Not long after this, we go to relieve the Twenty-Eighth Division, The Yankee Division. They’ve just finished trying to charge up a hill on the old Maginot Line, now turned around to face the French. They had a really bad time, trying to retake the French forts in and around Metz. The Germans had turned the forts around against the French and improved the basically inept French design in many ways. One regiment of the Twenty-Eighth tried getting up the hill, which is, in reality, an underground fort. They slogged and crept through mine fields and past dug-in bunkers. It must have been frightening. Practically the whole regiment is wiped out. It’s like the charge of the Light Brigade in some kind of a stupid old time war.
Most people in our outfit are not too happy about charging up any hills. But I have a personal relationship with one member of this division.
When I was in elementary school, there was a young Irish boy named Mike Hennessy. He’d been left back a few times; he wasn’t much of a student. That’s putting it mildly, he was a Neanderthal. He had blue eyes, heavy black brows and black hair, he was somewhat stunted in growth, about the size all of us in the sixth grade were, when he should have been in the eighth. I was tenth, because I’d been double promoted once. He was fourteen and had to shave. The joy in his life seemed to be taking the joy out of my life. He was a real bully. I spent all of my recesses running around the school building trying to escape Mike Hennessy. One time he caught me, turned me upside down, pushed my head into the toilet and flushed it. I’ve never felt comfortable being in water since.
I hadn’t thought much about Mike Hennessy in almost ten years. He left that school or I moved away, I don’t know which. I didn’t care too much as long as he was gone. They might have thrown him out of school, or he ran away; maybe they put him in reform school, he was always stealing things, letting air out of tyres, breaking windows, general mischief. He definitely needed reforming. But just by accident, while I was in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I met Mike Hennessy in the PX. He was easy for me to recognise. I’ll never forget that brutal low-browed, long lipped, Irish face. He was in the Twenty-Eighth Division.
We shook hands, and here we are, both grown up, more or less, and he’s two or three inches shorter than I am, and he actually even weighs less than I do. It doesn’t seem possible. Even though the relationship of elementary school is gone, we could never be friends because he’s as vulgar and stupid a man as he was a boy. He’s almost drunk when I meet him, on three point two beer, yet. He’s very definitely not the kind of person I can relate to. But we have a beer together for old times’ sake. I realise he couldn’t have been in a reform school or the army would never have drafted him, but he still looks like someone somebody ought to reform.
When we come up to relieve the Twenty-Eighth, on that steep hill near Metz, we all know what’s happened and are scared. Luckily, someone has finally gotten smart, checked with the French and found how, for this particular fort, the one we’re going to attack, Fort Drion, there are only two water sources, or wells. The sources fill great reservoirs dug inside the hill. These forts are really underground warrens. There’s even an underground railway for moving guns and equipment. We find that out later. There are holes dug out in the sides of the hill to concrete bunkers. The sight of it is enough to scare anybody.
All of us in I&R are convinced they’re going to send some of us up that hill to snoop around, find out where the bunkers are. We don’t sleep much.
But the French tell us where the hidden springs are, so we poison them. Just like that. The glories of war. I don’t know how, but somehow the Germans find out, maybe because people are dropping dead all around them and somebody guesses.
As soon as we arrive, the first thing I do is go see if Mike Hennessy has survived the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. I go asking around the busy grave registrars on the Twenty-Eighth. Finally I find someone who knew him and is pretty sure he’d been hit. They’ve pulled most of the bodies down from the hill, I believe they even arrange a sort of truce for doing this.
Sure enough, there’s Mike Hennessy stretched on the ground, his head sticking out of a body bag. It’s a terrible shock to see someone who’s been such a menace in your childhood, such a symbol of violence, unfairness and fear, who took so much of the joy away from your life, lying there empty, bloody, spattered with dirt particles and shrapnel pitted into his skin. He’s white and blue, his whole shoulder blown off and his arm more or less tucked back in beside his body. The body bag is, in reality, a fartsack. He’s still wearing his wool knit cap over his dark curly hair. One of his dog tags has been jammed in his mouth between his teeth. I’m not even nineteen years old yet, and Mike Hennessy is dead. Some things are hard to live past.