(Casablanca-Algiers)
I REMEMBER THE SIXTH GENERAL HOSPITAL IN CASABLANCA. IT was stuck, as they seem to stick all hospitals, in a school with large windows and many floors. Its doctors and its nurses were mostly from New England, so that the place had an air of efficiency and cold kindness that struck me strange in Casa. The nurses lived in a high apartment like a silo. The GI’s had a tent area near Parc Lyautey. On one side was a clearing of French tanks drawn up in rows, the way military force is deceptive and orderly—on review. Between the tanks and the tents there was a cement road where the French used to walk arm in arm in the evenings. Ward boys and dental technicians leaned over their barbed-wire enclosure on nights when they weren’t on duty. They called out to all and sundry, as though they felt it necessary to reaffirm their being in a strange land. Their tents were pyramidal. In the daytime the flaps were tucked up, and I could see the mosquito netting looped up over the frames of the cots in a tight ball.
I remember that the nurses at the Sixth General Hospital were plumper and saltier than most ANC’s. They talked wistfully of Boston and Taunton and Waltham and Cambridge and Worcester. Army general hospitals are incestuous. They’re like a little town in which everyone spies on everyone else, and everyone dates everyone else. The surgical captain has his favorite nurse, while the anesthetist looks on and gnashes his teeth. The patients are well cared for, but they’re outside the charmed circle; they’re like guests at a summer hotel in the Adirondacks. They never get to see the inside. They lie in their beds and watch the life of the general hospital. They’re not a part of it at all, unless some nurse takes a fancy to them on her ward, or some doctor bucking for his majority takes a special interest in their rare disease.
The main ward at the Sixth General was the biggest in the whole world. They’d taken over a lumber shed and a printing plant, and the beds just went on and on. In those acres of beds they could have laid all the sick and wounded of the war. I remember lying in my bed in this ward. I had the GI’s because I’d neglected to scald my mess gear with one soapy and two clear. My illness gave me a time schedule all my own. I’d feel the dry spasms of peristalsis in my belly and I’d go tearing to the latrine. Everything came out of me in an agony over which I had no control. Then I’d go back to bed, cured of everything, including my energy and the will to live. Two hours later it would happen all over again. I turned from side to side under my mosquito netting and watched the goings and comings on the big ward, the visits, the flirtations. I envied the Georgia ward boys for the easy way they had with the doctors and nurses, the kidding, the rushes with the bedpan, and the goose-necked jars of amber. And because I was an ambulatory patient, I had to make my own bed every morning.
I remember best one of the nurses. She told us to call her Butch. She was from Dorchester and she was the biggest gal I’d ever seen. When she bent over to take my temperature, I thought from her wide breasts and bulging belly that a witty and motherly cow was ministering to me. We loved the lieutenant for her laugh that was cynical and rich. She specialized in making the appendix patients laugh until they all but burst their stitches. There was a smell of cologne and soap about her. One night she had a baby on the stairs of the nurses’ quarters. The colonel had to deliver her himself; it was the first time he’d practiced obstetrics in thirty years. He was so mad at her for waking him out of a sound sleep that he shipped her and her baby back from Casa to the States. We smiled in our beds, for after she’d cared for us all, she now had something all her own to love. A parachutist in a near-by bed bet that an Ayrab was the father, but none of us laughed. We were ashamed of the parachutist and devoted to the lieutenant. She’d been the nurse of the Sixth General who’d mitigated for us the somber impersonal excellence of army medical care. She’d had a good word for each of us. Often when we couldn’t sleep in the Casablanca nights, she’d given us that pink pill. A truck driver three beds over said that if he ever got back to Boston alive, he’d take out our lieutenant and her baby and set them up to supper and drinks. He added that women like the lieutenant are the salt of the earth.
