End of War

By Edward Loomis

He came from Ohio. Young, unsure of himself, innocent. He came to Europe as an infantryman battling his way into the heart of Germany.

There he stopped being unsure of himself. He stopped when he first went into battle and heard the singing of bullets close overhead, heard the crump of the four-inch mortars and saw the Tiger tanks rumbling towards him.

He grew to maturity when he killed his first German and he stopped being innocent when he bought his first woman...for a bar of chocolate.

When the war ended and the fighting died away, how was he to regain his lost innocence? How was he to lose the habits of a killer?

There was no one to help him except Chrystel, the refugee with the body of a girl and the heart of a woman. No one but Chrystel...and himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcole Publishing
• Release date: Feb 27, 2018
• ISBN: 9781789120356

Edward Loomis

"FRANK GOAD is a retired beach volleyball player, an artist manqué, a barely published writer, a marginal but occasionally successful progenitor of performance art, a very early and accidental dj, a runner-turned-jogger-turned-walker, and an occasional lightweight lifter. He lives in rented digs in Santa Barbara with his diffficult girlfriend and her lazy, sullen, lordly son, and gleans a living by making graphic designs on his computer. His pets have died." "EDWARD LOOMIS is a writer and audio artist, and a collaborator on the Goadian audio projects. His best known work is THE CHARCOAL HORSE, a novel, "A Kansas Girl," a story, and ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN, an audio tape. In recent years he has been working on a non-fiction book on Spain, and translating the poems of Rubén Darío and the brothers Machado."

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Text originally published in 1958 under the same title.

© Arcole Publishing 2017, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

END OF A WAR

BY

EDWARD LOOMIS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 3

END OF A WAR 4

PROLOGUE 5

CHAPTER ONE—August and September, 1944 7

CHAPTER TWO—October, 1944 11

CHAPTER THREE—October and November, 1944 18

CHAPTER FOUR—November, 1944 23

CHAPTER FIVE—December, 1944 and January, 1945 30

CHAPTER SIX—February, 1945 36

CHAPTER SEVEN—February, 1945 45

CHAPTER EIGHT—March, 1945 50

CHAPTER NINE—March, 1945 55

CHAPTER TEN—March, 1945 61

CHAPTER ELEVEN—March and April, 1945 71

CHAPTER TWELVE—April, 1945 80

CHAPTER THIRTEEN—May, 1945 84

CHAPTER FOURTEEN—May, 1945 94

CHAPTER FIFTEEN—May, 1945 101

CHAPTER SIXTEEN—May, 1945 106

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN—May, 1945 113

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 125

END OF A WAR

He came from Ohio. Young, unsure of himself, innocent. He came to Europe as an infantryman battling his way into the heart of Germany.

There he stopped being unsure of himself. He stopped when he first went into battle and heard the singing of bullets close overhead, heard the crump of the four-inch mortars and saw the Tiger tanks rumbling towards him.

He grew to maturity when he killed his first German and he stopped being innocent when he bought his first woman...for a bar of chocolate.

When the war ended and the fighting died away, how was he to regain his lost innocence? How was he to lose the habits of a killer?

There was no one to help him except Chrystel, the refugee with the body of a girl and the heart of a woman. No one but Chrystel...and himself.

PROLOGUE

Towards the End

Here is a soldier of the infantry, risen from the dark earth which colours him. He stands heavily, bracing against his burdens; he wears a helmet, he carries a pack and a rifle, and, out of sight in his voluminous clothes, he carries candy, cigarettes, old letters, a billfold, and French brandy in a stolen silver flask. There is also a German Luger automatic pistol, a trophy from a corpse discovered in southern Holland; the pistol goes between woollen underwear and OD trousers, and is held in place by the soldier’s web belt.

