by John Hersey
Now Erlanger broke into a halting, shuddering laugh.
The colonel said, “What’s the joke?”
Erlanger was immediately drained of his false humor and looked frightened again. “Bronze Star,” he said. “I’m in for the Bronze Star. How do you like that, for what I did on the field of battle? Huh? How do you like it? First I kill my best friend, then he saves my life, so I get in for a Bronze Star.” He paused, and then the manifestations of cold fear seemed subtly to be translated into those of cold hate and fury. He continued with bitter sarcasm. “My father will be pleased. Oh, yeah, I can see him, yeah, the old man will be very proud. He’s a wonderful man and all that, doctor, but for years he’s been after me with his God-damn D. S. M., always telling me, always writing me, ‘Well, any day now our rural free delivery is looking for your citation.’ Needn’t to come home without some kind of decoration, he didn’t want me back, except if I was a hero. Now I’m a hero, I can go home, he’ll pound me and slap me on the back and tell me I did good….”
The colonel interrupted—and injected a third cubic centimeter of Amytal. “Tell me about Ting. What did you do?”
“Well, I crawled up there where he was screaming. More grenades, of course. The Jerries wanted him to shut up just like I did. It’s natural; nobody wants a grown-up man to make a noise like that. So I crawled up there, and the first thing I did, I reached out and grabbed his hand and I figured to pull him back by the hand and so I pulled on it, and the hand came along and a piece of the arm came along and the whole thing didn’t weigh more than a small kitten; it came right off him. That was what I was dragging off the field of battle, Ting’s hand up to the elbow. So of course I had to go back for the rest of him. The grenades were not close enough, only by luck. This time I got onto the solid part of him, and I jerked and yanked at him, and I got him back a ways. I had to leave the hand out there, I had no place to put it. So I kind of shinnied under him and pried him onto my back, and I crawled on back to near a wall. I was damn near dead then from being scared. So I just lay down there while Ting passed out. At least I figure he did, because he didn’t sound off like before.
“And then they started slinging these mortars in.”
* * *
—
This memory, slipping out into the open so suddenly, cracked Erlanger’s sense of time and threw him back again into the actual situation. He gave a full minute’s exhibition of naked, unashamed, uninhibited terror; exactly what he had felt inwardly that night by the stone wall in Germany. He was, for a time, a man in the sharply recollected presence of death.
He ripped his arm out from under the needle, wrenched himself away from the outer side of the bed, and huddled abjectly against the wall. His face turned white, then greenish-gray. He began to tremble violently, and his body suffered gross jolts when the memory of each mortar flash dazzled his brain. A fine perspiration broke out on his upper lip, forehead, and neck. His breath came faster and faster, until he sounded like a panting, shivering puppy.
He turned back toward the open bed, flung out an arm, grabbed his pillow, put it over his shoulders, got up on his knees, scrabbled at the wall of the room for a moment as if he were trying to climb over an obstacle, sank back, made himself as small as possible in the angle between bed and wall, and pulled the pillow—with great effort, as if it were unwieldy, heavy, and repugnant—over his body. He lay that way and shook and cried.
The doctor allowed this violent outpouring to go on for about a minute, then he said, “Erlanger! You’re all right now, you’re out of danger. You’re in a hospital, back in the States.”
Gradually Erlanger’s shivering eased. His huge body became unstrapped by terror and free again. He said, “Don’t send me back, I can’t go back in there.”
“The war’s over for you, Erlanger. You’re safe now.”
“I want to go home.” The big man lying on the cot spoke like a little child.
“You’re safe now,” the colonel said. “You have nothing to fear.”
Erlanger seemed to be calmed by these assurances. He shook his head, as if to clear it, and then lay still for some time, looking at the ceiling.
The colonel said, “You can tell me, now, what happened beside the wall.”
A brief shiver, repeating in miniature the nightmarish fear Erlanger had just been through, jarred his body.
He turned his face helplessly toward the colonel and said, “Doctor, do I look like a horse, or an ox, to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Doctor, I’m such a big strong horse of a man, how could I get so weak? What’s the matter with my leg? I want to walk, I ought to be strong enough to take care of myself and walk around.”
“You will be. Tell me what happened by the wall.”
“Don’t ask me to talk about that. Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”
“No, now. Tell me now.”
“Doctor, I’ll tell you what bothered me even more than beside the wall there. I’ll tell you. It was seeing a horse one day, I was going along and I seen a horse lying right out in a field with its legs up in the air and its guts all over the ground, just like that, dead as hell. What could a horse do to the Germans? Just because it couldn’t pull them fast enough, it couldn’t keep up with the half-tracks and trucks to pull something for them, that was all, so they blew him up in the stomach; it was a yellow cowardly bastard’s trick to do that to a horse. That made me damn sore, seeing that.” Erlanger was close to tears again.
“What happened beside the wall?”
Erlanger frowned. “I remember something,” he said. “It bothers me. I used to think about it all the time overseas.”
“What’s that?”
“On my mother’s bureau, home, she’s got a picture. It’s a picture of me when I was three, four years old. I got long curly hair and I got a dress on. I was too old to be like that. How you think that makes a big horse like me feel, to remember that picture?”
