Once There Was A War Part 1

ONCE THERE WAS A WAR.

by JOHN STEINBECK.

Introduction.

ONCE THERE WAS A WAR: AN INTRODUCTION.

ONCE UPON A TIME there was a war, but so long ago and so shouldered out of the way by other wars and other kinds of wars that even people who were there are apt to forget. This war that I speak of came after the plate armor and longbows of Crecy and Agincourt and just before the little spitting experimental atom bombs of Hiros.h.i.+ma and Nagasaki.

I attended a part of that war, you might say visited it, since I went in the costume of a war correspondent and certainly did not fight, and it is interesting to me that I do not remember very much about it. Reading these old reports sent in with excitement at the time brings back images and emotions completely lost.

Perhaps it is right or even necessary to forget accidents, and wars are surely accidents to which our species seems p.r.o.ne. If we could learn from our accidents it might be well to keep the memories alive, but we do not learn. In ancient Greece it was said that there had to be a war at least every twenty years because every generation of men had to know what it was like. With us, we must forget, or we could never indulge in the murderous nonsense again.

The war I speak of, however, may be memorable because it was the last of its kind. Our Civil War has been called the last of the "gentlemen's wars," and the so-called Second World War was surely the last of the long global wars. The next war, if we are so stupid as to let it happen, will be the last of any kind. There will be no one left to remember anything. And if that is how stupid we are, we do not, in a biologic sense, deserve survival. Many other species have disappeared from the earth through errors in mutational judgment. There is no reason to suppose that we are immune from the immutable law of nature which says that over-armament, over-ornamentation, and, in most cases, over-integration are symptoms of coming extinction. Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee A Connecticut Yankee uses the horrifying and possible paradox of the victor's being killed by the weight of the vanquished dead. uses the horrifying and possible paradox of the victor's being killed by the weight of the vanquished dead.

But all this is conjecture, no matter how possible it may be. The strange thing is that my dim-remembered war has become as hazy as conjecture. My friend Jack Wagner was in the First World War. His brother Max was in the Second World War. Jack, in possessive defense of the war he knew, always referred to it as the Big War, to his brother's disgust. And of course the Big War is the war you knew.

But do you know it, do you remember it, the drives, the att.i.tudes, the terrors, and, yes, the joys? I wonder how many men who were there remember very much.

I have not seen these accounts and stories since they were written in haste and telephoned across the sea to appear as immediacies in the New York Herald Tribune New York Herald Tribune and a great many other papers. That was the day of the Book by the War Correspondent, but I resisted that impulse, believing or saying I believed that unless the stories had validity twenty years in the future they should stay on the yellowing pages of dead newspaper files. That I have got them out now is not for my first reason given at all. Reading them over after all these years, I realize not only how much I have forgotten but that they are period pieces, the att.i.tudes archaic, the impulses romantic, and, in the light of everything that has happened since, perhaps the whole body of work untrue and warped and one-sided. and a great many other papers. That was the day of the Book by the War Correspondent, but I resisted that impulse, believing or saying I believed that unless the stories had validity twenty years in the future they should stay on the yellowing pages of dead newspaper files. That I have got them out now is not for my first reason given at all. Reading them over after all these years, I realize not only how much I have forgotten but that they are period pieces, the att.i.tudes archaic, the impulses romantic, and, in the light of everything that has happened since, perhaps the whole body of work untrue and warped and one-sided.

The events set down here did happen. But on rereading this reportage, my memory becomes alive to the other things, which also did happen and were not reported. That they were not reported was partly a matter of orders, partly traditional, and largely because there was a huge and ga.s.sy thing called the War Effort. Anything which interfered with or ran counter to the War Effort was automatically bad. To a large extent judgment about this was in the hands of the correspondent himself, but if he forgot himself and broke any of the rules, there were the Censors, the Military Command, the Newspapers, and finally, most strong of all in discipline, there were the war-minded civilians, the Noncombatant Commandos of the Stork Club, of Time Time Magazine and Magazine and The New Yorker The New Yorker, to jerk a correspondent into line or suggest that he be removed from the area as a danger to the War Effort. There were citizens' groups helping with tactics and logistics; there were organizations of mothers to oversee morals, and by morals I mean not only s.e.xual morals but also such things as gambling and h.e.l.ling around in general. Secrecy was a whole field in itself. Perhaps our whole miasmic hysteria about secrecy for the last twenty years had its birth during this period. Our obsession with secrecy had a perfectly legitimate beginning in a fear that knowledge of troop-s.h.i.+p sailings would and often did attract the wolf packs of submarines. But from there it got out of hand until finally facts available in any library in the world came to be carefully guarded secrets, and the most carefully guarded secrets were known by everyone.

