Butterfly's Shadow (34 page)

Bumping, bouncing, they trundled on. At one village, whose houses were strung out along the route like a broken wall, they slowed down, paused for a few minutes. The place was deserted, but by the roadside, at the village trough, a group of women stood washing clothes. With impassive, peasant endurance, stooped over the trough, grimly dunking and scrubbing, they ignored the looming vehicles and the soldiers. One, straightening up to ease her back, caught Joe’s eye and he sketched a salute, attempted a gesture of generalised goodwill.

Up front the first truck coughed into life. As the convoy moved on, liquid mud flung up by the churning wheels splashed the women and their clothes and they cursed, quietly.

Joe wanted to call out, apologise. But he was learning that soldiers were trained to reverse the evolutionary process: to forget the rules of civilised behaviour, falling back into savagery to protect their minds from the dangers of feeling; just as in other ways they protected their bodies from attack. In war there was no time to apologise.

Here and there were glimpses of what this country had been before the war arrived: stone farmhouses sitting on hilltops, pale oxen grazing in grassland, the spears of cypress trees dark against a blue sky. Wheat fields fat with grain. Olive groves where silver leaves – coins minted by sunlight – hung in the branches. The calm south. In that moment of indrawn breath before an attack, the only noise was the twittering of birds and the sound of a stream as it bounced over smooth boulders; a green and yellow landscape where poppies fluttered scarlet among long grass. Then, shattering the silence, tanks and guns crested the horizon and the sky was blotted out by sulphurous
fog, the greens and yellows savagely whipped into a palette of mud, and farmhouses reconstructed, as ruins.

Across the open terrain between the woods and the water, they run crablike, in zigzags, knees bent, leaping, crouching, dropping when a shell explodes, locating the source, firing back. Stumbling on, through air filled with gunfire, confusion, the brief scream of a man as he dies. Close at hand Joe hears the muffled
crump
of a mortar; and for a fraction of time there is a sense of suspended action, as in a car crash, a slow motion collision, before the hit: the thunder, the metallic crunch, the smell and sound of battle.

No one had told him it wasn’t the enemy you should be afraid of, it was the generals. Your own high command. You could kill the enemy. The generals tell you what to do and you obey them. The generals send you off to die.

And here’s where it happens.

The orders are clear: secure the next stretch of ground, the next hill; silence the artillery, cross the river.
Silence
the artillery? The river is fast-moving, treacherous. The Germans are on the high ground, concealed, perfectly placed to pick off men up to their armpits in icy water, attempting the insanity of crossing. Blinded with spray, slithering down the banks, fighting the current, he entrusts himself to the churning flood.

How can something as soft, as formless as water hit you with the force of a blow? Water fights dirty, spiteful, no rules. He loses the contest.

The green fills his lungs; the river engulfs him, the fight is over and he sinks into darkness, the chill dulling all pain. He is aware of a vast sorrowful regret. Then he is dragged from the blackness, hauled from the sucking mouth of the riverbed, is face down on the bank, choking, retching, water streaming off him, an unseen figure punching him repeatedly between the shoulders, screaming, ‘Cough, damn you, cough!’

Spewing river water, blinded by mud, Joe is hauled to his feet. He tries to wipe mud from his eyes with mud-caked
hands. All around, men are running, yelling, falling, cursing. Smoke envelopes him like a shroud.

He peers, blinking, at his shadowy saviour. ‘Otishi?’

‘Christ, man, you took your time with the breathing!’

Water dribbles from Joe’s mouth and nostrils. His lungs stab and he doubles over, coughing liquid mud, tries to draw breath.

‘What happened?’

‘Shell. Too close.’

They stagger together up the slope towards the trees, Otishi hauling Joe with him. They are clumsy, climbing with absurdly slow, exaggerated care; boots weighed down with a cladding of yellow mud that covers them head to foot; life-size clay maquettes, only eyes and dark, stretched mouths revealing their humanity.

Later, after dark, they slump alongside the others, waiting for the next morning’s push.

Joe says, blearily, ‘Otishi, you don’t do action stuff. You can’t even swim. You just read fucking history. How come—’

‘Don’t knock history. It teaches you things.’

‘How to save a drowning man?’

