Beckoning War Page 12

  After a stop at the hallway washroom, a hole in the floor and a tap and basin, he steps heavy-footed down the creaking stairs and makes his way down to the dining room, now appropriated as the officers’ mess. He can hear the murmur and muttering of various officers before he gets there. In it, he sees seven officers thus far gathered: Major Gordon, Lieutenant Sachs, Lieutenant Muller, Therrien, Captain McCambridge, Lieutenant Wells, and Major Henderson, the MO. Giovanni Ceci is seated among them, reading an old newspaper.

  “Good morning Captain,” says Therrien, bored and tired and awaiting his breakfast. Jim returns the greeting and gives the others a perfunctory wave, and takes a seat beside Captain McCambridge and Mr. Ceci, getting a better look at the latter’s newspaper. Though it is in Italian, he can see that the headlines refer to the Battle of Kursk in the Soviet Union, many months ago. Mr. Ceci’s face is a burnt and weathered sienna, centred by a tuberous nose from which his mighty moustache ruffles. He looks up and greets Jim with a smile and “Buongiorno, Capitano.” He puts his paper down on a small table in front of him and the pages settle in a flutter.

  “Buongiorno, Mr. Ceci. Please, call me Jim.” Jim manages a relaxed and sleepy morning grin as he speaks, and his last word draws out and dies off in a yawn.

  Mr. Ceci waves off Jim’s suggestion of formality. “No, you are Capitano McFarlane. Be proud of your title. You are brave soldier. Come, have coffee with us, my wife, she is brewing up some coffee the Germans left, very kind of them.” He winks at the end of his sentence.

  “It smells delicious. The best thing that I’ve smelled in two weeks.”

  “Lazarus awakens! It is a miracle!” McCambridge exclaims humourously. “Four days up there in that shellstorm myself and I don’t even know how I woke up.”

  “Good morning to you too, Fred.” Jim yawns again. His eyes still feel swollen, the lids droopy as though he were a morning flower yet to face the rising of the sun. Captain Fred McCambridge of Baker Company, sipping espresso from a chipped cup, bleary but relaxed, is wearing only his khaki woollen pants, a white undershirt and his suspenders. McCambridge resembles Clark Kent with his square jaw, black hair (often slicked when behind the lines with a generous dollop of pomade) grey-green eyes and wide, nearly lipless mouth. Always smiling, I don’t bloody know how he does it. He was more made for this sort of thing than I was, I think. Jim can hear the sizzle and smell the unctuous savour of frying from the kitchen. Giovanni Ceci seats himself with an air of gastronomical expectation.

  “Buongiorno!” chirps Mrs. Ceci from the stove over which she is hunched. “Your coffee, it is a-ready!” She comes out and, holding a steaming metal pot, fills and refills various cups, including Jim’s.

  “And buongiorno to you too, Mrs. Ceci,” he addresses her with a sleepy smile. She matches his, the lines in her face filling into an hospitable smile that she has worn many, many times throughout the years.

  “These aren’t such bad digs we ended up in, eh?”

  “Well, it beats San Matteo, that’s for sure.” Jim notes a listlessness in his own voice.

  “I know what you mean. I took ten hits on my position alone up there on the ridgeline.”

  “I took at least double that. I shouldn’t’ve picked the big obvious church. There was a reason that the major I relieved was using the general store instead. We were one helluva thin red line up there, let me tell you. Stretched out on that ridge like that.”

  “Well, we passed it off on others—rest easy now.” Artillery rumbles in the distance, its dense and sharp vibration dispersed and muffled by time and distance.

  “I fully intend to. Let someone else deal with the gunder and fightning.” He looks down into his cup of espresso, the coffee dark and lined with foam like volcanic mud. It gives off a sharp, roasted earthiness, a deep invigorating bitterness, utterly inviting in its quest for consummation with his mouth. He downs it in one go. “I fully intend to,” he repeats, the last syllable slackening into a loose and wheezy yawn.

  “I don’t know how you can drink that Eyetie tar coffee. You must be even more exhausted than I am. As if that’s possible.”

  “You two, you look like dead people,” jokes Mr. Ceci, who has been observing them all the while. “Me, I was in trenches in the last war, fighting the Austrians. Every time I went behind the lines I sleep. All the thunder in the world, it couldn’t wake me up.”