I remember also the nut ward of the Sixth General in Casa. Not that I was ever in there, except for a visit. It was called the Parker House after the nice old psychiatrist in charge of it. Lieutenant Colonel Parker never knew why so many people smiled at him on the streets of Casablanca. He kept the nuts in a separate building, locked and grated and barred and remote from the other buildings of the Sixth General. Beaucoup GI’s and officers ended up in the Parker House. From there they usually went home on a boat, under guard. The officers and GI’s were together on one ward. I guessed that when you went off your trolley, you didn’t care much whether your insignia was a bar or a stripe.
I remember going to the Parker House to visit a buddy who blew up after a week’s sitting and staring at the wall of his tent. He took his tommy gun and fired it at the canvas. Then he lay, after he’d fired his bursts, in a slit trench of his own making until our major came:
—What you tryin to do, Perkins, k-k-k-kill us all?
And Perkins was taken to the Parker House. It was his theory that his heart was going to stop in the very next minute. Old Colonel Parker told him there was nothing the matter with his heart. Still he moaned and stared at the wall for hours on end. He wasn’t the same, I remember, when I went to see him the last night before they shipped him back to the States. He sat on a bench with his head in his hands. He was wearing GI pajamas and a red bathrobe with 6TH GEN HOSP stenciled on the back. They’d taken away the belt of his bathrobe so he couldn’t strangle himself. But when he saw me outside the grating, all his apathy dropped, and he came over and hung on the bars, smiling and cavorting, like a monkey praying to be fed.
—They’re ZI-ing me. It’s one way to get out of all this crap.
He told me about the new truth drug they gave him, and he wondered what he’d talked about under its influence.
—Just like you do when you get crocked, I said reassuringly.
—Well, anyway, I’m getting out of all this crap, he said over and over.
After a while the MP told me I must go. The MP’s at the Parker House were a strange gang, gentle and gangling and tender. They used to kid the nuts, and they told me on my way out that many people outside in the army were crazier than some locked up in here.
I remember that outside on the streets of Casa I wondered which of us would go next to the Parker House. I got lower and lower because I knew Perkins wasn’t just pretending. So finally I went into the Select Bar and started throwing them down. I got bluer and bluer in spite of the phonograph playing “L’ombre s’enfuit” and the luscious Casablancaise hanging over her cash register and the pigs sitting buxomly on the green leather chairs and waiting till I’d buy them a drink. It was a new sort of drunkenness I hit that evening. I seemed to be a ghost in a roomful of yelling people, all aliver than I.
When they threw me out of the Select at closing time, I lurched through the streets of Casa and got lost. I’d go a few blocks, lean against a doorway, black out, come to, and then blunder on again. It was the only time I’d ever wanted to meet an MP. Once I came to and looked up to see the stars of Casa flickering. I was lying on my back in the rue, and an Ayrab was bending over me. He was removing my cigarettes and franc notes from my pockets. I began to laugh in my stupor as I thought of the GI legend that the Ayrabs will cut off your balls and sew them in your mouth. I laughed although the cognac had paralyzed me. The Ayrab stopped his frisking and kissed me on the forehead:
—Je cherche ce soir un copain du genre féminin.
And knowing I was about to black out again, I gathered up all my forces and yelled. The Ayrab fled laughing into the blue shadows. I remember being trussed into the MP wagon. And I remember waking in an immaculate bed at the Sixth General.
—I want Lieutenant Duffy to give me a pink pill.
—Oh hush your mouth, the nurse said, reversing my ice pack. You’re still as drunk as a skunk.
I remember when it came our turn to go in the forty-by-eights. We sat by the long stubby train in the freight yards of Casa, swatting flies. The officer in charge of the movement bustled about counting noses. We lay on our barracks bags swigging from our canteens.
—This is it. We’re going to Italy to fight.
—Ah, blow it. . . . I figure we’re going to Oran or Algiers for more of this base section life.
I remember that our officers had two cars of their own up front. We were put with all our equipment into the open latticed horse-cars. Guard details were posted in each car. Through the slats the Ayrabs could stick their fingers and remove anything, for we heard that the train went through Morocco at a speed less than a man could run. We made our beds on the floor, where there were still leavings of hay.
