The Dissertation, page 18
part #2 of Tinieblas Series
He hadn’t a nick on him. A bomb he never heard had blown him from his truck and sent his conscious mind on nine weeks furlough. He was watched for another month, found fit for duty, and sent to a big depot in Algeria—back where he’d started almost three years before but without much feeling that he’d served with Jacques Leclerc or taken part in operations in the Sahara. He felt mightily sick of truck driving, though, and not a little angry at the Germans for having tried to kill him. He asked to be sent to some formation where he’d have a weapon, and since the French command was for the moment undecided whether to disband L Force or build it to a division, he was assigned as a replacement rifleman to the 3rd Algerian infantry Division, refitting at Kléber in Oranie.
León was now among the regulars, the hard-ranked big battalions of the French African Army.70 It was an army laden with tradition, sodden with glory, weighed with the valor of chasseurs cut down at Balaklava and Moroccan infantry pounded to morsels in the trenches at Verdun. It was charged, too, with shame: from the moment, eight months before, when it had turned to face the Germans it had fought bravely, but its Tunisian combats were too brief to atone fully for its years of idleness and indecision, and it yearned to its lowest private to prove itself an equal to its allies. Its ranks, once starved by Vichy policy, were now engorged with escapees from France, with Muslem volunteers, with mobilized pieds-noirs. Its formations were being thoroughly reequipped with U.S. weapons and materiel. León felt as if he had been dropped into a huge and pulsing mass which was about to rumble forward with invincible power. He sought eagerly to graft himself to it.
As mentor he had his great-great-grandfather General Isidro Bodega.71 It is true General Bodega never saw a battle, never took part even in the briefest skirmish, never so much as heard a cannon except on ceremonial occasions; that at the first gesture of Tinieblan independence he surrendered the plaza at Otán without a shot and went over to the insurgents; that he lived by guile, not violence, and died, boots off, of gastroenteritis—but it is just as true that in his youth he was the finest drillmaster in all the Spanish Empire. He came at night to León and drenched his dreams in discipline and in esprit de corps. For six months León trained day and night, and his flesh-and-bone officers and noncoms were like gentle nannies beside General Bodega. Each night General Bodega marched León to an astral barrack ground, barked him through squad, drill and the manual of arms, set him the rule of military bearing, taught him to love his weapons as himself and his unit above himself. General Bodega put León to riflery until his concentration never strayed from sights and target, drilled him at bayonet until his hand was sure as any surgeon’s, read him the principles of tactics until he could have led a regiment in combat. Most tellingly, he molded León to group thought and action, so that in his battalion exercises at Kléber, in mountain training in the Saharan Atlas, in divisional maneuvers, León grew able to anticipate commands and sense the movements of men out of his vision.
Under this tutelage León learned to modulate his heartbeats to the cadence of a marching column, to make himself a single and dependent cell in the great body of his regiment. When on the dusty route marches across the bled the first sergeant would sing out “Auprès de ma blonde,” León would join and feel that in some past existence he had marched in Holland with the army of King Louis. On parade, with the division ranged in heavy regimental squares before a huge and floating tricouleur, with massed bands blaring out “La Marseillaise,” he felt one with the army of Bonaparte. By late December, when his division boarded ship for Italy, he had been merged into the army and transformed into a regular and rewarded in this metamorphosis by promotion. And now, a soldier, he was to take part in a great battle.
