John Steinbeck - Once there was a war

This is a large and comfortable station. There are club-rooms and a bar and a large restaurant. It is cold outside and inside the fireplaces are piled high with glowing coals. In the largest clubroom are many people waiting their time to go. There are men who have been here a week and some crews which just got in. A phonograph is playing something sung by Dinah Shore. The men sleep on the couches and wait for their time.

The control-desk officer says, “Come back at one-thirty and you will be told when you go.”

The nearest town is several miles away. The crews wander about for a while and then go back to the club-room to read comic books—Superman and the rest. They read them without amusement, but with great concentration.

The officer says, “You will probably go in eight hours,” and again the wandering. A ship is warming up. It is going home. The men on it will be in New York tomorrow. Even the ones who recently came over look longingly at these lucky ones. Just before they go they are cornered and messages given. “Call my wife and tell her that you saw me. Here is the telephone number.” There would be letters to carry, but that is forbidden.

The men going home actually write the numbers down. They look a little self-conscious to be going home, and very happy about it, too. They get into the big ship and the door closes. It is a four-motored ship and you have to climb high to get into it. The little crowd stands in the entrance and watches it go and then it has disappeared into the rain almost before it is off the ground. The field has suddenly become very lonely. The men go back to the coal fires and to old copies of magazines, Esquires and New Yorkers, months old, copies of Life from April and May.

The officer says, “The plane will leave for Africa in fifteen minutes.” It would seem the plane would be crowded, but it isn’t. There are on board only one combat crew and two civilians. It is a C-54-A, which means that it has bucket seats and is more than half cargo plane. Now the crew are gathering together their bags and their parachutes, slinging on their pistols and knives and web equipment. They are being very nonchalant about the whole thing. Africa means nothing to them.

For a while we stand shivering in the rain while our names are called off. Then each one climbs the ladder and goes through the door. The windows of the plane are not blacked out, the way they are at home. They don’t mind if you see. The big door slams, and outside you can hear the motors begin to turn over.

ALGIERS

ALGIERS (Via London), August 28, 1943—Algiers is a fantastic city now. Always a place of strange mixtures, it has been brought to a nightmarish mess by the influx of British and American troops and their equipment. Now jeeps and staff cars nudge their way among camels and horse-drawn cars. The sunshine is blindingly white on the white city, and when there is no breeze from the sea the heat is intense.

The roads are lined with open wagons loaded high with fresh-picked grapes, with military convoys, with Arabs on horseback, with Canadians, Americans, Free French native troops in tall red hats. The uniforms are of all colors and all combinations of colors. Many of the French colonial troops have been issued American uniforms since they had none of their own. You never know when you approach American khaki that it will not clothe an Arab or a Senegalese.

The languages spoken in the streets are fascinating. Rarely is one whole conversation carried out in just one language. Our troops do not let language difficulties stand in their way. Thus you may see a soldier speaking in broad Georgia accents conversing with a Foreign Legionnaire and a burnoosed Arab. He speaks cracker, with a sour French word thrown in here and there, but his actual speech is with his hands. He acts out his conversation in detail.

His friends listen and watch and they answer him in Arabic or French and pantomime their meaning, and oddly enough they all understand one another. The spoken language is merely the tonal background to a fine bit of acting. Out of it comes a manual pidgin that is becoming formalized. The gesture for a drink is standard. Gestures of friendship and anger and love have also become standard.

The money is a definite problem. A franc is worth two cents. It is paper money and comes in five, ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred, and one thousand franc notes. The paper used is a kind of blotting paper that wads up and tears easily.

Carried in the pocket, it becomes wet and gummy with perspiration, and when taken out of the pocket often falls to pieces in your hands. In some stores they will not accept torn money, which limits the soldier, because most of the money he has is not only torn but wadded and used until the numbers on it are almost unrecognizable. A wad of money feels like a handful of warm wilted lettuce. In addition there are many American bills, the so-called invasion money, which is distinguished from home money by having a gold seal printed on its face. These bills feel cool and permanent compared with the Algerian money.

A whole new tourist traffic has set up here. A soldier may buy baskets, bad rugs, fans, paintings on cloth, just as he can at Coney Island. Many GIs with a magpie instinct will never be able to get home, such is their collection of loot. They have bits of battle debris, knives, pistols, bits of shell fragments, helmets, in addition to their colored baskets and rugs. In each case the collector has someone at home in mind when he makes the purchases. Grandma would love this Algerian shawl, and this Italian bayonet is just the thing to go over Uncle Charley’s fireplace, along with the French bayonet he brought home from the last war. Suddenly there will come the order to march with light combat equipment, and the little masses of collections will have to be left with instructions to forward that will never be carried out. Americans are great collectors. The next station will start the same thing all over again.

