WHEN 11TH COMPANY had seized Crest 718 and taken cover in the German fire pits, León’s exhilaration left him. He lay against the rock all trembling, sweating cold, and watched Boulala and Reveil embrace as though the war were over, and watched Djemal prod a dead German with the muzzle of his BAR, and watched El Haoui and Barelli strip off another’s watch and wedding ring and hoist him up and roll him from the pit. León felt himself about to urinate, and only with great effort was he able to rise and crouch—for on no account would he go out where shells were bursting—, and when he’d drained onto the rocks where he’d been lying, he fell back exhausted. He recalled his vision of General Mojón and instantly decided not to think of it. Then he recalled his joy in killing and pinched that from his mind as well. Then, more to guard against pernicious thought77 than from a sense of duty, he heaved himself up and began to see about defending their position. All along the crest 11th Company breathed and drank and rolled dead Germans from their pits and reloaded weapons and set themselves to be counterattacked.
They were shelled first and then attacked, but they held firm. Two sections of the 10th had gotten up by then to reinforce them, and they killed the Germans in the trough between their crest and Crest 862. General Mojón stood in the air above them as they cut the Germans down, but León could not see him and he felt no glow. He aimed and squeezed and let his rifle punch his shoulder and felt as though he stood in the rank mire of an abattoir, braining mewling beasts with a rude club.
Night fell and with it freezing rain and an incessant peltering of mortar bombs, and Lieutenant Jordy said, “So much the better; while they’re mortaring they won’t attack.” They lay all shrouded in their sopping bedrolls, shivering on cold humps of rock, and for a long time León could neither sleep nor catch his mind to aim it. His mind flew nervously about like a crazed insect, alighting sometimes on the face, of the first man he’d killed, sometimes on scenes of peace, but it would never stay at rest more than an instant, and its fluttered gyres were so enervating that León took relief when its whirled course was fixed by a close explosion. At last he slept, and when he did General Mojón came to him and scowled at him from under his cocked hat and said he was proud of him, that León was the worthiest of all his many descendants. Then the image faded, for though General Mojón had no flesh and bone to ache in the drilling cold, the bleakness of that vigil on the mountain weighed on his spirit, and he retired to his own world, planning to return when there was fighting. León dreamed on, though. His great-grandmother Raquel Fuertes wove him an animated tapestry of the atrocities wrought by General Mojón after he came to power and his courage went fester into cruelty: men and young women chained to crosses in the bay of Ciudad Tinieblas, their living bodies rent by savage sharks, while General Mojón watched from the palace terrace. León felt the anguish of his great-grandfather, who needed victims as a healthy man needs love, yet the most horrid sufferings now brought no ease, and the groans of a whole country left him unsatisfied. León knew then the fearful price one pays for pleasure seized in violence, but he chose to defer his own debt and let it grow. He turned from the dream Raquel had brought him and constructed a different one, a dream where the German gunner fell dead under his bullet and then was resurrected, only to fall again. The scene brought him relief, and thus he slept under the rain and mortars.
Before dawn two German companies filtered down from Crest 862, and at first light they charged out of a hail of shellfire. Their wave carried to the stone lips of the French fire pits, and when it ebbed it left a flotsam of smashed manhood strewn along the crest. One more attack would have won the positions, for 11th Company had no more hand grenades and little ammunition, but instead the Germans tried to blast them off the mountain. All day the top of Belvedere was a great orchard of explosions. The German shells fell in heavy salvos, raising sheafs of flame over the French crest, and from the valley the French guns responded, till the whole summit bloomed in splintered steel and rock, and one would have thought nothing could live there, not a flea, not a microbe. Men huddled in the pits like rodents, twitching, gibbering, soiling themselves, but León Fuertes kept his mind gripped, as it were in both his fists, and shouted to his people that the Germans felt it worse. He helped them bear the pounding, but at length Dax could bear it no longer, and he leaped to his feet and made to climb out of the pit and run away, though there was nowhere to run to. A shell burst over him, and a chunk of steel tore his throat out, and he died kicking, choked in his own blood, and León watched him die and filled his mind with rage and violence and imagined shells falling on the German crest, blasting men to pieces.
