Whistle

by James Jones

  But on the last phrase it sailed upward, almost getting away from him.

  “Noble sentiments,” Winch said. “Noble sentiments, I’m sure. Well, we won’t send you to the infantry. (Remembering that I could, if I wanted.)”

  “They’re not fair,” Landers said furiously. “It’s unfair.”

  “Fair? Unfair?” Winch said. “You’re dealing here with forms. Forms made out in triplicate. Somebody just happened to make your forms out wrong. Make a mistake.

  “But we won’t send you to the infantry. We’ll throw you up to the lottery. We’ll turn you over to one of my clerks. I don’t know, I have no idea, what’s coming up right now out there. And he probably doesn’t either, until he looks. There’s no fix. How’s that?”

  “Fine. That’s fine,” Landers said coldly.

  “There’s no way to be decent, and moral, and honorable in a war, kid,” Winch said softly. Landers refused to answer.

  The clerk Winch turned him over to certainly was unbiased. He picked off the top reassignment listing from the stack that was on his desk, then paused to take two slow, bored drags on his cigarette. The assignment was to the 3516th QM Gasoline Supply Company, a brand-new, newly organized outfit, limited duty only.

  Landers took his processed assignment orders and left to go report in, without pausing to thank Winch for fixing up his three-day AWOL. Winch watched him leave.

  On his way down there Landers remembered his last conversation with Curran at the hospital, about limited duty in general, and QM Gas Supply outfits in particular. Their high rate of unsung casualties.

  The hutments assigned to the 3516th as quarters looked like a natural disaster had struck them. Built at some time in the distant past of nine months ago, they were already coming apart at the seams and threatening to fall. The day’s quota of new men fresh from the comfort of the hospital stood around with their gear, looking at them disbelievingly.

  One-story high in the gray cold, they were heated by pot-bellied coal stoves. The stoves were inadequate to the cracks in the clap-boards, and sheet rolls of tar paper had been nailed up inside by desperate former inhabitants. They were filled with old double-decker wooden bunks which threatened to splinter when an upper bunk was used. The latrines were worse. In separate buildings, yards from the hutments, they were built over concrete slabs on the ground which were freezing cold. Half the faucets did not work, and one-third of the toilets were out of order. Dirt was everywhere. Old dirt, new dirt, and dried mud. The accumulated dirt of men living together in confined spaces. Nobody could ever really get it clean.

  When they had all inspected their new home, they were called outside to listen to a lecture by the new company commander. He too did not look very happy. The subject of the lecture was cleanliness. It sounded as if he had given it numbers of times.

  The cold, wet winter weather was the worst part of it. The un-giving, unrelenting cold kept on, boring in from all directions, until nothing and nobody was ever really warm. And the constant daily scrubbings at the encrusted dirt, while never seriously diminishing the dirt, made the walls, floors, and ceilings colder.

  Landers existed in an almost constant state of anger and outrage, over his hospital reassignment papers. It was so typical of the Army. Nobody had read them. Who the fuck had read them? Had Curran? Had Stevens? Had the man who signed them? That colonel heading the medical board? Landers did not even know whether these papers were to be part of his permanent records. What if he were shipped to Europe, and over there, on the strength of these papers, was suddenly transferred over to some infantry unit? Where would he turn for authentication? He had not remembered to ask Winch about the possibility of such a thing happening. Landers did not even know if it could. He should have asked Winch to correct the mistake. But to go back up there now and ask him would be awful, as unseemly as Winch’s indecent grin. So he went on living in a kind of limbo, combined with fury, not knowing.

  The new outfit was a catastrophe, as bad as its quarters. Newly activated, around a cadre of five men and three officers, it was receiving shipments of from ten to thirty men a day. Most days it received none. Landers arrived on a day when it received twenty-five, none of whom the cadre knew how to process properly. The cadre did not know their jobs. The officers did not know how to help the cadre. Meanwhile, the new men went on scrubbing at the quarters until enough new men arrived to fill out the company strength and begin the training.

