J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [57]
The story’s anger is outweighed by a sense of grief, and though much of Salinger’s fury was directed toward the army, his despair was directed more at the pointlessness of war. This sense of futility is presented through the battle scene but is best conveyed at the story’s end. Garrity seeks out Gardner not to see his condition but to find out whether he has killed his phantom son. Gardner has not. He allowed Earl to live because his son “wanted to be here.” The line is pregnant with meaning, and its words have resulted in Gardner’s fatigue far more than the battle or the specter of Earl. Gardner’s future son’s willingness to be on the field of battle convicts Gardner. After all that he had witnessed and suffered, what did he do—or not do—in the future that allowed it to happen again? After his experience at “The Widow Maker’s Swamp,” it would have been his duty to teach his son the terrors and uselessness of war. Realizing that that never happens and that his own failure is to blame for Earl’s eagerness “to be here,” Gardner is cast into madness.
Salinger also uses Earl’s words to challenge his generation, asking them to teach their children not the phony glory of war but the cruel stupidity of it. As Garrity begins to tell a story about a nurse he met on the beach, readers realize that he himself has already forgotten these lessons. As the story closes, he calls out to another hitchhiking soldier, “Hey, buddy! Want a lift? Where are you going?” This is Salinger’s question to us: What will we do to see that war never happens again? What direction will we take? What path will we teach our own children? In the autumn of 1944, this kind of message was explosive, made all the more incendiary by the fact that it was written by a staff sergeant serving on the front.
The most powerful portion of “The Magic Foxhole” is the opening lines, which describe landing at Normandy on D-Day. The scene unfolds in silent slow motion and is brilliantly conveyed. There is nothing on the beach but dead bodies and a solitary living figure—a chaplain crawling around in the sand, frantically searching for his glasses. As his transport nears the beach, the narrator watches the surreal scene in amazement, until the chaplain too is torn to pieces and all motion stops. Only then is there room for the noise of explosions. This segment is hauntingly moving but above all highly symbolic. It was no accident that Salinger chose a chaplain to be alone among the dead in the heat of war. It was also no accident that this doomed cleric should be desperate for the clarity of his glasses in the chaos around him. His fate displays the image of someone who believed he held the answer and, when it was needed most, discovered he did not. It is an image of despair and hopelessness—a great wail of anguish. Held within it is a critical moment of advent in Salinger’s writing. For the first time, J. D. Salinger asks the question: where is God?
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After the liberation of Paris and the subsequent German retreat, General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s chief of staff declared with confidence that “militarily, the war is over.” The Allied generals agreed. Even Churchill and Roosevelt expected victory by mid-October. Orders were given to pursue the Germans and hasten their surrender. In the meantime, the post exchange was instructed to stop any delivery of Christmas packages to the troops from home. The war would not last that long.
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The Hürtgen Forest occupies approximately 50 square miles of