Gone to Soldiers

by Marge Piercy

  I will try to see only the labor before me. That labor is hard, because I am frankly of little use, with one arm in a sling and the other hand partially splinted. Our groups have been attacking German convoys on the way toward Normandy with food or munitions, attacking too the concentrations of troops moving in that direction. We have gone a long way from practicing with sticks.

  I forgot to say, in my personal craziness, that London called off the order for the general uprising. Too bad, folks, we changed our mind. Sorry about that. In the meantime maquis all over France went on the attack, expecting that mythical Force C to land by plane to reinforce us, and the Boches responded with tanks, planes, the full works, and wiped them out. They have also killed entire towns full of people as punishment. A woman arrived who may be the sole survivor of a little village in the Dordogne. She and I spent several days together, as we were both in the same state of torn-open crazy grieving.

  I work with Daniela in our improvised field hospital, where every day’s fighting brings casualties. We still have no doctor, but we have another nurse besides Daniela, and me, with my limited hospital experience. We had a drop of medical supplies and lots and lots more arms, food, gear. After all those years of shortages, suddenly they are dropping tons on our heads every week. Now everybody has at least one weapon. We feel rich.

  26 juin 1944

  I work in the hospital. My hand is out of its splint and I am doing exercises Daniela gave me to recover the full use. My arm in the cast itches terribly. I sleep badly and I can never tell when I will begin to cry, suddenly. Tears just start running from my eyes as if a faucet were turned on. It is completely out of my control, and mostly I ignore it, and try to get everyone else to do the same. I was pleased when my period started. The last thing I could endure is to be pregnant by one of those thugs. It was a week late, but at last it came.

  Papa is a good leader, adored by his comrades. He and Lev get on well after a rocky start, but Papa is especially fond of Daniela. We have a lot more OSS and SOE people coming through here as if we were camped on a great highway of intelligence and guerrilla warfare: the former are American; the latter, British. I tend to be friendlier to the OSS. I ask them if they knew Jeff. One had met him in training, but none of them has turned out to be his friend. On the whole the Americans are warmer than the British, but they have dreadful or silly politics. I speak English very well now, but the British tell me I have an American accent.

  We had horrible news of Vercors, which was the biggest maquis base in France. After they rose to attack the Germans on command, the Germans poured a whole army in there and wiped them out. Some of the maquis got away over the mountains, but whole villages were massacred down to the babies and even the pets, their bodies hung on hooks in the butcher shops. It is terrifying and leaves us unable to enjoy the news we hear from Normandy of the Allied advance. It seems they are really established now. The Resistance has been doing a good job of tying up German troops and preventing columns from reaching Normandy to join in the fighting. That is one reason the Germans are trying harder than usual to wipe us all out.

  5 juillet 1944

  Mme Faurier sent for me to come and talk to her. It broke my heart to see the farmhouse there, with the room upstairs under the steep pitch of slate roof where he and I used to sleep, with the sound always of water cascading over the frogsback rocks. Sometimes remembering happiness sticks in the chest like a knife. Everything I looked at—rocking chair, pitcher, plate, ticking clock—went off like little time bombs exploding memories, his face, his voice, his hands, the skin of his back, the way he would brood on a landscape as if it said and meant something entirely different to him than to anyone else.

  Mme Faurier took my hands in hers, calloused and with the feeling they have always of being warm but worn. “We have learned several things. There has been a big shake-up at the Milice. The guards who assaulted you and the one you think helped you have all been sent to forced labor in Germany, and that captain has been demoted and sent to Pau. You see, the Gestapo got no one and the Milice had to be punished. In the general upheaval, we once again have someone inside now.”

  “What are you not yet telling me?” I asked none too politely, because I could feel her holding something back.

  “The Milice did not kill Vendôme. He took his own life after torture.”

  I must have screamed, because she jumped up and put her arms around me, hugging me against her softness. She is shorter than me but plumper, softer-bodied. Normally I like to lean against her the way her daughters do, but I could not bear it then and yanked away.

  “Jacqueline, he is a hero, like Daniela’s brother. He knew too much. That’s why OSS gives them poison capsules, so that if they feel they cannot take the torture, they have a way out. His is an honorable death.”

  I shook my head but did not answer. I could not speak.

  “Jacqueline, they were torturing him already, don’t you understand? They were watching him much more carefully than you. They hadn’t figured out yet that you were involved. They knew he was a spy. In the morning, he was going to the Gestapo.”

  Like Larousse, I thought. I left at once—fled might be more like it—and headed back on foot to Murat, where the railway ends and the cheminots had promised to get me to Castres from which I was to be transported in a lumber wagon. I know these mountains pretty well from the time we spent here but I almost got lost twice. I had to force myself to concentrate because my thoughts and feelings were churning wildly until I felt the centrifugal pressure would tear me apart. When I did go astray, I had only to climb, because these mountains are denuded except for fragrant deep gold broom and heather and an occasional beech, and you can see very far. The ancients lived here, for the moors are full of upright monoliths, dolmens and burial sites, stones grey as the local sheep.