That afternoon, when the bombardment lightened, a draggled group came in carrying a mortar and two .50-caliber machine guns and some ammunition and a radio-pitiful, precious store, all borne up on men’s backs in a twelve-hour, inching progress under fire. Lieutenant Jordy spoke to Commandant Gandoët by radio and learned they could not hope to be reinforced or further supplied that day, and he decided that they could not hold against a German charge, hence must attack themselves and take Crest 862 that night. But first they would have to reduce a forward spur where the Germans had heavy machine guns. Sublieutenant Bouakkaz had learned from the bearers that his friend Lieutenant El Hadi had been killed with 9th Company on Monte Cifalco, and he asked to lead the attack and swore he would be first onto the spur, and so at dusk he led his section out of the pits and right, along an escarpment just below the rim of Belvedere, and another section followed. When they were grouped below the spur, they unslung rifles and fixed bayonets, and when León drew out the long knife and fixed it to his rifle, he felt the thrill of violence sweep him, and his weariness drained from him, and his blood sang, and he caught sight of General Epifanio Mojón standing above him in the air, looking down at him, licking his lips, nodding and smiling grimly.
Bouakkaz rose and called out in a high-pitched cry, “La Allah il Allah!” He bolted up and forward, and both platoons charged with him, screaming the same cry. All the Arabs cried it, and all the French, and Barelli, who had made contrition in Latin on the night before the battle, and Djemal, who had prayed in Hebrew, and León, who had cried out before in Spanish. They cried above the din of German guns and dashed on wildly. Tracers swept toward them like a cloud of sparks, and fire flashed from the gun barrels above, and the sky opened above the mountain and all the stars glared at them. Time stopped for León then, and as he ran forward screaming he knew that never in this world would he see anything so beautiful.
Then Sublieutitenant Bouakkaz fell forward, and his cry was stilled, and both sections stopped in place, astonished, and their chant died in their throats. They hung against the wall of fire, silent, but Sergeant Mohammed ben Abdelkadar went to his officer and lifted him, and León followed, and the two of them lifted Bouakkaz on their crossed rifles and bore him forward, though his skull was shattered and his head lolled and his brains spilled on the ground. Both sections charged behind them, drunk beyond pain or terror on their rage and hate, crying their war chant, rolling up through grenades and bullets to take the German forts by bayonet. And when he and Abdelkadar had reached the summit of the spur and held Bouakkaz’s corpse a moment standing and then laid it down, face to the enemy, while Abdelkadar retrieved the flare gun from Bouakkaz’s body and sent the signal that the spur was theirs, León leaped down into the seething frenzy of a German gun pit and gave himself up to the hallucinating joy of thrust and stab, and when he came to himself, panting hoarsely, his rifle was no longer in his hand but stuck fast by the bayonet in a man’s skull, jabbed through the face and wedged there, and León was kneeling on the back of a still thrashing enemy, sawing the man’s gullet with his razor.
He rose, sated and weak, and let his razor drop. He smeared his reeking hands against his field pants. He saw his rifle and pulled it free, holding the dead man’s chest down with his foot so that air was forced from him in a final sigh. He unfixed his bayonet and wiped it on his leg and sheathed it. He climbed out, stepping on corpses, and stood uneasily and then sat down. He felt a great lassitude and reverberating tremors of satiety, but then he thought of what he had just done and of the inexpressible pleasure it had brought him, and he jumped to his feet and called his squad78 yelling their names quickly, and while he was collecting those who were still alive and thus keeping his mind empty of thought, Lieutenant Jordy led the other sections forward in general assault and drove the Germans from Crest 862.