I remember how strange and autonomous it was to scud slowly through Morocco in a boxcar. At one end we had a pile of C-rations and a gasoline can of water. On the floor were our packs and blankets. We slept like a litter of kittens. The brown cleft hills swam slowly past; I sat on a ledge with my legs swinging. The crap games started up. The train would stop in the middle of desert spaces where there was nothing to halt for. And Ayrab kids would come out of the nowhere as though they’d inched up from the sand. With them, since we’d been red-lined for months, we did a thriving trade in mattress covers, shirts, and trousers. They brought us vin rouge in leather bottles. At night, lying on the floor, it was hard to sleep. In the moonlight the sandy hummocks drifted past as though I watched them from a magic carpet. Or sometimes I remember that the duty officer would come to our car when the train was taking on water. He wore fatigues and carried his carbine slung on his shoulder. After six months in Casa he figured that these were genuine combat conditions. Who knew but what the Ayrabs would ambush us all by the full of the moon when we were stalled out in the middle of nowhere?
—Remember it’s a court-martial offense to sell anything to the Ayrabs, men.
—Yessir, we said in chorus.
In his barracks bag the mess sergeant had beaucoup vin that he’d laid in before we left Casa. He had also a small spirit lamp, a present from his last shackjob. He was a Polack hunky and knew all the angles. He knew how to lick around officers with a bold obsequiousness that made them think he was treating them as a rough and ready equal. With us he was like an SS man in the movies. When drunk, which was always, he’d knock our heads together and let loose on us a stream of obscenities. He said that these phrases excited a shackjob more than loving words. Then when we were black and blue, he’d fall into a sort of motherliness toward us and make coffee. He was in his element in that forty-by-eight. Made us bring him his breakfast box of K-ration as he lay yawning in his sack. His buddy the second cook Jacobowski was growing a mustache on the trip.
I remember the sorrows of our officers in their two wagons-lit up front. The French locomotive sooted all over the cars so that they had to sit all day with their windows closed while they read their cases or did crossword puzzles. Our officers fell into types. The Sporting Set had their musette bags full of rum and didn’t come out of their haze till we hit Algiers. The Girls had pneumatic mattresses which they inflated every evening at sundown. On the second day out of Casa the officers ordered the French engineer to put their cars at the end of the train. Said they were tired of looking like niggers. But French engineers take orders from no one but Maréchal Pétain.
Outside of Oran at Mostaganem I remember we stopped on a siding near Prisoner of War Enclosure 131. Shipping to Algiers were all Italian officer P/W who’d decided that they were no longer fascist but wanted to collaborate with us Allies. We got out of our forty-by-eights and stretched our legs. We were warned by the duty officer that we mustn’t fraternize with the P/W.
—Fraternize, my arse, the mess sergeant said after the officer had gone. Who wants to fraternize with an Eyetie? They fired on our boys in Africa, didn’t they? And they’re doin it now in Italy.
—They did it because they were told to, the pfc said.
He was a liberal and wore horn-rimmed spectacles.
—I say, put the bastards against a wall, the mess sergeant said.
He always shouted his opinions.
—You forget the Geneva Convention, the pfc said gently.
—Sure, we treat em white! the mess sergeant said, looking at his buddy Jacobowski. So in twenty years they can declare war on us again. What have they got to lose? They’ll live better’n they did in the Eyetalian Army. . . . Friggin wops . . . Dagos. . . .
—Polack, the pfc said, almost inaudibly.
I remember how the Italian officers approached their cars with the MP guards. I thought of the Guineas of Brooklyn and Joisey City with their pimpled faces and their oiled hair and the aggressive spite that made them boxers and corner toughs. For I’d never seen anything of the Italian Army except the explosive tiny Sicilians from Camp 101 who used to wait in the officers’ messes of Casa.
—Christ! screamed the mess sergeant, waving his lumpy fists. They’re gettin parlor cars!