‘Right. Bonaparte’s men bent bayonets into hooks to fish enemy bodies out of the Nile—’

‘You reckoned if the French could fish—’

‘Listen, it worked. To a point. I couldn’t bend the goddam bayonet, I kind of harpooned you. So did your life pass before your eyes like they say?’

‘Just water.’

For a moment Joe feels again the force of it crushing his lungs. The huge sadness.

‘My father drowned.’

He wants to say ‘You saved my life’, which would sound corny. Moreover it is obvious.

‘You were pretty quick there.’

‘Just practical. There’s nothing theoretical about war; you do what you have to do. And you do it.
Fast
. That’s Napoleon
again.’ Through the mud spattering his face, Otishi’s eyes gleam dark, his teeth white.

In training camp they were taught the nine principles of war:
objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, manoeuvre, unity of command, security, surprise and simplicity
.

Okay in theory. But as Joe was learning, war is not theoretical. War is a bullet that tears through your arm, the shriek of gunfire blasting your ears, the smell of rotting flesh. Trench foot.

Through the fog, the unrelenting rain, men screamed aloud with the agony of every step. Ankle-deep in quagmire in boots that leaked and split, there was no way to protect infected feet. The burning, the swelling were warnings that came too late: first the deadly numbing, then the real pain, feet turning blue, toes weeping like burst blisters. With luck and dry socks, the swelling subsided. If not, toes twisted like evil growths, spongy and leprous, came away as a man wrenched off his boot. There were amputations. Joe’s toes were now stabbing, burning. The swelling would follow. Government-issue combat boots were not made for this bone-chilling, amphibious world.

When Joe stumbled over the dead German soldier half buried in a crater, what he saw first was the dark blood, the tumble of guts. Then he saw the boots. Strong leather. Hobnailed soles.
Waterproof
. Joe measured his foot against the dead man’s, squatted and fumbled at laces strong as twine. Inside the boots the dead man’s socks were dry; an impossible luxury. Off with his soaking footwear; on with the German’s socks and boots, enclosing his feet like a thick skin, supporting, protecting. Unashamed, he felt grateful to the body he had robbed.

He scrambled to his feet, quickening his pace to catch up with the others. Within the boots, he flexed his dry toes.

To Nancy he wrote,
I can’t tell you where we are; actually I don’t
know
where we are. Unfortunately, the enemy knows . . . It’s raining. It’s always raining . . .’

*

Afterwards he does the calculations: how much time to obliterate a town; how many bombs to smash a monastery; how long it takes to lose fifty thousand men and at the end gain nothing but the knowledge that it was never necessary? At the time, there
is
no time, just the blind reflex to obey the order. Cassino is pounded into ruin, and high above him Joe sees people fleeing as the monastery dissolves into a torrent of crumbling walls, a stone cascade showering the troops below. Only later, as German paratroopers float down to occupy the shell, does the full irony become clear: they have succeeded in turning a place of sanctuary shielding a couple of hundred civilians into the impregnable fortress the generals had believed it to be.

‘Whoever wins,’ Otishi commented, ‘this will be in a history book one day.’

‘You could write it.’

‘You kidding? That’s for the generals.’

The generals give orders. Dog-face soldiers obey, hurling themselves into wall after wall of fire. Acronyms multiply; each day a new SNAFU. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Plus FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. Cassino was a FUBAR. The generals themselves inspire a rich, multilingual litany of curses. Gurkhas, Poles, Anzacs, Tommies, Yanks – all have a special word for the gold-braid assholes, the guys who write the memoirs, the bastards.

The Nisei’s bastard –
kisama
– was Mark Clark, who sent men to their deaths; the
kisama
who chose the wrong river to cross and the wrong day to cross it.

‘What did we do?’ Joe hears a mutter from the GI next to him, face down in a foxhole, ‘to deserve this shit-head?’

Half blinded by mud, they crawl from the foxhole and press on. Jogging clumsily over unexpectedly soft turf, Joe stumbles and glances down: he is trampling the prostrate bodies of dead
GIs from the line ahead of him. This is the first time, though not the last, that he throws up. Doubled over, the bile filling his mouth, he retches and runs on, knees bent, dead men underfoot.

