Shannon (44 page)
Authors: Frank Delaney
I determined to press on too, hoping to find men who could be helped, if wounded. By now I think I must have determined that rescuing wounded men was more important than Last Rites. On all fours I made my way down the line— or where the line had been, because I would, in time, come to body after body after body.
Encounter after encounter proved futile— again and again I received the impression of mere piles of rags. In each case I anointed the dead man and traveled on. I was running out of the holy oils. Then I found a boy of
nineteen, who had been hit in the shoulder and who had spirit. I asked him, “Can you run?” and he said, “I can try, sir.”
Our cover behind us, from which we had set out, stood perhaps twenty-five yards back; this was the farthest distance that I had yet penetrated the wheat field; that gives a measure of the enemy fire. On my count to three we rose, linked arms like husband and wife, and began to zigzag in a half trot, half gallop. I heard the deadly mechanical rattle, then several rattles; mercifully, nothing struck my young comrade, and we made it to cover.
Numbers of marines awaiting their turn for battle saw us, and all their training failed to control their delight at seeing a surviving comrade. They cheered him as though he had carried the day. Such is the true human spirit that shows through the inferno.
An adjutant to the colonel had come to that meeting point. He ordered me to return with him, not to Lucy-le-Bocage but to Bouresches, where we had our nearest quarters. In the field hospital there I was given coffee. Soon, I was taken before the colonel and after some discussion I was allowed to resume my little operation. With new supplies of the oils, I set out again.
For that day and the next three or four days (I still find it difficult to count), I made several forays out onto that wheat field. Often I believed that the enemy gunners must have guessed that my presence did not threaten them, because their shooting was haphazard and never greatly endangered me.
On my hands and knees, on those terrible days, I continued to meet only those who had paid the fullest price. Three, four, five, six— ten bodies in a row bore heartrending testament to the accuracy of the gunners against us. My estimate is that few of the fallen men exceeded twenty-five years in age, boys in fine condition and wonderful training, who had now been made as nothing. The whole field became a place of “rags,” as I now perceived their gallant fallen bodies. The word Haceldama kept ringing in my mind, the field of blood of the Scriptures.
Impressions persist. On one stretch of this grueling crawl along our line, I encountered a living soldier. He twisted himself this way and that on the ground, and I put out a hand to subdue him, telling him that a friend had arrived. With great force he grabbed my arm and hauled me
to him, cursing and swearing. The sight of my chaplain's tabs did not cause his language to abate— but my grip on both his hands did. Such fire as had struck him had taken away the strength of his legs; I discovered later that he had been shot in both knees, apparently by one bullet. Such are the strange vagaries of a battlefield.
We lay on the ground together, heads close, and I began to speak to him, to reduce his terror. He told me that he had put up his head to look for help and had seen his captain cut down a few feet away. I told him I knew; the captains was the body I had just then anointed. I helped him reach for his supply of water and waited until he had drunk; now his anguish was beginning to subside.
He asked as to the state of the battle and I told him that we seemed to be in a lull; it was now close to noon and the heat was rising fast. When we had spent maybe fifteen minutes alongside each other, I proposed to him that we try to get back to our lines, trusting to the good luck I seemed to be having. His movements, with no power in his legs, proved clumsier than I had anticipated, yet I nevertheless managed to get one arm around him and then hauled him up, half astride me on one shoulder.
As I looked, I saw a sergeant flap a hand at me like a flag:
Down! Down!
I sank. In that position I spent a half hour and more, taking care to keep the blood flowing to my knees by sliding carefully across the field, hauling my injured comrade.
On another occasion, I had better fortune. This man had fallen, his knee destroyed, but he was light and slight and no great burden, and not one shot whizzed near us as I carried him from the field.
Not all my memories offer such reward; the abiding impressions are of disturbance and pain. Any human being who has not witnessed war has no understanding of what it feels like. The human body, when killed or terribly wounded in such circumstances, acquires an unexpected looseness of limb, a sagging of flesh. Bodies fall apart more easily than we realize when we are inhabiting them. A limb gets torn off in the blink of an eye, an eye bursts out from a head under the dreadful force of a bullet or a bomb. Policemen know this, and forensic doctors, as do soldiers who have been on active duty; they have all shoveled loose human flesh into bags, rough caskets, and graves.
Those of us who returned safely to our lines were, naturally, those of us
who could. This starkly obvious fact did not strike me for some time, at least not until we had come back down into our own encampment and reached for water or coffee or whatever we had been offered.
Confusion dominated much of the event. We had— and could acquire— so little information. No runners could be used to carry messages; they would not have survived. The officers and men questioned us when we returned: What was happening out there? Were we retreating or regrouping? What were our casualties? I was now ordered to stand down.
That day, however, a larger question emerged and began to dominate: What had become of most of our number? Were we assuming that all who had not returned had been fatally wounded? This thought had not occurred to me and I asked for permission to return to the field and find those of our comrades who still breathed. I had to ask many times. Permission was denied.
I waited until night fell and I could not be seen, and then I went back out into the wheat field and by good fortune was able to find my way to those who called out.
To summarize: My battle, if I may call it that, had begun on a beautiful summer day in June. Our soldiers fought from one stalk of wheat to the next. To get anywhere near the machine-gun nests on that crown of thorns, they had to cross a wide field of grain, and they had to cross it over and over. Even when they did get into Belleau Wood on the other side, every rock outcrop had, we learned, an enemy machine gun behind it.