  I had to face that I was furious with Jeff. I could not forgive him for choosing death. I felt that he should choose life at any cost of pain, because in life we had a chance to be together. I felt he had deserted me, and I did not forgive. I realized I could tell this to no one, least of all to Daniela, whose brother had killed himself.

  I did not think my reaction to his suicide was justified or ethical, but I would not lie to myself. As I strode through the broom heavy with bees, I swore at him. I cursed him for choosing death. I cursed him for turning his face away from me.

  Finally I threw myself down in the shade of a roofless stone shed, long abandoned, and lay there weeping until I fell asleep. I woke in the sun, feverish. When I opened my eyes, an eagle was circling over me. She was so close I could see the fiery glint of her amber eye. When I moved, she rowed heavily off and then soared on her powerful wings until she was invisible in the bright air. I went on lying there. I realized I have been humiliated to feel now and then a pang of sexual feeling, as if that had all died with him or should have. The sexual awakening that came to me with him was deep and beautiful, but highly dangerous while we are fighting for survival and fighting to win. If we had only been friends, comrades, he could not have distracted me so that we walked into that trap the Milice set for us. I was not alert. It was my fault. I was not paying sufficient attention; I lacked clarity.

  So if my sexual feelings did not die with him, they should have. Now I must lock deep within my bones such a possibility, maybe for however short a time I may have to live, maybe until we break through into some other world. As I lay there, I swore to suppress all that. Around me mountain arnica was in flower. Mme Faurier uses it to make compresses for bruises and strains. I rose oddly relieved, although groggy, as if I had slept far longer than I could have, looking at how high the sun still stood. My anger was numb as a stone.

  As I climbed the next ridge I felt for a moment as if I were in one of his paintings, a figure on one of those long dun or lavender hills he liked to paint. Then I simply concentrated on climbing steadily. I lived most of my life without him and I will lead the rest of it, whether it ends tomorrow or in forty years, without him.
That is given. That and the need to be useful.

  LOUISE 9

  Rations in Kind

  The file declared in big red letters: U.S. CONFIDENTIAL. Inside reposed Louise’s orders with six carbons. It said:

  SUBJECT: Travel Orders

  TO: All concerned

  1. Following will proceed by first available transportation from London to First Army Headquarters, then to proceed to such places within the Theater as may be necessary for the accomplishment of her mission, including entrance into the actual theater of war.

  2. Travel by military aircraft is authorized. Rations in kind will be provided.

  Mrs. Louise Kahan, Correspondent

  By command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower

  That was what the orders said, but that didn’t mean that anything was about to happen. She was awaiting transportation to France. In the meantime, she was working on a piece about families living in the Underground. A lady from the Volunteer Services took her around, a little too genteel for Louise. She found a woman fire fighter who was a better guide.

  The men she had been working with in OWI had been skeptical that she would actually go to France. “Louise, near the front lines? Not a chance.”

  Even if they turned out to be right, she could find plenty to write about in wartime London. She was still experiencing shock at her abrupt departure and total change of life, but she was as glad as she had been at first offer that she had seized the chance as it flashed before her. She felt brimming with energy and health and curiosity.

  Ordinary people here did not complain of rationing as they did at home, but seemed to think it was only fair that everybody should have a crack at what was scarce. As for the rubble, nothing had prepared her for that. St. Paul’s stood in classic splendor over surrounding ashes, absolutely alone. She understood that the worst of the bombing had been years before, but it had never entirely stopped and now rockets were landing. On her second day, she saw one in the air, lethal and insectlike, a wingless plane roaring and sputtering, canted down. An enormous explosion shook the earth. Although it was almost a mile from her, she felt the shock wave.

  People looked shabby and pale, bedraggled by comparison with Americans. Her clothes stood out, even in well-to-do circles. She took to wearing her uniform most of the time. In the shops, there was little of anything, but PXs and American messes were abundantly supplied. So, too, were the restaurants where the well off ate.

  Claude called her, and out of a mixture of curiosity and the desire to have some kind of coda to their truncated intimacy, she lunched with him. “How’s the Marshal Zhukov epic? Are you on your way to the Soviet Union?”

  Everything in his handsome face went a bit awry. “It doesn’t really focus directly on Zhukov. Filming in the Soviet Union in the middle of the devastation of war is out of the question. We filmed it on the back lots and in Idaho—gorgeous scenery, very underused.”

  “I thought Kursk was in rather scrubby country, sandy, marshy. Some thick forests.”

  “It’s not directly about Kursk. We decided to focus on the partisans. We have Tyrone Power playing the American flier and Hedy Lamarr as the Russian nurse.”

  Louise decided it would be better to change the subject, as the film obviously had. “So how long do you expect to be in London?” She felt a casual friendliness toward Claude. Hollywood was chewing him up, while she had escaped Washington.

  She spent her third day running around to nurseries. In the evening, she had supper at the enormous Grosvenor mess with Oscar and his girlfriend Abra, whom she had insisted he bring.

