Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [50]
But one day this here new lieutenant he sees the commotion and he says, sergeant, what’s all the commotion? And the sergeant said, lieutenant sir, them is Eyetie kids what keep hangin‘ around for leftovers. And the lieutenant sir, he says that will never do. Men gotta eat. Can’t waste food on just kids that way. Obstructin’ the war effort. Might even be sabotage. Besides, it air.’t right that kids should eat garbage. Ain’t sanitary. So the lieutenant sir, he says, sergeant, send three men to dig a nice sanitary hole for the garbage.
But the kids they all let out a howl when the left-over chow got dumped in the hole. Jumped right in after it. Little dirt didn’t matter none to them. Had to stretch ropes around the hole. Push back the crowds. But the kids ducked under, slippin‘ and slidin’ and floppin‘ around right in the mud. Screechin’. Cryin‘. Raisin’ all kinds of hell.
So the lieutenant sir, he had the sergeant fill the hole up with dirt right away. Then the kids started diggin‘ up the dirt with their hands. So the lieutenant sir, he has the dirt tamped down hard and has it run over with trucks and then he posts a guard over it. Day and night. That learned them little kids all right. Little smart alecks. Ain’t s’posed to eat dirty old slop that-a-way.
The lieutenant sir, he just played it cool. Like you just gotta do.
So we learned about the war and we learned about Luke. We heard it as a song and a story, a jeremiad of pain and bitterness, a ragged tale made of scraps of memory, things seen and heard and half dreamed within the nightmare of combat.
The banjo told us how it felt during the triumphal entry into Rome. The next weekend we heard about the artillery barrage and the shrapnel that put Luke in a base hospital for two months. Afterwards it was France and the mountains, the roads clogged with peasants riding in carts and wagons and automobiles pulled by oxen, carrying rucksacks, pedaling bicycles, all fleeing to the rear to escape the terrors of scorched earth that the Germans left behind.
But the banjo picked and plucked and reverberated through the monotony, the waiting, the hunger, the heat and the cold and the wet and the filth, the drunken revels and the jokes, the agonies and the horrors. Men were bombed and burned and butchered. Germans and Americans. Frenchmen, Englishmen and Italians. Civilians shot as hostages, as spies, as accidents. Children disemboweled. Women decapitated.
Luke began to join those who sought out the liquor in every captured village and farmhouse. When the sergeant led his squad into the overrun German dressingstation and pounced on the two nurses who had been left behind with the wounded, Luke took his turn in line. And when again a few weeks later they shot their way into a farmhouse and found three hysterical French girls amidst the wrecked furniture, the corpses, the empty shell cases and littered weapons, again Luke took his turn in line.
But he and the sergeant were the first of their division to enter into Germany. They crossed the bridge at a dead run, firing their M-is from the hip at the demolition team that was frantically trying to light the fuses on the charges already put in place. Stumbling when they paused to ram another clip of ammo into the breech, running ahead, firing, screaming back at their own men who cowered and took cover, screaming curses at the fumbling Germans who fell, lit fuses, shot back and started running, the two of them kicked explosives into the river, cut lashings, snatched out burning fuses and kept up a continuous, hysterical firing.
Running so fast and so recklessly that their speed alone kept them alive in the storm of answering fire, their battle fury making them insensitive to danger and pain, the sergeant not even knowing when his helmet was shot off his