My voice was steady. “A pekinese named Wee Wee.”
A long pause. “General Clay has a pekinese named Wee Wee?”
“Bring it over to Haldon House as soon as you find it, will you, Al?”
“A pekinese named Wee Wee?”
I lowered the phone back to its cradle. Colonel Fantine’s entire battalion put aside their ammo boxes and belts, abandoned their trucks and tractors, and began a stone to stone, bush to bush search for the dog. They found it less than an hour later, locked in a grain bin near one of the earl’s wheat fields. One of the farmhands had not looked around before locking up.
Colonel Fantine and twelve of his men drove to Haldon House in a flatbed. I notified General Clay, who hurried out to the road, thanked the colonel, and grabbed the dog.
A master sergeant who must have weighed 250 pounds, with none of it fat, called from the bed of the truck, “General, I hope you didn’t miss Wee Wee too bad.”
They tried, but the soldiers couldn’t keep it in. Their laughter rocked the truck. Colonel Fantine tried to wave them to silence, but his men were buckled over with laughter.
Master sergeants can get away with almost anything. This one knew it. He said, “General, you’d better follow Wee Wee next time she goes out for a pee pee.”
The laughter might have been heard as far away as London.
General Clay held this panting bundle of hair with as much dignity as the situation would allow, which was almost none.
He said between clenched teeth. “Colonel Royce, may I speak with you a moment?”
I followed him inside the manor, our departure hailed with another round of convulsions. Safely inside the hallway, he turned to me and said, “George Patton owns a bull terrier named Willie, as rough-and-tumble a dog as exists. Patton is famous for it. And now, Christ on a crutch, every one of my soldiers is going to think I’ve got a pekinese named Wee Wee.”
“Perhaps I didn’t think this through sufficiently, sir.”
“Jack, just as soon as you can push through the paperwork, I want you to bust yourself down to about private first class, and assign yourself the worst duty in the AEF.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t mean just KP. I mean something truly awful. Maybe bomb disposal.”
“Yes, sir.”
He walked into the library to present Wee Wee to Lady Anne.
The general must have been forgetful, because I reappeared at AEFHQ the following morning still wearing my silver oak leaves and carrying my notebook, and he did not say anything about it.
General Clay had bigger things on his mind, the defense of England. We return now to the beaches.
12
Private Ray Chase had been dozing about twenty minutes, lying across his pack with his feet on a box of rations, when a blast dropped a lump of cement and a yard of dirt into his trench. He leaped up, coughing against the dust and trying to swat it away with his hands. Immediately another explosion tumbled the earth above him, rippling the walls of the trench and shaking Chase’s insides.
He sank to his pack, spitting sand and dirt, hearing his sergeant call over the ringing in his ears. Chase yelled out, “I’m OK, Sarge.”
The concrete had smashed a canister of M2 HB machine gun ammunition. Bullets in their belts covered the duckboards on the trench floor. Chase thought of repacking them, but then another round screamed into the ground above, and more debris dropped on him. He would sit right there.
More rounds, each seemingly closer than the last. The trench filled with dust. The earthen wall vibrated against the private’s back, pushing him off balance. He righted himself. He tried to look skyward, to his post at the machine gun, but pebbles rained on him. The sound was of the sky splitting and the earth opening. He wanted only to burrow deeper into his hole.
He held his hand to his helmet lid and peered to his right. Tom Osborne was crouched there, gripping his Ml, his head buried in his chest and his eyes squeezed tightly closed.
“You with us, Tom?” Chase bellowed. He could not hear his own voice above the bombardment. He tried again. Still not a distinguishable sound. There were half a dozen other soldiers along his portion of the trench, but it was a traversed system, a zigzag designed to prevent an enemy who jumped into it from shooting its entire length and to contain explosive bursts. So he could see only a few of his fellows. Chase slumped lower, wishing the trench were fifty feet deep instead of twelve.
His dugout was just off the beach and had been on the receiving end of explosives before, but nothing like this. The private did not know if these were lobbed by German ships or dropped by planes. The sound alone crushed him inward, sucking the air out of his lungs. He lowered his helmet to the bridge of his nose. He drew his legs closer, so his knees were against his chin.
Good Christ, he wanted out of the trench. There was a time a week or so ago when he considered going SIW, self-inflicted wound, a comfortable one in his leg or foot. He once read somewhere that nineteenth-century Russian serfs knocked out their own front teeth so they would not be able to bite a musket cartridge and thus avoid conscription. He laughed at the serfs’ cowardice at the time. Not now.
He opened his eyes to a slit, and they found his new green stripe below his chevrons. All Allied combat troops—British, Canadians, Americans, Poles, Free French, the lot, but only combat forces—had been awarded the stripe two days before. It didn’t make him feel better.
It should not have been possible, but the roar of bombs escalated, bucking the walls of the trench and dropping football-size dirt clods on him. Ray Chase was frightened to his core, not so much of the bombardment, but of the silence that would come momentarily if this were the invasion. The last bomb would hit. The walking barrage up the beach would end. For a moment, serenity would come to the FEBA (another acronym from the staff college dolts, short for forward edge of battle area).
This deadly calm would begin the race to the parapets, the fortified top edge of the trench. If the German invaders rushing up the beach behind the barrage arrived first, Chase and his friends would die. If Chase got there first, the Germans would be obliterated. His machine gun would see to that.
Chase thought he heard his sergeant again. He brought his head up. Instead it was the corpsman, waving at him. A blanket of sand fell between them, but the medic appeared again, still waving. Cursing, the machine gunner rose to his knees and crawled north on the planks. The din was unceasing.
The corpsman yelled into Chase’s ear, “I need your help. Some wounded ahead.”
The private followed him around a bend in the trench. Sitting on the planks, motionless as if asleep, were three of his buddies, their legs ranged out in front of them and their rifles across their laps. Their eyes were open.
The corpsman bent over them, taking pulses, shining his flashlight into their eyes. He turned to Chase. “I won’t need your help after all. They’re dead.”
“Dead?” Chase yelled above the storm of bombs retorts. “They’re not dead. Just look at them.”
The corpsman didn’t have the time. He moved along the trench. Chase knelt to his friends. They were still and unseeing. And dead. “Jesus.”
Chase could not have known, but a bomb blast above them had created an instant vacuum in his friends’ body organs, hemorrhaging their brains and spinal cords. Otherwise, they were untouched.
Chase crawled back around the corner to his post under his weapon. He sat on his pack and clutched his legs, forming himself into a ball. He shuddered under the crack and thunder of the explosives.
God, he wanted out of the trench. He closed his eyes so tightly they hurt. Anywhere, God, anywhere in the world but here.