In Sunlight and in Shadow (65 page)

She was so afraid of gunfire, and she could hear so well, that if a tank or an artillery piece were to report anywhere within a twenty-mile range she would tremble uncontrollably. There was hardly a minute during which a shell was not fired, a bomb not dropped, or a demolition charge not detonated within that radius. When the paratroopers could not hear a distant thud, she could, and no amount of petting could stop the trembling.

Harry thought that, stressed without letup, she would die. She seemed too innocent to die, but he could think of nothing that would help her except to stop the war or finish it more quickly. “It’s a dog,” said Bayer. “She’s had a good life. If she dies, she dies—like us.”

Reeves said, “In the mountains in summer, watching the flocks, we’ll kill a sheep every four or five days. That’s how we eat. That’s just the way it is.”

“What about earplugs?” asked Johnson, who was fond of disputations in which he represented both sides. “No, the low frequency goes right through her skull: earplugs wouldn’t work.”

“I don’t know much about dogs,” Sussingham told Harry. “I never had a dog.”

“It’s a pity,” said Rice, “but maybe she can weather it. We’re all under the same sort of strain, even if we’re not dogs. Her trembling is equivalent to our worry.”

“Swaddle her,” said Hemphill, as if speaking to idiots.

“What?”

“Swaddle her. Wrap her up. That’s what you do to a dog that’s afraid of thunder, or maybe up there in Yankee-land you send it to a dog psychiatrist or get it addicted to dope.”

“Yeah, that’s what we do,” Harry answered. “We get our dogs addicted to dope, then we take them to dog psychiatrists. How’dja know? And that was the cause of the Civil War. Lincoln wanted to addict the dogs of Alabama to dope. Aren’t most wars caused by that?”

Hemphill snorted contemptuously.

“With what?” Harry asked about the swaddling.

“That’s not my problem, Captain.”

It was, however, a problem. In the foxholes and lean-tos they had no swaddling; every bit of cloth they had, had been sewn into a shape to clad or make a shelter for a body. As they moved slowly east, mainly on foot—fighting and resting in alternation—the dog, as if she did not want to go into Germany, became a mental case. One rifle report was enough to set her trembling for half the night. It seemed unfair to take her with them, but without them she would have frozen to death, starved, or been eaten. Winter came down so hard that they fought and moved in slow motion. To walk a hundred yards in thigh-deep snow dangerously sapped their strength. Many a soldier separated from his unit died of the cold, because no boy scouts or village search parties would be there for a private who, after his platoon had been outflanked, had been driven into the forest, where he then slowly turned blue, slept, and died.

Harry’s stick was ordered to help hold a section of the front thirty miles east of the breached Siegfried Line. They reinforced a company that had dug in at the edge of a wood overlooking a broad prospect of open country dotted with villages and small stands of pine. Larger forces and armor would be on their way when they could disengage from what they were doing elsewhere, to push onto the peaceful-looking killing fields beyond the trees on the hill. Until those columns could be diverted, the task was to hold against counterattack. In the forest, Harry’s men dug in on the south side of a snow-covered dirt road that led down across the fields and to the first village. Though they could see assembled German armor to the east, all they had to stop it were bazookas and
PIAT
s. The ground was so hard frozen it could be excavated only near the roots of trees, where the loamy soil was relatively soft. So they dug in at the base of the pines flanking the road, and lived among the roots. Evergreen boughs burned well when thick fogs allowed the soldiers to make small fires that would go undetected. Nonetheless, the cold was doing them in, and it was dangerous to be among the trees, the branches of which could fuse enemy shells so they would blast down from above instead of partially slaking their force in the earth.

On the second day, a truck came up from the rear with ammunition for an anti-tank gun. “Where’s the gun?” a master sergeant asked Harry after he rolled down the window, and then, when he saw Harry’s insignia peeking out of the blanket Harry clasped at the base of his neck, “Sir.”

“What gun?”

“G-Two says there’s supposed to be a captured eighty-eight at the intersection of this road and the front line,” the sergeant said over the rumble of the engine.

“How would they know?”