—The Geneva Convention, the pfc prompted under his breath.
—Those Ginso bastards are gettin parlor cars while we sleep like pigs in a forty-by-eight! Will someone please tell me what this goddam war is about?
We walked a little closer to have a look at the Italian officers, waiting to mount the train with their gear.
—Gosh, they are good-looking men, the company clerk said.
He read the poems in Stars and Stripes.
I remember that the Italians struck me with marveling. They looked neither like movie gangsters nor like the sad barbers of Brooklyn. These carried themselves with a certain soft proudness, though I remember arrogant ones among them. A few were blond. But nearly all wore a delicacy of feature and a dignity I’d never seen before. Their noses and their mouths had a different look than Americans’. The Bersaglieri officers had sugarloaf caps with feathers in them. The Alpini officers wore shorts that showed their fine long legs, like the limbs on wrestlers in old statues. And all had sewed, below the left shoulder, a metal boot.
—Well, Musso did all right in his men, the company clerk said.
—Wait till we see the wimmin, the mess sergeant promised. I’m keepin my C-ration till we get to Italy. Those Ginso signorinas will do anything for food.
—Damn good-looking guys, a corporal said. But I s’pose they’d put a knife in your back as quick as they’d look at you.
I remember that one of our officers talked Italian. His old man had left Naples and had made a mint in the meat-packing business in Chicago. This was the moment Lieutenant Figarotta’d been sweating out for years, a chance to crap all over the folks from the old country. He stepped forward and offered a cigarette to an officer of the Alpini. When the officer reached out with a smile and a bow, Lieutenant Figarotta tittered and twitched the cigarette out of reach. The Italian officer flushed and stood at rigid attention. This scene angered some of us.
—If you ask me, the pfc with glasses said, they make some of our officers look sick.
But no one had asked him.
—Pretty boys, ain’t they? the mess sergeant ranted to his following, but not too loudly. How’d ya like to have ya sisters goin out on dates with them? Because that’s exactly what them P/W are doin back in the States. And our wimmin are fassenated with that Dago stuff.
And I remember that, as he was getting into his car, a captain of the Bersaglieri dropped his portfolio at my feet. I hesitated an instant, then I bent and picked it up and handed it to him.
—Grazie infinite, he said.
There was something old and warm in his voice such as I’d never heard before. I felt that beyond all pretense he liked me, that he was lonely and lost. On his lips was a neat mustache. He had clear gray eyes behind lashes longer than any I’d ever seen, except those that girls buy in the five and ten. His breath was sweet. He wavered an instant before me then vaulted into his car.
The Italian officers hung out of the windows of their cars, talking excitedly to one another like vacationists on an excursion train. Most had blue-gray caps like Mussolini’s, with the earflaps tied up over their heads. Some waved cordially to the MP’s.
—Addio al reticolato, a quel benedetto recinto! one called.
The mess sergeant was beside himself with fury. He raved at all the cars of Italian officers:
—If ya hadn’t declared war on us, I wouldn’t be here lookin at ya goddam sissy faces.
—They had no more to do with the war than you did, the pfc confided to his spectacles.
I remember that as I lay down again in my sack in the forty-by-eight, I mused on the faces of those Italians. They had fewer lines, fewer splotches than the young men of America. I wasn’t quite convinced that their sorrow came because they were defeated. It must be some agony that we as yet knew nothing of. . . . But then they’d declared war on us. They were our enemies. Yet in those young men of Italy I’d seen something centuries old. An American is only as old as his years. A long line of something was hidden behind the bright eyes of those Italians. And then and there I decided to learn something of the modern world. There was something abroad which we Americans couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. But unless we made some attempt to realize that everyone in the world isn’t American, and that not everything American is good, we’d all perish together, and in this twentieth century. . . . My mind kept reverting to the captain of the Bersaglieri. And under different circumstances he’d have ordered me to my death. . . . Something stirred in me that touched me more profoundly than ever before, even in love. And I fell asleep. . . .