Irwin Shaw - Short Stories - Five Decades

So, it was too expensive, Algiers. So, the desert would prove to be even more expensive.

… Back in Algiers he knew the men of his battery had mimicked him behind his back—his slow, painful way of delivering orders, full of agonized pauses, as he tried to remember to keep his voice down, tried not to sound like a young idiot imposing callously on these veterans of a war that had passed him by.… They had mimicked him, but he knew them and even felt they liked him, and if he were with them now in this tragedy of a situation he would be able to go to them, talk to them, draw strength and resolution, one way or another from the men who would have to bear the burden of living and dying with him.

But here he was, on the one important day of the last two years, with a group of sullen and bearded strangers, who regarded him only with steady and cool hostility, a newcomer and an officer in an army where newcomers were automatically suspect and officers automatically hated.…

Lieutenant Dumestre walked slowly out toward the west across the dusty scrub. The sun had set and the wind had died and the walking, he felt, might help somehow. Perhaps, he thought, smiling a little to himself, there will be an American patrol and I am unavoidably captured and there’s an end to the problem.… It’s like a child, he thought, hoping that by morning he will have a sore throat so he does not have to go to school and take his examination in arithmetic. What an arithmetic was being imposed upon him now! What a savage and pitiless calculation! He looked toward the last blur of the horizon beyond which the Americans were marching. How simple it was to be an American! In their arithmetic there was an answer to all problems. How merry and dashing a lieutenant in the artillery in the American army must feel tonight, marching beside men whom he could trust, who trusted him, who all believed the same thing, who knew an enemy when they saw one, whose parents were well-fed and healthy, in no one’s power, three thousand sweet miles from all battlefields.…

What a tragic thing to be a Frenchman this year! Hamlet, sword out, killing Polonius and uncle in blind unprofitable lunges.… Frenchmen, Hamlets of the world …

Lieutenant Dumestre stopped and sat down like a little boy on the dark earth and put his head in his hands and wept. He stopped suddenly and bit his lips and neglected to dry the tears from his cheeks. Nonsense, he thought, a grown man … There must be an answer to this, too. After all, I am not the only Frenchman afloat on this continent. The thing is, the men. If I knew what they wanted … If there was only some way to be present, without being seen. Armies have surrendered before. Detachments have surrendered before. Officers have appeared under a flag of truce and offered their services to their official enemies. The Captain was in Algiers, there was no one to stop him. “Dear sir, is there anyone here who speaks French? Dear sir, Lieutenant Dumestre, Battery C, wishes to state that he desires to join forces with the American Army in North Africa and put himself under the flag of the United States for the duration against the common enemy.…” There must be a technique to surrender, just the way there was a technique for everything else in the army. His mother and father would have to look out for themselves. Now, if only the men …

Lieutenant Dumestre slapped his thigh briskly as he stood up. At last he had reached a decision. He had faced the arithmetic and at least he knew what answer he wanted. There only remained going in frankly to the men and putting the situation up to them, in words of one syllable, simply.… He started back toward the forward gun, walking more swiftly than he had walked for a week.

“Men,” he would say, remembering to keep his voice pitched low, “this is the way it is. You may or may not know it, but tomorrow an American army will appear.” You never knew how much the men knew, what rumors had reached them, what facts confirmed, what punishments and discharges and prophecies and movements were peddled at the latrine or over a morning cigarette. “I am under orders to resist,” he would say. “Personally, I do not believe we are bound by those orders, as I believe all Frenchmen to be on the side for which the Americans are now fighting.” Perhaps that was too heroic, but it was impossible to fight a war without sounding from time to time a little heroic. “I intend to go out under a flag of truce and give over the guns of this battery.” Now the question of dissenters. “Anyone who does not wish to join me in this action is free to leave toward the rear.…” No, they’d go back and talk and by morning a troop of cavalry would come up and Lieutenant Dumestre would be finished in thirty minutes. Keep them with him? How do that? Supposing they were all Vichy men? After all, they were being paid by Vichy and there were thousands of Frenchmen in Africa who had staked their lives on a German victory. They’d shoot him in cold blood.

Once more he cursed the trick that had landed him at this moment among two hundred strangers. In his old company he would have been able to take Sergeant Goubille aside and talk honestly and get an honest answer. Sergeant Goubille was forty-five years old and there was something fatherly and tolerant of young officers in his bearing, and a man like that would be worth a man’s life on this harsh and doubtful plain tonight. Well, there was no Sergeant Goubille at hand.… Perhaps that Breton, that farmer, Boullard. He was an older man and he looked honest and pleasant.

He took a deep breath and walked swiftly, not knowing exactly what he would do but knowing he had to do something, toward the forward gun.…

Under the tarpaulin, Boullard was talking, his voice low and harsh, all the kindly, old countryman’s lines somehow vanished from the set, desperate face. “There will be a token resistance,” he was saying to the men, who were all sitting up, looking at the ground most of the time, looking up only occasionally at Boullard with a kind of deep embarrassment. “In a token resistance there are token deaths.” He looked around him calmly from face to face, his thought plain in his eyes. “A token corpse feeds as many worms as any other.…”

Jouvet, the young one, was the only one who could not manage to sit still. He rubbed his heels back and forth, making marks in the sand, and studying them intensely.

“Kill the pretty Lieutenant,” Boullard said, “and we have our own lives in our own hands. We dispose of them as we see fit.”

“Let us look at it from the political angle,” Labat said. “Politically, we are fried if the Germans win.…”

“Perhaps,” Sergeant Fourier said uneasily, his voice full of the nagging pain of having to make a decision. “Perhaps we ought to wait and see what happens.”

“We will wait and see ourselves buried,” Boullard said.

“At least,” said Labat, “we ought to talk to the Lieutenant. Sound him out.”

“I was on the Meuse,” said Boullard. “I know better than to talk to a lieutenant. I’ll take the responsibility. If you’re all afraid …” He looked around him with savage, peasant contempt. “There’re a lot of men still to be killed in this war. I don’t mind making it one more or less, personally.…”

“We have to talk to him first,” Labat said stubbornly.

“Why?” Boullard asked loudly.

“Maybe he’s with us. Maybe he wants to fight with the Americans, too.…”

Boullard laughed harshly. Then he spat. “I’m surrounded by children,” he said. “If he’s still an officer in the French Army after two years, he is not fond of the Americans. I am. At this moment, I am crazy about Americans. If there is any hope for anybody in this stinking year, it is in the Americans. I’m forty-four years old and I’ve fought in two wars. The third one, I want to pick my own side.…”