Click, click, my keeper turns to the left. Thock, thock, thock, he transfers his rifle, waits. The Old Guard—the 3rd U.S. Infantry—never quits. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week: can you imagine? Three a.m. on Christmas morning, say, with snow tumbling down and nobody around except a lot of dead veterans, and here’s this grim, silent sentinel strutting past my tomb? It gives me the creeps.
The division surgeons spliced me together as best they could, but I knew they’d left some chips behind because my chest hurt like hell. A week after I was taken off the critical list, they gave me a month’s pay and sent me to Bar-le-Duc for some rest and relaxation, which everybody knew meant cognac and whores.
The whole village was a red light district, and if you had the francs you could find love around the clock, though you’d do well to study the choices and see who had that itchy look a lady acquires when she’s got the clap. And so it was that on the 1st of July, as the hot French twilight poured into a cootie-ridden bordello on the Place Vendome, Wilbur Hines’s willy finally put to port after nineteen years at sea. Like Cantigny, it was quick and confusing and over before I knew it. I had six more days coming to me, though, and I figured it would get better.
My keeper heads north, twenty-one paces. The sun beats down. The sweatband of his cap is rank and soggy. Click, click: right face. His eyes lock on the river.
I loved Bar-le-Duc. The citizens treated me like a war hero, saluting me wherever I went. There’s no telling how far you’ll go in this world if you’re willing to belly rip a few German teenagers.
Beyond the Poilu and the hookers, the cafes were also swarming with Bolsheviks, and I must admit their ideas made sense to me—at least, they did by my fourth glass of Chateau d’Yquem. After Cantigny, with its flying metal and Alvin Piatt walking around with a bloody stump screaming “Mommy!” I’d begun asking the same questions as the Bolshies, such as, “Why are we having this war, anyway?” When I told them my family was poor, the Bolshies got all excited, and I hadn’t felt so important since the army took me. I actually gave those fellows a few francs, and they promptly signed me up as a noncom in their organization. So now I held two ranks, PFC in the American Expeditionary Forces and lance corporal in the International Brotherhood of Proletarian Veterans or whatever the hell they were calling themselves.
My third night on the cathouse circuit, I got into an argument with one of the tarts. Fifi—I always called them Fifi—decided she’d given me special treatment on our second round, something to do with her mouth, her bouche, and now she wanted twenty francs instead of the usual ten. Those ladies thought every Doughboy was made of money. All you heard in Bar-le-Duc was “les Americains, beaucoup d’argent.”
“Dix francs,” I said.
“Vingt,” Fifi insisted. Her eyes looked like two dead snails. Her hair was the color of Holstein dung.
“Dix.”
“Vingt—or I tell ze MP you rip me,” Fifi threatened. She meant rape.
“Dix,” I said, throwing the coins on the bed, whereupon Fifi announced with a tilted smile that she had “a bad case of ze VD” and hoped she’d given it to me.
Just remember, you weren’t there. Your body wasn’t full of raw metal, and you didn’t have Fifi’s clap, and nobody was expecting you to maintain a lot of distinctions between the surrendering boys you were supposed to stab and the Frog tarts you weren’t. It was hot. My chest hurt. Half my friends had died capturing a pissant hamlet whose streets were made of horse manure. And all I could see were those nasty little clap germs gnawing at my favorite organs.
My Remington stood by the door. The bayonet was tinted now, the color of a turnip; so different from the war itself, that bayonet—no question about its purpose. As I pushed it into Fifi and listened to the rasp of the steel against her pelvis, I thought how prophetic her mispronunciation had been: I tell ze MP you rip me.
I used the fire escape. My hands were wet and warm. All the way back to my room, I felt a gnawing in my gut like I’d been gassed. I wished I’d never stood on my toes in the Boalsburg Recruiting Station. A ditty helped. After six reprises and a bottle of cognac, I finally fell asleep.
The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, parlez-vous? The mademoiselle from Bar-le-Duc, She’ll screw you in the chicken coop, Hinky Dinky, parlez-vous?
On the sixteenth of July I boarded one of those 40 and 8 trains and rejoined my regiment, now dug in along the Marne. A big fight had already happened there, sometime in ‘14, and they were hoping for another. I was actually glad to be leaving Bar-le-Duc, for all its wonders and delights. I knew the local gendarmes were looking into the Fifi matter.
Click, click, thock, thock, thock. My keeper pauses, twenty-one seconds. He marches south down the black path.
At the Marne they put me in charge of a Hotchkiss machine gun, and I set it up on a muddy hill, the better to cover the forward trench where they’d stationed my platoon. I had two good friends in that hole, and so when Captain Mallery showed up with orders from le general—we were now part of the XX French Corps—saying I should haul the Hotchkiss a mile downstream, I went berserk.
“Those boys are completely exposed,” I protested. The junk in my chest was on fire. “If there’s an infantry attack, we’ll lose ’em all.”
“Move the Hotchkiss, Private Johnson,” the captain said.
“That’s not a very good idea,” I said.
“Move it.”
“They’ll be naked as jaybirds.”
“Move it. Now.”
A couple of wars later, of course, attacks on officers by their own men got raised to a kind of art form—I know all about it, I like to read the tourists’ newspapers—but this was 1918 and the concept was still in its infancy. I certainly didn’t display much finesse as I pulled out my Colt revolver and in a pioneering effort shot Mallery through the heart. It was all pretty crude.
And then, damn, who should happen by but the CO. himself, crusty old Colonel Horrocks, his eyes bulging with disbelief. He told me I was arrested. He said I’d hang. But by then I was fed up. I was fed up with gas scares and Alvin Piatt getting his arm blown off. I was fed up with being an American infantry private and an honorary Bolshevik, fed up with greedy hookers and gonorrhea and the whole dumb, bloody, smelly war. So I ran. That’s right: ran, retreated, quit the western front.
Unfortunately, I picked the wrong direction. I’d meant to make my way into Chateau-Thierry and hide out in the cathouses till the Mallery affair blew over, but instead I found myself heading toward Deutschland itself, oh yes, straight for the enemy line. Stupid, stupid.
When I saw my error, I threw up my hands.
And screamed.
“Komerad! Komerad!”
Bill Johnson nee Wilbur Hines never fought in the Second Battle of the Marne. He never helped his regiment drive the Heinies back eight miles, capture four thousand of the Kaiser’s best troops, and kill God knows how many more. This private missed it all, because the Boche hit him with everything they had. Machine gun fire, grape-shot, rifle bullets, shrapnel. A potato masher detonated. A mustard shell went off. Name: unknown. Address: unknown. Complexion: charred. Eye color: no eyes. Hair: burned off. Weeks later, when they scraped me off the Marne floodplain, it was obvious I was a prime candidate for the Arlington program. Lucky for me, Colonel Hor-rocks got killed at Soissons. He’d have voted me down.
As I said, I read the newspapers. I keep up. That’s how I learned about my father. One week after they put me in this box, Harry Hines cheated at seven-card stud and was bludgeoned to death by the loser with a ball-peen hammer. He made the front page of the Centre County Democrat.