I was suddenly filled with rage.
My anger had nothing to do with sympathy for an oppressed minority or any of that crap. I didn’t feel any democratic principle was being violated here, it wasn’t anything like that. There was too much real democracy at stake everywhere else in the world; I wasn’t about to start crying over a bunch of poor bastards living in the asshole of Chicago. Actually, I didn’t know what caused my anger. But I suddenly did something very strange and dangerous.
I picked up a brick and threw it.
I happened, in fact, to throw it at a first-floor window which smashed with amazing alacrity, not for nothing had I been a star third baseman with the Grace School Blues. A fat Negro man sitting on an upturned garbage can and fanning himself with a folded copy of the Tribune didn’t quite appreciate either my anger or my throwing arm. “You sumbitch white bastard!” he shouted, and jumped off the garbage can and came racing after Michael and me, brandishing the folded newspaper like a hatchet. Michael, who was not as sober as I yet, even though he’d reacted to my window-smashing in absolute astonishment, stumbled and fell, and I ran back to help him, and then looked up to discover that seven thousand men and boys of varying sizes, shapes, and shades were coming down the street after us, led by the Tribune-swinging fat man.
I was terrified.
I thought how ignominious it would be for a future fighter pilot to be squashed into the pavement by a rioting band of black men who had surely misunderstood why I’d thrown a brick through one of their windows, even though I myself didn’t yet understand why I’d done it. Michael, the idiot, was laughing! I thought. Oh my God, please don’t let these boogies, niggers, Negroes, NEGROES hear this madman laughing! Clutching Michael’s hand in my own, running like the track star I once had been, though burdened by Michael, who giggled and lurched and stumbled and cursed, I heard the sudden sweet sound of the subway rumbling along the tracks on Michigan Avenue and miraculously found the platform at Thirty-first, it must have been, or Twenty-ninth, or Twenty-sixth, God knew where, while Michael laughed insanely, and behind us the Negroes shouted bloody murder just because I’d hurled one lousy little goddamn brick. The train rolled in to a screeching stop.
I never thought we’d get out of there alive.
July
There was, I had not expected, there was, the German guns had started shortly after midnight, star shells erupting in the moonlit sky over the Marne, the river itself a curve of molten silver winding through poppy-dotted wheatfields, I had not expected. The shells came screaming at us from twenty miles away, Holy Mother, Mary of God, and we crouched trembling in trenches we had deepened the day before when the papers on a captured German major revealed Von Boehn’s plan of attack to us. The trenches faced Varennes and Courtemont, which the French were defending and which we expected to be overrun, our own plan being to wait until the German bombardment had abated, at which time we would scramble out of these deeper trenches and move forward into the echeloned slit trenches that would form our line of defense against a flanking attack.
I was Private Bertram Tyler in Captain Reid’s F Company of the 38th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Division, with our backs to Hill 231, wooded, higher than the plain, our bayoneted rifles pointed toward the curving right flank of the Marne horseshoe, the toe caulk of which was Jaulgonne to the north, the two heel caulks being Mézy to the west and Sauvigny to the cast. The Paris-Nancy (Nancy!) railroad tracks paralleled the river, passing through H and E Companies massed on the bank, skirting behind the 28th’s L Company facing Jaulgonne, and then disappearing out of sight to the east.
I was Private Bertram Tyler, and I had never been in battle before. As we waited now for them to come across the river in pontoon boats, as I lay with my face pressed to the dirt wall of the trench, there was insinuated into all the smells around me — the smell of men vomiting, the smell of phosphorus, the smell of earth suddenly exploding, richly, darkly turning loamy interior to the midnight air, the oppressive biting stink of cordite, the rancid aroma of sweat produced by fear, the smell of the waist-high wheat gold and silver in the moonlight, splashed with blood-red gilded poppies — into all these contradictory smells came the stench of human flesh burning and entrails exposed, the horrible sickly scent of death.
I tried to move away from Timothy, I did not want him to know how terrified I was. I was weeping into the earthen wall of the trench, ashamed of myself, frightened beyond sanity, the Germans would be coming soon, they would cross the river and storm our position.
“Easy, Bert,” Timothy said beside me.
“I’m scared,” I said. “Oh God, I’m so seared.”
“I am, too.”
Trembling, crouching, weeping, I flattened myself against the side of the trench as another shell exploded. I had not expected, there was nothing to prepare, I did not imagine, could not have, the noise. I wanted to cover my ears, but I was afraid to let go of my rifle. There was no small arms fire as yet, only the heavy steady pounding of our own guns firing northward across the river, unrelenting, and the muted faraway counterpoint of the big German guns, a steady rumble on the horizon. The sky flickered with light, erratic and unsettling, as though the eyes were out of focus. Shells exploded in the distance, adding to the muted enemy percussion, and the air shivered with the high whining whistle of incoming artillery fire, the deafening explosions everywhere around us, the shrapnel adding its own deadly high whistle to the air, clods of earth growing wheat and poppies landing with lifeless thuds, soil sifting in a whisper into the trenches, the sound constant, until at last the barrage stopped and we knew they were coming across the river because we heard the clacking of the machine guns and the popping of the rifles and the irregular louder explosions of grenades along the bank. Someone was shouting, the shout streaked the comparative silence like a smear of blood, a whistle shrilled into the midnight expectancy, a doughboy whispered “Jesus save us,” sibilant and scared, and we came out of the trenches and ran in waist-deep wheat like children in a dream summer on a star-drenched night — It’s really only another July, I told myself, and firecrackers are popping for independence by the river.
There was, you could not, all order was gone, the troops retreating on our front were French, their uniforms, you could, the Bois de Condé was where they would hold, the reserves of the 28th were waiting there, French at first, you could see their uniforms. And then the color changed, the landscape changed, the army coming over the railroad tracks and into the fill was German, fierce against the summer sky, bayonets glinting in moonlit pinpricks, machine-gun carts hauled by barking dogs, horse-drawn batteries rumbling into place. They wished to go to Paris, and we were there to stop them, but Paris was not the prize to defend, Paris was the immediate goal. The prize was Hill 231, where a strategically placed machine gun could control the entire plain, a knoll worthless for anything but artillery now, perhaps a good site for a small French château in another time and in another place, but not here and not now. Here, with the German batteries in place and beginning to pound shells into the slit trenches, now with the machine guns adding their staccato ululation to the din, we understood very little, and cared less, about over-all strategy or logistics. We did not know where the 4th or the 7th were, did not even fully comprehend whether Château-Thierry was to the east or the west across the Marne. We knew only Hill 231. This was our reason for being here, Hill 231, this was why we crouched and waited to kill, crouched and saw Fritz come over the horizon with identical intent, to kill for that elevation of ground behind us, from which our own guns were now firing over our heads.