Losing Julia (3 page)

I had intended to be braver at this age, a fearless old fart beyond intimidation. Even a role model of sorts for the young and afraid, like the last Civil War veteran leading the town parade, chin up, eyes glinting, seen it all and survived. After all, the worst possible thing that could happen to me is bound to happen any day now, so what’s to fear but a little flatulence as I shuffle past the nurses’ station?

And how I fear flatulence, which rattles the nursing home like car alarms in the city. “It tolls for thee,” quips the ubiquitous Oscar Bellamy, wagging his finger at the offender as he patrols the hallways in his squeaky wheelchair. For the first time in my life, flatulence is no longer a source of mild bemusement but genuine alarm. A loss of control. A clarion call from hell.

Control. Here at the Great Oaks Home for Assisted Living—and dying—control means having possession of the call button. Everything else is careening out of control, which is why we are all here in the first place. We piss in our pants, we drool, we cry uncontrollably, we smell, we leak.

That’s it, really. We have all sprung unstoppable leaks. We’re hissing to death, deflating old rafts adrift in the sea, flat out of flares and shit out of luck.

I really must get some rest.

Know your rifle. The rifle is the soldier’s fighting weapon, given to him by the Government with which to defend his country and himself.

It is the soldier’s best friend.

He should know it and understand it. He should learn its peculiarities, if it has any—that is, if it shoots high or low; to the left or to the right. And just as one makes allowance for the peculiarities of a friend, so should the soldier, in firing, make allowance for the peculiarities of his rifle—
his best friend.

—Privates’ Manual, 1917.

THIS MORNING
I looked in the mirror and saw just the outlines of my uniform, new and neatly pressed. What am I? Nineteen? A freshly minted soldier in the American Expeditionary Forces. One of Pershing’s doughboys. An eager transfusion for the drained armies of the West, bled silly in a monstrous, thunderous draw.

I sit stiffly next to Mother and Father at the Hostess House at Camp Merritt, listening to their instructions on how to deport myself and what to avoid and most of all to stay safe. On the last day we are issued our steel helmets, and each man gets a new safety razor in a khaki kit with a trench mirror, a gift from the government. Early the next morning we march in the darkness to Cresskill Station, where we board a train to Hoboken. Then we march through the city to the docks, where we take coffee, doughnuts and apples from a table run by smiling women from the Red Cross, then fill out safe arrival cards to be mailed home from France.

Six ships of differing sizes await us, each dazzle-painted to confuse German subs. On the side of the largest ship the silhouette of a small destroyer facing backward has been painted. We point and laugh loudly as we march up the gangplanks, waving back at mothers and fathers and wives and aunts and uncles and children. Black smoke belches from two dark gray funnels as thick, pythonlike ropes are tossed onto the pier where seagulls flap over food.

France. Son of a bitch! I’m sailing for France. The war! I hear the band playing and flags snapping in the wind and the cool ocean air reddens my cheeks as I stand at the railing, leaning forward so I can look straight down and see the dark blue water sluicing by the side of the ship. Most of the men have been ordered below deck until we clear the harbor to prevent German spies from estimating our troop strength. But I and a few dozen others have been allowed to remain on deck to smile and wave our campaign hats, lest those waving from the piers and smaller boats feel ignored. A fireboat salutes us with great arches of water as we pass the Statue of Liberty, the brave sons of America steaming east to join the valiant sons of France and Britain and Germany and Russia and Italy and Austria and Canada and Belgium and Bulgaria and Turkey and Australia in the greatest test of manhood in human history. A worldwide war!

ON SHIP
we play cards and study phrase books and listen to lectures and sleep in shifts. The soldier whose bunk I share is seasick, and I am dizzy with the smell. During twice-daily abandon-ship drills I stare at the dark frothing water and try to imagine jumping in. No, the fire would have to be at my back. But what about burning oil? Does it really burn upon the water? I look out on the horizon and see one of our escorting destroyers, a thin trail of smoke rising behind the sleek gray silhouette as it zigzags toward France. We are seven days out, three to go.

