“Well,” I said, subtly I thought, “it looks as if Michael Mallory will be leaving for the Air Force soon.”
“And here I thought we were actually going to get through a meal without hearing Will’s enlistment pitch,” my father said.
“The wheel that docs the squeaking is the wheel that gets the grease,” my mother said. “Don’t you know that, Bert?”
“If I wait till my eighteenth birthday,” I said, unrattled, “and then get drafted, I’ll end up in the Infantry.”
“Let’s wait till your eighteenth birthday and find out, shall we?” my father said.
“Sure, I’ll send you letters from Italy. Written in the mud or something.”
“You spent six summers at camp without writing a single letter,” my father said. “I have no reason to believe you’ll be changing your habits when and if you get to Italy.”
“That wasn’t my point,” I said.
“Your father knows your point,” my mother said.
“I’ll be eighteen in June,” I said.
“We know when you’ll be eighteen.”
“Well, for crying out loud, do you want me to go into the Infantry?”
“I don’t want you to go anywhere,” my father said flatly.
“Well, that’s fine, Pop, but Uncle Sam has other ideas, you know? Whether you realize it or not, there happens to be a war going on.”
“Living in the same house with you, it’d be difficult not to realize that,” my father said, and picked up his napkin, and wiped his mouth, and then looked me in the eye and said, “What’s your hurry, Will? You anxious to get killed?”
“I’m not in any hurry,” I said.
“You sound like you’re in one hell of a hurry, son.”
My sister glanced up at him quickly; it was rare to hear my father using profanity, even a word as mild as “hell.”
“I’m only trying to protect myself,” I said.
“Yes, by rushing over there to fly an airplane.”
“Yes, which is a lot safer than...”
“No one’s safe in war,” my father said. “Get that out of your head.”
“Look,” I said, “can we talk reasonably for a minute? Can we just for a minute look at this thing reasonably?”
“I’m listening,” my father said.
“It’s reasonable to expect that I have to register when I’m eighteen, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be put in 1-A, and it’s reasonable to expect I’ll be drafted.”
“Yes, that’s reasonable. Unless the war ends before then.”
“Oh, come on, Pop, you can’t believe the war’s going to end before June!”
“It may end before you’re trained and sent overseas.”
“Okay, then you should be very happy to let me join the Air Force. It takes longer to train a fighter pilot than it docs an infantryman.”
My father was silent. I felt I had made a point.
“Isn’t that reasonable?” I asked.
“It’s only reasonable for my son to stay alive until he becomes a man,” my father said.
“You stayed alive, didn’t you?” I said.
“I was lucky,” he answered.
April
I didn’t know what I was doing on a troopship in Brooklyn. I wanted to be with Nancy. Instead, I was sitting in the blacked-out hold of a British vessel, on the edge of a bunk which was the bottom one in a tier of four, waiting to sail for Brest. I couldn’t believe it. Nor could I even understand how I had got here.
My father was fond of saying that all of America’s troubles had started with the assassination, a premise I couldn’t very well argue, since I was only a year old when McKinley got shot. And even though the shock of the murder seemed to sift down through the next ten years or more, as if the idea of something so primitive happening in a nation as sophisticated as America took that long to get used to, it was never more than a historical event to me, vague and somehow unbelievable. I was, frankly, more moved when the Archduke Ferdinand and his wife got killed. Not shaken to the roots, mind you (I was fourteen, going on fifteen, too old to be carrying on like an idiot) but frightened and excited by everything that happened in the month that followed: Austria-Hungary declaring war on Servia; Russia moving 80,000 troops to the border; Germany declaring war on Russia; Germany declaring war on France; Germany invading Belgium; England declaring war on Germany; everybody declaring war on everybody else — except the United States.
We were neutral.
We were sane.
To me, in Eau Fraiche, Wisconsin, the war was something that erupted only in newspaper headlines — I didn’t know where Servia was, and I couldn’t even pronounce Sarajevo. England was the only country with which I felt any real sympathy, but that was because both my parents were of English stock; my father, in fact, had been born and raised in Liverpool. But even then, I think my own attitude about the war in those early days was a reflection of what the rest of America was thinking and feeling, or at least the rest of America as represented by the state of Wisconsin. It wasn’t our battle. We were determined to stay out of it. We had headaches enough of our own — all that mess down there in Mexico which we still hadn’t resolved, and people out of work everywhere you looked, and southern Negroes causing even bigger job problems by moving in batches to the north and the midwest — we didn’t need any war. And anyway, even though Germany’s march into Belgium had caused us to sympathize momentarily with the underdog, it was really pretty hard to believe that people related to gentle Karl Moenke, who ran a dry-goods store in Eau Fraiche, could be even remotely capable of sacking Louvain, and shooting priests and helpless women there. The war for us was fascinating but remote. We didn’t want involvement. We said we’d remain neutral, and that was our honest intention.
And yet — there was something. There’s always something about war, a contagious excitement that leaps oceans.
I couldn’t look at the battle maps printed in the Eau Fraiche Record without visualizing gallant armies massed beneath those tiny flags:
By the nineteenth of August, the line stretched from Antwerp in the north to Mulhausen in the south, passing through towns with names like Charleroi and Bastogne and Bitsch (which gave me a laugh), but it was a fluid front that changed from day to day; you could follow it like a general yourself and discuss it with other generals — here’s where I’d break through, here’s where I’d try to outflank them. In addition, you could be a general for whichever side you chose, because in the months that followed each side certainly gave us reason to believe it was right and the other was wrong. If the Germans were cutting off the breasts of Belgian women and the hands of Belgian babies, then the French were firing on ambulances and killing doctors; if the English served coffee laced with strychnine to German prisoners, then the Huns were shipping corpses back home to be made into soap. We suspected both sides were lying, of course, but the Allies’ stories were more inventive and entertaining in a horrible way than the ones the Germans concocted, so I guess even then we were beginning to lean in their direction — though we had no real quarrel with Germany and, if anything, distrusted the French who, we’d been told, “fought with their feet and fucked with their face.” Wilson said in his address to Congress that year that this was “a war with which we have nothing to do,” and we believed him, I suppose, even though we were already singing “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary” in the streets of Eau Fraiche, Red Reynolds’ orchestra having introduced the song in November — “the favorite of the first British Expeditionary Force,” he had proudly announced.