  Slightly more than half of the men were from one of the two infantry divisions in training at O’Bruyerre, which had just had its final division medical exam before shipment to England. Having squeaked through their lucky failure of that, they were very happy to be here and made no bones about saying so. At least not until they saw what an abysmal fuckup their new outfit was. A fair percentage of them were noncoms, transferred in grade, and these were quickly snatched off the lineup by the cadre officers to fill the vacant NCO slots in the new company T.O.

  The rest of the men were hospital releases like Landers. Mostly they came from Kilrainey General. Landers recognized a few faces he had seen along the corridors. But a lot were from other hospitals in the wide area serviced by O’Bruyerre’s Second Army repple depple. (Another new word.) Some were more crippled than others. They were the “barrel scrapings,” as one tobacco-chawing country farmer with a mean smile put it, succinctly. One man whom Landers could not get out of his mind had had the whole ball of his left calf taken off in the Italian campaign, so that it looked as though some large animal had bitten it.

  With very few exceptions these men were overseas wounded, who were now going back. They were not happy with anything. Not with the new outfit, and not with anything else.

  In such a situation Landers as a pvt could hardly be noticed, and wasn’t. Landers was relieved that he was not. He wanted time to think. At this point, he had decided never to seek promotion again. He would do what he was told as a pvt, but no more, no less. His fury and righteous indignation at the way the hospital discharges were being treated was high, and pure. He did not care so much about the infantry division men. But even they should not be put in barracks like these. He explained all this to Strange up at the Peabody, the first time he got a pass.

  “Nobody cares,” he said, trying to make it simple and easy so Strange could understand. “Except the unsophisticated. And they’re just being used. Look at that medical board. Those five old men. All good citizens. Not even your shitty West Pointers. And they all sit there and give me their spiel. About how they need me. They want to use my experience. So I agree. What experience? And look how they’re using it. Tell me they want me to train people in infantry fighting. I don’t know infantry fighting. What am I agreeing to? Am I crazy? And look where I am. And they didn’t any of them read those papers. None of the doctors read them. Or they’d have found that mistake. No, sir. I don’t see any other way for me. Except to run away. And there’s no place to run to.”

  “Good,” Strange said, with that urgency, “fine. But I still don’t understand. All you got to do is go to Winch, and get a good clerical job, and sit it out for the rest of the war. You’ve got that experience. You’d be good at that. I don’t understand, I honestly don’t.”

  “But then I would be like all the rest of them,” Landers protested. He shook his head. “I won’t do that.”

  Mary Lou had already found another serviceman for boyfriend. Strange went off with Frances Highsmith, as soon as he could. Landers could have stayed on and taken one of the other girls. He preferred to go off by himself in the city, just wandering around. Bar to bar.

  It was the only pass Landers was to get for quite a while. Back at O’Bruyerre, when he reported back in, he found the 3516th had received orders it was to go through the standard six weeks of basic training.

  That this crew should go through basic training was ridiculous. Even the new company commander was embarrassed, and half-apologized when he read the order to them. The chorus of bitching which greeted the announcement migh
t have been funny. Except that it carried so many serious results. Twelve men went over the hill in the first week after the announcement, and as the first weeks of basic training got under way, more followed.

  Landers did not go. But he thought about it seriously. And in fact was invited to go, by two other hospital cripples, who had decided the whole thing was more than they could stomach. But they did not know where they were going, or how long they would stay away, and had nobody really to go to. Also Landers did not much like them. All this decided him against going with them.

  And in the end he decided not to go alone, by himself. Where would he go? He couldn’t go home, that was the first place they’d look. He did not want to go back to the Peabody, like his first AWOL, and lie around day after day. This time, when he decided to go, it was going to be for good. For desertion. Not for any piddling AWOL. And he did not think things had gotten quite bad enough to warrant that, yet. Partly he did not go because he had begun to have a tenuous, sneaking affection for this befuddled fucked-up outfit, and partly he did not go because he had begun to take a serious liking to the new company commander of the 3516th.

