Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

Sergeant Fourier even went so far as to get up and look out across the plain.

“Anything?” Labat asked.

The Sergeant squinted anxiously. “Nothing.”

“Waiting, everything is waiting,” Labat said. He was a long, ugly man, with a big nose and large ears. He was from Paris and excitable and given to throwing his arms around in rage and was a great patriot of the French Republic. “In a war you wait for everything! Even the Americans! At last, I thought, things will finally move. The Americans are famous for their briskness.… We’re still waiting.…”

“Only a day,” said Boullard. Boullard was a big, quiet man, over forty, with a wrinkled, brown, farmer’s face. “They’ll be here soon enough.”

“I can’t wait,” Labat said. He stood up and peered out. “For a year I sat in the Maginot Line. Now for two years I sit here. I am finally impatient. A day is too much.”

“Shut up,” Boullard said calmly. “You’ll get us all nervous.”

Labat lay down and put his hands behind his head and looked up at the tarpaulin angrily. Sergeant Fourier came back and sat down.

“More of the same,” Sergeant Fourier said. “More nothing.”

“It must be worse for Americans,” Corporal Millet said. He was a man who, although he was nearly thirty-five, was still plagued by pimples. His face had raging red blots on it all the time and he suffered meanly under his affliction, taking his misfortune out on the work details in his charge. “It must be unbearable for Americans.”

“Why?” Labat asked angrily. “What’s wrong with the Americans?”

“They are not a military people,” Corporal Millet said. He had a lawyer’s voice, smooth and reasonable and superior, and on bad days it made men want to kill Corporal Millet. “They are used to sitting back and pushing buttons.”

“Corporal,” Labat said calmly, “you are perhaps the biggest idiot in the French Army of 1942.”

“The jokes,” Corporal Millet said. “We can do without the jokes. It is a fact that war is harder on some races than on others. The Americans must be suffering the tortures of the damned.”

“I repeat,” Labat said. “The biggest.”

Corporal Millet was a devotee of Vichy, and Labat enjoyed making him angry.

“Push buttons,” Boullard said reflectively. “I could use a few push buttons at the moment.”

“See,” Corporal Millet gestured to Boullard. “Boullard agrees.”

“See,” Boullard said. “Boullard does not agree.”

There was silence for a moment, while the men thought of the wind and the ugliness of the men around them and the possibility of dying tomorrow.

“Be more cheerful,” Boullard said, “or kindly keep quiet.”

The men sat silently for a moment, everyone heavy and gloomy because the word death had finally been mentioned.

“It will be a ridiculous thing,” Labat said. “To be killed by an American.” Labat had fought at Sedan and made his way bitterly down the length of France, cursing the politicians, cursing the officers, cursing the Germans and English and Italians and Americans. At last he had stowed away aboard a freighter to Algiers and without losing a day had joined up all over again and had since then sat, full of pent-up vengeance, in the gloom of Africa, waiting to fight the Germans once more.

“I refuse,” Labat said. “I refuse to be killed by an American.”

“You will be told what your orders are,” Corporal Millet said, “and you will follow them.”

Labat stared gloomily and dangerously at Corporal Millet. His face, which was ugly but usually pleasant enough, now was harsh and his eyes were squinted balefully. “Corporal,” he said, “Corporal of the pimples, do you know what our orders are?”

“No.”

“Does anybody know?” Labat looked around, his face still flushed and glowering, angry at Corporal Millet and the government of France and his position in the world that afternoon.

Sergeant Fourier cleared his throat professionally. “The Lieutenant. He must know. The Captain’s gone …”

“What a wonderful thing,” Boullard said, “to be a captain.…”

“Let us ask the Lieutenant,” Labat said.

“Sergeant Fourier, we make you a committee of one.”

Sergeant Fourier looked around him uneasily, pulling in his round little belly nervously, uncomfortable at the thought of any action that would make him conspicuous, endanger his pleasant anonymous future with the masseuse in Algiers. “Why me?” he asked.

“Highest non-commissioned officer present,” Labat chanted. “Channels of communication with the commissioned personnel.”

“I haven’t said two words to him,” Sergeant Fourier protested. “After all, he just got here five days ago. And he’s reserved.… All he’s said to me in five days is, ‘Make sure the men do not smoke in the open at night.’”

“Enough,” Labat said cheerfully. “It’s obvious he likes you.”

“Don’t joke,” Boullard said sharply. “We have no more time to joke.”

“I’m only joking,” Labat said soberly, “because I am willing to slit my throat.”

He got up and went to the edge of the tarpaulin and stood there, his back to the men, watching across the enigmatic plain for the first fateful dust cloud.

“What sort of man is this Lieutenant Dumestre?” Boullard asked.

“It’s hard to tell,” Sergeant Fourier said, with the caution born of three years in an army where a hasty approval of a man, before all the facts of courage, sense and rectitude were in, might one day cause your death. “He’s very quiet. Stiff …”

“A bad sign,” said Boullard.

“Very rich in the uniform department.”

“Another bad sign.”

“It doesn’t pay to be too hurried,” Sergeant Fourier protested.

“It’s the Americans,” Boullard said. “They’re in a hurry, not me. Well, there’s only one thing to be done.” He rubbed his cheek absently with the back of his hand, like a man determining whether or not he needs a shave. The other men watched him silently, anxious and curious about a definite plan that might have finally bloomed on this last nervous afternoon. “One thing,” Boullard repeated. “We kill him.”

Lieutenant Dumestre stood in the observation post and felt the headache coming on like an express train. Every afternoon the boredom and misery of the day accumulated in his brain pan and punished him for still living. He stared painfully over the darkening plain, which was silently enveloping itself in blue and purple folds, intangible and deceptive, in which the shapes of men and machines might be capriciously and dangerously lost.…

Lieutenant Dumestre shook his head and closed his eyes, measuring gloomily the exact extent of the pain in his skull.

How do you do it? he asked himself. How does a first lieutenant hand a battery over to an advancing army, without orders? How does a first lieutenant save his life in a situation like this? In the distance there is a puff of dust and soon the first shell dropping somewhere near you, and all around you doubtful and uncertain men whom you do not know but who, for the lack of a better word, are under your command. Why had he left his post in Algiers? In this one, crazy, fateful week, his transfer had to be granted, this transfer to dilemma, this transfer to death.… In the days of Napoleon it was said that every French private had a marshal’s baton in his knapsack. Today every French soldier had in his knapsack a fatal and insoluble conundrum.

Lieutenant Dumestre had asked to be transferred from Algiers because he had been spending too much money there. It was as simple as that. The bills came in, the monthly reckonings were made, the deductions for the money sent home to his mother and father, who were lean and ailing in Paris, and it became clear that on a lieutenant’s salary you could not save money in a gay town, especially if you had been rich all your life and your family rich before you and certain habits of eating and drinking and generosity ingrained in you, war or no war.…