Once They Heard the Cheers Read online

  "I'm no psycho," I said.

  "You will be if you don't pull yourself together," John said. "You want to be sent home? Then you better stop this. You better just write your piece for today and say to yourself, 'That's that for today and there's another day tomorrow.' "

  "There isn't for a lot of them," I said.

  "You've got to do that," John said. "You really have to do that."

  We talked for another half hour or so, and then John left, telling me again to just take it one day at a time, and I finished my piece, such as it was. It was about how the Germans had all the main roads, and all the crossroads in the forest zeroed in for their artillery, and about how they had the pillboxes hidden among the trees and about the land mines that would explode at knee height and take a man's legs and his masculinity and about the almost invisible trip wires they had strung from tree to tree so that, when they were touched, they would set off a whole chain of explosives.

  When I finished I took the piece across the street to where the censors were set up, and I handed it to one of them and I came back and went to bed. I was fortunate that night because there was no way I could have known then that it would take more than three months to get the Germans out of what remained of that forest, and that five infantry divisions and parts of four others would be chewed up and we would suffer 33,000 casualties in there. I was fortunate, too, that I had John Groth for a friend and that he scared me about being sent home, and I lay in bed that night thinking about that and about how odd it was that he should be fathering me because we were always fathering John.

  John was the most impressionable of all of us, and he saw everything through the wide, unspoiled eyes of a child. He knew little about the martial art, about troop dispositions or unit actions, and when, now and then, the others of us would get into an argument about where we were going, John would never put in but just come along.

  "Wherever you guys are going," he'd say, "it's all right with me.

  When we got up to where we were going, and the rest of us were trying to cover our ignorance with professional poses, the way insecure outsiders do when they want to seem to belong, John would ask the simple civilian questions that were the best, but that gave the impression that he had no idea of what was going on.

  "But I don't understand," John would ask some major or captain who was filling us in. "Why are you fellows going to do that?"

  It was the same two years later, when I took him to Stillman's gym the first time. After I introduced him to Lou Stillman, I left him standing behind the two rings on the main floor while I went back to the dressing rooms to interview some fighter, probably one who would be fighting in the Garden that Friday night. When I came back out a half hour or so later, John was still standing there and sketching, with the fighters shadow boxing around him and sparring in the raised rings above him.

  "How are you doing?" I said.

  "I don't know," he said, showing me his notebook and riffling through the pages.

  "Hold it a second," I said. "Go back a couple of pages. There. That's Rocky Graziano's right leg, isn't it?"

  Graziano toed in with his right foot, and his right leg was slightly bowed. I always figured that that was one of the reasons he was such a great right-hand puncher, and now, with a few quickly scrawled lines on a notebook page, John had captured with absolute definition the one leg that was distinctively different from all the other legs in that gym.

  "Who's Graziano?" John said.

  "He's the leading contender for the middleweight title," I said. "He's the hottest fighter in years."

  "Gee," John. "He is?"

  "Yes," I said, "and he's the reason most of this crowd is here in those chairs and up in the balcony."

  "Oh," John said, and then pointing, "it's that fella over there."

  "Right," I said. "That's Rocky Graziano."

  The next week, when I stopped off at the gym again, Lou Stillman spotted me as I came in. He hollered at me and motioned for me to come over to where he was sitting on the high stool under the time clock and from where he ran the traffic in and out of the two rings.

  "Listen," he said, growling at me in what someone once described in print as that ash-can voice, which Lou resented. "You know that beard you brought in here last week?"

  "John Groth?" I said.

  "Yeah," Lou said. "You know what he done? Two days later he come in here with a whole gang of beards."

  "He teaches at the Art Students' League," I said.

  "Up on my balcony there's a whole gang of beards, all of them drawin'," Lou said. "What are they tryin' to turn this place into, anyway?"

  "I don't know," I said. "Ask them."

  "You ask them," Lou said. "I ain't got time to bother with them."

  The next time I saw John, I told him what Stillman had said. I told him that Stillman had all the fighters cowed, which was the way he kept order in the gym full of them, and I said that some of that carried over to the way he talked to everyone.

  "Oh, we get along fine," John said. "You know what Stillman does at home on Sundays? He paints in oil, and we talk about that."

  "There are some fighters I know," I said, "who won't believe it."

  Lying in that bed, though, that night after John had fathered me, I remembered the time he showed up without his bedroll and slept in my trenchcoat. I remembered the time I had found him in a barn behind a chateau in France, drawing in ink with a goose quill. The dampness had affected his drawing paper, so that he couldn't get the lines he wanted with his pens, and he had run down a goose and plucked a couple of quills and sharpened them with a penknife.

  "Now I can draw thin lines, thick lines, any kind of lines I want," he said, "but with everything that's going on over here, I don't get enough chance to draw the lines."