As we enter the danger zone we are issued life jackets, which we must wear night and day. Lying in my bunk in the darkness, far below the waterline, I rehearse what I’d do if a torpedo struck. Then I try to imagine what the war will be like. Not what it will look like, but what it will feel like to be at the front. To be under fire. To shoot back. I peer out from my bedroll at the other men, some asleep, others just getting dressed. If they can do it, I can do it.

We disembark at Saint-Nazaire, a sea of olive-drab khaki ordered left and right by MPs with scowls and whistles pinched between their thin lips. On the docks and wharves hundreds of black stevedores dressed in denim overalls unload crate after crate, their biceps straining beneath sweat-stained shirts, while bands of sullen German prisoners under guard shovel coal. We fall in and march and stop and march until eventually we are led into straw-lined boxcars, much smaller than ours, labeled
“40 hommes—8 chevaux”
on the sides in big white letters. We sit for six hours before moving, guarded by more MPs who line the tracks. I watch as the freight cars are loaded with horses, mules, rolling kitchens, machine gun carts, baled hay, ammunition, water carts, supply wagons, artillery and objects I’d never seen before. We pull forward, then stop in a railroad siding for two more hours. Then finally, the train heaves and creaks forward, clickety clacking through the French countryside, which looks remarkably tranquil and unmolested. Certainly land worth defending.

At Langres we march and drill with bayonets and gas masks and grenades, Stokes mortars and Chauchat machine guns, and listen to lectures by hard-looking French and British liaisons who make us wish that we too were veterans. We build trenches and lay wire and then attack trenches with carefully orchestrated leapfrogs of one company over another until we are lost in clouds of dust. And then week after week of drilling until we are numb with boredom. We want only to face the Germans, to prove ourselves in battle! To show what Americans can do. Hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Then, finally, my turn. I am going to the front!

I run my hands along the smooth stock of my Springfield rifle. I strap my puttees on tight. I stand and salute. I march farther and farther east, bent under the weight of my pack.

If only you could see me now, Father.

Thunder in the distance. Streaming refugees. Our pace quickens.

Now everything changes: trees are snapped and splintered, the thick-walled farmhouses are smashed, collapsed upon themselves in piles of stone. Dead horses. Rows of wooden crosses. Has some leviathan run amok? The earth convulses.

Father?

Mother?

Oh shit.

Father!

What was it that the British poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon said, that the war was a murderous “exploitation of courage”?

Ferocious courage. Ferocious exploitation.

Peer pressure gone berserk.

Nurse? I think I have soiled my sheets.

There could never before in war have been a more perfect target than this solid wall of khaki men… There was only one possible order to give: “Fire until the barrels burst.”

—Diary of the German 57th Regiment

THE ROAD FROM
the monument to the hotel was narrow and rough. As I followed Julia’s car I tried to think of all the things I should tell her, but I couldn’t, not clearly. I didn’t know where to begin.

We got to the hotel just after seven p.m. My room was on the third floor facing the street; Julia’s was on the second. After washing my hands and face in the enamel washbowl, I stood before the free-standing oval mirror, studying the red lines that fanned out from my corneas. In the corner of my eyes, the first traces of wrinkles arched toward my temples. I’d always assumed that I’d get better-looking as I aged, a consolation for my miserable teenage years, when acne and testosterone conspired to drive me to the brink of madness. That my looks might further deteriorate with time had only recently occurred to me.

I wasn’t unattractive. Not too short, with a slight but sinewy build, fair skin, hazel eyes, a good hairline and a smile that seemed to make people trust me. I had good teeth too, even though they remained largely hidden in my smallish mouth. Though I lacked any obvious flaws, I remained eminently average-looking, in that no single feature nudged me into the better than average-looking crowd.