant Follingsby, as usual, had arranged his message center with an eye to comfort and social life. True, the place was small, being a hand-hewn mud cave; and it was also true that there was not much visiting in this forest. Still Sergeant Follingsby had acquired, who knew how, some extra blankets which were nailed to the mud walls and so diminished the dampness; the floor was covered with pine boughs; there was a working kerosene stove and at night Sergeant Follingsby kept a pot of coffee boiling for any chance callers.