The soldier is intimate with ruins; he knows how it is with them. He can open a door hanging aslant on a single hinge without making a loud noise, as if he were entering his own old home at the well-oiled front door. He can crack a lock with a single bullet, for he knows what a bullet will do when it hits something solid. Six or seven times now, he has exploded his way through a house wall with a little block of TNT; and so he is familiar with the smell of brick dust, a pulverous red haze in a narrow room, subsiding vaguely toward the room’s corners. He remembers the smell of plaster when it has been reduced to its original powder; it is a smell of ancient damp, and visits a bloody cough on those who inhale it for more than a little while. Further, he understands that sometimes there are bottles of preserved fruit on shelves beneath cellar stairs; it often happens that the glass jars will be standing securely when the house above them has collapsed into rubble, prowled by ravening cats. The safety of fragile glass is thus a curiosity, in his knowledge, and he sometimes wonders at it. The stairs—they embody a principle of construction; he is perplexed; the principle escapes him, but he enjoys the fruit, which in Germany is pears, apples, and strawberries, marvellous gifts of fortune.

Outside of towns, he knows fields and streams and forests like a hunter who for many years has followed beloved dogs. He has pillowed his head on pine boughs cut with a trench knife; he has slept with his body embracing the tangled roots of a great tree upset by shelling. He knows the several smells of rain; he is a judge of weather, and when he is not watching the earth for little folds in its surface which can protect him, he will sometimes watch the sky, and at such times his face will have delicate lines, and resemble the face of a child.

Naturally, it does not often happen that he gets a chance to watch the sky. During most of his waking hours, his eyes are wide-open, faintly shocked, watching the earth with an expression cold and incurious. His face is lean, and does not smile readily, though it is a boy’s face after all. It is a face which has seen violent death, and consented to it, and therefore it is a face which looks a little cruel, and that is not remarkable. A soldier is necessarily cruel; he will be cruel while he is alive, so long as the war lasts.

This soldier is much changed from all that he had been in childhood and youth, and is a man now. He has come a long way, and become accomplished and final in his savage habits, but of course it is true that he will someday change again, for change is inevitable. Once, not so long ago, he was a good-natured boy, dear to his family, and known favourably to teachers and classmates. Soldiers grow old, however, and here is one whose eyes malignantly survey a world where his enemy will be hiding; what will he find when he takes his life once again into the frontier?

CHAPTER ONE—August and September, 1944

For George Leggett, a young infantry soldier in the Army of the United States, France was first a green bank between waves and mist, until it became the breakwater of Cherbourg and the grey city behind it. For a time after that, while his ship rode at anchor inside the breakwater, France was the quiet water of the harbour; little waves which did not satisfy him. Small boats moved on the harbour without changing the look of it; gulls rippled down, their sleek bodies glistening in an air which promised rain, their cries an airy recapitulation of the sea. Leggett was tired, fretful, a little bored; the war had not begun for him. He shuffled his feet, and talked, while he waited for the war to come to him.

In a little while, barges came out from the docks and Leggett rode ashore on one of them; after that, France became a place where he moved quietly with other soldiers. He boarded a truck, and Cherbourg became a view from the back of the truck. It was a view of grey buildings in ancient rows, their windows boarded up, and of oily cobblestones which made the truck rattle; within the view, a very few people stopped vaguely, stared, and moved faintly along the streets. An old man in a black suit and a cap paced a little circle at a corner, and watched the soldiers pass. Nearby, women stood in front of a shop; they were staring at a sign on the shop’s closed door, and seemed not to mind the rain, which in its falling darkened the shoulders of their coats and blurred the black letters of the sign; the wet air smelled of broken wine barrels.

Outside the city, German signs stood along the road, and Leggett wondered at them. Each sign carried the emblem of skull and crossbones and the message, ‘Achtung Minen!’ A few miles beyond the city, a German tank lay mired at the side of the road; black oil covered the water which lay in the deep tracks the tank had made in reaching its resting place. Otherwise there were no traces of battle along the road. Leggett’s truck, as part of a long convoy of trucks, passed through small forests in which there was no underbrush and it was possible to see a long way through the trees. From the truck, Leggett could know that the trees were hardwood trees, and occasionally he asked himself whether he had not just seen an elm, or maple, or oak, but this was idle curiosity. His active curiosity ranged beyond the small, tolerated forests out into the fields they passed, and along the hedgerows. Here there had been famous battles very recently; he had read about them in newspapers, and now he tried to fit the complex image of war which he had formed from printed stories and from blurred photographs of men awkwardly running, down over the fences and buildings they passed, and down over the green fields which glistened in the rain. Once they passed a tall wrought-iron gate set into a pink plastered wall; the gate was locked, and the lock was an heraldic device made of tarnished brass. Twice they passed farms, each of which was a huddle of old stone buildings, a pile of manure, a wagon, a pitchfork leaning against a wall beside a door.

