Most of the hospitals I passed through now seem woven together into a kind of puzzle whose parts all fit together somehow but cannot be separated. Sometimes men lying on either side of me awaiting emergency operations. Occasionally a man clinging to his Luger pistol, even as they wheeled him to the operating room, lest some medic steal his prize possession. Long rows of men with swollen, discolored feet sticking from beneath the covers, cotton between their toes—trench foot. In one hospital, Nick Von Keller, in terrible pain, almost delirious, wounded the day after I left Huertgen. An appetite for food that returned with a rush, and nurses who slipped you snacks of bread and jam between meals. Combat fatigue cases, men who might rise from their beds at any hour of the day and night, screaming and fighting enemies who weren’t there. Prisoners of war serving as orderlies, nervous when these attacks occurred. Men laughing and joking in spite of pain, because at last they were out of it, away from a miserable place called “the front.” A constant search for familiar faces, for men with news of the One-Two-One, for men with news of Jack, for Jack himself. Long letters home—two and three a day sometimes—but no letters back, because you moved too often for mail ever to catch up. Doctors who pushed and pulled at you, looked at your X-rays, then shook their heads in clucking disapproval and issued the diagnoses which meant, in effect, you’d never go back to combat.
Days passed. I was in a big converted warehouse in Eupen, Belgium. Then I was on a jostling, lurching hospital train en route to Paris, gritting my teeth to smother outcry against pain, for there were seriously wounded men all around me who must have hurt worse than I did. Then Paris and me peering out the porthole at the rear of the ambulance in search of familiar landmarks.
More days passed. I was on a C-47 hospital plane bound for England. I took daily physiotherapy treatments and followed the progress of the Battle of the Bulge from radio news reports.
Weeks passed. I was discharged from the hospital and sent back to the Continent, where, 50 miles from Paris, at Choisy-au-Bac, I commanded a company converting men from rear echelon units into infantrymen.
I was “limited service.” I could not return to a combat assignment.
February was waning when at long last I got a letter from Jack. He and I, it turned out, had spent a day’s leave at exactly the same time in Birmingham, England. No doubt we had trod the same streets, but we had missed each other. Now Jack was expecting any day to be discharged from the hospital and sent back to the One-Two-One. He swore he would get by to see me en route.
I packed my musette bag and a few things I genuinely treasured and kept them in a corner of my room, ready at a moment’s notice. I had thought it out carefully. Every request, every plea for reclassification so that I might go back to my regiment had failed. I would go anyway when Jack came. Since I would be running toward rather than away from the front, I could not believe the punishment would be severe.
But Jack never came. The train carrying him to Germany, I learned later, never came close to Paris. Jack had no opportunity to visit me without going AWOL himself. I unpacked my musette bag and resigned myself to a rear echelon existence until the war was over. Through it all I trained the men assigned to me with an almost feverish intensity, for they might be going to the One-Two-One.
One spring day we were seated in our mess hall when the church bells for miles around began to toll. A lieutenant with me turned to the French orderly who was serving us.
“Charley,” he demanded, “pourquoi Français ring all them goddamn bells?”
Charley threw his hands into the air in exultancy.
“Finis la guerre!” he cried.
Charley was right. It was over.