Work Text:
I
The platoon are scattered out in loose formation, travelling across pastoral farmland back to Rachamps when Babe notices the barrel of his gun is covered with something sticky. Sweat and dirt? Grease? Blood? Mottled fingerprints from a hundred sequential, anxious grips? All are likely, but he's not inclined to examine any of those options, and couldn’t see anyway in the dusk that’s quickly surrounding them. It’s not that it really matters anyway, he’s happy to have his skin pressed against the metal, finger hooked to scratch any itch that might cross his line of sight. Still, he takes his cuff and tries his best to wipe whatever it is away.
They’d taken Rachamps earlier in the day in a messy fire fight hampered by showers of unrelenting sleet and snow. Afterwards, the platoons had been sent to check out the local area - woods and barns – for any lingering snipers, or stranded infantry. They’d expected to find maybe a few German soldiers, but they’d found nothing at all.
The showers of sleet have slowed, but the sky is still grey and overcast, as it has been almost constantly for the past month. The landscape, unlike Aldbourne, wasn’t beginning to look familiar to Babe at all. Rather than being comforted by the open fields--punctuated by scratches of shrubs, banks of earth and the occasional tree--all he can think is how little cover it provides, how visible they all are. Despite its camouflage colours and textures he knows they stick up against the sky like cardboard rabbits in a fairground shooting game.
The colours of the day swim and converge to grey before his eyes. He’s tired, and his mind keeps jumping about from thought to thought with no rhyme or reason. He takes a hand from his gun and runs it over the meadow grass that’s nearly to the height of his waist. It's damp, and he rubs the small amount of moisture from his fingers over his eyes. Little buds – not yet flowers – tip the long fronds and he plucks one or two before letting the cold north wind carry them away. The limited palate of war, where the strongest colour is blood, makes him seek out others. He searches for the occasional purple or yellow flower, orange flag or painted sign. And when he has nothing else, beneath the dirt on the scarf that still binds his hand, the soft blue suffices.
The field they’re passing through reminds him of the one he’d landed in when Easy dropped into Holland. Only months had passed since that date, but it seemed a lifetime of difference. He’d been a different man then, might even say boy, but then he didn’t think he’d been a boy since the first day of basic training, hadn’t thought of himself as such since enlisting with most of his friends back in Philly.
The jump that September had been textbook; clear skies, the red to green light shuffle, the one Mississippi two Mississippi three Mississippi pull. The only difference from the training jumps near Aldbourne was the view on the way down. The land looked different here, different to home, to England. It wasn’t a patchwork quilt of field after fairytale field, each joined by neatly sewn stone walls. It was far too irregular for that – instead it was like the skin of an aged hand – thrumming with tree veins and road scars, mottled with patches of darkened evergreen forest. They’d jumped so low that he’d only been briefly able to appreciate its torn beauty, before hitting the ground running. There’d been no sign of enemy, but he’d been warned to err on the side of caution and his gun was already in hand. He’d listened carefully to every word of advice that came on beer stained breath from Guarnere’s mouth one night in a bar. Guarnere had told him everything he wished he'd known on jumping that first time. It had been better than anything anyone else had said, and he’d be forever thankful for every word.
Someone coughing sharply to his left brings him back to the moment. He stops walking only when the man in front of him does, and hunkers down likewise. Looking ahead, he can just make out the lead scout, paused and peering through a set of binoculars. After a moment they all rise and begin walking again. The meadow releases its damp earthy smell upwards with every brush of Babe’s canvassed legs and boot encased feet. It’s cold, but sweet and damp and he resists the temptation to lie down within its inviting embrace. Instead, he raises his gun a little higher, closer to his chest, anxious of getting it wet. He sees one of the replacements to his right watching him, copying his movement. Babe gives him a small smile and only realises afterwards that it can’t be seen under the scarf covering his face.
It’s dark by the time they reach the outskirts of the town and find their way to the convent, their shelter for the night. As they approach they can just about see the towering north wall of the side chapel, half blown away but sanding bracingly against the darkened blue skyline. He blinks a few times; trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness, and follows the others as they climb the steps up to the main door. There’s someone there waiting and they’re guided to a side entrance, through a bombed room, and into the church proper.
