Roll Me Over Read online

  But when I saw the gray-faced peasants of France and Belgium stand for motionless moments staring at the gutted wreckage of their homes; when I saw them kneel and start patiently to separate the whole tiles from the broken, the good timbers from the useless splinters; when they turned from their labors to smile at us and run smiling to pin flowers on our jackets—I woke up. I saw that life goes on, and that’s a good thing. It was right that the pattern, whenever broken, be patiently started once more by the brave at heart, and not abandoned in despair. It was right that when one of us dropped out, the gap should close up or be filled and life kept flowing, the complex structure maintained by any means because its units were so interdependent. Armies and wars were extracurricular; the basic structure remained always the same. And I knew that it was because / was now involved in this extracurricular activity—a bloody luxury for which I had no taste—that I had become so acutely conscious of the gap between myself, wearing a uniform, and the civilian. The peasants taught me the validity of that gap, the justice of it. Once I accepted that bitter condition, I was able (some of the time, at least) to shake off the numbing sense of estrangement from the world.

  We’d barely settled ourselves, tents up and slit trenches dug, before the kids started drifting out from Bastogne. “Goom?” they’d say. “Choong goom?” One of them, a freckle-faced youngster about eight years old, sidled up to me. After a solemn exchange of the amenities, we discovered to our mutual delight that we enjoyed the same first name. Secretly I felt that such a bond ought to put me off limits, spare me the customary appeal. Noblesse oblige, I thought. But no! He opened up by asking for shoes pour Papa. I assured him no dice; I had no shoes pour Papa. Then brightly, as though he had only that moment thought of it, “Cigarillos? Cigarettes?” Registering shock, I said, “Pour toi?” Grinning, he answered, “Oui... et mon papa!” I was low on cigarettes and rations were erratic, so I decided Papa had better fend for himself awhile longer and Junior was better off without them. I gave him some candy, we exchanged solemn smiles, and presently he wandered off and I heard his voice at the next tent. “Goom? Choong goom?”

  Time moved on mud-heavy feet in the Bastogne woods. We slept, we huddled around tiny fires and tried to get warm, we wrote letters, we talked idly and passionately about anything and nothing and sweated out the next chow time. Sometimes we sang, and the songs we chose offer an interesting commentary on the “popular” music of wartime.

  Early in the war I had started a collection of war songs, just for the hell of it. It soon became apparent that all war music fell roughly into three categories.

  The first category was the straight love theme, the tear- jerker: the gallant hero off to meet the enemy, and the true- blue sweetheart left behind, who apparently divided her time evenly between praying, weeping, and (judging from the number of promises it required) trying like hell to remain faithful. There were some ingratiating melodies in this group; it was the lyrics that gagged.

  The second category was the real nux vomica section. It contained the songs that made capital of honest feeling and attempted to cash in on patriotism. Consider such nauseous messes as “We’ve Gotta Slap the Dirty Little Jap” and “Goodbye Mama, I’m Off to Yokohama.” Mawkishness was a staple in this trade, and the offensively creamy use of good phrases: “This Is Worth Fighting For”...“Comin’ in on a Wing and a Prayer.” Absolute zero was reached by a little gem called “Send This Purple Heart to My Sweetheart.”

  Subheading A in this group was the “religion cum patriotism” school, including such things as “I Had a Little Talk with the Lord,” and “We’ve Got the Lord on Our Side.” No comment.

  The third group was made up of songs that were real attempts to create music for the men in service, music designed for the singing and marching of men, rather than the lucrative weeping of the folks at home. Songs like “In My Arms,” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition,” and “What Do You Do in the Infantry?” Oddly, the two most popular songs in my outfit were British in origin: the rollicking “I’ve Got Sixpence,” and “Bless ’em All.” The Australian “Waltzing Matilda” was well-liked, too, but I never met anyone who knew all the words. And perhaps the most popular of them all was the German “Lili Marlene,” a particular favorite of American and British troops who’d seen service in Africa.