Gandoët joined them there at dawn with the rest of 10th Company, and 2nd Battalion seized Crest 915, and 1st Battalion occupied the slopes, and Colonel Roux informed General Monsabert that all his regiment’s objectives were now carried and the Gustav Line deeply breached, but Monsabert had no fresh troops to consolidate these victories, much less exploit them, and the Germans counterattacked with two regiments and surrounded 2nd Battalion and pounded it and overran it, so that 2nd Battalion ceased to exist, and forced Gandoët’s battalion to withdraw from 862 back to the lower crest and retook the spur of Monte Cifalco, annihilating 9th Company, and regained both the banks of Riosecco and captured Colonel Roux in his command post, and ambushed convoys of supplies and wounded, and drew a circle of flame about the troops who clung on Belvedere. Then the days and nights fell together79 for these men and were confused in noise and terror, and companies and squads and sections merged, and grey and khaki spilled into each other, and metal fused with bone and rock with flesh, and blood and sleet mixed roughly, and there was no more order anywhere on earth. Then neither was there food, nor warmth, nor medicines, nor bandages, nor shelter from the elements, nor cover from the enemy, nor sleep, nor ease save death. When it was light each individual movement was the object of a murderous salvo, and with the dark the Germans crept down in little groups and then assembled to assault in furious shocks. Each time the tirailleurs rose to meet them with bayonet, and each time they drove them back and then rummaged the bodies of dead enemies for weapons and munitions before regrouping in an ever-tighter circle. In this manner they held on the mountain, while below, the 3rd and 7th Algerian Regiments struggled to reopen contact with them.
During this time my father, León Fuertes, passed into a protohuman manner of existence, a trance outside the pale of thought and over the frontier of most emotion. His frontal lobes suspended operation save to emit a nagging whine of worry which remained constant whether shells fell near or farther off. Other centers of his brain shut down entirely. He saw men die, comrades and enemies, their bodies blown apart or pierced or riddled, as one who sits nodding at the window of a train sees telegraph posts step by and disappear. He heard screams and the crash of high explosives as a townsman hears street sounds. He was conscious of the random pass of death as a particular Tinieblan might on Sunday morning know the lottery was being drawn and sums both great and small disbursed at hazard, but the drawing has been held each week as long as he remembers and will be held next week and next and next, and in his weariness and headache he cannot recall his number or where he’s put his ticket or even if he’s bought one, and the whole thing is of little moment, win or lose. The regions of León’s cortex that held the program of his infantry training remained in function. The survival centers of his lower brain were working well. By day crawling was his natural way of locomotion, and he adapted to terrain like bug or lizard. By night he sensed the approach of enemies and could without fearing he’d guessed wrong take men to brace a threatened point in the perimeter. At each attack he felt a strong fix of adrenaline bang through his body, and his fatigue would melt, and he would rise, soaked in clean fury, to meet the fury of the men who sought to kill him. Grunting and bellowing, he thrust his bayonet into men’s chests and rammed his rifle butt up in men’s faces, and each thrust or blow that hit brought animal satisfaction, but he neither thought of what he did nor reflected on it later nor could remember or look forward to another mode of life. This state continued with him after 3rd Battalion was reinforced and resupplied—twelve men out of a platoon of fifty who’d set off from the ravine to reach them, five, mules out of five dozen with ammunition but no rations—and 11th Company went over to the attack again. It continued through the wash and slide of combat on the slopes of 862, through the charge that took him and Boulala —the last men still alive out of their squad of eight-and perhaps twenty others to the summit of the crest. It continued into his fifth night on Belvedere, when half a German company flowed in around them and went up to wipe them out, when he and Boulala stood in a forward gun pit, firing their rifles at the shapes that scrambled toward them. Then their cartridges were gone, and Boulala crawled out to a dying German to take his weapon, and the German killed him, and with that León stepped from his trance into a great clarity.