“Either ’cause someone told them, or from the air,” the sergeant replied.

“That’s the front line,” Harry stated, pointing to where the field began a hundred feet from where they stood. “There’s no gun here. We have an infantry company dug in north and south of the road. No armor, no gun.”

The sergeant looked exhausted. “We’ll just go back.”

His driver told him that to turn around they had to shovel out a space. “Do it,” he said, and then closed his eyes and sank back in his seat.

Harry walked to the rear of the truck. Two privates were shivering inside, sitting on crates of captured shell for the captured 88s. They also had quart containers of gun oil and carbon tetrachloride, ramrods, and dozens of rolls of new gun flannel. These were little bolts of cloth a foot high and as thick as a telephone pole. Every six inches or so, a blue line ran from edge to edge so the gunners would know where to cut the patches they slotted into the heads of their ramrods and ran through the barrels of the guns.

“Could you spare five or ten feet of one of those rolls?” Harry asked.

“Not without a trip to the stockade,” said one of the privates, with blue eyes and a rosacean complexion waxen with cold.

Harry dipped into his coat pockets. “How ’bout for some cigarettes?” He often used his officer’s ration of cigarettes as currency.

“How many?”

“What’s your price?”

The rosacean private thought for a moment. “One cigarette per section.”

“Per three,” Harry said.

“Two.”

“Okay.”

“How many you want?”

“Twenty.” That would be more than enough, he thought, to wrap around the dog. He began extricating half the cigarettes from a full pack as the private unrolled the flannel, counted the sections, and unsheathed a bayonet with which to cut it.

“Roll that up!” the sergeant commanded from where he had been watching in the snow.

Embarrassed, Harry put the cigarettes back into the pack. He hated the smell of tobacco on his fingers, but was able to make the replacement very quickly because of so much practice inserting cartridges into ammunition magazines. More than embarrassed, the private rolled up the flannel as if it were a window shade that goes berserk and rotates with a bang like that of a bomb going off.

“You,” the sergeant said, addressing both privates, although only one was guilty, “get out of the truck and shovel. The driver shouldn’t have to do it.” They jumped out and dug with their hands. The sergeant stayed at the back, guarding the contents. Engaging Harry in forced conversation, he said
sir,
with obvious contempt, whenever he could: Harry, a captain, was just like any other scrounger. But Harry didn’t care. The truck crew got back in, doors slammed, and the truck turned around. As it left, the back flap opened a wink and the rosacean private looked out to left and right as if the sergeant might be running alongside.

And then a whole roll of gun flannel came flying from the back like a depth charge catapulted off the fantail of a destroyer. Harry watched it find its arc. Many things now seemed to happen in slow motion, and this especially. The flannel was as white as the snow,
pace
the blue stripes, and when he caught it he said “Thank you,” silently, and lifted his left hand to acknowledge the gift. The rosacean private seemed satisfied, and disappeared behind the flap as the truck itself disappeared in the snow.

When Harry wrapped the flannel around the dog’s middle, then over the shoulders and around the neck and back crosswise under the belly, Debra, who had been frightened by a mortar barrage several miles to the north, suddenly stopped trembling. As if he had won the Nobel Prize, had a baby, or bet on a horse at four hundred to one, Harry went from position to position and handed out lengths of flannel. The troopers wrapped them around their heads like burnouses, deployed them more prosaically as scarfs, or pressed them into service as socks: they were tight in the boots, but clean, warm, and thick. “This is better,” Bayer said, “than getting laid.”

After everyone had taken what he needed, much was left. First Harry made a pair of ersatz socks for boots that, because they had stretched too much anyway, would not be tight even with the flannel. He wrapped a length around his head and neck, as the others had done, took off his coat, sweater, and shirts, and stood half naked in the snow, winding the flannel around his torso to serve as an undergarment. The risk to his core temperature was worthwhile, for when he put back his layers of clothing he felt clean and warm for the first time in weeks. This produced a pathetic euphoria.