  She was pleased that he was still with the same woman; that had not happened since their divorce. Maybe he would marry Abra, if she hung in there long enough, and indeed, there she was visibly dangling, thinner, with a look somewhere between the American girl dazzle she had radiated at their last meeting and the worn, bled look of the Londoner.

  Oscar was beginning to show middle age, she thought, oddly touched. He too was shabbier and markedly thinner. He was beginning to sprout an occasional glittering white hair over the ears. He had a looseness around his eyes as if he was not sleeping enough.

  They finished a bottle of shipper Bordeaux. “As parents, we’ve been a disaster,” she said. “I tried, but perhaps I lacked the talent.”

  “It’s the times,” he said. She thought that he looked at her far too much and should look at Abra oftener. Abra was depressed and sulking. “Families are torn apart everywhere. If the worst that happens to our daughter is a trek through divorce court, she’s getting off lightly.”

  “Perhaps I consider divorce more traumatic than you do,” Louise said acidly. “However, I imagine she’ll have thousands of companions in that misery. Marriages between strangers living in a romance based on movies and pop songs are bound to shatter quickly.”

  “There’s this to consider too,” Oscar said with conscious malice, “his profession is high risk.”

  “And this to consider,” Louise replied, “perhaps they’ll both survive the war just fine and we’ll be combusted. Then deprived of our ill will, they’ll live happily ever after.”

  “I thought you’d be far more anguished about Kay,” Oscar said, observing her carefully.

  “I’ve resigned, in all senses. I am resigned and I have resigned. Kay will do what Kay must do. I have interfered and brooded and intervened, and to what end? Maybe if she feels free of me, she’ll settle into being a person of her own.”

  Oscar seemed about to say something more, but as she observed Abra’s lowered face, she changed the subject. “At least among the working-class people I’ve been interviewing here, I’d say the Soviet Union’s stock is higher than ours.”

  “Remember, you’ve got a working class with less false consciousness about their class position, but a lot of illusions about Stalin and the Soviet Union—not unlike ours, before we went. Also, there are not several hundred thousand Soviet troops swarming over England. What they say about us is, overfed, overpaid, oversexed and over here. They resent how long we took to come into the war. The Soviets were almost as late, but they’ve suffered even more than the British.”

  “People also tell me that things have got more democratic here. That there’s been a leveling, due to rationing and scarcity.”

  “The working class is doing better, unless they’re in the armed forces, in which case their families live on air. Bevin’s done a good job strengthening the unions and making conditions in the factories less sweat-shoppy—but basically, the rich stay rich. Many of the well heeled retired to the country estate before the first bomb fell on Stepney.”

  “At home everybody’s doing well, but the rich are doing especially well. The bigger companies hog the contracts. After the war, there’ll be an explosion of buying: houses, cars, refrigerators, every appliance that’s been invented. It’s going to be a very different place, I suspect.”

  She enjoyed herself, although she felt guilty when she glanced at Abra, who obviously did not feel the same. Nonetheless, when they had finished coffee and dessert, she excused herself and set off for Claridge’s. She was not, however, immensely surprised when Oscar turned up there at eight the next morning. She was having breakfast in her room, and since they had the same name, the hotel announced him to her as her husband and sent him up. She did not dispute the assertion but ran to the bathroom to adjust her face and comb her hair. Fortunately bombing had caused the lift to malfunction, and he would have to climb four flights to her.

  She would almost have time to dress. But did not. Louise! she reproached herself in the mirror, but the truth was, she loved the moss green dressing gown that set off her hair and her complexion, the peek of paler green silk from beneath it, and her keenest thought on the subject was, Let him see what he gave up. Besides, dressing gown and nightgown would have to stay in London with her extra baggage. She might as well get some use out of having dragged them across the ocean. If Oscar thought he could take her at a disadvantage by showing up without warning
at eight A.M., let him discover her with her hair loose around her moderate but fetching décolletage. Tough, Oscar, just tough. She answered the door with sublime surprise. “Oscar, my goodness. At this hour. Is something wrong?” She did not for two minutes think anything was. He would have telephoned with bad news.

  “Only us. I don’t know why you insist on seeing me with Abra for chaperone, but it’s no fun for her.”

  She motioned him to the couch and sat in the chair. “They have real tea here. Will you have some? Why don’t you marry the girl, Oscar?”

  “Whatever for?” He looked startled, accepting the tea.

  “You’re using up years of her life. I presume she’d like to have children relatively soon.”

  Oscar shook his head wearily. “She’s an excellent assistant. She really is. Quick, bright, interested, hardworking but not ambitious for herself. That’s how it all started. That’s what I really wanted.”

  “My dear, that’s never all you wanted from any woman, not for long.”

  “Moreover, we’re in it together, OSS, the war.” He finished his tea, sighing. “I presume you aren’t about to marry your very young man.”

  She was startled. His narrow eyes were sharp as obsidian, watching. “What games we play. I imagine you know because either someone in Washington told you, or more likely, Daniel wrote Abra. He does write her. They have a long and durable flirtation going.”