Spilled from ripped knapsacks, strewn around the dead like sacrificial offerings, are snapshots, odd socks, bibles, razors, letters from home, all beaten into the ground by the remorseless rain.

How much ground did they cover? A mile? A few yards? Inches? How long would it take to cross the next river, advancing, retreating, aiming and ducking fire as they waded through the swollen water? Nobody knew or cared how far the next hill was – only how long it cost to take it.

In this often perpendicular landscape, wheels were useless. Mules were brought in to carry food, water, guns, ammunition, the wounded. The dead. While the generals gave orders, the officers took their chances with the men, and there came a day when every commander but one of the regiment was dead or injured.

At sunset, following a day of doomed sorties, Joe saw, far off, a line of mules plodding back to mountain base with what appeared to be sacks of grain strung across the saddles. As they came nearer, he saw the mules were laden with bodies. The mules waited, rain dripping off lowered heads, while dead officers were hauled off the saddles and laid out side by side, a human raft floating on the waterlogged earth. Tired men stood silently by the bodies as though waiting for a service to begin. In due course there would be official recognition; pomp and ceremony. This was the real thing.

One GI crouched awkwardly to pat a sodden shoulder, another touched a dead officer’s sleeve. There were muttered obscenities: inarticulate farewells. Joe bent to straighten the torn jacket of a young lieutenant, a Bostonian who had told him yesterday that he planned to come back one day, to see this country properly.

*

It was August when they crossed the Arno, not far from Florence, and coming up over a rise Otishi slapped Joe’s sleeve and pointed out a distant shaft of pale stone, slender arches catching the sun: the leaning tower of Pisa. Nobody slackened pace: Pisa, like Florence, was just another dot on the map.

On the outskirts of town villas sheltered, secluded behind walls and iron gates, some set in stone-flagged courtyards. The path of war had swerved here and the street was undamaged. The houses stood shabby and neglected, stucco flaking, shutters hanging crooked from broken hinges. A terracotta urn on a gatepost was cracked, spilling dried earth, dead roots. Evidence of diminished splendour and privilege.

As the convoy penetrated further into the narrow streets, the urban terracing, the damage was all around them: entire houses crushed to rubble, women in dusty black silently picking over the debris, lining up at a wrecked shopfront for bread. Massive walls that had resisted destruction for centuries lay crumbled into chunks of stone. A landscape of defeat.

Occasionally they paused at a town where sunshine and Italian girls in summer frocks offered a brief reunion with what seemed like ordinary life. Starving, selling anything that might buy food, survivors welcomed the uniforms, high-born matrons grimly moonlighting as tarts, with a pre-penetration
aperitivo
for officers. GIs got young girls who smiled, offering rounded bodies, a momentary forgetting, a quick fuck in a back room or the park in return for nylons, spare rations, cigarettes and gratitude. Sometimes they got dollars.

There were promises: ‘When this is over, Rosina, I’m coming back to find you.’

The definition of comfort can change with circumstances: a flimsy metal seat on the pavement, a rusty café table and a glass of sour wine could feel like luxury.

Joe closed his eyes and felt the warmth of the sun sink into his bones. His ribs ached, his feet hurt and there was an unspecific
soreness in his guts. He flexed unwilling muscles and stretched out his legs across the pavement, allowed himself to let go, to drift for a moment; but drifting was bad, it allowed unwelcome thoughts to surface. Passing a once-elegant villa earlier, Joe had glimpsed a room empty of furniture, an electric cable hanging from the ceiling where a chandelier had spread its crystal wings. At the window a woman stared, unseeing, into the street. A bare room, a woman alone, waiting. Elsewhere, in another place, were waiting women being ordered to defend their country against the approaching Americans? Arming themselves, barricading their homes – vulnerable structures built not of stone and brick, but of more fragile materials. How do you barricade a structure of paper and wood?

He took another gulp of wine. Not far from vinegar, it still warmed his guts; it gave comfort.

Cho-Cho is often hungry, but she is also grateful: at least she is not in Tokyo, where American B-29s have efficiently fire-bombed the city to rubble. Here plants grow and birds sing. But she is hungry, a constant condition.

There is a haiku she recalls with wry nostalgia, written by a woman nearly two hundred years before, but some things don’t change – for example, yearnings in a time of shortage.