I do not mean to indicate that the correspondent was harried and pushed into these rules of conduct. Most often he carried his rule book in his head and even invented restrictions for himself in the interest of the War Effort. When The Viking Press decided to print these reports in book form, it was suggested that, now that all restrictions were off, I should take out the "Somewhere in So-and-So" dateline and put in the places where the events occurred. This is impossible. I was so secret that I don't remember where they happened.

The rules, some imposed and some self-imposed, are amusing twenty years later. I shall try to remember a few of them. There were no cowards in the American Army, and of all the brave men the private in the infantry was the bravest and n.o.blest. The reason for this in terms of the War Effort is obvious. The infantry private had the dirtiest, weariest, least rewarding job in the whole war. In addition to being dangerous and dirty, a great many of the things he had to do were stupid. He must therefore be rea.s.sured that these things he knew to be stupid were actually necessary and wise, and that he was a hero for doing them. Of course no one even casually inspected the fact that the infantry private had no choice. If he exercised a choice, he was either executed immediately or sent to prison for life.

A second convention was that we had no cruel or ambitious or ignorant commanders. If the disorganized insanity we were a part of came a cropper, it was not only foreseen but a part of a grander strategy out of which victory would emerge.

A third sternly held rule was that five million perfectly normal, young, energetic, and concupiscent men and boys had for the period of the War Effort put aside their habitual preoccupation with girls. The fact that they carried pictures of nude girls, called pin-ups, did not occur to anyone as a paradox. The convention was the law. When Army Supply ordered X millions of rubber contraceptive and disease-preventing items, it had to be explained that they were used to keep moisture out of machine-gun barrels-and perhaps they did.

Since our Army and Navy, like all armies and navies, were composed of the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, the cruel, the gentle, the brutal, the kindly, the strong, and the weak, this convention of general n.o.bility might seem to have been a little hard to maintain, but it was not. We were all a part of the War Effort. We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don't mean that the correspondents were liars. They were not. In the pieces in this book everything set down happened. It is in the things not mentioned that the untruth lies.

When General Patton slapped a sick soldier in a hospital and when our Navy at Gela shot down fifty-nine of our own troop carriers, General Eisenhower personally asked the war correspondents not to send the stories because they would be bad for morale at home. And the correspondents did not file the stories. Of course the War Department leaked to a local newsman and the stories got printed anyway, but no one in the field contributed to that bit of treason to the War Effort.

Meanwhile strange conventional stories were born and duly reported. One of the oddest concerned the colonel or general in the Air Force whose duty required that he stay in reluctant comfort on the ground and who ate his heart out to be with his "boys" out on mission over Germany among the red flak. It was hard, stern duty that kept him grounded, and much harder than flying missions. I don't know where this one started, but it doesn't sound as though it came from enlisted personnel. I never met a bomber crew which wouldn't have taken on this sterner duty at the drop of a hat. They may have been a little wild, but they weren't that crazy.

Reading over these old reports, I see that again and again sentences were removed by censor. I have no idea what it was that was removed. Correspondents had no quarrel with censors. They had a tough job. They didn't know what might be brought up against them. No one could discipline them for eliminating, and so in self-preservation they eliminated pretty deeply. Navy censors were particularly sensitive to names of places, whether they had any military importance or not. It was the safest way. Once when I felt a little bruised by censors.h.i.+p I sent through Herodotus's account of the battle of Salamis fought between the Greeks and Persians in 480 B.C., and since there were place names involved, albeit cla.s.sical ones, the Navy censors killed the whole story.

We really tried to observe the censors.h.i.+p rules, even knowing that a lot of them were nonsense, but it was very hard to know what the rules were. They had a way of changing with the commanding officer. Just when you thought you knew what you could send, the command changed and you couldn't send that at all.