  The new company commander was a 1st/lt named Harry L Prevor. Prevor was a Jew from Indiana, with high cheekbones and Mongolian eyes, who had been sent down here to the boondocks to take over and build this scumbum outfit for that very reason, according to his cadre. If so, he took it very well. Prevor was a French name, he said, probably a corruption of prévoir, which meant to see ahead; foretell the future. The wry way he said it always got him a laugh. He had not let the new assignment deck him. Prevor was a self-effacing man, of low physical authority perhaps, but with a sense of humor, and a man of considerable decency.

  The cadre said the other officers had fucked-up in some equally catastrophic way, though both were goyim. Landers formed no opinion of them, but grew to like Prevor more and more.

  The cadre themselves were not at all in the same situation and were not being punished. For them this was a definite step up. They were all very happy to be where they were, and anxious to keep their promotions. The only trouble with that was that they were all so terrible at their jobs. And the promotions were not permanent yet. They were “acting” 1st/sgt, “acting” co/clk, until the time when Prevor was to finalize their positions, which was supposed to be in two months. This tended to make them even more nervous and anxious.

  Landers learned how really bad they really were when he applied for the job of assistant company clerk, after suffering and struggling through his third week of basic training.

  He still had not given up his decision never to seek promotion. But the suffering he incurred going through basic training with his bad ankle warranted some kind of counterattack. And the only way he could get out of the basic training was to get back into administration. The only way he could be useful enough to them to be shifted into administration was through clerking.

  He was not all alone, in his reaction to the physical stresses of the basic training routines. Men were dropping out all around him like flies, going on sick call, trying unsuccessfully to turn themselves in to the camp hospital, actually falling down and failing in all sorts of the training exercises. The man from Italy with the crippled calf fell down and simply lay on the ground four times in one morning, before being allowed to go over and sit on the sidelines in dour silence.

  Landers did not think the man from Italy was putting it on, faking it. The reactions of his own ankle to the physical strains, swelling up, turning out on him, simply refusing to move, were too painful. Curran certainly was right when he told him it was no good for infantry work. And his crippled ankle was a nothing, compared to that mutilated calf. But the man from Italy was not transferred.

  The physical jobs the 3516th would be performing in combat were loading and unloading five-gallon gas cans from high-bedded two-and-a-half-ton GI Army trucks. The beds of the two-and-a-half-tonners were about the height of an average man’s shoulder. Each truck carried one “bay” of 125 cans. Speed in loading or unloading was considered essential. For two men to load or unload a bay of empty cans was not a difficult physical feat. But for four men to load and unload a full bay of 125 cans full of gas (or water, during their first practice sessions) was no mean feat at all. And to do it all day long, six times, eight, ten, twelve times, was more than most well men could handle. To think the hospital cripples who had been siphoned off to this outfit could do it was ridiculous. Most of the men who had come down from the infantry division after its physical exam found it just about impossible. To send all these same men through the infantry training exercises of basic training was doubly ridiculous. No one knew where the order originated.

  The complaints about the basic training came to a kind of a head near the end of Landers’ third week in it. It was a night training exercise. And of course it was raining. Not a hard rain, but a steady uncomfortable cold drizzle. Landers could imagine some Plans & Training colonel with a nice big Scotch and soda in hand sitting at his warm desk in his warm office, and saying in his deep, manly, tough voice what a good thing it would be for the men, the rain. Teach them more about what it would be like in France.

  The exercise was the old live-fire exercise. It was designed to show green men what it was really like to be under fire. To this end seven or eight machineguns were set up on a small bluff, their barrel ends wedged between stakes and two-by-four crosspieces so they could neither elevate nor depress nor traverse. Behind these, machinegun crews were to fire tracer ammo off across a low area. The trainees (that was Landers and company) were to crawl across the valley to the bluff, the MG fire sparkling with tracers every five rounds four feet over their heads.

