Before Their Time: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF Page B

had marched on until midnight.
    We watched the smoke rise. Bern seemed sad. So did I. I felt a tug, a sudden gloomy sense that maybe we were in the wrong place.
    “You think we should go in?” Bern asked.
    I made a face.
    “Yes or no?” he said.
    “I’m hungry,” I said. “And I’m cold. I have a swollen eye. Do I need all this?”
    We moved off just as it began to rain again. I was limping a little from my cramp. The whole sky was now gray-black. Even the delicious Tennessee clover, rippling in sweet waves in the heavy wind, was beginning to look gray. There was not a house or a shed, no habitation of any kind in sight. We were totally alone. The rain persisted, however, very fine in the early morning, misty and still soft, not yet ready to offer the wild drenching that would soondescend on the area of our so-called maneuvers where Bern Keaton and I were wandering so aimlessly and amateurishly. But we kept going, trying to catch a glimpse of the hidden road below, dreaming of food and warmth, while almost straight ahead, although we didn’t know it yet, lay the broad, brooding sweep of the Cumberland River, already in full spring flood.
    BY MID-MORNING we were drifting down toward the road, hating each other again. There was nothing we could do about it. We were like two Pavlovian animals, enslaved by our oppressed reflexes, and, as I’ve suggested, between Bern and me misery usually brought resentment. Besides, the sight of fresh smoke rising in the morning air from the road below reminded us of how hungry we really were. We had not eaten in sixteen hours. I had reached the point of blaming Bern; I’m sure he blamed me.
    We slipped onto the road amid strangers. Company C? we asked. Wrong company, wrong battalion. We were then pointed in the right direction, toward the rear, by a couple of ASTPs who recognized us, and we started on our way back to the platoon. As far as I could tell, there was no sign of the 78th Division today. It was just a long, disorderly line of YD troops from the 104th regiment, most of them half-dressed and unshaven, chewing away on C or K rations, sipping hot coffee, and smoking cigarettes from little cardboard boxes that came with the rations. As we moved along, my wool sweater hugged me like a wet sheet. Bern suffered the same clinging mess. “Jesus,” he kept complaining, pulling at himself. At least the rain had stopped, momentarily.
    In another few moments, I recognized a couple of faces from A Company, then B. When we reached C, a little throb of joy, mixed with a touch of fear, rose in my throat. Really home! Would we be welcomed or punished?
    From the side of the road, Ira Fedderman called out a greeting. He was sitting in his underwear on a blanket, hugging his chubby knees, with another blanket wrapped around him while his clothes dried on the ground alongside him. On his face, which was as round as a dinner plate, was a smart little half-smile. Typical. (Fedderman was from Greenwich Village, via Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, a route into the great world that he liked to describe as “a heady descent onto the primrose paths of lower Manhattan”; that was how Fedderman talked.) As we passed him, he began to sing to us, in a voice that was deliberately off-pitch.
    “Lights are low since you went away
 …” And so on, right to the end of the absurdly lugubrious lyric:
“My buddies … my buddies … my buddies,”
Fedderman’s voice rising with each repetition, like a choirboy’s falsetto.
    Fedderman was full of such tricks. They got him into a lot of trouble. Other guys didn’t quite appreciate them. They were insulted by them, or ticked off. Nobody was immune. It was as though Fedderman couldn’t help himself. Occasionally, he would even call Bern and me “Allegro and Penseroso,” interchangeably. Fedderman thought the literary allusion would flatter us. But we weren’t flattered. We thought it was ridiculous and affected, being called Allegro and Penseroso like that,