  McCambridge is fascinated by this revelation, and decides to pursue it further. “You were in the Great War? Wow, that must really have been something.” He whistles through his teeth. “What did you do?”

  “Me, I was medic. I am big man, no? I a-used these big arms to carry men out of the trenches. I was wounded at Caporetto. See?” It is only now that Jim realizes that Giovanni Ceci has only one hand. He brandishes a gleaming two-pronged metal prosthetic, festooned to the stump of his right wrist. “And these Fascisti, they send us right back in for another war. Look where it gets us. Italy, it is a ruin, now. These Germans, they come in and take the place over. Then Allies come and bomb our country into rubble. The Monastero di Monte Cassino, the Americans bomb it into stones. And the Germans, they were not even in it I read.” There is an uncomfortable silence. Jim and McCambridge exchange glances. Mr. Ceci continues: “But, that is war. I a-rather the Allies take over, then Italy is safe from Fascisti and Nazis. These Fascisti, these Nazis, they start wars, and everyone lose. We admire fighting men like you who come to kick them out. You are like our son.”

  “Your son is in the army? Fighting with the Eighth Army?” asks McCambridge, curious.

  “No, he is with Garibaldi partigiani. Fighting the Germans behind their own lines. He was in army before Italy surrendered, captured by British in Libya. They released him after surrender. I worry for his safety, but he is brave and tough.”

  “Like his father,” adds Mrs. Ceci over their shoulders as she refills coffee cups. By now the other officers have arrived, and some thirty-odd men are awaiting breakfast and sipping coffee and chatting together. Breakfast is served by the cooks; today it is sausages, pancakes, scrambled eggs, fruit salad and cereal. In addition there is slightly stale piadina bread offered by Mrs. Ceci. McCambridge places a sausage into a piadina, rolls it into an unleavened half moon and eats it with his hands.

  “Buonissimo, Mrs. Ceci, treo buonissimo!” he acknowledges with a wink, his words muffled by a chewed wad of egg and bread. Estella Ceci winces at McCambridge’s mangled Italian.

  “I say, stick to English, mine is a-better than your Italian,” she admonishes with a hint of humour, refilling the two officers’ coffee cups. From his first cup, Jim can feel a caffeinated jolt and an edgy anticipation working its way from his gut upward.

  “How did you learn to speak English so well?” asks McCambridge in an attempt to change the subject.

  “For a time we work in New York, at hotel owned by a cousin. Then we come back here to run our own place. Stock market crash closed hotel and sent us back.”

  “I see.”

  “Excuse me, please,” says Mr. Ceci, and he gets up to mingle with other officers. When he is served, Jim devours his breakfast with scarce attention to table manners. An officer and a gentleman, hunger and nerves have temporarily devalued the second half of that title in reference to his commission. He scoops up the leftover clots of egg with a piadina and shovels it in, food becoming him in instant absorption. He feels centred and clear now, as if his prior lack of food had dissipated the mass and gravity that held him together. He is turning on his axis now, pulled together, “good and proper,” as Witchewski would say.

  “Atten-SHUN!” Feet together, hands at sides, fists balled, eyes staring straight ahead out of stern poker faces. Now that Gordon has everyone’s attention, he continues: “At ease.” Everyone relaxes his stance. “Good morning, gentlemen,” continues Gordon. “Lieutenant Colonel Hobson is attending an ‘O’ Group at Division regarding our upcoming part in th
e coming offensive. Suffice to say, we are going back into battle quite soon. You are all required to be here at precisely 1800 hours for an ‘O’ Group led by him in which he will outline the battle plan. In addition, all NCOs from sergeant upward must be present.

  “As for me, I have here your orders for the day, which after our last assignment, are somewhat easier, I should think. In reference to a conversation I had with one of you in San Matteo recently—” At this, he shoots a glance at Jim: “I bear welcome news. After our losses over the past week and a half, we have reinforcements. We are being allotted seventy new soldiers to join our ranks.”

  McCambridge whistles through his teeth at this.