Naples did not put on its chrome and azure for the men of the Three Crescent Division. The sky was grey. A cold wind blew in tempest. North, the old villages crouched in a sea of mud, a strange mud, imprecise of color, liquid as milk, which splashed above house windows from the heavy wheels of the division’s columns. Above San Vittore they went into the Fifth Army line, forcing themselves up paths glutant with mud and snow, struggling along ridges swept by gases and thunderclouds behind the mules that bore their rations and ammunition. Sometimes a mule would lose its footing in the frost and tumble, dragging the whole string into a ravine, and they would clamber down and shift the loads onto their backs and clamber back, while gaunt and hard-eyed muleteers went about cursing, blasting injured beasts with pistols, lashing the sound ones up along the slopes. Some sections of their route were under observation of the enemy, and here they went by night, bent double under loads, groping their way. In this manner they relieved the U.S. 45th Division and took their place between the 4th Moroccan and the U.S. 34th. On 12th January, 1944, they went to the attack. In the pitch dark of 5 A.M., cannon spoke out behind them and were answered from the heights across the valley, and at dawn the 7th and 3rd Algerians went down through the barrage and up Monna Casale to meet the Panzer Grenadiers. They fought four days and nights. A Moroccan regiment joined on the right, then a battalion of another. The 1st Battalion 4th Tunisians was committed, but León’s stayed in reserve. Its only wound was to its pride and came when the fight was over. At noon on the 16th as they moved up behind the newly-won positions, a goumier of the Tabor Palange came by them on a stretcher, waving a German ear in his filthed hand and repeating an old saying of the bled: “Tunisians are women, Algerians are men, Moroccans are lions!” For a week they waited opposite the Gustav Line while both armies took their breath under cold rain and hawk sweeps of Messerschmitts and Mustangs. On the night of the 20th they heard cannon south, and then word filtered to them that the Texas Division was getting minced on the Rapido River. Two days later the sounds of battle moved closer, and they were ordered to relocate south and to prepare for action. None of them knew because a soldier never learns such things till later, but the Battle of Cassino72 had begun.
Montecassino and its adjacent heights form the strongest natural defensive position in Europe: an abrupt mountain wall, pitted with deep ravines, glacis’d with rugged ridges, barbed with jagged crests. This serried pile of rock beneath which Hannibal and Belisarius had marched, which had been stormed by Saracen and Goth, was for five months in 1944 the point of contact for two mighty armies. Both disposed of the most modern weapons of an advanced technology and hurled upon each other an immense weight of steel and high explosive, yet much of the battle was fought hand to band in the hardest possible circumstances of terrain and weather. The positions round Cassino were held by Germans and Austrians and were successively assaulted by Americans, by Frenchmen and North Africans, by Rajputs, Gurkhas, and Punjabis, by white New Zealanders and Maoris, by English, Welsh, and Scots, by Canadians, and by Poles. They fought, it turned out, solely for the suffering and joy, the pride, the exercise of their humanity in the profoundly human enterprise called war, because the battle was entirely needless and indecisive. It need never have been fought: when the Allies had collected enough men, they flanked Cassino to the south and the Germans simply abandoned the positions they had held against bombardment and assault. And since Kesselring’s army got away intact, Cassino accomplished nothing—save to provide action for its participants (along with great expense of blood and goods), spectacle for onlookers, study themes for students, and a delineation of the shame and glory of the human species for anyone who cares about such things. Thus Cassino possessed all the chief attributes of a great work of art: it was grand in theme, apt in setting, of good duration, and intense; it was at once contemporary and traditional; it transcended race and nationality; it depended on nothing outside itself; it served no useful purpose. Cassino was bellum gratia belli.
North of Cassino, overlooking it, though overlooked itself by higher peaks, there is a hill called Belvedere, a naked rock that rises nine hundred meters from the valley of Atina. In January, 1944, this hill was separated from the Allied line by two fresh torrents and a line of blockhouses, and it was strongly fortified and held by German mountain troops. On 23rd January General Mark Clark, Commander, U.S. Fifth Army, asked General Alphonse Juin, Commander, French Expeditionary Corps, to take Belvedere, and Juin assigned the task to Major General Aimé de Goislard de Monsabert, Commander, 3rd Algerian Infantry Division; and Monsabert gave the assault to Colonel Roux, Commander, 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs; and Roux picked his 2nd and 3rd Battalions (Commandants Berne and Gandoët), which had not yet seen action in the campaign. Plans were made and routes mapped and coordinates worked out, and at dusk on 24th January Sublieutenant Bouakkaz assembled his section of 11th Company, 3rd Battalion, and told them they were going to earn their pay at last and justify their training and their weapons. He pointed out the crests of Belvedere, just visible in the darkening sky five miles away across the valley, and told them that by this time tomorrow they would be there or in Paradise. La Allah il Allah! Vive la France! Then Sergeant Mohammed Ben Abdelkadar told the section to stand fast and said that every man would clean his weapons and check his equipment and fill his canteen and make up his bedroll with his extra shirt and socks inside and bend the roll for slinging and take his knapsack to the supply tent to be packed and be ready for inspection at midnight, for they would move at two A,M., and any man who was not ready would surely wish his she-camel mother had never dropped him, and when they moved they would move silently with no talk or any clatter of equipment, and they must surely now be grateful for this chance to meet their enemies and prove that they had something more between their legs than what a woman has there, and while he knew to his despair how lazy and stupid they all were, he prayed that tomorrow they might not disgrace France and Tunisia and the regiment and him dismissed!