Debris crunches underfoot as they go and dust from exploded stone covers everything. Powdery, and kicked up with movement, it clings to the sweat of his exposed skin on his hands, palms, and on the back of his neck. It even gets between his teeth, causing them to grind unpleasantly. He pulls down his scarf further, spits once to his left – force of habit - and tries his best not to stumble over any of the smaller pieces of broken carved stone. In the moonlight every splinter of wood and spec of dust look the same; colourless, serene. He examines his cuff where he wiped his gun earlier, he can’t see anything but a damp mark but he remembers words they were told back in basic – the same words he’d said to Julian in that foxhole ‘keep your gun and underwear clean, everything else will take care of itself’.
Flagstones clatter and echo beneath the platoon’s combined steps and he can hear behind him as the heavy studded door is closed and bolted. There’s very little light but for what the moon is offering through the small windows, and it’s not long before a smattering of torches make dizzying circles around his feet. As they pass through a vaulted hall and through another heavy door, they’re welcomed by hundreds of candles and the sight of the other platoons already resting, asleep, or chatting and joking amongst themselves.
It’s only when they enter this relative safety that Babe finally releases his deathgrip on his rifle. He removes his hand from near the trigger, stretching and clenching his fingers to ease the stiffness in his cold knuckles. Once seated, gun safely at his side, he massages the other hand, the one Roe stepped on in that foxhole in the Ardennes. It still ached, moreso in the constant cold. A fine ending to what had felt like purgatory in that place. Doomed to repeat things he’d rather not remember - conversations with Julian, over and over in his mind. He thought he’d never have a chance to leave there; that his death shroud would be the packed snow, his coffin made of pine needles. Even after they’d made a move into Foy -- a welcome relief despite the direct horror of the attack -- he hadn’t quite believed it. It was only when they’d moved to open ground and on to Noville that he’d been able to leave the forest foxholes behind without their constant visual reminder. Even now he can’t crouch down without feeling some of the phantom pain of cramped frozen limbs and tired eyes; symptoms of high alertness and blinding snow.
He looks around, counts faces and remembers names, attaches memory to each he sees. It’s a way for him to grasp reality, the present. To think of something that’s other. The nuns have brought in their choir to sing, local girls with sweet high voices. Their music eases his body, and his eyes dip toward sleep. The others too are slowly doing the same, sitting on pews or benches and leaning against walls. The hard wood is uncomfortable, but at least it’s not frozen mud. Before he has time to finish repeating the Lord’s Prayer, as he does every night, he feels himself drifting off.
It’s the first time he’s slept with a roof over his head in a month and he takes the peace where and when he can, it’s the best any of them can do.
II
What is memory but cutting through smoke.
Fog in a forest.
Hacking through thick undergrowth, thorns catching in forearms and the soft flesh of concave bellies.
Dry cold like ash in the lungs.
Grenades exploding.
Showers of pinewood splinters.
Flying metal.
Flying limbs.
Bodies running in some crazed frenzy to get to the next dugout, to the next flimsy cover, imagined safety.
Or if there isn’t a rain of fire, to get to the enemy first, outrun them, grasp them with the upper hand, shoot first and don’t look back.
He sees Julian, as he has done frequently, lying in that same position in the snow, arm stretched outwards. Blood bubbles no longer burst from his mouth with no breath to carry them. Motionless, yet still that same position in the middle of the trees. Stripped and left to nature; for its snow to cover his modesty, his innocence, Babe’s shame.
Babe wakes with a start, but for a moment he’s not sure if he is or not. Memory plays back behind his eyelids; is it the remnants of sleep or simply blinking that’s bringing back those images? He gets up and forces his tired muscles to walk fast towards the door. He feels desperately like he needs oxygen, open space, space like that he's become familiar with sleeping beneath the sky. He trips once in his haste to make it outside, and on fighting with the heavy bolted door, falls out the empty entrance of the chapel. He retches nothing onto the empty cobbled street. There’s a smell to the air, metallic, something that sticks in the chest and causes him to hitch his breath when he takes in too long a draught. Julian’s neck haunts him - not his eyes, he’s blocked them out, their image far too raw - but the gush and swell of the ruined flesh; it gathers with the sounds, the gurgle and mewl, until he coughs dryly and sits where he stands, not far from the door.