León’s clarity spread through his brain and out like an aurora for a space of several meters all about him. It was bright as an arc light and pulsed rhythmically, and my aunt Rosario saw it from above the lower crest and followed its light to León. She had been searching for him, stepping among the crouched soldiers of his battalion, peering desperately into their faces, and when she saw the light of his clarity, which no living person saw, she went to him and sat down beside his friend Boulala’s body. León didn’t see her, for in his clarity he was recalling every detail of his five days and nights of battle even those details he’d been unconscious of as they occurred. He recalled Jabara’s death, and Dax frozen in terror on the cliff face, and how he’d fired on the Germans in the trough between the crests and how he’d stabbed and clubbed men in the dark. He recalled the face of the first man he’d killed exactly and the face of a man he’d bayoneted after Bouakkaz’s charge and how he’d stabbed another through the face. His point had struck on bone near the man’s nose and slid into his eye and driven through into his skull and wedged there. León recalled the human pleasure he had taken in this act of killing and the great surge of pleasure that swelled in him when he seized another man, a man who held his palms up, pleading, and threw him, twisting, down and held him down and found the razor, opened it, and cut—yes, cut through the man’s throat so that blood spurted, thick and hot, on León’s hands. When he recalled all this, León felt hideously guilty, more soiled with guilt than when he’d been a catamite.
He knew each living thing was doomed to die, and always by some agency. To be the agency of death, as well as life, was in the destiny of everything on earth. But man, who had the faculty of thought, ought not to kill unthinkingly, without considering what he killed or why, or to take pleasure as death’s agent. Joy in battle was correct, as joy in any part of life, but one ought not to kill unthinkingly or out of selfish pleasure.
Then León realized that his whole life had been a constant self-indulgence.80 As a child he had indulged himself in the power of being family breadwinner, and he had bathed in self-indulgence while he lived with Dr. Grillo. He had indulged himself in the hardships of desert journey, and his merging with the army was an acute form of self-indulgence. No doubt he was fated to live selfishly, indulging and asserting his own self, but he ought to acknowledge his nature and bear it consciously. All his life he had evaded and denied his human obligation to consider, to understand his life and bear it consciously. For eight years he had smothered this obligation, in degradation, in action, in the monastic fraternity of soldiering, and before that also he had lived thoughtlessly, without considering. He had, especially, loved thoughtlessly and thus become the agency of Rosario’s death. It was time he considered that and acknowledged it and bore it consciously. As these thoughts came to him, he saw his sister-love Rosario sitting beside Boulala’s body, smiling at him, and his clarity grew calm.
Then León pardoned whatever agency might cause his death, the man of the opposing army who might kill him in the next instant or the myriad army of bacilli that might invest and kill him years ahead. He pardoned the soldier who had killed his friend Jabara and the artillerymen who had killed his comrade Dax and the men who’d killed his other comrades and the dying man three meters off who’d killed Boulala. And when he’d given pardon, he asked it for himself. He first asked pardon of Rosario, and she gave it to him, smiling. Then he asked pardon of the men he’d killed, a special pardon of the men whose killing had been done in pleasure, then pardon of the men he’d killed in present self-defense. As he did so, the Germans charged again, and León’s vision of Rosario was broken by a man who ran over and through her, firing a pistol, and as he reached the pit where León stood, he roared and aimed his pistol down at León, and, asking pardon, León reached up and slid his bayonet without difficulty into the man’s belly.
The man fell forward and crashed down on León, and his pistol crashed on León’s face, and León fell back senseless. He came to himself lying at the bottom of the pit with the man on top of him, screaming, trying to choke him, but his great clarity was with him still, and he pried the man’s grip gently from is throat and gently pushed him up and raised himself, so that the German across his lap, which was drenched with the German’s blood. Then León calmed him, cradling his head and caressing his check, which was filthy and stubbled, soiled by sweat and tears, and the man’s screams softened into whimpers. Then León looked at the man’s wound.
