Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“All right, get back to your post, Farrel. I’ll see him when I can.”

“Right, sarge.”

Baird sat on the cold floor of the cave and stared at the small wood fire, hardly conscious of the icy wind forcing its way around the sagging tarpaulin. His skin felt hot to his hand and the occasional eddies of sleet stung the cuts and bruises on his face. He moistened his cracked lips and tried to think of the farm in Middleburg, Virginia, but his memories were so confused and erratic that he found it difficult to keep them in a consecutive line.

Section Eight was more a home than the big farm had been, where he was alone most of the time except for the housekeeper and the old black groom, Mr. Skipper, who slept in the tack room and took care of the horses. There was only one room in the house he felt comfortable in, and he thought about it now, the library with the gun cases and the hunting ledgers and maps. He liked to go there after school when the late sun was coming in the windows facing the pond.

There was a silence in that house you could almost listen to, even when the rooms were filled with his father’s friends, tall rangy men who knew everything there was to know about hunting and guns and horses, even when they argued or laughed over their drinks, still there was the silence you could hear if you listened for it, and somehow this had always saddened him, because it was a tantalizing but deceptive conduit that led almost, but never quite, to his father’s attention...

He blinked and looked down at his combat boots. They were stiff with mud, the cross-laced thongs frozen hard and gleaming with flecks of ice, stiff and brittle as pieces of straw, and he thought of the library with the sun turning everything into warm colors — the shining old campaign desk, the animal skins and deep suede chairs, the round, leather game table and the framed portraits of soldiers in their uniforms from the wars against Germany and Spain and England and the Civil War in America.

He remembered holidays on the farm and family dinners and his father and his brother and other men shooting skeet in the high meadows beyond the pond, with Mr. Skipper releasing clay birds when they shouted, “Tull!” and the sound of shotguns with silver trim on their stocks booming through the brilliant fall countryside, and he remembered, too, the feeling of pride and terror his father’s guns evoked m him when he was small, and Baird almost began to cry then, the heat of the wood fire stinging the cuts on his face, because he was thinking of the German soldiers in the woods and the sound of their artillery and rifles that had sent him stumbling in panic toward the shelter of the woods...

He was so sick, so depressed and so near delirium that he didn’t hear the tarpaulin pulled back from the entrance to the cave—

“What the hell’s wrong with you, Baird?”

He looked up then, rubbing nervously at the tears that finally had appeared on his cheeks. Docker was crouched by the fire, watching him.

“I’m all right.”

Docker unstoppered his canteen and handed it to him. “Take a drink of this.”

He shook his head, but Docker said impatiently, “Goddamn it, it’ll do you good.”

He took a small sip of black whiskey, and began coughing.

Docker looked at the boy’s wet boots and at the bruises on his face. “Use some more sulfa powder, then I want you to rig this tarp to keep the wind out and take off those boots and dry them at the fire. And don’t sit on that frozen ground, get some blankets under you.”

“I’m all right,” Baird said again. “Really, sergeant, I’m fine.”

“Yeah, you look great.” He took a short drink of the cold whiskey. “Baird, you’ve been lying ever since you hooked up with this section. So now how about leveling for a change.”

In the shifting light, Baird’s eyes were empty. “I wanted to tell the truth,” he said, his voice so low the words were almost lost in the wind rustling through the cave.

“But you sure as hell didn’t. You want another drink?”

“No, but I think it helped.”

“Good.” Docker put the canteen away. “Okay then. Let’s have it.”

“Just turn everything around one hundred and eighty degrees and you’ve got the truth. Shorty was right all along. I’m a deserter. That’s why I lied about everything.” Baird’s voice had begun to break and there was an unnatural brightness in his eyes. “I just ran when I heard the artillery and saw those German soldiers.”

“And threw away your rifle?”

“That happened later. I tripped in the woods and fell. I dropped my rifle and didn’t look for it. I just got up and kept on running.”

“What about your dog tags?”

In a listless voice Baird said, “I threw them away.”

“Is Baird your real name?”

The boy laughed softly, but there was no humor in it. “Sure, that’s my real name. But I wanted to get rid of my Army serial number, I didn’t want anybody checking it out. I was too scared to think straight.” He looked away and wet his lips. “If I had guts, I’d be in a German stockade with the other guys. I disobeyed a direct order from you, I pulled a gun on everybody in the section. What do the dog tags matter? What more do you need?”

“Damn it, Baird, this isn’t a court-martial... But you’re still holding out on me. You know a helluva lot about weapons, and you know a lot about West Point. You mentioned taking snapshots on Lee and Jefferson Roads — that’s where the superintendent of the academy lives, an area about as restricted as Ike’s privy at Versailles.”

“Trankic didn’t believe me either, I guess.”

“He’d sure as hell like to,” Docker said. “You handled yourself fine when Gelnick got hit.”

It was obvious to him that Baird wasn’t listening now. His voice was tired, threaded with pain when he said, “They usually had drinks in my father’s library before dinner. That’s where the family portraits are...” Baird smiled at the fire. “My family called it the Hall of Gentlemen. On holidays the ranking officer would propose a toast. It was always the same: ‘To absent friends.’ ”

“Who is your father, Baird?”

“I lived at the Point for eight years when he taught there. He was a full colonel then. Now he’s a major general on MacArthur’s staff at Port Moresby in New Guinea, the last I heard. Major General Jonathan Baird. My brother, he’s twelve years older than I am, he’s a major with the Eighty-eighth Infantry in Italy.”

Docker heard someone outside the cave calling his name, the words blown into grotesque rhythms by the wind.

“When they both went overseas, I stayed at our farm in Middleburg. My mother died years ago, there was nobody there but a cook and the groom. I knew if I missed this war I’d never have anything to talk to my father about. It would just be” — he made a helpless gesture with his hands — “it would just be all over, my whole life, like I’d never been born. So I enlisted. I was going to surprise him so that when we all got together again...” With an obvious effort, Baird raised his head and looked at Docker. “Now do you understand about those dog tags? Can’t you see how it was?”

Docker didn’t, probably no one else would either. He’d learned that much in the olive groves and deserts, had matured with the sound of gunfire, and at least knew that it was pointless and ultimately presumptuous to try to “understand” how another person might react when he was fired on.

“Does your father know you’re over here?”

“He does now. I wrote him from basic training, and when the One hundred sixth shipped out.”

Docker heard heavy footsteps outside the cave. The tarp was pulled back by Schmitzer, whose impassive face was tight with excitement. He handed a white scarf to Docker. “You better come over to the machine gun, sarge. The Bonnard kid just brought this up. She’s talking French so I ain’t sure what she’s saying. All I can make out is that the German officer is at the castle and wants to talk to you.”