Then Corporal León Fuertes went to his sangar,73 a four-foot-high, six-foots square, three-sided, poncho-roofed fort of piled-up rocks—the kind of shelter built by all the men who fought around Cassino, for the ground there was too stony to dig holes in—which he shared with his squad leader, Sergeant Jabara, and got out a stub of candle and lit it and glued it with hot wax to a projecting ledge and disassembled his U.S.-issue, 1903 model Springfield rifle down to the firing pin and cleaned each part slowly and carefully and then wiped all the oil away so that nothing would freeze. Then he replaced his cleaning rod and brush and little oilcan and wad of patches in the well in the butt and put the rifle back together and dry-fired it and put the piece on safety and loaded it, thumbing one round into the chamber and stripping a clip of five down onto the spring follower and closing the bolt. Then he dug into the pocket of his olive green woolen shirt and got out the condom which a soldier of the 45th Division bad tossed him three weeks before, shouting to his buddies that the Frogs would sooner fuck the Krauts than fight them, and peeled the foil and rolled the rubber down on his rifle’s muzzle so that no dirt could enter and laid the piece carefully, bolt up, beside the sangar wall.
Next he drew out his fourteen-inch World War I model bayonet and tested its edge and found it sharp enough to shave with, but nonetheless he moistened it with saliva and stropped it on his shoe, and then wiped it and eased it in its sheath and clipped the sheath to his cartridge belt. He got out his clean shirt and a clean pair of socks and rolled them in his blanket and rolled the blanket in his poncho and tied the two ends of the roll together so it would sling over his shoulder, and while he was doing this Sergeant Jabara crawled in and began to make his own equipment ready, but León exchanged no words with him, nor did he think of anything except what he was doing. Once or twice, since his actions were all rote, thoughts did begin to infiltrate his mind, but he pinched them out instantly.
León left the sangar then and went two hundred meters back to the open latrine and let down first his U.S.-Issue field pants and then his khaki drab woolen trousers and squatted in the freezing drizzle and emptied himself as completely as he could. Then he went to the back of the officers’ mess tent and took off his steel helmet and got it two-thirds full of fairly clean hot water and walked back to his sangar, holding the helmet cupped in his two palms, enjoying its warmth and hunching over it to keep the rain out. He sat down cross-legged and set the helmet between his thighs and got out a cake of soap and his shave brush and the razor he had tried to kill himself with three and a half years before and lathered up and stropped the razor on his shoe and shaved slowly, carefully, and well, by touch. He set the helmet in a corner of the sangar and took off his shoes and socks and washed his feet, dipping them in the deliciously warm water, and rubbed them dry and put on his last pair of socks and his shoes and his World War I style leggings, fitting the straps under his arches and drawing the laces tight enough to hold his field pants bloused but not so tight as to cut off circulation. All this time he thought only of what he was doing.
Then he leaned out of the sangar and emptied his helmet and put it on over his knit wool, cap and took his empty knapsack and went out. He went first to the wheeled water tank and filled his canteen, then to the supply tent, where he packed his knapsack with rations and hand grenades under the eye of the First Sergeant, Le Grevez, and filled the empty pouches in his cartridge belt with rifle clips, and hung three more grenades on his field jacket. Then he went to see the other soldiers of his squad.