Nowhere could Leggett find a fact of war to confirm his image of war. The green soft land was empty, cool. The ride in trucks ended for Leggett, and for the other men in his company, on a muddy road which ran between tall hedgerows. Officers appeared from the cabs of the trucks and commanded the men to enter the field to the right of the road, and when the men had made their way through the hedgerow they found themselves in an apple orchard. Little trees with sleek black trunks stood there in crooked rows; green apples lay scattered on the ground beneath the trees. Because there had been no further orders, there was nothing for the men to do; Leggett, being idle, picked up an apple and tasted it, finding it sour and sharp until he reached the sweet core. Then he stood quietly, wondering whether he would like to try another; smells of apples and decay eddied through the falling rain.

Later, the officers reappeared and commanded the men to pitch tents in the orchard, and that night Leggett, with the others, slept with two blankets, or tried to sleep, on the chilly ground. Twice he was awakened by the need to make water, before dawn he gave up trying to sleep and left the tent to stand outside. He was not alone; others had risen also, but there was little talk. Dawn came with a squall of rain which drove the men into their tents again.

After that, the army’s discipline came alive with schedules, plans and exercises. Leggett’s company belonged to an infantry division which was expected to enter the war soon, but from day to day the company’s life was merely the mild routine of the bivouac. During the day, there were callisthenics, close-order drill, and organized games; Leggett played third base on the company’s softball team. After a week, the men became accustomed to sleeping on the ground, and the company’s life became milder still.

On Sundays, the men were free of their labours but were not permitted to wander very far. Some went to a village nearby, to purchase black bread and Calvados; others stole straw from the neighbouring farmers to make more comfortable beds, a practice which the officers could not approve but which they tolerated. Leggett, wanting neither bread nor liquor, spent his Sundays wandering in a little forest behind the orchard with another member of his squad, a tall, narrow boy named Joe Manley; they had found an ancient tower.

It was a small tower, with crumbling walls, but within the walls a circular stone staircase rose like a mast. Leggett and Manley found pleasure in examining the staircase and in thinking about the Normans who had built it so well. Plainly the tower had been built for defence against enemies, and so it could seem an appropriate place for them to consider their own enemies, who were still so far away that it was hard to bring them to mind.

Together Leggett and Manley sat at the head of the stairs, where they could look out through a gap in the walls, and pondered the future.

‘Mainly I want to find out what it’s like,’ Leggett said. ‘By God, I do. Are you curious too, Joe?’

‘You bet I’m curious,’ Manley said. ‘I promised the editor of the paper at home to write him letters telling him what it was like, and I’ll do it too. It’s just a small paper, George; I’ll bet they print my letters, all right. Not many of the boys from back there are in the infantry.’

‘Of course, there’s something else too,’ Leggett said. ‘Sometimes I wonder how I’ll do when the time comes; you know.’ He felt himself too small and careless for the great events which were soon to happen; he was not far from high school, nor from college, which for a few months had kept him involved, in a strange place of high antique elms and old buildings; an Ohio college, where nothing was known about war. He thought of his family, of those pleasant, far-distant people his parents, and of his brother and sister, children with black hair and blue eyes who had learned to respect his uniform. They were all gentle and kind; they could not help him, for he wanted change, he wanted to grow fierce; but he was willing to wait and learn. ‘I’m not worried, though,’ he said. ‘I’m kind of glad to be here. Anyway you’ll do all right, Joe!’

