Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Ruben was from somewhere around New York City. He was short, and better with a pistol than a rifle, but he was exceptional with a pistol. Frank never quite knew if he was joking or not when he said he learned to shoot shooting rats in alleyways “or scurrying from building to building across clotheslines. It was easy to pick them off when they were doing that.” Ruben hadn’t finished high school — he had, instead, run numbers for a local gangster. He reminded Frank of that kid Terry, in Chicago. He looked tough and he was tough, and there was no trying involved. He had enlisted because the cops had a warrant out on him. He had gotten from New York to Florida, changed his name from something to Ruben, and joined the army. In Florida, he said, they took about anyone. He accepted that Frank was his superior officer, and he took orders as if he had always taken orders, which maybe he had. He was a criminal and he was brave, but he was a born follower.

The abbey was visible from everywhere, even through the curtain of constant rain, and Frank had heard all the arguments — you could see lights, you could see soldiers, you could see artillery, or, if you couldn’t, why in the world would any army, especially the Jerries, forgo such a perfect spot for recon? And if they weren’t there now, well, give them a day, or a week — they would get there. It was also evident that a thousand guys, or ten thousand guys, or twenty thousand guys, no matter how well equipped, were not going to climb that mountain and storm those walls — in addition to the terrain difficulty, the Jerries had planted every square inch with traps, mines, and wire. Five days before the bombing, after the Italian regiment that stormed up the hill were mowed down, Frank’s group was asked to do the impossible again. Some of the boys had taken Lieutenant Martin aside, and they had explained to him their point of view. That Ruben had pressed the lieutenant by the throat to the wall of their emplacement and simultaneously removed the service revolver from the lieutenant’s holster certainly accounted for much of Martin’s willingness to listen to his soldiers.

Frank would not have said that he ordered Ruben to offer his opinion (and the opinion of all the men) to Lieutenant Martin so forcefully, but he did say that he thought Martin was not only something of a dope, but also of two minds himself. A little persuading was all that was needed. But they did not fall back so far that they didn’t experience the night of the fifteenth, when the ranks of Flying Fortresses, Mitchells, and Marauders showed up and pounded the abbey for hours on end, shaking the earth with tremors and the sky with booms, and lighting up all the mountains. Bombs dropped everywhere, it didn’t matter where the lines were or were supposed to be — Frank huddled against the earth and wondered again if the generals had bothered with a map. The good thing was that the mountains were so steep and craggy that a bomb had to drop right on you to kill you, and, lucky again, Frank found himself alive in the morning. Ruben, who had whispered prayers all night in some language that was not English, found himself alive, too. Lieutenant Martin did not. But Frank suspected that that was a relief for him more than anything else.

Things were no better at Anzio when their unit was moved there. The Allies had landed months before — right around the time Frank’s unit had attacked Monte Cassino the first time — but they had gotten nowhere, and were now drowning in mud. Frank had thought that surely the German army was massed at Monte Cassino, but in fact they seemed to be in the ridges encircling the beach at Anzio, pouring 88mm artillery shells on everything and everyone — it was generally known that they aimed for Red Cross tents. And they had an unbelievable amount of firepower. Day after day, they shelled everything that moved in the marshes below the cliffs, exploding one little stone house after another. Frank saw at once that the Allied plan here was like it had been in Africa, to attack and attack and attack, even though defense forces were superbly entrenched and didn’t even bother to bury their own dead. The Allies didn’t want the Jerries to dare divert anyone to France, or Greece, or wherever else they might be useful. Every so often, you heard the words “cannon fodder.” Well, this was cannon fodder at its most expensive. Frank saw that his job had changed. What use were snipers? You couldn’t get around the Jerries, and you couldn’t get above them, and they controlled all the buildings. You could do one thing and one thing alone, which was to press them over and over, until — until what? Until, Frank thought (the generals thought), some happenstance turned up. Maybe that happenstance was only this, that it was spring, and therefore freezing cold had been superseded by pouring rain, and they didn’t have to cross the Rapido ever again.

Dawn on May 23 was rather nice, if you were only looking at the weather, but when the artillery commenced firing, and Frank began advancing toward the cliffs with the rest of his unit, he thought, and maybe for the first time, You’re in the army now. He was in charge of five men. They carried tommy guns, pistols, grenades, and plenty of ammunition. They wore helmets and were, except for the smoke all around them, entirely visible. But they did attain the cliffs. Private Ruben, who was short and quick, managed to take out two machine-gun nests one right after the other, and to get back to their unit, stand on a little promontory, and give everyone and everything around them an exuberant finger. The squad then fought their way through the pass, with only Private Cornhill getting shot, a flesh wound in his left arm that did not, he insisted, even hurt, much less compromise his fighting prowess. Frank let him keep at it through the rest of the day. Frank wasn’t as heroic, but he did get six or eight kills. It wasn’t until the next day that they realized how hard it had been — their unit was intact, but hundreds of men had been wounded or killed, and dozens of tanks disabled. However, they were off the beach.

Late the next day, they got to a town called Cisterna. Frank guessed that it had once been a nice town — there were the remnants of streets, of parks, of houses, of shops. Their orders were to go house to house, rousting out the last Jerries and shooting them. Ruben was good at this, too, but so was Hernandez, who was from Oakland, California. The both of them actually seemed to relax as they got farther from the countryside. Frank himself got jumpy. Maybe the most disturbing of the Jerries was a fellow in the fourth house they entered, who had barricaded himself in a corner room on what was left of the second floor. He had seen them coming, and shot at them, a fatal error, since Frank had not intended to check that house. They went slowly up the stairs, pressing against the walls on either side of the steps, which were intact. The fellow made no sound and no move until Frank guessed which door he was behind, kicked it open, and ducked. But the Jerry was too frightened to come out, and as they stormed the room, he sat down on the windowsill and was shot from behind by some troops from the Thirty-fourth in the street below. He fell backward out of the window. One other Jerry tried to shoot them but missed, and two simply gave themselves up. At the end of the day, the town was quiet, and the entire German unit wiped out, according to Major Sandler. They bivouacked in the town for two days after that, sleeping most of the time.

The next day, they turned left. Frank didn’t know why they turned left, but thought that it was probably, once again, the scarcity of maps. And the rest had done him good. Yes, there was fighting, and Cornhill was injured again, this time shot in the shoulder, so he had to be evacuated. Frank was grazed by a fragment of a grenade; it stung his ear and dinged his helmet. But the Jerries started to evaporate for the first time that Frank had seen, and on a lovely day in June, they marched into Rome. It was very quiet that first day, but the second morning, they woke up surrounded by Italians, and Ruben was talking with them a mile a minute.