Dax and Barelli had their gear in shape, and Barelli asked permission to visit Pére Bérenguer, the Catholic Chaplain, saying Dax would get his knapsack packed for him, and León thought first of sending him to Jabara but then gave him permission himself, wondering for an instant whether he ought go as well and deciding that since the Fuertes family never gave pardon, no member had a right to ask any, even from God if he happened to exist, and then he pinched that kind of thought out of his mind. Reveil crawled out to León when León looked in on him and his sangar-mate, Djemal, because Djemal, whose Browning Automatic Rifle was propped against his leg, had his phylactery wrapped round his arm and rocked in prayer. Reveil held out a grooved copper telephone jeton, which was the only thing besides his clothes he had brought out of France when he escaped, and asked León to take it in safekeeping, and León first thought of asking why Reveil thought it might be safe with him, but then took it and put it in his shirt pocket under his field jacket. Sergeant Jabara was in with Privates Boulala and El Haoui, honing his bayonet on Boulala’s tiny whetstone. He looked up at León with his soft brown gazelle’s eyes and smiled and said they would kill many infidels—Germans, he meant—the next day. León nodded at him in agreement. Then he went back to his sangar and set down his knapsack and took off his cartridge belt with its pendent bayonet and aid kit and canteen and lay down in the dark to think.
He did not simply relax and let thoughts swim haphazard to his consciousness. He took grip on his mind and beamed it down across the Rapido River into the German line. First he searched out the sentry posts, sweeping his mind left and right across the far bank of the river until he found first one guard, then another, hunched over rifle and field telephone, slapping their palms against their arms from cold, peering into the darkness. He focused his mind so that he had clear image of these men as they shivered out their hours of guard, straining to catch some warning sound over the monotone low rushing of the river, feeling the wind (dry now of rain) bite cold into their checks, clenching their jaws to hold their teeth from chattering. Then he swung his mind up and back into the sangars, some with riflemen and some with Spandau teams, where some men watched and worried and some others slept, chins tucked to knees and hands between their thighs. León reached his mind down through the filth-encrusted blankets into these men’s dreams and found them filled with warmth and calm and safety—shimmer of sunlight on a Baltic plain, heavy caress of Vatti’s work-roughed hand, food smell and muslin rub of Mutti’s apron—but monstered at their borders with ice fangs and shapes of terror. Then he aimed his mind into the deep concrete blockhouses and candlelit cellars of L’Olivella. Here men were playing skat, slapping bent, sweaty cards onto scarred tables, or reading letters. The readers would run their eyes down the thin paper and purse their lips and shake their heads and rub their brows, reading that Hansi was dead and cousin Paula’s husband missing or that the British bombed each night and people went to bed at six to get some sleep beforehand, or that the cold was terrible in Russia and one was lucky to be down in Italy. Then León’s mind found other men who lay sleepless, thinking of their children howling in bomb-quaked shelters or of their mothers racked by fear and worry or of their wives spraddled in frenzy under schnapps-breathed, sweat-rank men. Still others thought of themselves blasted to mangles by a bomb, or blinded by rock fragments, or pounded crazy by artillery, or gelded by mortar shrapnel, or pierced by a bayonet—pierced through the belly wriggling helplessly, pierced through the throat, pierced through the groin and anus, pierced and pierced again, pierced through the chest and hearing the bone grate, pierced through the temple feeling the bone crumble, pierced through the back and nailed, pierced through the spine and paralyzed, pierced through the lips and tongue, biting on steel—, or buried alive under the crumbled roofing of a bunker, or skewered by tracer bullets, or torn apart by grenades, or killed, maimed, broken, crushed, wiped out, destroyed in still another fashion too hideous to imagine yet quite real. Others talked softly to each other of better times, and others touched themselves in the dark and thought of women, and others listened to the sounds of battle to the south and wondered If attack would come that night or in the morning, some fearfully and some in the wild, joyful hope of seeing men cut down in sweeps of fire. León’s mind reached out over the valley and down across the Rapido and through the minefields and the bunkers of the Gustav Line and on across the Riosecco and up the cliffs behind onto the slopes of Colle Belvedere, even to the crests, groping among the men in Feldgrau whom in the morning he would try to kill and who would try to kill him, until he could smell the wine and bad tobacco on their breaths and feel the stubble on their faces and hear their talk and read their thoughts and know their hopes and terrors. And when he had built this vision of his enemies and stretched it even to include the gunners far off among the heavy batteries, men who would never see his face though they might kill him, León brought his mind back and gauged, himself.