He feels cut open, exposed, unable to stop a gushing flow of blood that pours from him. He sometimes thinks about getting hit by a bullet, right in the centre of his chest, or in his head. He wasn’t sure he didn’t want it to happen. More and more, especially since they left the Ardennes, he wonders if it wouldn’t be an easier option. Easier than the guilt.
After all, everything dies. But, he gradually thinks, at least it’s born first, at least it has a chance. And maybe it’s right to cling to that chance. Maybe it’s worth it. He closes his eyes again and prays to the statues inside the church, to the crucifix that lies desolate behind the half broken alter. He prays to the nun that picked him up as a small child and put disinfectant on his grazed elbows, patting him on the back and telling him what a big boy he was, to his mother who kissed them better. He imagines her sitting, listening to the wireless at home. He prays for his father who he can’t imagine doing anything but working, for the kids on his block that are scattered across Europe and north Africa, for everyone he’s known, and to everything he’s ever thought had any kind of divine power. He asks, not for the first time and not for the last in his life, for forgiveness. And then he tries to forget.
This place would make anyone pray.
He thinks of the statue of the Virgin Mary, the one he fell asleep opposite just inside. It’s really no different to those statues he used to see back in Philly, in school, in church; the same colours, the same blank mysterious expression, her hands clasped, her head bowed slightly in prayer. He closes his eyes, and for a moment he can smell the incense from every Sunday morning he’d been dragged by the coat-tails to Mass with his mother, father and younger siblings. He used to love that smell. The feet on that Mary had worn to the plaster beneath layers of lead paint. Old women would rub them as they passed, whispering under their breath, making the sign of the cross. For a fleeting moment, in a world away from Rachamps, he feels safe.
Luz appears after a few minutes, does his business against the side wall of the church and ambles over, zipping his fly. Luz’s face is like a Caravaggio – draped in shadow, bathed in sorrow and something like regret. He imagines his looks much the same in this light. He’s not been the same since Bastogne, but he’s okay. Luz tosses a cigarette into Babe’s lap and sits beside him on the stone steps. Babe picks it up, hands it back and Luz lights it. For a time they sit and wait and smoke their shared stale damp tobacco until somebody comes and tells them to move.
III
They leave bleary eyed at dawn the next morning. Just as the light begins to glance through the gaps and cracks in the buildings, they march steadily on. As they make their way out of the convent the beams sparkle on remnants of window glass in the bombed out houses and glitter on the cobbled stone. Slate roofs - claimed by gravity once more - litter the sides of the road peeking from beneath white. The quiet outside seems particularly deceptive as they load onto trucks to catch their ride towards Haguenau. There’s a fresh layer of snow on the ground and the sky is bright, orangepink above the horizon. Standing there, with nobody between him and the sun and the clouds, the violence of the past few weeks recedes imperceptibly. It seems to seep back into the surrounding area, absorbed by wallpaper and carpet, earth, sky and stars. The only recognition of those indescribable moments are fleeting pieces of physical evidence: empty space, destruction, the residue of blood splattered on snow, the dirt on their uniforms, the men themselves. And the memories too are like carved rock in Babe’s and the other Easy men’s minds. He wonders how long and how well he’ll carry the weight of them, how any of them will.
He wonders still as they bunk down in an abandoned house in Haguenau, as they leave towards the Eagles Nest, as they celebrate VE-day and he toasts John Julian and the other pals they’ve lost. He wonders all the way home to Philly where he soon finds someone to wonder with. Guarnere, he learns over time, wonders too. There comes a moment where he realises he'll be carrying that weight all the way back to the source, and it will be then that he'll also finally ask forgiveness face to face.
In his memory, Julian still lies in that forest, the snow falling softly over his body. Sometimes he dreams he’s there too, just waiting, fingering his mother’s cross. He’s there, praying for so long that he watches as the last sight of uniform and cold bare skin is covered by a scattering of heavy snowflakes, until there appears to be nothing in front of him but a mound of snow in the shape of a body. Even then he can't reach him. He often finds he has no words to let others know there’s someone buried underneath, hasn’t the breath to shout, or the body to push them away. It’s always like that until he wakes; it’s only then that he finds his voice and speaks out loud in practised phrases, usually in the dark, to whomever might listen.
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