The correspondents were a curious, crazy, and yet responsible crew. Armies by their nature, size, complication, and command are bound to make mistakes, mistakes which can be explained or trans.m.u.ted in official reports. It follows that military commanders are a little nervous about reporters. They are restive about people breathing down their necks, particularly experts. And it was true that many of the professional war correspondents had seen more wars and more kinds of wars than anybody in the Army or Navy. Capa, for example, had been through the Spanish War, the Ethiopian War, the Pacific War. Clark Lee had been at Corregidor and before that in j.a.pan. If the regular Army and Navy didn't much like the war correspondents there was nothing they could do about it, because these men were the liaison with the public. Furthermore many of them had become very well known and had enormous followings. They were syndicated from one end of the nation to the other. Many of them had established their methods and their styles. A few had become prima donnas, but not many. Ernie Pyle was so popular and so depended on by readers at home that in importance he much outranked most general officers.

To this hard-bitten bunch of professionals I arrived as a Johnny-come-lately, a sacred cow, a kind of tourist. I think they felt that I was muscling in on their hard-gained territory. When, however, they found that I was not duplicating their work, was not reporting straight news, they were very kind to me and went out of their way to help me and to instruct me in the things I didn't know. For example, it was Capa who gave me the best combat advice I ever heard. It was, "Stay where you are. If they haven't hit you, they haven't seen you." And then Capa had to go and step on a land mine in Viet-Nam, just when he was about to retire from the whole terrible, futile business. And Ernie Pyle got it between the eyes from a sniper on the trip he planned as his weary last.

All of us developed our coy little tricks with copy. Reading these old pieces, I recognize one of mine. I never admitted having seen anything myself. In describing a scene I invariably put it in the mouth of someone else. I forget why-1 did this. Perhaps I felt that it would be more believable if told by someone else. Or it is possible that I felt an interloper, and eavesdropper on the war, and was a little bit ashamed of being there at all. Maybe I was ashamed that I could go home and soldiers couldn't. But it was often neither safe nor comfortable being a correspondent. A great part of the services were in supply and transport and office work. Even combat units got some rest after a mission was completed. But the war correspondents found that their papers got restive if they weren't near where things were happening. The result was that the correspondents had a very high casualty rate. If you stayed a correspondent long enough and went to the things that were happening, the chances were that you would get it. In reading these reports I am appalled at how many of the reporters are dead. Only a handful of the blithe spirits who made the nights horrible and filled the days with complaints, remain living.

But to get back to the conventions. It was the style to indicate that you were afraid all the time. I guess I was really afraid, but the style was there too. I think this was also designed to prove how brave the soldiers were. And the soldiers were just exactly as brave and as cowardly as anyone else.

We edited ourselves much more than we were edited. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles.

The self-discipline, self-censors.h.i.+p among the war correspondents was surely moral and patriotic but it was also practical in a sense of self-preservation. Some subjects were taboo. Certain people could not be criticized or even questioned. The foolish reporter who broke the rules would not be printed at home and in addition would be put out of the theater by the command, and a correspondent with no theater has no job.

We knew, for instance, that a certain very famous general officer constantly changed press agents because he felt he didn't get enough headlines. We knew the commander who broke a Signal Corps sergeant for photographing his wrong profile. Several fine field officers were removed from their commands by the jealousy of their superiors because they aroused too much enthusiasm in their men and too much admiration from the reporters. There were consistent sick leaves which were gigantic hangovers, spectacular liaisons between Army bra.s.s and WAACs, medical discharges for stupidity, brutality, cowardice, and even s.e.x deviation. I don't know a single reporter who made use of any of this information. Apart from wartime morals, it would have been professional suicide to have done it. The one man who jumped the gun and scooped the world on the armistice was ruined in his profession, and his career was terminated.

Yes, we wrote only a part of the war, but at the time we believed, fervently believed, that it was the best thing to do. And perhaps that is why, when the war was over, novels and stories by ex-soldiers, like The Naked and the Dead The Naked and the Dead, proved so shocking to a public which had been carefully protected from contact with the crazy hysterical mess.

We had plenty of material anyway. There was a superabundance of heroism, selflessness, intelligence, and kindness to write about. And perhaps we were right in eliminating parts of the whole picture. Surely if we had sent all we knew, and couched in the language of the field, the home front would have been even more confused than we managed to make it. Besides, for every screaming egotist there was a Bradley, and for every publicity-mad military ham there were great men like Terry Allen and General Roosevelt, while in the ranks, billeted with the stinking, cheating, foul-mouthed goldbricks, there were true heroes, kindly men, intelligent men who knew or thought they knew what they were fighting for and took all the rest in their stride.