‘We’ll both do all right,’ Manley said. ‘You just wait and see.’

At the end of the second week of September, a rumour appeared in the company that the division was to be sent within the week to capture Brest, still held by Germans. Men gathered around anyone who had a map, in order to locate this place where they might be called upon to fight; the officers refused to answer questions; the rumour swept the camp, but after a time it passed. In the third week of September the war had almost worked its way out of France, and some of the men were convinced that the war would end before they could catch it. A football team was organized in the company, and the team played twice a week against teams from other companies in the regiment.

At the end of September, the mild life of the bivouac was ended by an order which came from above; the division was to enter the war, but the order from above brought no details. Two days later, further orders came, directing cooks, mechanics, supply men and drivers to prepare to depart in the company vehicles, and the other men in the company to break camp; that night Leggett marched with the company to a railroad and boarded a train of boxcars. Each man carried a small supply of rations in cans and boxes.

At midnight the train began to move. By daylight the train was travelling in open country which no one in the car could identify; the car became a home, the only place the men could know. Leggett and Manley played hearts with the other men in the squad; with Fernando Gallegos, a small, hatchet-faced man from Los Angeles, and Tommy Block, a confident youthful boy from Oakland. They talked while they played. In the talk about women, Gallegos was the most successful, because he was willing to claim precise knowledge of thirty-two women in Los Angeles and seven in San Diego. In the talk about home, all were successful because all were homesick. In the talk about the war they were travelling toward, they spoke in questions which none of them could answer. Now and then the squad leader, a man named Leo Meyers, who never spoke of home, entered the game and brought with him news from the higher councils of the non-commissioned officers. Each day the game of hearts began toward noon, after long sleep, and continued until dark with few interruptions.

But now and then there were interruptions which could not be resisted. On the first day, the train passed the wreckage of twenty-two American tanks in one small wheatfield. Between the tanks, the wheat was burned flat to the ground, and even the ground was scorched. Only in one corner did wheat still stand, the heavy spikes of grain rocking in the wind. Each tank showed already the rough orange colour of rust.

On the second day, the train passed the wreckage of a railroad marshalling yard, in which were cars from most of the nations of Europe; fleets of locomotives lay helter-skelter in the bomb craters. Leggett tried hard to read the words on the sides of the cars, but found them illegible; many of the words were formed of letters which were strange to him. Now and then he could make out a number on the side of a locomotive cab.

Such were the wonders of the trip. Once a tall woman ran from a house to scream at the train as it passed, and be answered with jeers from the soldiers in the cars. Once a soldier returned late to his car after a stop, and was obliged to run shouting beside the slowly moving train until someone reached down to pull him aboard. In two different towns, middle-aged Frenchmen came to the train with green bottles of wine for sale. There were no striking things to see except scenes of wreckage, and it was not long before the soldiers became accustomed to wreckage; the train moved slowly, with many stops, once for ten hours, another time for six, through country which changed almost imperceptibly.

There were two days of open country, with small cultivated fields and grey little towns; then a day of dark rounded hills, with sooty towns spotted along the rivers which the train followed. As nearly as the men could tell, the train moved to the north and east for the first three days.

On the fourth day, the train turned to the west, leaving the hills during the night, and moved out into flat country which the platoon’s officer claimed was Belgium; on the fifth day, the train passed through the outskirts of Brussels. Through heavy mist which was not quite rain, the city of Brussels looked clean and white, like a city of churches, so that some of the men felt a desire to stay. While the train moved on, they talked of their desire.

That night the train stopped in a village of two houses and an inn, from which a group of officers emerged to direct the men to descend from the cars. Heavy rain was falling as the men assembled sleepily in front of the cars. There was a confused march of perhaps two miles from the town, the men struggling under barracks bags, packs, and weapons; the march ended in a beetfield. Leggett’s company pitched tents between the pyramidal stacks of beets, on soft ploughed ground with water running through it.

The next day, Leggett’s company was assembled along the road to hear the company commander explain that the division had been assigned to the Canadian army to help