Dream Catcher: A Memoir (12 page)

“Last Day of the Last Furlough” was published on July 15, but its author couldn’t have known about it until, at the earliest, the seventeenth, when, outside of Deauville, he and the other men of the Twelfth Infantry had their first shower and change of clothes since leaving England on June 5. On the day the story was published, these soldiers were in the midst of some particularly nasty fighting in hedgerow country about six hundred yards east of Saintenay, France. The Twelfth Infantry had recently finished what was basically hand-to-hand combat, clearing out the city of Cherbourg, building by building, street by street, body by body. They were now painfully gaining territory, one miserable field at a time, each bounded by nearly impenetrable hedgerows (the United States had not figured on this feature of the terrain, and the tanks were
nearly useless) behind which a German panzer division and parachute regiment were well defended. Each field was gained at a tremendous cost of human life. A day’s fighting often yielded only a few hundred yards of ground. Colonel Gerden F. Johnson of the Twelfth Infantry wrote, “The carnage was frightful. . . . The next morning it took three two-and-one-half-ton trucks to remove all the German bodies” from the field where they fell.

After a brief rest, shower, and regrouping outside Deauville, Colonel Johnson tells us that the men of the Twelfth Infantry “climbed from their slit trenches to watch one of the war’s greatest dramas unfold in the skies west of St. Lô.” Three waves of fighter bombers—350 planes in the first wave, 350 in the second, and 1,300 in the third wave—“as far as the eye could see . . . rolled out a lethal carpet of bombs on the terror-stricken Germans, saturating every field and hedgerow from one end of the bomb pattern to the other. . . . As suddenly as this hellish inferno had begun, it ceased, and the silence that followed was eerie.” There were far more dead bodies than trucks to handle them, and they lay where they were. The entire Fourth Infantry Division (of which the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was part) began a night march on a narrow road jammed with tanks and vehicles and dead bodies. A breakthrough had been accomplished, and the need to exploit it was urgent. The road they were on came to a dead end in a swamp. The intelligence officers went on ahead and succeeded in locating a new route. They were headed to Mortain, a battle General Bradley said involved the most critical decision he had to make during the entire war.

In four and a half days of fighting at “bloody Mortain” the Twelfth sustained 1,150 casualties, bringing the division’s death totals for June, July, and first weeks of August to 4,034, that is to say about 125 percent of the original 3,080 men. Nasty. The few men who lived through it were left with much to sicken them, body and soul.

I remember standing next to my father—I was about seven at the time—for what seemed like an eternity as he stared blankly at the strong backs of our construction crew of local boys, carpenters building the new addition to our house. Their T-shirts were off, their muscles glistening with life and youth in the summer sun. After a long time, he finally came back to life again and spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one in
particular, “All those big strong boys”—he shook his head—“always on the front line, always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them,” he said, his hand flat, palm out, pushing arc-like waves away from him.

O
N
A
UGUST
23, the Twelfth Regimental Combat Team started the 165-mile march toward Paris. It was slow going; trucks slipped off the wet, treacherous roads into ditches, and the convoy was forced to stop every three hours to let the cramped, soggy troops stretch. On August 25, they entered Paris. They were the first large military force, the first American troops, to enter the city. The Parisians went berserk. My father told me that when he and his Jeepmate John Keenan arrested a suspected collaborator, the crowd spotted the man, tore him from their arms, and beat him to death on the spot. My father said there was nothing, short of gunning down the entire crowd, that they could have done to stop them.

In Paris, he was able to get away from his duties long enough to pay a visit to Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was, at the time, a war correspondent attached to the Fourth Division. They had never met, but according to John Keenan, when my father heard that Hemingway was at the Ritz, he suggested they go and see him. Their visit was, apparently, a warm one. Hemingway asked to see my father’s most recent work, and he showed him “Last Day of the Last Furlough.” Hemingway had read it and said he liked it very much.
¹³

Their stay in Paris was brief, and what followed was what the regimental historian could only call a “mad dash” through France and Belgium. In less than a month (they had reached Paris on August 25; Germany on September 12), they would cross the border into Germany. My father gives voice to one soldier’s exhaustion at this time in a story called “A Boy in France.”
¹⁴

Until I read this story, published only in an old issue of
The Saturday Evening Post,
I was left, along with all readers of “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” only to wonder what had happened to that
soldier between D-Day and the war’s end. Here we meet up with Sergeant Babe Gladwaller, last seen in the story “Last Day of the Last Furlough,” now on a battlefield somewhere in France. It is an extraordinary piece of writing, I think, haiku-like in its brevity and evocative power. Babe, nearly dead on his feet from exhaustion, is searching a rain-sogged, blood-soaked battlefield for someplace to sleep. He finds a foxhole with a stained “unlamented” German blanket in it and begins, leadenly, to dig out the “bad spots,” the bloody places at the bottom of the hole. He takes out his GI bedroll and “lifts this bed thing, as though it had some kind of spine to it,” into the hole. He is filthy, wet, cold, and the hole is too short to fully stretch out his legs. My father, at six feet two inches tall, encountered this same problem all too often. An ant bites Babe, and as he swats it, he scrapes the place where his fingernail had been torn off in the morning’s battle.