  Perhaps there ought to be a fourth category, one closely related to the third by virtue of a tough and humorous acknowledgment that war is not all beer and skittles, heroic heroes and faithful females. Songs in this group were written with a courteous bow to the serviceman’s point of view, but they did not lend themselves easily to unison singing or to marching. Here, with a C rating, I’d list “Three Little Sisters.” I’d give a B rating to “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.” And here, marked with a triple-A rating in purest gold, I’d list “G.I. Jive” and “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old.”

  All this is only the prelude to my discovery that most men in uniform were left cold by ninety percent of the musical crap that, theoretically, was dedicated to the war effort. (And that’s a lousy phrase, too: “The war effort!”) On those rare and sentimental times when it was safe to sing and we were drunk enough to feel like it, there was an occasional chorus of a tune that had been popular when we left the States. But for the most part our sentimental yearnings were best satisfied by older music, music antedating the war by many years and minus the phony war flavor. Songs like “In the Evening by the Moonlight,” “Home on the Range,” “I Want a Girl,” “Drifting and Dreaming,” “Moonlight Bay.” Locker-room favorites, songs from summertime front porches in Kansas and Vermont and Jersey and Texas. And the ageless favorite of all males, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

  As for war songs per se, we sang the kind with which soldiers from time immemorial have cheered themselves. Dirty songs, songs that reflected with rough, brutish humor our intense need for women and our hunger for the soft world of women. I am stoutly convinced that when Achilles sallied from his tent to avenge dead Patroclus, the drinking song of the night before that still roared in his ears was an old Greek version of “Roll Me Over in the Clover.” And Beowulf and his hairy crew, carving the white swan road, bellowed the Scandinavian equivalent of “Mabel, Get Off the Table.” The old army promise, “An old soldier never dies!” is peacetime talk, barracks talk, but there is a larger truth implied here: soldiers are deathless, and war is forever. The terrain shifts, the weapons evolve beyond recognition, the uniforms and slogans change, but some things he beyond the power of the centuries to alter, and there are aspects of modern army life and modern war that a centurion of Caesar’s army would find nostalgically familiar. Soldiers lying down each night with sudden death their bedmate are concerned with five things only. Three of them are physical: food, sleep, shelter. The other two, though physical at source, are heavily charged with emotional implications.

  Men complain about the first three; they piss and moan endlessly. Yet without them they can endure for incredibly long periods of time, finding new reserves of strength each time it seems the end has been reached. But the other two, home and sex, eat inward, and the secret preoccupation with them strips off in unguarded moments the tough, protective, masculine sheathing, lays bare the soft places in men. It is a nakedness too revealing to contemplate, and only the unperceptive are shocked or outraged to hear a weary man say hoarsely, “By Christ, if my wife was here now, right now, I’d clip her in the jaw, just a tittle tap, just to remind her I’m still boss, an’ then I’d throw her in bed so goddamn fast she wouldn’t even have time to get her shoes off!” The words are crude, but the hunger of the voice hints at all the loveliness men have surmised in women and sanctified with music and poetry and high art.

  (There will be many references to the soldier and sex in this journal, but I draw a line between the raw license that came on the heels of V-E Day and the hunger during the combat months, the hunger that sometimes was rape, orgy, or satyriasis, hunger born of the hovering presence of death
and the wild desire not to die unsatisfied, with a body still fierce and full and unused.)

  To return to war music and dirty songs: several were more obscene than “Roll Me Over,” but I heard none that seemed as witty. And Kate Smith, Irving Berlin, and the American Legion notwithstanding, I heard “God Bless America” not a single time while I was overseas, an aesthetic deprivation that distressed me not at all.

  Maybe all this talk about sex and dirty songs gives the impression that men in wartime have one thought only in their inflamed minds. That’s not true, of course. There was a lot of talk about sex, sure, but so is there in a clubhouse locker room or a fraternity house bull session. We did talk about other things, honest! We even thought about other things.