Professionally the war correspondents, I believe, were highly moral and responsible men, many of them very brave men, some of them completely dedicated men, but in the time after the story was filed I guess we were no better and no worse than the officers and enlisted men, only we had more facilities than the services, either commissioned or enlisted. We carried simulated ranks, ranging from captain to lieutenant colonel, which allowed us to eat at officers' mess, where enlisted men could not go, but we also had access to the enlisted men, where officers could not go. I remember an officers' dance in North Africa, a dull, cold little affair with junior officers mechanically dancing with commissioned nurses to old records on a wind-up phonograph, while in nearby barracks one of the finest jazz combos I ever heard was belting out pure ecstasy. Naturally we correspondents happily moved to the better music. Rank surely has its privileges, but with us it sometimes amounted to license. When our duty was done and our stories on the wire, we discovered and exchanged every address where black-market meat, liquor, and women could be procured. We knew the illegal taxis. We chiseled, stole, malingered, goldbricked, and generally made ourselves as comfortable as we could. I early learned that a pint of whisky to a transportation sergeant would get me on a plane ahead of a general with crash orders from the General Staff. We didn't steal much from the Army. We didn't have to. It was given to us. Besides we were up against experts in the Army. I remember a general in supply morosely reading a report of missing materiel from a supply depot and exploding, "The American soldier is the worst thief in the world. You know what's going to happen? When they steal everything we've got, they'll start stealing from the Germans, and then G.o.d help Hitler." And I remember on a destroyer at sea when every sidearm of every officer, 45s and carbines, suddenly disappeared, and although the s.h.i.+p was searched from stem to stern, even the fuel and water tanks explored, not one single weapon was ever found. There was a kind of a compulsion to steal. Prisoners were frisked for watches, cameras, and sidearms (the trade goods of the GIs) with professional skill. But the correspondents didn't steal much-first, as I said, because they didn't have to, and second, because we moved about so much that we couldn't take things with us. Heaven knows how many helmets, bedding rolls, and gas masks I was issued. I rarely got them where I was going, and I never got them back. In the cellars of London hotels today there must be trunks of loot left there fifteen years ago by correspondents and never claimed. I personally know of two such caches.

For what they are worth, or for what they may recapture, here they are, period pieces, fairy tales, half-meaningless memories of a time and of att.i.tudes which have gone forever from the world, a sad and jocular recording of a little part of a war I saw and do not believe, unreal with trumped-up pageantry, so that it stands in the mind like the battle pictures of Crecy and Bunker Hill and Gettysburg. And, although all wax is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal, still there was in these memory-wars some gallantry, some bravery, some kindliness. A man got killed, surely, or maimed, but, living, he did not carry crippled seed as a gift to his children.

Now for many years we have suckled on fear and fear alone, and there is no good product of fear. Its children are cruelty and deceit and suspicion germinating in our darkness. And just as surely as we are poisoning the air with our test bombs, so are we poisoned in our souls by fear, faceless, stupid sarcomic terror.

The pieces in this volume were written under pressure and in tension. My first impulse on rereading them was to correct, to change, to smooth out ragged sentences and remove repet.i.tions, but their very raggedness is, it seems to me, a parcel of their immediacy. They are as real as the wicked witch and the good fairy, as true and tested and edited as any other myth.

There was a war, long ago-once upon a time.

England

TROOPs.h.i.+P.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 20, 1943 June 20, 1943-The troops in their thousands sit on their equipment on the dock. It is evening, and the first of the dimout lights come on. The men wear their helmets, which make them all look alike, make them look like long rows of mushrooms. Their rifles are leaning against their knees. They have no ident.i.ty, no personality. The men are units in an army. The numbers chalked on their helmets are almost like the license numbers on robots. Equipment is piled neatly-bedding rolls and half-shelters and barracks bags. Some of the men are armed with Springfield or Enfield rifles from the First World War, some with M-1s, or Garands, and some with the neat, light clever little carbines everyone wants to have after the war for hunting rifles.

Above the pier the troops.h.i.+p rears high and thick as an office building. You have to crane your neck upward to see where the portholes stop and the open decks begin. She is a nameless s.h.i.+p and will be while the war lasts. Her destination is known to very few men and her route to even fewer, and the burden of the men who command her must be almost unendurable, for the master who loses her and her cargo will never sleep comfortably again. He probably doesn't sleep at all now. The cargo holds are loaded and the s.h.i.+p waits to take on her tonnage of men.