  There was the time, too, when he was worried that he was going to lose his accreditation because he was supposed to be back at Army Group instead of up with us. Then I remembered the day he was so obviously depressed that I asked him what was wrong, and he showed me the letter he had just received from a friend back home in New York.

  "I play volleyball for the Grand Central 'Y,' " John said, "and this guy is on the team, too. He writes here, see, that they got into the semifinals of the Nationals at Kansas City, and look at this."

  With his index finger he pointed out the sentence ending one paragraph: "Al Burwinkle says that if you had been with us we would have won the national championship."

  "He's got to be kidding," I said.

  "No he's not," John said. "Al Burwinkle is our captain, and if he says we could have won it if I was there, we could have won it."

  "Those guys must be on another planet," I said. "They're playing volleyball in Kansas City and you're covering a war in Germany, and they're blaming you because they lost?"

  "That's what Al Burwinkle said," John said, and he walked away still depressed.

  So each day after the night John scared me about being sent home, I would tell myself that I would just try to do the best I could for that day, and then hope I could get more of it in, and right, the next day. I always lived, though, as most of us did, with that suppressed guilt about the way it was at the front and the way we had it, and with that growing personal fear. Man is born with the illusion that he is immortal, and as every good writer who has gone into man's reactions in war has written, he goes under fire the first time shielded by that illusion and believing that others will be killed but that it will not happen to him. Then it happens, not to him, but so close to him that it could have been to him, and that is the beginning of the fear.

  "A good soldier does not worry," Hemingway wrote in his introduction to Men at War, the anthology he edited. "He knows that nothing happens until it actually happens, and you live your life up until then. Danger only exists at the moment of danger. To live properly in war, the individual eliminates all such things as potential danger. Then a thing is only bad when it is bad. It is neither bad before nor after. Cowardice, as distinguished fr
om panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have."

  That was the problem we had, we who were not soldiers but writers, we who were not ordered by others but had to order ourselves. Each day, two or three to a jeep and with a G.I. driver from the motor pool, we would go up toward the front and stop off at Corps to be briefed on what the divisions were doing, and then we would split up by jeeps and go to one division or another. At Division they would fill us in about what the regiments were doing, and at Regiment what the battalions were doing. Then we would go up to a battalion and sometimes to a company or a platoon until we got what we thought were our stories.

  At first, and functioning behind that illusion of immortality, we all bore ourselves as if we were brave, but then, depending upon what happened around us, and to us, and upon our separate abilities to suspend our imaginations, we all came to live in fear. Then it became more difficult to go beyond battalion, and we went less often, and there wasn't a one of us who lived through it who could honestly say to himself that he had covered the war the way he should have. Two I knew, who had been in it too long and whose pieces had become irrational, were called home, and I heard later that, months after it was over, one of them was still walking around New York in uniform and carrying his musette bag. Then, when the Germans broke through during The Bulge, scattering our troops and us in panic, several of us, including the one who had been so irate about his wife buying that lecture by the Five Day Wonder, took off for Paris and London, and the rest understood. When their replacements arrived, we watched them sally forth behind the shields of their own illusions, as we once had, and then always that thing happened, whatever it was, near them and thus to them, and they too became, like us, cautious in their fear.

  The soldier fights the enemy and his fear, and exercises that fear, if it is not so big that he can't handle it, against the person of the enemy. For the writer, implanted weaponless in war, his two personal enemies are his guilt and his fear, and after a while it was only our guilt that sent us out against our fear. We did whatever we did because, knowing what those we left at the front were doing, we were ashamed not to, and if we were honest with ourselves, we knew that all we were doing was trying not just to go on living, but to go on living with ourselves.

  If ever there is a time to die in a war, it is not after the issue has been decided. That time came after the bridge across the Rhine was captured at Remagen, and we broke out of the bridgehead on the east bank, and one day, five years later, I was sitting in the Yankee dugout at the Stadium watching batting practice, and talking with Ralph Houk. This was when Houk was a second-string catcher with the Yankees and, of course, before he managed them and later the Detroit Tigers, and I knew what he had done in the war. Among other things, during the Bulge he had taken a night patrol in to Bastogne while the Germans had it surrounded, and he had brought out the plans for the defense of the town. During the last week of the 1949 baseball season, though, with the Yankees and the Red Sox wrestling for the pennant in a game at the Stadium, Johnny Pesky had slid home under Houk's tag with the winning run. The next day, all of the New York newspapers, and I suppose the Boston papers as well, carried a photo sequence of the play intended to let the reader make up his own mind as to whether Pesky had been safe or out, and now a lot of people finally knew Houk's name because an umpire had said he had missed a tag in a game.