  Food was a major topic of conversation. We bitched a lot about the quality and quantity, mostly the quantity, of army food, and sometimes with reason. Here’s a sample of our breakfast menu while we lay in the woods near Bastogne: one-half ladle of hot cereal, one-third canteen cup of coffee, one small teaspoon of sugar (you could choose: either in your coffee or on your cereal), one tablespoon of milk (same choice), four dog biscuits (hardtack about the size of graham crackers), and one slice of bacon. I admit that this menu represents one of the bad days and often we ate better. But sometimes we ate worse, and there were many days when even the daintiest eaters wholeheartedly agreed with the wit who said, “In this goddamn army you don’t get enough to eat in a week to have one good bowel movement!”

  Neither Supply nor our field kitchens and mess sergeants should be blamed for the food situation, by the way. They did an admirable job under trying conditions. I don’t blame anyone, as a matter of fact, because I don’t know where the blame should lie. It was just one of those things, and I mention it only because food and the lack of it was so important to us.

  We’d sit around our daytime fires—fires at night were not permitted because of the danger of air raids—and talk about food, talk about the things we’d like to be eating. There was plenty of time to write long letters home, and when our wives received them and tore them open, looking eagerly for words of love and comfort, they found us drooling about the things we wanted to eat when we came home! Here’s a sample, taken from one of my Bastogne letters:

  I have been thinking long, tender thoughts of the dishes you cook that I’m particularly fond of: rich, dark chocolate cake, heavy with fudge icing ... grilled kidneys and bacon ... that favorite menu of ours—roast pork, accompanied by red cabbage that has been cooked with red wine and apples... shrimp curry... strawberry shortcake and cherry pie... steak, two inches thick, and new potatoes, glazed and browned in the oven... pumpkin pie, with the extra tang that a shot of good liquor gives it... our favorite omelette with that special liver sauce... those Swedish cookies that you roll in powdered sugar while they’re still hot... apple pie with cream, hot mince pie—why the hell am I doing this?

  Why indeed? All I know is that it passed many long hours almost pleasantly, and it was even possible to sustain a glow of anticipation while trotting through the mud with clanging mess gear, en route to what was sure to be another unsavory arrangement of Spam and green beans.

  Another fireside discussion that took place at least once a day always started the same way. Some sorehead would start to burlesque FDR’s famous and easily mimicked voice: “I don’t like waw! Eleanaw doesn’t like waw!” Then, the mimicry having served its purpose as introduction, he would say in his normal voice, “Why, that sonofabitch!” And we’d be off again. I know now that much of it was bitching just for the sake of bitching, a safety valve that relieved other pressures. My judgment was not so charitable at the time, but I learned discretion; those of us who protested the easy blindness of this standard gripe were regarded as the close relatives of the Antichrist. After a while we just shrugged and let the stuff roll off our backs.

  Thinking about the bull sessions in the Bastogne woods reminds me of an incident at Camp Shanks a day or two before we sailed. We had been alerted, and were confined to our barracks. We were tense and restless, talkative because we were frightened. I stretched on my bunk and tried to read, but soon dropped the book and eavesdropped on a conversation a few bunks away.

  In the main it was a diatribe directed against the Negro. The biggest mouth of them all was telling the others of an argument he’d had during basic training with “some nineteen-year-old college bastard” who was apparently so stupid that he couldn’t see the difference between a white skin and a black. All the weary old chestnuts were dragged out: “Would you let your sister go out with a Negro? Would you eat outta the same plate, use the same fork?” (An absurdity that always makes me yearn to reply, “No, and I never share my toothbrush with my wife, either!”) Encouraged by approving grunts, the gabby one spouted on and on, ever more loose-mouthed, and my anger rose in pace with his clichéd eloquence. With each moment that passed and no protest raised, I grew a little more sick inside, too, because if that was the way these men felt, then we weren’t in the same war, we weren’t fighting for the same things. We were enemies, not sharers in a common hazard. And yet I knew I didn’t really believe that, because these were good Joes, fundamentally. Most of them. It was just that they had accepted the easy solution of label-sticking, and the label had become their stock answer to bothersome questions. The label was the important thing and not what was hidden under it, and the army was doing a lousy job of teaching them to be more careful with the labels.

