“You know those little painted carts the Sicilians have, with scenes painted on them? Well, there were some of those lying on their sides and the donkeys that pulled them were lying there dead, too.
“The First and I walked up into the town. Every once in a while I’d get the idea of going into one of the houses and just seeing what they were like, but I couldn’t. It was quiet and there wasn’t a breath of wind and the doors were open and I just couldn’t make myself go into one of those houses.
“We’d walked quite a good distance up into the town, farther than we thought, when it began to get dark. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight. Well, when we saw the dark coming, I think we both got panicky without any reason. We started to walk back to the waterfront and we kept going faster and faster and then we finally broke into a run.
“There was something about that town that didn’t want us there after dark. The open doors were black already and the deep shadows were falling. We dog-trotted through the narrow streets and then I got to thinking—there’s nobody here, but now if I see anybody it’s going to scare me. It gets dark awfully quick there. It was pitch black in the narrow streets, but you could see light above the houses.
“It got so we were really running and when we broke out on the dock and climbed over the wrecks, we were panting. The First said to me, ‘A guy might have got lost in there and not got back all night.’ But he knew we had been scared, and I knew it too.”
A hard dash of spray came over the bow of the PT and splashed him in the face.
“That gave me the willies,” the captain said. “I think that scared me more than I’ve been scared for a long time. I got to thinking about it and once or twice I had a dream about it. Come to think of it, the whole thing was like a dream anyway, from that dead woman right on through. But if I ever wanted to say how it was to be alone and panicky, I think I’d think of that right away.”
SOUVENIR
SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, October 12, 1943—It is said, and with some truth, that while the Germans fight for world domination and the English for the defense of England, the Americans fight for souvenirs. This may not be the final end for our dogfaces, but it helps. It is estimated that two divisions of American troops could carry away the Great Pyramid, chip by chip, in twenty-four hours. This writer has seen pup tents piled nearly to the ridge rope with nearly valueless mementos of places the soldiers occupied. Dark back rooms of houses in Algeria and Palermo and Messina, and by now probably Salerno, are roaring with the industry of making bits of colored cloth and celluloid into gadgets to sell the soldiers.
A soldier has been seen struggling down a street in Palermo carrying a fifty-pound statuette of an angel in plaster of Paris. It was painted blue and pink and had written on its base in gold paint, “Balcome too Palermo.” How he ever expected to get it home no one will ever know. If the homes of America ever receive the souvenirs that are being collected by our troops there will be no room for living. The post office at an African station recently stopped a sentimental present a soldier was sending his wife. It was a prized possession and he had bought it from a Goum for 1000 francs. It was a quart jar of fingers pickled in brandy.
It is reported that the pre-Roman Greek temples at Salerno have suffered more from chipping by American soldiers in two weeks than they did during the preceding three thousand years, and whereas they have suffered the destructive rage of invaders for centuries they are not expected to survive the admiring souvenir-hunting of our troops, who only want to send a small chip home to the little woman.
True souvenir-hunting has its rules. It does not apply to the fighter group who transported a grand piano, piece by piece, over a thousand miles. Nor to the bomber swing band who rescued a crushed bull fiddle and mended it with airplane fix-it until it was four inches thick. They wanted to use these things. Souvenir hunting, if properly done, only takes notice of things that can’t possibly be used for anything at all and are too big or too fragile ever to get home.
Probably the greatest souvenir hunter of this whole war is a private first class who must be nameless but is generally called Bugs.
Bugs, when the battle for Gela in Sicily had abated, was poking about among the ruins, when he came upon a mirror—but such a mirror as to amaze him. It had survived bombing and shellfire in some miraculous manner, a matter which created wonder in Bugs. The mirror was six feet two in height and four feet wide, and it was in a frame of carved and painted wood which represented hundreds of small cupids wrestling and writhing about a length of blue ribbon, which accidentally managed to cover every cupid from indecency. The whole thing must have weighed about seventy-five pounds, and it was so beautiful that it broke Bug’s heart. He just couldn’t leave it behind.
Bugs probably fought the toughest war in all Sicily, for he carried the mirror on his back the whole way. When the shellfire was bad, he turned his mirror face down and covered it with dirt. On advances he left it and always came back in the night and got it again, although it entailed marching twice as far as the rest of his outfit.
Finally Bugs arranged a kind of sling, so that while advancing he had the appearance of a charging billboard. He gradually came to devote a good part of his life to the care, transportation, and protection of the biggest souvenir in the whole Seventh Army. When he finally marched into Palermo he did so in triumph, for his mirror was un-chipped and its frame was only a little chewed up from handling.
Now, for the first time, Bugs was billeted in a house, one of those tall houses with iron balconies and narrow stairs. Bugs tried in vain to get the mirror around a corner of the narrow stairway and finally he got a rope and, tying one end of it to the balcony, he went back to the street and tied the other end of it to his mirror. Then he went back and hauled it up to the second floor, where he was billeted. There he surveyed the room and decided where to hang his mirror. He drove a nail in the wall, hung the mirror, and stepped back to admire it. And he had just stepped clear when the nail pulled out and the whole thing crashed and broke into a million pieces.
Bugs regarded the mess sadly, but then the great philosophy of the “blowed in the glass” souvenir-hunter took possession of him. He said, “Oh, well, maybe it wouldn’t have looked good in our flat, anyways.”
WELCOME
SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, October 14, 1943—The Italian people may greet conquering American and British troops with different methods in different parts of the country, but they act always with enthusiasm that amounts to violence. One of their methods makes soldiers a little self-conscious until they get used to it. Great crowds of people stand on the sidewalks as the troops march by and simply applaud by clapping their hands as though they applauded a show. This makes the troops walk very stiffly, smiling self-consciously, half soldiers and half actors.
But this hand-clapping is the most restrained thing that they do. The soldiers get more embarrassed when they are overwhelmed by Italian men who rush up to them, overpower them with embraces, and plant great wet kisses on their cheeks, crying a little as they do it. A soldier hates to push them away, but he is not used to being kissed by men, and all he can do is to blush and try to get away as quick as possible.
A third method of showing enthusiasm at being conquered is to throw any fruit or vegetable which happens to be in season at the occupying troops. In Sicily the grapes were ripe and many a soldier got a swipe across the face with a heavy bunch of grapes tossed with the best will in the world.
The juice ran down inside their shirts, and after a march of a few blocks troops would be pretty well drenched in grape juice, which, incidentally, draws flies badly, and there is nothing to do about it. You can’t drown such enthusiasm by making them not throw grapes.