  "You remember Remagen?" Houk was saying in the dugout. We had been talking about the war that had just started in Korea, and Houk had said that he couldn't tell much about it from what he read in the paper, and that got him onto our war.

  "Remagen?" I said. "Sure I remember it."

  "You remember," Houk said, "how, in the town, there was one road that turned right along the river?"

  "I know where you mean," I said. "One day I came back across the river and I was driving along our side, and somebody was working south along the other side. You know the river's nowhere near as wide there as the Hudson, and I could see and hear a fire-fight going on over there in the trees just south of the bridge."

  "You saw that?" Houk said, looking right at me.

  "Yes."

  "That was me," Houk said. "We had a hell of a fire-fight there. I'll be damned."

  "So will I," I said, sitting there and watching Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Phil Rizzuto, Hank Bauer, and the others taking their batting practice.

  Once they broke out of that bridgehead, though, and the tanks started east, the infantry rode on the tanks or in trucks for miles before they had to dismount, cursing, to clear out the scattered pockets of resistance. Now it was obvious that the Germans were finally beaten, and now the dying seemed sadder than ever. In the residential suburbs of Halle, the birthplace of Handel, they fell among the fallen petals of magnolias, when there was no longer any reason for it. Now the fear, supressed for so long, of not surviving swept the troops themselves, whole units, and we were all of us one as the time wore down slowly to that new morning.

  As I lay in that bed now, on that morning, free again at last, I heard the voices of the Germans in the yard below rising and, although I had no idea what they were saying, I could tell that they were arguing, women's voices among men's. Then the voices of two men began to dominate, as if they had singled out each other, and I thought that maybe this would turn into a fist fight, and I would enjoy seeing Germans fighting among themselves. When I got up and looked down, though, I couldn't see them through the leaves and branches of the trees, and even as I tried to make them out, the intervals between the verbal exchanges became longer and the two voices less assertive, so I went across the hall and washed and shaved. When I came back there were no sounds at all in the yard below, and I dressed and went downstairs and walked, in the cool, clear morning, around the corner to the other hotel where they fed us. We sat there, eating and then smoking with our coffee, and we were all of us loose and lazy and dull, like men who have slept themselves out for the first time in a long while.

  Several of us walked back to our hotel together. We got a jeep and a driver from the motor pool, and we drove out of Weimar into the Thuringian countryside. The lilacs were blooming in the farmyards, and under the yellow of the morning sun the apple trees were white and pink along the sides of the roads. In the rich brown fields the Germans were walking along the furrows, sowing their grain, and we went out to get a story of V-E Day in Germany because it would be the last story and it was a way to end a job.

  We drove for almost an hour, following our map and looking for the Third Armored Division, until we saw the tanks in a field on the left. There were four or five divisions that we had come to know well and for whom we had the highest admiration. The Third Armored was one, and so we had decided that we would end the war with them—or what was left of them.

  There were seventeen of the tanks parked in the field on the left and along the partial cover of a long gray barn. Across the road on the right the land rose, and on the flat of the rise and forming a quadrangle there were some low, brown wooden barracks of what had been a Nazi youth camp. We could see the tankers walking about and lolling in the sun on the plot of winter-browned grass in the middle of the quadrangle, so we drove up the rise and into the quadrangle.

  The lieutenant was the eighth commanding officer the company had had in ten months of fighting, which will give you an idea of what they had been through, and he had the Silver Star and the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart with cluster. His name was Thomas Cooper and he was from Henderson, Kentucky, and we asked him how I Company of the First Battalion of the Thirty-third Regiment of the Third Amored Division had heard the news of the German surrender.

  "I got a telephone call from Battalion headquarters at 9:10 last night," he said. "I told the first sergeant. He had an old ni
ckle-plated horn from a Kraut car, and he went to the door and blew the horn a couple of times. Then he hollered, 'The war is over. The war is over, you guys. It's official now.' "

  "Then what happened?" one of us said.

  "Nothing much," the lieutenant said. "We knew for a long time it was gonna be over."

  Some of the kids from the company were standing around us as we talked with the lieutenant. Out of the eighty-five who had started out with the I Company in Normandy, there were only six originals left on the day that peace came, and one of the best was a staff sergeant named Juan Haines from Gatesville, Texas.

  "This tank of yours," I said to Haines. "What's its name?"

  At the beginning, almost all of them gave their tanks names. I wanted to find out if the soldier who went through the war with a tank had any affection for it, if he felt anything about his tank on the day the war ended.

  "I don't rightly know," Haines said. "This is the fourth tank we had. We lost three."

  "When did your tank fire its last shot?" another of us asked, trying to establish when the war in Europe had really ended for the sergeant and the others in his tank.

  "I'll have to think," Haines said.

  He was tall and thin and with reddish hair. He stood looking at the ground at his feet.