On the dock the soldiers are quiet. There is little talking, no singing, and as dusk settles to dark you cannot tell one man from another. The heads bend forward with weariness. Some of these men have been all day, some many days, getting to this starting point.

There are several ways of wearing a hat or a cap. A man may express himself in the pitch or tilt of his hat, but not with a helmet. There is only one way to wear a helmet. It won't go on any other way. It sits level on the head, low over eyes and ears, low on the back of the neck. With your helmet on you are a mushroom in a bed of mushrooms.

Four gangways are open now and the units get wearily to their feet and shuffle along in line. The men lean forward against the weight of their equipment. Feet drag against the incline of the gangways. The soldiers disappear one by one into the great doors in the side of the troops.h.i.+p.

Inside the checkers tabulate them. The numbers chalked on the helmets are checked again against a list. Places have been a.s.signed. Half of the men will sleep on the decks and the other half inside in ballrooms, in dining rooms where once a very different kind of people sat and found very important things that have disappeared. Some of the men will sleep in bunks, in hammocks, on the decks, in pa.s.sages. Tomorrow they will s.h.i.+ft. The men from the deck will come in to sleep and those from inside will go out. They will change every night until they land. They will not take off their clothes until they land. This is no cruise s.h.i.+p.

On the decks, dimmed to a faint blue dusk by the blackout lights, the men sink down and fall asleep. They are asleep almost as soon as they are settled. Many of them do not even take off their helmets. It has been a weary day. The rifles are beside them, held in their hands.

On the gangways the lines still feed into the troops.h.i.+p-a regiment of colored troops, a hundred Army nurses, neat in their helmets and field packs. The nurses at least will have staterooms, however crowded they may be in them. Up No. 1 Gangway comes the headquarters complement of a bombardment wing and a company of military police. All are equally tired. They find their places and go to sleep.

Embarkation is in progress. No smoking is allowed anywhere. Everyone entering the s.h.i.+p is triply checked, to make sure he belongs there, and the loading is very quiet. There is only the shuffle of tired feet on the stairways and quiet orders. The permanent crew of military police know every move. They have handled this problem of traffic before.

The tennis courts on the upper deck are a half-acre of sleeping men now-men, feet, and equipment. MPs are everywhere, on stairs and pa.s.sages, directing and watching. This embarkation must go on smoothly, for one little block might well lose hours in the loading, just as one willful driver, making a wrong turn in traffic, may jam an avenue for a long time. But in spite of the shuffling gait, the embarkation is very rapid. About midnight the last man is aboard.

In the staff room the commanding officer sits behind a long table, with telephones in front of him. His adjutant, a tired blond major, makes his report and places his papers on the table. The CO nods and gives him an order.

Throughout the s.h.i.+p the loudspeakers howl. Embarkation is complete. The gangways slide down from the s.h.i.+p. The iron doors close. No one can enter or leave the s.h.i.+p now, except the pilot. On the bridge the captain of the s.h.i.+p paces slowly. It is his burden now. These thousands are in his care, and if there is an accident it will be his blame.

The s.h.i.+p remains against the pier and a light breathing sound comes from deep in her. The troops are cut off now and gone from home, although they are not a hundred steps from home. On the upper decks a few men lean over the rails and look down on the pier and away at the city behind. The oily water ripples with the changing tide. It is almost time to go. In the staff room, which used to be the s.h.i.+p's theater, the commanding officer sits behind his table. His tired, blond adjutant sits beside him. The phone rings, the CO picks it up, listens for a moment and hangs up the receiver. He turns to the adjuntant.

"All ready," he says.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 21, 1943 June 21, 1943-The tide is turning now and it is after midnight. On the bridge, which towers above the pier buildings, there is great activity. The lines are cast off and the engines reversed. The great s.h.i.+p backs carefully into the stream and nearly fills it to both banks. But the little tugs are waiting for her and they b.u.mp and persuade her about until she is headed right and they hang beside her like suckling s.h.i.+ps as she moves slowly toward the sea. Only the MPs on watch among the sleeping soldiers see the dimmed-out city slipping by.

Down deep in the s.h.i.+p, in the hospital, the things that can happen to so many men have started to happen. A medical major has taken off his blouse and rolled up his sleeves. He is was.h.i.+ng his hands in green soap, while an Army nurse in operating uniform stands by, holding the doctor's white gown. The anonymous soldier, with the dangerous appendix, is having his stomach shaved by another Army nurse. Brilliant light floods the operating table. The doctor major slips into his sterile gloves. The nurse adjusts the mask over his nose and mouth and he steps quickly to the sleeping soldier on the table under the light.