The doctor told Erlanger that was nothing to worry about—that in those days mothers often kept dresses on boys a long time.
“Is that true?” Erlanger seemed to be thinking it over. Suddenly he said, “Sometimes I’d like to push Lieutenant Grant’s face in.”
“Who is he?”
“He was our lieutenant. I remember one time we were walking along—it was a dirt road, I remember that—and I was having some trouble with my foot at that particular time. I had a blister on my heel, it got full of green stuff and my foot swole up, it hurt like hell. So he comes up and he says, ‘Erlanger, what’s the matter with you? You’re the biggest guy in the platoon but you’re just like a baby.’ I could kill that son of a bitch. He was a second lieutenant, he had gold bars but we used to call them his yellow stripes. I hate the God-damn Army. Nobody is ever a person. You get pushed around because you’re just a serial number. I hate the whole God-damn thing. They shout at you and they say you’re dumb and you’re a baby and you can’t take it and get the lead out of your tail and keep going and what’s the matter, you afraid of getting killed? I hate it and I don’t care who hears me say so. I hate it! I hate it!”
Erlanger had begun this outburst speaking quietly, but his temper and voice grew. As he shouted the two final protests, he pounded his left fist hard on the wall beside him.
After a few moments Erlanger said, quite quietly, “Horses are okay if they’ll do their work, but I don’t know, I just don’t like cats. My sisters always had cats. I wanted a dog, but they were the baby girls, my mother always favored the baby girls, so they had a black cat with white paws on it, and she said I couldn’t have a dog. I don’t think my mother ever wanted any boys in the family, anyhow not after Carl—he’s older than me. She treated me different. Definitely.”
Erlanger paused and then said, “I don’t like anyone laughing at me.”
The colonel said, “Nobody likes that.”
&nb
sp; Erlanger said resentfully, “Well, I don’t like it…. One night, you know how you sit around at night, we were bivouacked in some kind of old college or some monastery, I don’t know exactly, and we were all arguing and discussing there; we were talking about automobiles after the war, what we would buy and all that. And I got talking about my first choice, and I pronounced it coopay. And all the guys laughed and said any jerk knew it was pronounced coop. And when I told ‘em my mother was half French and she said it was coopay, they all laughed more and called me Frenchie. And also they used to call me Jerry, because I had a German name, like I wasn’t a loyal soldier or something, and there was one guy, he was a tech sergeant, he was too wise for his own good, he used to pick on me all the time. He used to call me Moose, because of my size, and whenever I got tired or like that—you know, a big person gets tired just as much as a small one, sometimes more—he always used to chew my tail and say I was soft…. They better not pick on me, I can handle any man, I’ll beat the crap out of them.” Suddenly Erlanger’s belligerency broke and he said miserably, “Doctor, it used to make me very nervous, the way they picked on me. I just wanted to be friendly.”
In similar words and with rising and falling moods, Erlanger aired his memories of having been fired, at the age of eighteen, from the job of wrestling two-hundred-pound tanks of artificial gas on and off delivery trucks because, his boss said, he was a “big slob but not man enough for a heavy job”; of unwarranted, extravagant abuse received in England from an MP; of being laughed at, the first time he asked a girl for a date; of a dirty trick his friend Ting had played on him—setting Erlanger up as the victim of a practical joke involving an imaginary ammunition-dump detail; of having been recommended for the Bronze Star because, on the way back from the wall that night, he had helped a wounded man in spite of his own already painfully weak leg; of not being able to keep up with smaller men in basketball at school; of being forced to listen to his father’s stories of the last war—claims of heroism and loud-laughing histories of debauchery; of having been beaten up, when he first arrived in Syracuse, by the block bully, a boy much smaller than he; of his feeling, often repeated, that he never did anything well; of trying to make love in a brothel, to which he had been taken by friends, and of failing, because he was afraid of catching something; of having been slapped, for a stupidity rather than a misdemeanor, by a teacher in school.
* * *
—
After the interview had lasted in all about fifteen minutes, the colonel broke in and said, “Now, Erlanger, I want you to tell me exactly what happened beside the wall.”
Erlanger said weakly, “I don’t like to remember that.”
The colonel said, “You’ve got to face it. Now tell me.”
“Well,” Erlanger said, “I got Ting back there by the wall and the mortars started dropping in, so I thought I better get against the wall, then I thought I ought to go over. So I tried it with Ting—I didn’t know was he dead or alive—I tried getting him on my shoulders and over the wall. I couldn’t do it, I was too scared and weak. So I fell down and I wanted to take cover, and I didn’t have any way. I wanted to get covered over…. I didn’t have anything else…. I took…. I had to take….”
Erlanger gave up. “Go on,” the colonel said.
“Well,” Erlanger said, “I had Ting back to the wall and when the mortars started falling I wanted to get over….” Erlanger had begun the episode all over again.
“You told me that,” the colonel said. “Tell me how you took cover.”
Erlanger spoke in a tortured voice.
“I killed him and then he saved my life.”
“How?”