The bayonet had pulled free when the man fell, leaving a slit in his grey trousers from which blood pumped. Gently León opened the man’s belt and then his trousers and drew them down. A sausage of intestine pocked from the wound, and León cradled the man gently and pushed the roll of gut back into him and, having nothing else, took off his woolen cap and pressed it over the wound—uselessly, for the man was surely dying. While León tended him, the man whimpered and wriggled weakly, but now he let his head lie against León’s chest, breathing heavily, and with that León began to weep.
The Germans did not attack again. There were only a handful of them left around the crest, half of them wounded, but had they attacked, León would not have noticed. He sat at the bottom of a pit about the width and depth of a man’s grave, cradling his enemy, weeping for all the living things on earth that have to die and mostly for the human beings of this world, who have to think about their death and bear it consciously.
At length the German moved his head and opened his eyes and looked at León, and León stopped weeping and looked down at him.
“Mutti?” the German murmured. “Mutti?”
León cradled him, and the man smiled faintly. Then he died.
That midnight the soldiers of both armies crouched on the freezing top of Colle Belvedere heard singing from the summit of Crest 862. A voice sang a song called “La Golandrina,” sang it through once quite slowly, then was silent. None of the men who heard it understood the words, but the song spoke so piercingly to them of grief, the voice so swelled with joy and with lament, that they believed they’d dreamed both song and singer. In the morning, when 3rd Battalion, 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs stormed the crest and reached the little group who held the summit, their commanding officer found an exhausted corporal sleeping in a gun pit with the body of a dead German cradled in his arms.
On 4th February, 1944, the 4th Tunisian Tirailleurs were relieved from Colle Belvedere. In little groups, followed by German shells, they came down off the mountain, tattered, smeared with blood and filth, bearded, pale, eyes sunken. In two hundred forty hours of uninterrupted combat the regiment had taken fifteen hundred casualties, well more than half its strength, nearly three hundred killed, more than four hundred missing. In 3rd Battalion all three company commanders had been killed and every other officer killed or wounded, so when the regiment returned to action early in May, León Fuertes was a sublieutenant.
He was wounded leading his section in the assault on Monte Pico in the last chapter of the Battle of Cassino, receiving the Médaille Militaire for his conduct in this action. By the time he was returned to duty, Juin’s Expeditionary Corps had been withdrawn from Italy and made a part of the newly formed French First Army under de Lattre de Tassigny. León took part in the landings on the Riviera and fought with his regiment through France and into Germany. When the war ended he held the rank of captain and was commanding a company on the headwaters of the Danube.
During his months of combat after Belvedere he showed consistent valor under fire and received several decorations, French and Allied, but he never killed again or used a weapon. It was not that he now thought war or killing wrong. While his regiment was resting and refitting after Belvedere, he took pains to inform himself on recent history and came to the obvious conclusion that Hitler and those who followed him in arms had best be extirpated, as quickly as possible, as violently as necessary. He directed men bravely and efficiently in combat, and the units that he led killed many Germans. León did not kill personally because he feared he might enjoy it. To be an agency of death was oftentimes an honorable and sacred occupation, but one ought not take selfish pleasure in it, and as he had found killing could bring exquisite pleasure, León, in self-defense, adopted the custom of British officers and went into battle with his revolver holstered, carrying a little cedar swagger stick, which was capped at one end with a highly polished .30-06 cartridge case and which he jokingly called “La Joyeuse,” after Charlemagne’s sword.
Thus equipped, León no longer enjoyed the company of his great-grandfather General Epifanio Mojón. My aunt Rosario was with him constantly, however, beside him in every battle, so that he felt her presence though he could not see her, and in his dreams each night. In these dreams they conversed chastely and hence guiltlessly, as neither lovers nor siblings but as friends. Thus, in Rosario’s company and burdened with a consciousness which he strove always to bear firmly and yet lightly, my father, León Fuertes, came out of the wilderness regions of his life.