  “NCOs are to report to the central piazza to sort out these new greenhorns and allot them into their respective companies and platoons after lunch. RSM Albert is briefing them to this end. See to it that you get your rosters updated. In addition to other ranks, we have with us two new officers, a Captain Riley and a Lieutenant Pruitt. And a welcome piece of news for all of you—though we never got mail at all over the last few days, fresh mail arrived last night. The roads have been clogged, I guess, what with all the action lately. Mail call will follow this meeting at the stores, and will be distributed by company.” Following this, Gordon dispenses housekeeping orders, that officers and NCOs are to ensure that all weapons are cleaned and inspected, that there will be movies shown for rest and relaxation in the afternoon, and so on and so on.

  Upon dismissal, Jim makes his way eagerly along with the others down the street for mail call. He waits his turn with other members of his company as the company clerk stands amidst the eager crowd, calling names and dispensing mail to soldiers starving for correspondence. His heart thuds in anticipation, an excited thrill courses upward through him. Marianne, oh Marianne, please let there be a letter from you, Marianne …

  “And for you, Captain McFarlane,” begins the clerk, Private Glasser, young and bespectacled and looking very much like an accountant in uniform, looking down as he rummages through the sacks of parcels and letters, “we have … these.” He produces two letters and a parcel bound together with twine.

  “Thank you, Private.”

  “My pleasure, sir. Next, Sergeant Whitmore!”

  15

  Under the shade of a willow tree and partly hidden by an overgrown, untended hedge, Jim undoes the twine and looks at his mail. In the distance artillery rumbles, the weather of war over the horizon. A letter from his father. A letter from Barrett. No letter from Marianne. His heart sinks. He starts with the letter from his father, peeling away the lip of the envelope, tearing the paper as he does so. He reads hungrily:

  Dear Jim,

  I hope this finds you as well as you could be, given where you are. Once again, I can’t tell you how proud I am that you are doing what you are doing. You always impressed me as you were growing up, the way you took your younger brother under your wing and guided him. Maybe I didn’t always let you know how proud I was of you. I sometimes feel I missed out on this experience during the last war, hellacious though it was, but my bum knee kept me out. But if I did go, who knows? Maybe then I would not have raised a pair of fine sons that would serve their country later on.

  Your poor mother is always worrying about you and wished you had stayed behind, but I understand the call of duty. Well, it looks like you guys are really pulling your weight over there. The Nazis are really on the run now, aren’t they, caught in a vice between two huge armies. I wonder how we will get along with the Soviets once all this is said and done. We do make strange bedfellows.

  I got a letter from an old medical school friend of mine the other day, Dr. Theodore Jenkins. He’s with the Canadian Neurological Hospital now based in England. When we declared war, the whole staff volunteered as one and left Montreal to set up shop over there. He attends to head wounds from Allied soldiers, sailors and airmen. Especially airmen. I had a flash of your brother possibly being delivered into his care when I read the message. Those boys in Bomber Command, they really take a beating. Have you heard from Mark lately? I haven’t, but I trust he’s all right. As you know, I really got a kick out of hearing that you two met up a few times while you were stationed in England. It is really important to keep those family ties strong no matter how far apart we are, and especially when some of us have put ourselves in harm’s way.

  Well, as well you might know from my letters previously, I’ve certainly been paying attention to the Allied operations since you and Mark went overseas. I now have a map decorated with arrows and flags. I have to do something; you boys are so far away and doing this allows me to put it all in perspective. I particularly follow the Italian front and the air war, naturally. When you have a personal investment in something, you tend to pay more attention!

  I have sent along with this letter some socks knit by your mother, along with some treats. Well, take care over there Son, keep your head down and your fists up, and come home in one piece—

  Yours sincerely,

  Dad

  Just like Dad to talk about war. He’ll probably want to take me out to dinner with me kilted and cobeened and with a chest of shining medals, too. “This is my officer son! Look, all! He saw quite a lot of action over there in Italy, he did. Didn’t you, boy?” Have I heard from Mark recently? Not for a month, I’m assuming he’s alright, always lucky, that one. He looks at the package sent along with his father’s letter. Inside there are clumped four new pairs of socks, a tin of soft, sugarcoated peppermint candies, a new carton of Player’s cigarettes, and a bottle of Canadian Club whiskey, which in its brown glass bottle looks like a bottle of cough syrup. Medicine for the soul.