“I killed him because I let him take the point, and he saved my life because I…I had to take cover, I didn’t know what I was doing, I was crazy scared…. I…”
“How did Ting save your life?”
“I used him. He was dead already, but I used him. I got him on top of me for protection, and he kept the mortars off me. He was awful like that; I hated him even when he was alive. So I killed him dead and he turned right around and saved my life.”
“Don’t you realize that the grenade might have landed anywhere in the dark, that it was just by chance that it didn’t hit you?”
“Yeah, but look who it killed.”
“But if you’d been up at the point, it might have been thrown a little harder and still hit Ting. That grenade might have had Ting’s number on it, no matter what you did. Mightn’t it?”
“It could. I suppose it could.”
“What does it mean to you to have a big husky body and yet have people tease you for being weak?”
“It means any man who is a man doesn’t like to be pushed around.”
“Exactly. And what does your bad leg mean to you?”
“I guess it means I got hurt by blast, or something. It also means I’m weak.”
“You’re weak. With a crippled leg, you can’t be big and strong, so that there’s no reason to feel bad if anyone pushes you around?”
“Doctor, I got a lot of blast there by the wall. I figure my leg must’ve been sticking out from under Ting there.”
“But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with your leg. The examinations have all shown that.”
“Then what’s wrong with it?”
“You tell me. Did you ever know anyone with a crippled leg like yours?”
Erlanger lay still a long time. Then he said positively, “No, sir, not like mine.”
“Are you sure? Think back.”
Erlanger lay quiet.
The colonel said, “Well, what about it?”
Erlanger’s upper lip began to tremble. He put his hands over his face and broke out sobbing.
The colonel said, “What’s the matter?”
When Erlanger had controlled himself, a confession welled up from layers of his mind which were most secret, and he uttered it calmly, as if it were some commonplace tossed out at random by his conscious mind. “I could kill my old man,” he said. “I never told anybody that before. I wish I could kill him.”
“Why?”
“He made us work so damn hard. One night I fainted at the churn, and he beat the hell out of me for being a sissy. He used to drive me and threaten me, that I had to be a real man. He wanted me to grow up strong, like he said he was…only he was lazy. He was a lazy good-for-nothing no-good bum and a loafer…just like Ting was….” Erlanger continued defiantly, as if he had suddenly caught himself red-handed in a tremendous cheat. “Yes,” he said, “I knew someone who had a bad leg. It wasn’t this bad. It was just a game leg. My father. He caught some shrapnel in it in the last war.”
The colonel said, “Was it his right leg, by any chance?”
“Yeah, it was.”
“Just like yours.”
“Yeah, that’s funny, I hadn’t thought of that. Every time the harvesting came long, and usually every day about milking time in the evening, and exactly at the time to feed the chickens, and all of that, why, his leg would trouble him. He’d get a spell. He’d say, ‘The boys can do it.’ He’d limp around and lie down on the porch.”
“Did it hurt him?”
“Yeah, he had a big piece in his leg, it used to hurt.”
“Was it right here in the thigh, at exactly the place where you say you feel pain?”
Erlanger ignored this question. He said, “He could walk on his leg, though.”
“His leg got him out of a lot of work, didn’t it?”
“I’ll say. And Carl and me, we were the ones that had to do the work.”
“And after that patrol you were telling me about, you had some things you wanted to get out of, didn’t you?”
“Nobody likes to get killed.”
“Of course not. You’re no longer bothered by that patrol, are you?”
“I am and I’m no
t.”
“How do you mean?”
“I’m not because I’m away from all that. I am because I seen it.”
“But you’re no longer afraid of dying, are you?”
“No, sir.”
“You don’t have to limp around and lie down on the porch any more, do you?”
Erlanger took this as a slur. “I try to do my part, sir. I’m a good patriotic American.”
“Nobody’s questioning that. I’m just saying that you don’t have to be afraid of dying any more, the way you think your father was afraid of working.”
Erlanger thought hard about that one, but he said nothing.
“You said you felt guilty about the death of your friend Ting.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“You did? Does that mean you don’t any more?”
“Well, sir, after what you said I figure maybe he would have been killed anyhow, at least I figure there wasn’t anything I had to do with it.”
“Good. About some of those other things, about being afraid that other people may not think you’re quite the man your size indicates, about why you like horses and don’t like cats, and all that—you and I are going to have lots of time to talk it all over.”
“Gee, doc, maybe that’s all kind of silly.”
“It’s only silly when you try to hide it from yourself.” The doctor stood up and pulled his chair back away from the bed. He said, “Now let’s try to get up. Let’s see if we can walk.”
* * *
—
Erlanger looked at the colonel and said, “I can’t, sir. You know my leg is no good.”
The colonel said, “There’s no more pain in it, is there?”
Erlanger squeezed his right thigh with his right hand. Then he put both hands on his leg and prodded and kneaded. Begrudgingly he said, “No, sir, it don’t seem to hurt right now.”
“I think perhaps it does work. You just told me that your leg did the same thing for you that your father’s did for him. Now you’re out of danger and away from the thing your leg got you out of, so maybe it will work again.”
