Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [106]
‘Just water.’
For a moment Joe feels again the force of it crushing his lungs. The huge sadness.
‘My father drowned.’
He wants to say ‘You saved my life’, which would sound corny. Moreover it is obvious.
‘You were pretty quick there.’
‘Just practical. There’s nothing theoretical about war; you do what you have to do. And you do it. Fast. That’s Napoleon again.’ Through the mud spattering his face, Otishi’s eyes gleam dark, his teeth white.
In training camp they were taught the nine principles of war: objective, offensive, mass, economy of force, manoeuvre, unity of command, security, surprise and simplicity.
Okay in theory. But as Joe was learning, war is not theoretical. War is a bullet that tears through your arm, the shriek of gunfire blasting your ears, the smell of rotting flesh. Trench foot.
Through the fog, the unrelenting rain, men screamed aloud with the agony of every step. Ankle-deep in quagmire in boots that leaked and split, there was no way to protect infected feet. The burning, the swelling were warnings that came too late: first the deadly numbing, then the real pain, feet turning blue, toes weeping like burst blisters. With luck and dry socks, the swelling subsided. If not, toes twisted like evil growths, spongy and leprous, came away as a man wrenched off his boot. There were amputations. Joe’s toes were now stabbing, burning. The swelling would follow. Government-issue combat boots were not made for this bone-chilling, amphibious world.
When Joe stumbled over the dead German soldier half buried in a crater, what he saw first was the dark blood, the tumble of guts. Then he saw the boots. Strong leather. Hobnailed soles. Waterproof. Joe measured his foot against the dead man’s, squatted and fumbled at laces strong as twine. Inside the boots the dead man’s socks were dry; an impossible luxury. Off with his soaking footwear; on with the German’s socks and boots, enclosing his feet like a thick skin, supporting, protecting. Unashamed, he felt grateful to the body he had robbed.
He scrambled to his feet, quickening his pace to catch up with the others. Within the boots, he flexed his dry toes.
To Nancy he wrote, I can’t tell you where we are; actually I don’t know where we are. Unfortunately, the enemy knows . . . It’s raining. It’s always raining . . .’
*
Afterwards he does the calculations: how much time to obliterate a town; how many bombs to smash a monastery; how long it takes to lose fifty thousand men and at the end gain nothing but the knowledge that it was never necessary? At the time, there is no time, just the blind reflex to obey the order. Cassino is pounded into ruin, and high above him Joe sees people fleeing as the monastery dissolves into a torrent of crumbling walls, a stone cascade showering the troops below. Only later, as German paratroopers float down to occupy the shell, does the full irony become clear: they have succeeded in turning a place of sanctuary shielding a couple of hundred civilians into the impregnable fortress the generals had believed it to be.
‘Whoever wins,’ Otishi commented, ‘this will be in a history book one day.’
‘You could write it.’
‘You kidding? That’s for the generals.’
The generals give orders. Dog-face soldiers obey, hurling themselves into wall after wall of fire. Acronyms multiply; each day a new SNAFU. Situation Normal, All Fucked Up. Plus FUBAR: Fucked Up Beyond All Repair. Cassino was a FUBAR. The generals themselves inspire a rich, multilingual litany of curses. Gurkhas, Poles, Anzacs, Tommies, Yanks – all have a special word for the gold-braid assholes, the guys who write the memoirs, the bastards.
The Nisei’s bastard – kisama – was Mark Clark, who sent men to their deaths; the kisama who chose the wrong river to cross and the wrong day to cross it.
‘What did we do?’ Joe hears a mutter from the GI next to him, face down in a foxhole, ‘to deserve this shit-head?’
Half blinded by mud, they crawl from the foxhole