The great troops.h.i.+p sneaks past the city and the tugs leave her, a dark thing steaming into the dark. On the decks and in the pa.s.sages and in the bunks the thousands of men are collapsed in sleep. Only their faces show under the dim blue blackout lights-faces and an impression of tangled hands and feet and legs and equipment. Officers and military police stand guard over this great sleep, a sleep multiplied, the sleep of thousands. An odor rises from the men, the characteristic odor of an army. It is the smell of wool and the bitter smell of fatigue and the smell of gun oil and leather. Troops always have this odor. The men lie sprawled, some with their mouths open, but they do not snore. Perhaps they are too tired to snore, but their breathing is a pulsing, audible thing.

The tired blond adjutant haunts the deck like a ghost. He doesn't know when he will ever sleep again. He and the provost marshal share responsibility for a smooth crossing, and both are serious and responsible men.

The sleeping men are missing something tremendous, as last things are usually missed. The clerks and farmers, salesmen, students, laborers, technicians, reporters, fishermen who have stopped being those things to become an army have been trained from their induction for this moment. This is the beginning of the real thing for which they have practiced. Their country, which they have become soldiers to defend, is slipping away into the misty night and they are asleep. The place which will fill their thoughts in the months to come is gone and they did not see it go. They were asleep. They will not see it again for a long time, and some of them will never see it again. This was the time of emotion, the moment that cannot be replaced, but they were too tired. They sleep like children who really tried to stay awake to see Santa Claus and couldn't make it. They will remember this time, but it will never really have happened to them.

The night begins to come in over the sea. It is overcast and a light rain begins to fall. It is good sailing weather because a submarine could not see us 200 yards away. The s.h.i.+p is a gray, misty shape, slipping through a gray mist and melting into it. Overhead a Navy blimp watches over her, sometimes coming in so close that you can see the men in the little underslung cabin.

The troops.h.i.+p is cut off now. She can hear but cannot speak. Her outgoing radio will not be used at all unless she is. .h.i.t or attacked. For the time of her voyage no one will hear of her. Submarines are in the misty sea ahead, and of the men on board very many have never seen the ocean before and the sea itself is dark and terrifying enough without the lurking things, and there are other matters besides the future fighting that frighten a local boy-new things, new people, new languages.

The men are beginning to awaken now, before the call. They have missed the moment of parting. They awaken to-destination unknown, route unknown, life even for an hour ahead unknown. The great s.h.i.+p throws her bow into the Atlantic.

On the boat deck two early-rising mountain boys are standing, looking in wonder at the incredible sea. One of them says, "They say she's salty clear down to the bottom."

"Now you know that ain't so," the other says.

"What you mean, it ain't so? Why ain't it so?"

The other speaks confidently. "Now, son," he says, "you know there ain't that much salt in the world. Just figure it out for yourself."

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 22, 1943 June 22, 1943-The first morning on a troops.h.i.+p is a mess. The problem of feeding thousands of men in such close quarters is profound. There are two meals a day, s.p.a.ced ten hours apart. Mess lines for breakfast form at seven and continue until ten. Dinner lines start at five in the afternoon and continue until ten at night. And during these times the long, narrow corridors are lined with men, three abreast, carrying their field kits.

On the first day the system does not take effect. There are traffic jams and thin tempers. At ten in the morning a miserable private in chemical warfare whines to a military policeman, who is keeping the lines shuffling along. "Please, mister. Get me out of this line. I have had three breakfasts already. I ain't hungry no more. Every time I get out of one line I get shoved into another one."

Men cannot be treated as individuals on this troops.h.i.+p. They are simply units which take up six feet by three feet by two feet, horizontal or vertical. So much s.p.a.ce must be allotted for the physical unit. They are engines which must be given fuel to keep them from stopping. The products of their combustion must be taken care of and eliminated. There is no way of considering them as individuals. The second and third day the method begins to work. The line flows smoothly and on time, but that first day is a mess.

The men are rested now and there is no room to move about. They will not be able to have any exercise during this voyage. There are too many feet. The major impression on a troop s.h.i.+p is of feet. A man can get his head out of the way and his arms, but, lying or sitting, his feet are a problem. They sprawl in the aisles, they stick up at all angles. They are not protected because they are the part of a man least likely to be hurt. To move about you must step among feet, must trip over feet.