  The letter from Barrett is entirely different in character from his father’s. He welcomes the sarcastic tone of his friend and wishes he were still here.

  Dear Jim,

  Well, well, well. There you are over there having all the fun while I’m stuck here with my bum leg and all, at home with the birds singing outside the kitchen window where I am writing to you this letter. War is hell. But home is so boring, it makes you yearn for a little (s)hellfire once in a while. I’d rather be in the news than reading it, you know? I’ve been here a month now, laid up and the like, scrunched back into my parents’ place. It was great to visit, but I tell you, if it weren’t for this damn leg of mine I’d be back in a shot. You know, I hated the war in so many ways once I experienced it, but I was at home with all you boys. People here, they whine about rationing and this and that and I just bite my lip and think: if only all you knew what we do over there. You can take your complaints and put them somewhere warm and dark and smelly.

  Anyway, forgive me my grouchiness. My leg hurts, it will never quite be the same again, but slowly but surely, I will walk again in some capacity. At least, that’s what the doctor says. It hurts a lot, especially at night. So does my abdomen, there is still a lot of metal in there, the doctors tell me. I could probably make a fortune if I sell mineral rights to the highest bidder and have it mined. I can’t sleep at night. I’m always thinking about all you guys still sweating it over there you know, and I have memories of being there, and nightmares sometimes when I do sleep. Nightmares about the Melfa, about the Arielli, about patrols at Cassino, the food, the clap, you name it. Especially those last two items.

  By the way, congratulations on your promotion. Maybe by war’s end you’ll be discussing the postwar organization of Europe with the Big Three, moving a country here, dividing another there, offering Churchill a cigar, or Roosevelt a hot stock tip, or Stalin a moustache trim. Or, maybe you’ll make major, anyway. Maybe you can replace Gordon as 2IC, that humourless ass. Don’t show him this letter! How’s he holding up as the Big Number Two? He and Bly made such interesting counterparts when they commanded the company, didn’t they? One with a sense of humour, one without.

  Well, shit, all this writing and reminiscing is making me miss it over there even more. I guess I c
an brew up some more tea and listen to some stupid radio comedy show or the Farm Report. Though, I must vouch for the tea at home. It is usually better than the filmy roadside bucket-brewed crap we cooked up with gasoline over there. I’ll bet you’re still swilling that stuff while ducking the shells, no?

  You know, I can’t help forget that time back at Christmas when you and I and the good doctor put back all that scotch together. God, we were so drunk, weren’t we? I remember we couldn’t even walk, the three of us swaying and staggering back home from the party, trying to slur some Louis Armstrong song together. The one you told me that you once made love to your wife to: you were a fountain of information that night. And of vomit. I remember I just about had his voice, because of all the cigarettes I’d smoked that evening. What a mess.

  Anyhow, keep up with the correspondence. I am bored, bored, bored here. By the way, before I forget, let me remind you of our little deal. At war’s end I’ll meet you under the clock in the foyer of the Royal York for some drinks in the hotel saloon. We have plenty of remembering to do, and the booze will help us forget!

  Take care, old man—

  Yours elliptically,

  Lt. John Barrett (Ret.)

  His stomach is sore from laughing, memories flooding his mind. His eyes are welled up with tears from both the humourous tone of the letter and the melancholy of having a friend so far away. He sniffles, and his eyes water and burn. He looks at the bottle of whiskey. He unscrews the cap and releases crisp and pungent fumes of distillation into the air. What the hell, he thinks as he takes a gulp, swishing it about his mouth, numbing his tongue. It burns its way down his throat and lights a fire in his belly before subsiding. He is overtaken by a pleasing dizziness, a relaxed euphoria, a convivial glow, which complements Barrett’s memories of drinking in England. Many a night of drinking in British pubs and saloons and clubs are contained in that flavour, in that feeling. Long sudsy evenings of cards with Barrett and Leprenniere and Bly and Lieutenant Wole, and with British officers, with obliging locals, full many a midnight wobble back to barracks and billets, stumbling through the streets of Aldershot, London, Brighton, singing and swaying and hanging onto each other in hoarse-voiced hilarity.