He ate, drank a little hot water, brushed his teeth, and as it was quiet and he didn’t have the watch until four the next morning, he retired, sitting the dog on a bed of pine needles next to his sleeping bag and pulling a blanket over them both. No longer trembling, the dog fell asleep immediately. True, the wind that blew across Harry’s face was many degrees below freezing, but all else was covered and warm.

The cold air smelled especially good because there was no gunpowder in it. He could sleep until four
A.M.,
and it was only six in the evening. After ten good hours, with no attack, no call to get up, no anxiety to wake him, he would be reborn. He slept, and dreamt not a dream but a precise recollection so vivid and exact that the illusion had no check, and was not only more desirable but somehow more real than sleeping in the snow on a front line pushed up to within easy range of German armor.

In the early twenties, after the Great War and its many casualties, the many more of the influenza epidemic, and the minor depression at the beginning of the decade, New York was as quiet and slow as an invalid who though he has crested his illness remains extraordinarily weak. Harry’s formative years were spent in the dip before the bustle and prosperity that would signify the rest of the decade all the way to the Crash at its end. As a child, he roamed freely about the city. He swam in the rivers even though he was forbidden to do so; climbed girders and bridges even though forbidden to do so; hitched rides on the back bumpers of buses and trolleys even though forbidden to do so; and wandered through the many worlds that were New York’s neighborhoods. This he was allowed. It was only one city, but no walker could see all of it even were he to walk forever, for it changed by the hour and no matter at what speed or with what duration one might try, it would never be compassed.

He liked to go to the Hudson River piers to look at the warships when they tied up—the gray four-stack destroyers from the World War and the gunboats remaining from the war with Spain, with their black cannon and white sides. This was in Hell’s Kitchen, which was tame compared to what it had been in the nineteenth century, and now controlled by gangs of Irish children highly alert to invasion of any type, including that of a lone Jew from Central Park West. As urchinesque as Harry was, he was immediately recognizable as a Jew and a swell, and he paid for this in bruises and blood. Because his antagonists, like him, were not yet ten, he was neither killed nor maimed, although he could have been. The unusual twist was that he admired them. He believed, as did they, that because they were Irish and he was Jewish, they were clean and he was dirty. The fact that he was highly scrubbed and they were often filthy was irrelevant. They were taller and lighter-colored, and their English, even if they said
youse,
was authoritative. When he spoke to them, he filtered out any hint of Yiddish syntax or intonation that otherwise marked his dialect. In short, although he was never quite sure that he was an American, he was sure that they were—no matter how Irish they were, no matter when they had gotten off the boat (and some of them were still quite seasick). Not only did he want to be like them, he felt that somehow, fundamentally and indelibly, he really was like them. So he went there a lot, and was beaten up a lot.

“Why do you want to go to Hell’s Kitchen so much?” his father asked, which, translated from the Yiddish idiom, was “Don’t go to Hell’s Kitchen.”

“To see the ships.”

“Go down to Chelsea.”

“Chelsea’s Irish too.”

“It’s less warlike.”

“Still, Irish.”

“Then go to Hudson Street.”

“Too far away.”

“So take the subway.”

“It’s too expensive.”

“I’ll give you the money. Why don’t you go to . . . Little Italy? Do the Italians beat you up?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They think I’m Italian.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“They don’t think you’re Irish?”

“Why would they think I’m Irish?”

“I don’t know. They beat you up so much you’d think it might rub off on you.”

“I get along with them.”

“You get along with them?” His father was astounded.

“In a way.”

“Why not go to Yorkville?”

“I do go to Yorkville.”

“Where the Germans beat you up?”

“No, they’re too busy beating up the Negroes, who live on the edge of them.”

“Do the Negroes beat you up in Harlem?”

“They always say they will, but they never do.”

“Just don’t go to Hell’s Kitchen. Harry, they beat you up.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s America. I can go anywhere in America, I’m an American. Even Scarsdale.”

“Okay, but you can also get beaten up.”

“I can get strong, and learn to fight.”

“Harry, Harry,” his father said, looking at an eight-year-old with skinny limbs and muscles like shredded chicken. “Don’t waste your time on that. You could be a neurologist.”