There are big, misshapen feet; neat, small feet; shoes that are polished; curl-toed shoes; shoestrings knotted and snarled, and careful little bows. You can read character by the feet and shoes. There are perpetually tired feet, and nervous, quick feet. To remember a troops.h.i.+p is to remember feet. At night on a blacked-out s.h.i.+p, you must creep and feel your way among acres of feet.

The men begin to be restless now. It is hard to sit still and do nothing. Some have brought the little pocket books and others go to the s.h.i.+p's library and get books. Detective stories and short stories. They take what they can get. But there are many men who do not consider reading a matter of pleasure and these must find some other outlet for their interests.

Several months ago Services of Supply, in reporting the items supplied to the soldiers' exchanges, included several hundreds of thousands of sets of dice, explaining that parcheesi was becoming increasingly popular in the Army. Those who remember parcheesi as a rather dumpy game may not believe this if they have not seen it, but it is so. The game has been streamlined to a certain extent but there is no doubt of its popularity. The board with its string pockets has disappeared in the interest of s.p.a.ce. Parcheesi is now played on an Army blanket.

It is a spirited, healthy game, and seems to hold the attention of the players. Some tournaments of parcheesi continue for days. One, indeed, never stopped during the whole crossing. Another game which is very popular in the Army is ca.s.sino. Its most common forms are stud ca.s.sino and five-card-draw ca.s.sino. It is gratifying to see that our new Army has gone back to the old-fas.h.i.+oned virtues our forefathers lied about.

The s.h.i.+p is very heavily armed. From every point of observation the guns protrude. This troops.h.i.+p could fight her way through considerable opposition. On the decks, in addition to the lifeboats, are hundreds of life rafts ready to be thrown into the sea. These boats and rafts are equipped with food and water and medicine and even fis.h.i.+ng tackle.

Now the men who slept on the decks last night move inside, as the inside men move out. The wind is fresh. The soldiers take the shelter halves and begin to build ingenious shelters. Some erect single little covers between stanchions and rails, while others, pooling their canvas, are able to make windproof caves among the life rafts. In these they settle down to read or to play parcheesi or ca.s.sino. The sea is calm and that is good, for great numbers of the men have never been on any kind of boat. A little rough weather will make them seasick and then there will be an added problem for the worried and tired permanent force on the boat.

The decks cannot be flushed, for there is no place for the men to go while it is being done. There are many delicate problems on such a s.h.i.+p. If another s.h.i.+p should be sighted, the men must not crowd to one side, for that would throw too great a weight on one side of the s.h.i.+p and might even endanger her. Our cargo is men and it must be s.h.i.+fted with care.

Every day there is boat drill. The alarm sounds, and after the first day of pandemonium the men go quietly to their stations. There are so many problems to be faced on a troops.h.i.+p.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 23, 1943 June 23, 1943-A troops.h.i.+p is a strange community and it reacts as a community. It is unique, however, in that it is cut off from all the world and that it is in constant danger of being attacked and destroyed. No matter how casual the men seem, that last fact is never very far from their minds. In the water any place may be the submarine and any moment may come the blast that sends the great s.h.i.+p to the bottom.

Thus the gunners never relax, the listening devices are tense and occupied. Half the mind listens and waits all the time and in the night small sounds take on a large importance. At intervals the guns are fired to see that they are in perfect condition. The gunnery officer never relaxes. On the bridge the captain sleeps very rarely and takes his coffee in his hand.

Under such a strain the human brain reacts curiously. It builds its apprehensions into realities and then repeats those realities. Thus a troops.h.i.+p is a nest of rumors, rumors that go whisking from stem to stern, but the most curious thing is that on all troops.h.i.+ps the rumors are the same. Some generalized picture takes shape in all of them. The story starts and is repeated, and everyone, except perhaps the permanent crew, believes each for a few hours before a new one takes its place. It might be well to set down some of the rumors so that when heard they will be recognized for what they are, the folklore of a troops.h.i.+p.

The following are heard on every troops.h.i.+p, without exception; further, they are believed on every troops.h.i.+p: 1. This morning we were sighted by a submarine. It could not catch us, but it radioed its fellows and now a pack is a.s.sembling ahead of us to intercept us and sink us. This rumor is supposed to come from the radio officer, who heard the submarine calling its brothers. The pack will close in on us tonight. All of these rumors are said to come from a responsible officer.