  Landers did not know who began the protest. But ten yards from the bluff, where they were supposed to stop, the man on Landers’ right leaned toward him in the rain and shouted at his ear in the racket of fire pouring over their heads, “Look at here!” In his right hand was a rock, about the size and heft of a hand grenade.

  In the near dark, lit eerily and unevenly by the burning tracers overhead, Landers after a moment recognized him as the man from Italy with the ruined calf. His face and uniform were covered with the mud, and the piece cradled in his arms was going to take hours of cleaning. The man from Italy grinned and made a gesture with the rock as if chucking a grenade at the MGs.

  They had arrived at the end line among the first, and had nothing to do until those behind crawled up to them. Landers looked around him and saw that the ground was strewn with the grenadelike rocks. Plenty for all. Landers did not know whether the idea had come from the right of the line, or the man from Italy had thought of it. He seized a rock for himself and shouted at the man on his left, made the same gesture of chucking a grenade. The man nodded happily and turned to pass the word.

  In two minutes each man of the forward end line was lobbing his grenade-like rock over and up at the bluff line of firing MGs. As men crawled up singly through the mud of the little valley in the dark, they were incited to join in.

  At first there was no appreciable effect from the line of machine-guns. Then the throwers began to repeat, concentrating their lobs on the seven or eight MG positions. They were easy enough to see in the dark, with the tracers spouting from them. There were some squawks of dismay from the little bluff, and strings of cursing which could be heard but were not readable in the noise of the fire. In the pauses in the firing a clank or two was heard, as if a rock had hit metal: an MG receiver or a helmet. Then there was one loud shout of consternation from the bluff, and in half a minute three loud blasts of a whistle came from behind the crawlers where the officer commanding them was placed with his radio. The exercise was over, called off before half of the men had completed the crawl. When they climbed up the bluff, they found one of the machinegunners had had his jaw broken when hit in the face with a rock. There was a lot of cursing and grumbling and complaining up on the little hill.

  For Landers it had been a wild, bizarre, eerie scene: the crippled,
muddy veterans of the Pacific from Lae, Guadalcanal, New Georgia, the European vets and survivors of Sicily, Salerno, Naples, lobbing grenade-sized rocks into the line of their own fixed machineguns manned by their own green men. Landers had not expected or thought about someone getting seriously hurt. He was not so sure about some of the others. When he climbed muddily up the bluff in the cold drizzle, shaking with cold, and watched the injured man for all the world like an injury in a football game being walked away by medics with flashlights, Landers had already made up his mind about applying to the new orderly room for an assistant clerk’s job. Any job.

  There was a minimal investigation of the incident. But nothing came of it. The men looked at each other with wide, innocent eyes. No one knew who had thrown any rocks. No one had seen any rocks thrown. Nobody was prosecuted. The investigation died of malnutrition. The basic training schedule continued. The next time a live-fire exercise was laid on, it was placed in a terrain where no rocks or stones or other debris littered the ground. Just mud and grass.

  Landers applied for the job by presenting himself at the orderly room and asking for it. “My God!” Prevor said, overhearing, and coming to his own office door, “do you know something about clerking?” Landers nodded. He said he had run an entire infantry company on New Georgia. “Service records? Morning report? Sick book?” Prevor asked. Landers nodded. “Come on in here,” Prevor said, and shut the door to his office behind them. Outside, his acting 1st/sgt and clerk were sitting with their heads down.

  A batch of morning reports had come back from Second Army Hq as unacceptable. They had been improperly completed and would have to be done over. Prevor grimaced. “My damned 1st/sgt doesn’t know what’s wrong with them.” The sheaf comprised the first two weeks of the company’s existence and that meant almost certainly that other batches would be following them, to be done over also. The sick book was in a like state, perhaps worse. It was being sent back almost every day, though the doctors were actually taking care of the men who reported sick. “They more or less have to,” Prevor said. “We’ve got more men on sick report almost, than we have for duty.”