The enemy strategy left us with hand-to-hand combat as our only solution, since no artillery bombardment of ours could pinpoint such a widely scattered and deeply concealed array of machine-gun nests. When the German gunners opened up, our men fell as wheat before the reaper. I saw them drop.
That vision, and the piles of garbage to which those human beings were reduced, and the prevalence of blood— that is how I shall ever remember war. My sadness, my incurable grief, will always be that I never did enough for my comrades.
Robert finished reading the last page and handed it to Ellie. She read it and laid it facedown on the stack of papers. He looked directly at her, his eyes wide. Neither spoke a word as they held eye contact. In time each sat
back and looked away, their bodies aching from the tension that had held them taut as bowstrings.
“That was how I remember it too,” she said. “The truth tells itself, even when it's understated.”
“What was your role?” he said.
“To take the pressure off you.”
“Tell me,” he said.
She had been posted from the larger base at Bouresches to the field hospital at Lucy-le-Bocage, the place to which Captain Shannon returned at night. With the unquestionable strength of all natural alliances, she became more or less his receiving nurse, as he brought men in from the field of battle. She never even paused to marvel at his efforts. Her job, she told him, was to be there and take care of the wounded as reliably “as the hands travel round the face of the clock.”
Robert said, “Do you know, I have never known how many men survived— I mean, of the ones that I found.”
“You brought in over a hundred men. Day and night, mostly night. Most of them lived.”
Robert nodded, taking in this information.
She told him that within a couple of days she had drawn attention to the number of men being rescued by the chaplain. That was when she had decided to take care of Captain Shannon himself. As this dreadful failing operation continued, long before the first whiff of victory, long before the crazy bravery that finally silenced the enemy machine guns, she would lecture the chaplain. If he wished to take care of others, she told him, he must begin to take care of himself. It was a moral matter.
She showed him how. Pulling yards of strings, she arranged a series of fresh uniforms so that every morning he had clean fabrics to wear. And every night, no matter what time he finally came in, exhausted and covered in the blood of others, she made him virtually a patient— that is to say, she cared for him as for a patient, this man of whom the entire camp had begun to talk. She laid him down in his exhaustion, she bathed him discreetly, she checked him for wounds, and she organized his food.
“Everybody watched me doing this,” she said, “and nobody stopped me.” No jealousies arose, nor did anybody issue countermanding orders. They understood that the chaplain needed physical backup for his extraordinary
scheme. “And in any case,” she said, “they saw that for the rest of the time I worked harder than anybody else.”
It seemed as though she meant to match the chaplain's stamina pound for pound, and as long as he kept bringing men in, she kept attending to them. She even joked with him: “Captain, you find ‘em, I'll fix ‘em.” The overworked medical teams themselves scarcely had the time to venture into the field— and given the nature of the battle, they were denied permission.
So night after night, as he went back out again, she made the assessments, allowing doctors to sleep. And while the chaplain was in the field, she closed the eyes of those who didn't live. Only now and then, an hour at a time, did she snatch any sleep.
Nurse Kennedy was also the one who retained objectivity. She soon began to consider the chaplain's efforts too great. It would only be a question of time before the priest himself succumbed to injury or exhaustion.
And indeed he did succumb. When his mind blew, they subdued him physically. In the tent to which he had carried so many others, he himself now received morphine.
The colonel came in next day to check on the chaplain's condition. When a young doctor said, “He's carrying no life-threatening wounds,” the colonel went back to his own tent and began the paperwork that saved Robert Shannon's life by shipping him out of Belleau Wood.
So Ellie Kennedy said as she told her side of it, on a sunny day in her own house, long after the war.
But neither Ellie nor Robert told the whole story. The battle of Belleau Wood became famous. Those who wrote the history of that June and July in the beautiful Marne valley dwelt— quite appropriately— on the military significance of what had happened. A crack German force, well equipped, under an excellent general, and with huge terrain advantage, failed to hold out against men who charged them bare-chested and often bare-handed, who not only took out their nests but then turned their own machine guns on the young men in the enemy ranks. It stopped the German advance and, in the opinion of many, it turned the tide of the war.
After several minutes of sitting there, privately reflecting on what they had read and reliving as far as they dared the days of Belleau Wood, Ellie and Robert reached a hand to each other at the same time. Not in the nights by the fire, he reading, she pretending to, not in the awkward mornings when she went into his room, awakened him, and helped him start the bad days, not in the sweetest of times walking by the river or simply sitting on the bank looking at the water— not once had they reached out simultaneously like this. She rose and led him by the hand into the garden.
Robert had astounded himself— over the days and weeks— by what he wrote. And then he astounded himself anew by reading it. As he did so, he reflected upon his own reach, upon his capacity to have recovered enough to put such recollections in words.
Is this how to find my soul?
Out-of-doors with Ellie that day he saw a garden greener than a garden ever was, felt a breeze blow warmer than a breeze ever blew, heard a bird sing sweeter than a bird ever sang. The senses of both people were heightened; everything felt brighter, clearer, swifter.
Ellie leaned back against the door, and if she had to swear to anything at that moment she would have sworn that she could feel every piece of her entire skin, postage-stamp square by square, under her clothes. She did not want to move.
