"Fahnstock!" Smiling Jack said.
"Yes, Sir?"
"Is this man telling the truth?"
"Yes, Sir. He slipped."
Smiling Jack looked around helplessly and furiously. "If I find out you're lying…" He left the sentence threateningly in the air. "All right, Whitacre, finish up here. There're travel orders for you in the orderly room. You're being transferred. Go on and pick them up."
He glared once more at the two men and turned and stalked away, after exacting a salute.
Michael watched the retreating, frustrated back.
"You son of a bitch," said Fahnstock, "if I catch you again I'll razor-cut you."
"Nice to have known you," Michael said lightly. "Clean those pots nice and bright now."
He tossed away his hammer and strode lightly towards the orderly room, tapping his rear pocket to make sure the bottle wasn't showing.
With his orders in his pocket, later on, and a neat bandage on his cheek, Michael packed his kit. Colonel Pavone had come through, and Michael was to report to him in London immediately. As he packed, Michael sipped at his bottle, and planned, craftily, to take no chances, volunteer for nothing, take nothing seriously. Survive, he thought, survive; it is the only lesson I have learned so far.
He drove down to London in an Army truck the next morning. The people of the villages along the road cheered and made the V sign with their fingers because they thought every truck now was on its way to France, and Michael and the other soldiers in the truck waved back cynically, grinning and laughing.
They passed a British convoy near London, loaded with armed infantrymen. On the rear truck, there was a dourly chalked legend. "DON'T CHEER, GIRLS, WE'RE BRITISH."
The British infantrymen did not even look up when the American truck sped by them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE Landing Craft Infantry wallowed in the water until four o'clock in the afternoon. At noon a barge took off their wounded, all properly bandaged and transfused. Noah watched the swathed, blanketed men being swung over the side on stretchers, thinking, with a helpless touch of envy: They are going back, they are going back, in ten hours they will be in England, in ten days they may be in the United States, what luck, they never had to fight at all.
But then, when the barge was only a hundred feet away, it was hit. There was a splash beside it, and nothing seemed to be happening for a moment. But then it slowly rolled over and the blankets and the bandages and the stretchers whirled in the choppy green water for a minute or two, and that was all. Donnelly had been one of the wounded, with a piece of shrapnel in his skull, and Noah looked for Donnelly in the froth and heavy cloudy water, but there was no sign of him. He never got a chance to use that flame-thrower, Noah thought dully. After all that practice.
Colclough was not to be seen. He was down below all day and Lieutenant Green and Lieutenant Sorenson were the only officers of the Company on deck. Lieutenant Green was a frail, girlish-looking man, and everybody made fun of him all through training, because of his mincing walk and high voice. But he walked around on deck, among the wounded and the sick and the men who were sure they were going to die, and he was cheerful and competent and helped with the bandages and the blood transfusions, and kept telling everyone the boat was not going to sink, the Navy was working on the engines, they would be in on the beach in fifteen minutes. He still walked in that silly, mincing way, and his voice was no lower and no more manly than usual, but Noah had the feeling that if Lieutenant Green, who had run a dry-goods store in South Carolina before the war, had not been on board, half the Company would have jumped over the side by two in the afternoon.
It was impossible to tell how things were going on the beach. Burnecker even made a joke about it. All the long morning he had kept saying, in a strange, rasping voice, holding violently on to Noah's arms when the shells hit the water close to them, "We're going to get it today. We're going to get it today." But about midday he got hold of himself. He stopped vomiting and ate a K ration, complaining about the dryness of the cheese, and then he seemed to have either resigned himself or become more optimistic. When Noah peered out at the beach, on which shells were falling and men running and mines going up, and asked Burnecker, "How is it going?" Burnecker said, "I don't know. The boy hasn't delivered my copy of the New York Times yet." It wasn't much of a joke, but Noah laughed wildly at it and Burnecker grinned, pleased with the effect, and from then on, in the Company, long after they were deep in Germany, when anybody asked how things were going, he was liable to be told, "The boy hasn't delivered the New York Times yet."
The hours passed in a long, cold, grey haze for Noah, and much later, when he tried to remember how he had felt, while the boat was rolling helplessly, its decks slimy with blood and sea water, and the shells hitting at random around him from time to time, he could only recall isolated, insignificant impressions – Burnecker's joke; Lieutenant Green bent over, holding his helmet with weird fastidiousness for a wounded man to vomit in; the face of the Naval Lieutenant in command of the landing craft, when he hung over the side to inspect the damage, red, angry, baffled, like a baseball player who has been victimized by a nearsighted umpire; Donnelly's face, after his head had been bandaged, its usual coarse, brutal lines all gone, now composed and serene in its unconsciousness, like a nun in the movies – Noah remembered these things and remembered looking a dozen times an hour to see if his satchel charges were still dry, and looking again and again to see if the safety-catch was on his rifle and forgetting two minutes later and looking again…
Fear came in waves, during which he could only crouch against the rail, helpless, holding his lips still, not thinking about anything. Then there were periods when he would feel above it all, as though it were not happening to him, as though this could never happen to him, and because it could not happen he could not be hurt, and if he could not be hurt there was nothing to be afraid of. Once he took out his wallet and gravely stared for a long time at the picture of Hope, smiling, holding a fat baby in her arms, the baby with its mouth wide open, yawning.
In the periods when he was not afraid, his mind seemed to run on without conscious direction from him, as though that part of him were bored with the day's activities and was amusing itself in recollections, like a schoolboy dreaming at his desk on a June day with the sun outside and the insects humming sleepily… Captain Colclough's speech in the staging area near Southampton a week before (was it only a week, in the sweet-smelling May woods, with the three good meals a day and the barrel of beer in the recreation tent, and the blossoms hanging over the tanks and cannon and the movies twice a day, Madame Curie, Greer Garson in a lady-like, well-dressed search for radium, Betty Grable's bare legs – doing God knows what for the morale of the infantry – flickering on the screen that flapped with each gust of wind in the tent, could it only be a week?)…
"This is the showdown, Men…" (Captain Colclough used the word "Men" twenty times in the speech.) "You're as well trained as any soldiers in the world. When you go on to that beach you're going to be better equipped, better trained, better prepared than the slimy bastards you're going to meet. Every advantage is going to be on your side. Now it is going to be a question of your guts against his. Men, you are going to go in there and kill the Kraut. That's all you're going to think about from this minute on, killing the bastards. Some of you are going to get hurt, Men, some of you are going to get killed. I'm not going to play it down or make it soft. Maybe a lot of you are going to get killed…" He spoke slowly, with satisfaction.