2. This morning a submarine surfaced, not knowing we were near. We had every gun trained on her, ready to blow her out of the water, because we heard her in our listening devices. She saw us as she broke water and signaled just in time that she was one of ours. It is not explained how it happens that she did not hear us in her listening devices, and if the question arises it is explained that probably her listening devices were out of order.

3. Some terrible and nameless thing has happened among the officers (this rumor is only among the enlisted men). The crime they have committed is not mentioned, but it is known that a number of officers are under detention and will be court-martialed. This rumor may be pure wishful thinking.

4. Both the officers' post exchanges and the enlisted men's post exchanges sell a water pop in brown bottles. The soldiers know very well that what is in their bottles is pop, but the rumor runs through the s.h.i.+p that the brown bottles in the officers' lounge contain beer. Some little discontent arises from this until it is forgotten in a new rumor.

5. The front end of the s.h.i.+p is weak and only patched up. On the last voyage she cut a destroyer (sometimes a cruiser) in two and they patched her up and sent her out anyway. She is perfectly all right, unless we run into heavy weather, in which case she is very likely to fall to pieces. Since men are not allowed on the forepeak, because the gun crews are there, they cannot look over and see whether or not this is true.

6. Last night the German radio announced that this s.h.i.+p had been sunk. The Germans often do this, fis.h.i.+ng for information. While parents, wives, and friends do not know exactly what s.h.i.+p we are on, they know about when we were alerted and they will be frantic and there is no way of telling them that we are all right, for no messages are permitted to go out. The soldiers go about worrying to think of the worry of their people.

7. Some kind of epidemic has broken out on the s.h.i.+p. The officers are keeping it quiet to prevent a panic. They are burying the dead secretly at night.

As the days go by and the men grow more restless and the parcheesi games have fallen off because the sinews of the game have got into a few lean and hungry hands, the rumors grow more intense. Somewhere in mid-ocean a big patrol plane flies near to us and circles protectively, and the rumor springs up that she has signaled the captain to change course. Something terrific is going on somewhere and we are changing our destination.

Since we change our course every thirty seconds anyway, there is no telling by watching the wake where we are going. So the rumors go. It would be interesting if the s.h.i.+p's officers would post a list of rumors the men are likely to hear. It would certainly eliminate some apprehensions on the part of the men, and it would be interesting to see whether then a whole new list of fresh, unused rumors would grow up.

SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND, June 24, 1943 June 24, 1943-A small USO unit is aboard this troops.h.i.+p, girls and men who are going out to entertain troops wherever they may be sent. These are not the big names who go out with blasts of publicity and maintain their radio contracts. These are girls who can sing and dance and look pretty and men who can do magic and pantomimists and tellers of jokes. They have few properties and none of the tricks of light and color which dress up the theater. But there is something very gallant about them. The theater is the only inst.i.tution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succ.u.mbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive. An accordion is the largest piece of property the troupe carries. The evening dresses, crushed in suitcases, must be pressed and kept pretty. The spirit must be high. This is trouping the really hard way.

The theater is one of the largest mess halls. Soldiers are packed in, sitting on benches, standing on tables, lying in the doorways. A little platform on one end is the stage. Tonight the loudspeaker is out of order, but when it isn't it blares and distorts voices. The master of ceremonies gets up and faces his packed audience. He tells a joke-but this audience is made up of men from different parts of the country and each part has its own kind of humor. He tells a New York joke. There is a laugh, but a limited one. The men from South Dakota and Oklahoma do not understand this joke. They laugh late, merely because they want to laugh. He tries another joke and this time he plays safe. It is an Army joke about MPs. This time it works. Everybody likes a joke about MPs.

He introduces an acrobatic dancer, a pretty girl with long legs and the strained smile acrobats develop to conceal the fact that their muscles are crying with tension. The s.h.i.+p is rolling slowly from side to side. All of her work is dependent on perfect balance. She tries each part of her act several times and is thrown off balance, but, seriously, she tries again until, in a pause in the s.h.i.+p's roll she succeeds, and legs are distorted properly for the proper two seconds. The soldiers are with her. They know the difficulty. They want her to succeed and they cheer when she does. This is all very serious. She leaves the stage under whistles and cheers.

A blues singer follows. Without the loudspeakers she can hardly be heard, for her voice, although sweet, has no volume. She forces her voice for volume and loses her sweetness, but she is pretty and young and earnest.