  So I lay in my bunk and got sicker and madder, and finally decided there was no other way out I’d have to get in that discussion, even though I’d certainly end up by having a label slapped on me—not to mention a possible poke in the jaw. I swung my legs over the edge of my bunk, and as I did so, a Jewish boy with whom I’d become acquainted walked over to my bunk, leaned an arm on it, and looked up. Neither of us spoke, and after a moment he turned away, murmuring, “I guess I don’t have to say anything.” I glanced down the length of the barracks and saw another man sitting erect on his bunk, listening. He looked over, flashed a smile of warmth and understanding, and there was another ally. Turning, I glanced at the sergeant who slept on the upper next to me. He opened one eye, grinned, and put his finger warningly to his lips. And I lay down again, heartened beyond belief. Democracy was saved! Jack Dalton Rides Again! Maybe in the entire barracks there were only four of us opposed to that hot little group up the row, but that was a better ratio than us radicals usually got. We’d make out.

  One final note on Camp Shanks. For many years I’ve concealed a degenerate interest in latrine interior decoration. By artistic standards it may be primitive, even infantile, but there are real and occasionally, flashes of genuine wit. The latrine at Shanks was decorated from ceiling to floor, and since it was a large one—a thirty-holer, at least—the representation of “art” and “literature” was sizable.

  The common quality that made these testimonials unique was that they had been scrawled by men in the army, most of whom were about to ship for whatever unknown awaited them overseas, a few days or weeks away. The prevailing note was sexual, of course, but sex with a difference, sex plus nostalgia, sex with overtones of despair because the delights of the flesh were ended for a time. Or forever. There were dithyrambs of praise for the special glories of “New York tail”; there were also the bitter comments of those who had been disappointed, those who had found New York only a glorified chop joint and all the women lecherous and greedy. Most of these men had already been touched by a sense of transiency, the cold warning of danger and death and decay. There was poignancy in their farewells to shapely breasts and warm thighs. And in their boasts of unique sexual development and prowess in bed there was something frightened, something that informed with what desperate premonitions they hugged the comfort of their own maleness to themselves.

  There was something else on those walls, too, something new and sobering in latrine literature: a devout consecration of self to God. Prayers for protection, statements of simple protestations of f
aith and innocence, vows of future purity, oaths of vengeance for brothers or cousins already fallen in action. More than a third of the messages on those wooden walls were like that, the world of the flesh already behind and only the world of the spirit holding hope of life and return. It was a curious and moving juxtaposition. But it was logical and simple and not incongruous.

  This is as good a place as any to give a well-merited plug to the Editions for Armed Services, Inc., a nonprofit organization established by the Council on Books in Wartime, composed of American publishers, librarians, and booksellers. Through their efforts we were kept supplied with a truly catholic selection of current best-sellers, old live-forevers, westerns, short stories, mysteries, and an excellent variety of nonfiction.

  No one who has ever known the slow acid of waiting, day after weary day, for something to happen can appreciate how important those books were to us. They were particularly precious through the long weeks we spent in replacement depots, and again when the war was ended and we had time on our hands. But even during combat we valued them and carried them in our packs until the moment when even those few ounces had to be pared from loads grown suddenly too heavy. I abandoned my pocket-size Shakespeare one weary day in the cellar of a ruined farmhouse and regretted my hastiness for weeks afterward.

  My thanks and gratitude to the Editions for the Armed Services. I think the bread they cast upon the waters will someday return to them as a fully equipped bakery: many men thus discovered the world of books for the first time. Not all of them will forget it when they’re civilians again.

  Nothing important happened while we were in the Bastogne woods. The days passed in a kind of dull struggle to keep warm and get enough to eat. After we’d been there awhile, occasional three-hour passes were granted and we’d walk the railroad tracks to Bastogne, get a meal in a restaurant, buy souvenirs and fruit and pastry at shocking prices. We