What Babe does next is something that grabbed me almost bodily when I read it. It is something my father has done to deal with pain and suffering for as long as I have known him. My strong hunch is that this pattern of coping became part of his being during the trauma of war, but, as I said, it’s a hunch, not a certainty, since, of course, I didn’t know him before the war.
¹⁵

Babe examines his throbbing finger and then puts his whole hand under the blanket

with the care more like that proffered a sick person than a sore finger, and let himself work the kind of abracadabra familiar to and special for G.I.’s in combat.

“When I take my hand out of this blanket,” he thought, “my nail will be grown back, my hands will be clean. My body will be clean. I’ll have on clean shorts, clean undershirt, a white shirt. A blue polka-dot tie. A gray suit with a stripe, and I’ll be home, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll put some coffee on the stove, some records on the phonograph, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll read
my books and I’ll drink the hot coffee and I’ll listen to the music, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll open the window, I’ll let in a nice, quiet girl—not Frances, not anyone I’ve ever known—and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll ask her to walk a little bit in the room by herself, and I’ll look at her American ankles, and I’ll bolt the door. I’ll ask her to read some Emily Dickinson to me—that one about being chartless—and I’ll ask her to read some William Blake to me—that one about the little lamb who made thee—and I’ll bolt the door. She’ll have an American voice, and she won’t ask me if I have any chewing gum or bonbons, and I’ll bolt the door.”

Babe takes out of his pocket a handful of newspaper clippings. They are full of vacuous gossip about celebrities and fashions, obscene in the context of war. He crumples them into a ball and lies back in despair. At last he reaches for a letter in his pocket, clutching it for dear life, rereading it for the hundredth time. It’s a simple, beautiful letter from his sister Mattie. She tells him she misses him and asks him to come home soon. The story ends as Babe falls “crumbily, bent leggedly, asleep.”

About this time, the men of the Twelfth, including my father, received a similar, much-needed letter written by a young Belgian girl to the parents of a Twelfth Infantry man. He was killed in action and the letter was sent on to
The Big Picture,
the Twelfth Infantry regimental newspaper, which, in the October lull, had a chance to turn out a few issues on location. The Twelfth Infantry historian writes of this letter, “Its simplicity so clearly plumbs the depths of heartfelt thanks that it will always remain among the treasures of the Twelfth Infantry as a reminder that its sacrifices were not made in vain.”

Rue De La Conversarie

Saint Hubert

Ardenne, Belgique

21
^st
October 1944

To Family Bill,

I know just a few words of english and it is from a very little Belgium town, they will start for to express our grateful
to you Americans, for the liberation of our Country by your Sons (the 8
^th
September).

My thanks to you in particular because we have been happy that Bill to be our liberator. He is first American soldier we have seen, we will always remember this nice and lofty fighter, may God keep him throughout the future years and words can never say how in our gratitude towards you and yours.

When you write to Bill said to him I always think very much to him and if he can come in Saint Hubert, I shall be very happy to see him again.

Said to him also, I am always waiting him and he writes with me when that is possible and you also.

Excuse my english. I can explain me very well but I hope you understand me.

Sincerely Yours

I was thrilled to find this letter in the regimental archives. What I find so interesting is the way in which a unique human voice—my father’s story for example—gives voice to a feeling, a condition of suffering shared by many.
¹⁶
And then reading how others, each in his unique way, gave voice to their shared experience as each wondered whether anyone back home knew, or cared to know, the hell they were going through and the losses they were suffering. I read somewhere that a biographer of my father’s, interested in his story “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor,” went on a pilgrimage, of sorts, all over that part of England posting notices in local papers in search of the “real” Esmé, just as a reporter had tried, earlier, to find the “real” Sybil from the story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.” I’m not entirely certain why, but that sort
of thing leaves me cold. Perhaps it’s because the idiosyncratic, the isolated, the almost mythological aspects of my father writing alone in his tower have held sway for so long.

W
INTER BROUGHT THE CONDITIONS
of the Twelfth from unbearable to unspeakable. Their numbers had been increased by 2,228 replacements, bringing its original 3,080 to 3,362. A terrible month of fighting in Hürtgen Forest saw 1,493 battle casualties, and a loss of an additional 1,024 men from non-battle causes, mainly from freezing to death in foxholes, half full of icy water, dug in the alternately frozen and wet ground, snow and mud, with no winter boots nor warm coats, nor an adequate supply of dry blankets for a bedroll in the foxholes.

The normally terse reports from headquarters issued a commendation on December 17, 1944, to the commanding officer of the Twelfth Infantry. It reads in part:

Unseasonal precipitation and damp, penetrating cold were a constant detriment to the health and well being of the personnel, rendering their day by day existence well nigh unbearable. The terrain was characterized by densely forested hills, swollen streams and deep, adhesive mud, which retarded all movement of troops and vehicles.

The enemy had prepared. . . . extensive mine fields and well placed booby traps, in particular, exacted a heavy toll of casualties during the advance. . . . Inasmuch as natural conditions precluded the employment of adequate aerial and motorized support, the burden of neutralizing frantically defended enemy fortifications fell heavily upon the shoulders of the foot soldier. It is with extreme approbation that I commend your officers and men. . . . The deeds of the 12
^th
Infantry Regiment shall not be forgotten as long as bravery and valor are honored and respected.