We had plenty of material anyway. There was a superabundance of heroism, selflessness, intelligence, and kindness to write about. And perhaps we were right in eliminating parts of the whole picture. Surely if we had sent all we knew, and couched in the language of the field, the home front would have been even more confused than we managed to make it. Besides, for every screaming egotist there was a Bradley, and for every publicity-mad military ham there were great men like Terry Allen and General Roosevelt, while in the ranks, billeted with the stinking, cheating, foul-mouthed goldbricks, there were true heroes, kindly men, intelligent men who knew or thought they knew what they were fighting for and took all the rest in their stride.
Professionally the war correspondents, I believe, were highly moral and responsible men, many of them very brave men, some of them completely dedicated men, but in the time after the story was filed I guess we were no better and no worse than the officers and enlisted men, only we had more facilities than the services, either commissioned or enlisted. We carried simulated ranks, ranging from captain to lieutenant colonel, which allowed us to eat at officers’ mess, where enlisted men could not go, but we also had access to the enlisted men, where officers could not go. I remember an officers’ dance in North Africa, a dull, cold little affair with junior officers mechanically dancing with commissioned nurses to old records on a wind-up phonograph, while in nearby barracks one of the finest jazz combos I ever heard was belting out pure ecstasy. Naturally we correspondents happily moved to the better music. Rank surely has its privileges, but with us it sometimes amounted to license. When our duty was done and our stories on the wire, we discovered and exchanged every address where black-market meat, liquor, and women could be procured. We knew the illegal taxis. We chiseled, stole, malingered, goldbricked, and generally made ourselves as comfortable as we could. I early learned that a pint of whisky to a transportation sergeant would get me on a plane ahead of a general with crash orders from the General Staff. We didn’t steal much from the Army. We didn’t have to. It was given to us. Besides we were up against experts in the Army. I remember a general in supply morosely reading a report of missing materiel from a supply depot and exploding, “The American soldier is the worst thief in the world. You know what’s going to happen? When they steal everything we’ve got, they’ll start stealing from the Germans, and then God help Hitler.” And I remember on a destroyer at sea when every sidearm of every officer, 45s and carbines, suddenly disappeared, and although the ship was searched from stem to stern, even the fuel and water tanks explored, not one single weapon was ever found. There was a kind of a compulsion to steal. Prisoners were frisked for watches, cameras, and sidearms (the trade goods of the GIs) with professional skill. But the correspondents didn’t steal much—first, as I said, because they didn’t have to, and second, because we moved about so much that we couldn’t take things with us. Heaven knows how many helmets, bedding rolls, and gas masks I was issued. I rarely got them where I was going, and I never got them back. In the cellars of London hotels today there must be trunks of loot left there fifteen years ago by correspondents and never claimed. I personally know of two such caches.
For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of attitudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stands in the mind like the battle pictures of Crécy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all wax is a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.
Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror.
The pieces in this volume were written under pressure and in tension. My first impulse on rereading them was to correct, to change, to smooth out ragged sentences and remove repetitions, but their very raggedness is, it seems to me, a parcel of their immediacy. They are as real as the wicked witch and the good fairy, as true and tested and edited as any other myth.
There was a war, long ago—once upon a time.
England
TROOPSHIP
SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 20, 1943—The troops in their thousands sit on their equipment on the dock. It is evening, and the first of the dimout lights come on. The men wear their helmets, which make them all look alike, make them look like long rows of mushrooms. Their rifles are leaning against their knees. They have no identity, no personality. The men are units in an army. The numbers chalked on their helmets are almost like the license numbers on robots. Equipment is piled neatly—bedding rolls and half-shelters and barracks bags. Some of the men are armed with Springfield or Enfield rifles from the First World War, some with M-1s, or Garands, and some with the neat, light clever little carbines everyone wants to have after the war for hunting rifles.
Above the pier the troopship rears high and thick as an office building. You have to crane your neck upward to see where the portholes stop and the open decks begin. She is a nameless ship and will be while the war lasts. Her destination is known to very few men and her route to even fewer, and the burden of the men who command her must be almost unendurable, for the master who loses her and her cargo will never sleep comfortably again. He probably doesn’t sleep at all now. The cargo holds are loaded and the ship waits to take on her tonnage of men.
On the dock the soldiers are quiet. There is little talking, no singing, and as dusk settles to dark you cannot tell one man from another. The heads bend forward with weariness. Some of these men have been all day, some many days, getting to this starting point.
There are several ways of wearing a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of his hat, but not with a helmet. There is only one way to wear a helmet. It won’t go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.
Four gangways are open now and the units get wearily to their feet and shuffle along in line. The men lean forward against the weight of their equipment. Feet drag against the incline of the gangways. The soldiers disappear one by one into the great doors in the side of the troopship.
Inside the checkers tabulate them. The numbers chalked on the helmets are checked again against a list. Places have been assigned. Half of the men will sleep on the decks and the other half inside in ballrooms, in dining rooms where once a very different kind of people sat and found very important things that have disappeared. Some of the men will sleep in bunks, in hammocks, on the decks, in passages. Tomorrow they will shift. The men from the deck will come in to sleep and those from inside will go out. They will change every night until they land. They will not take off their clothes until they land. This is no cruise ship.
On the decks, dimmed to a faint blue dusk by the blackout lights, the men sink down and fall asleep. They are asleep almost as soon as they are settled. Many of them do not even take off their helmets. It has been a weary day. The rifles are beside them, held in their hands.
On the gangways the lines still feed into the troopship—a regiment of colored troops, a hundred Army nurses, neat in their helmets and field packs. The nurses at least will have staterooms, however crowded they may be in them. Up No. 1 Gangway comes the headquarters complement of a bombardment wing and a company of military police. All are equally tired. They find their places and go to sleep.