The terraces of the hotels are crowded at five o’clock. This is the time when people gather to get a drink and to look at one another. There is no hard liquor. Cooled wine and lemonade and orange wine are the standard drinks. There is some beer made of peanuts, which does have a definite peanut flavor. The wine is good and light and cooling, a little bit of a shock to a palate used to bourbon whiskey, but acceptable.

On these terraces the soldiers come to sit about little tables and to meet dates. The French women here have done remarkably well. Their shoes have thick wooden soles, but are attractive, and the few clothes they have are clean and well kept. Since there is little material for dyeing the hair or bleaching it, a new fashion seems to have started. One lock of the hair is bleached and combed back over the unbleached part. It has a strange and not unattractive effect.

About five o’clock the streets are invaded by little black Wog boys with bundles of newspapers. They shriek, “Stahs’n Straipes. Stahs’n Straipes.” The Army newspaper is out again. This is the only news most of our men get. In fact, little news comes here. New York and London are much better informed than this station, which is fairly close to action. But it seems to be generally true that the closer to action you get, the more your interest in the over-all picture diminishes.

Soldiers here are not so much interested in the trend of war as the soldiers are in training camps at home. Here the qualities of the mess, the animosities with the sergeant, the price of wine are much more important than the world at war.

This is a mad, bright, dreamlike place. It is probable that our soldiers will remember it as a whirl of color and a polyglot babble. The heat makes your head a little vague, so that impressions run together and blot one another up. Outlines are hazy. It will be a curious memory when the soldiers try to sort it out to tell about after the war, and it will not be strange if they improvise a bit.

A WATCH CHISELER

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), August 37, 1943—It was well after midnight. The sergeant of MPs and his lieutenant drove in a jeep out of Sidi Belle Road from Oran. The sergeant had carved the handles of his gun from the Plexiglas from the nose of a bomber and he had begun to carve figures in it during off times with his pocket knife. It was a soft African night with abundant stars. The lieutenant was quite young and sensible enough to depend a good deal on his sergeant. The jeep leaped and rattled over cobblestones. “Let’s go up to the Engineers and get a cup of coffee and a sandwich,” the lieutenant said. “Turn around at the next corner.”

At that moment a weapons carrier came roaring in from the country, going nearly sixty miles an hour. It flashed by the jeep and turned the corner on two wheels. “Jeezus,” said the sergeant, “shall I go after him?”

“Run him down,” said the lieutenant.

The sergeant wheeled the jeep around and put his foot to the floor. Around the corner he could see the tail lights in the distance and he seemed to gain on it rapidly. The weapons carrier was stopped, pulled up beside a field. The jeep skidded to a stop and the sergeant leaped out with the lieutenant after him.

Three men were sitting in the weapons carrier, three in the front seat. They were quite drunk. The sergeant flashed his light in the back. There were two empty wine bottles on the floor of the truck. “Get out,” said the sergeant. As the men got out he frisked each one of them, tapping the hind pockets and the trousers below the knees. The three soldiers looked a little bedraggled.

“Who was driving that car?” the lieutenant asked.

“I don’t know him,” a small fat soldier said. “I never saw him before. He just jumped out and ran when he saw you coming. I never saw him before. We were just walking along and he asked us to come for a ride with him.” The small fat soldier rushed the words out.

“That’ll be enough out of you,” the sergeant said. “You don’t have to tell your friends the alibi. Where did you dump the stuff?”

“What stuff, Sergeant? I don’t know what stuff you mean.”

“You know what I mean all right. Shall I take a look about, sir?”

“Go ahead,” the lieutenant said. The sergeant went to the border of the field and flashed his light about in the stubble. Then he came back. “Can’t see anything,” he said, and to the men, “Where’d you get this truck?”

“Just like I told you—this soldier asked us to come for a ride, and then he saw you coming and he jumped out and ran.”

“What was his name?”

“I don’t know. We called him Willie. He said his name was Willie. I never saw him in my life before. Said his name was Willie.”

“Get in the jeep,” said the sergeant. “I’ve got the keys, lieutenant. We’ll send out for the truck. Go on now, you guys, get in that jeep.”

“We ain’t done anything wrong, Sarge. What you going to take us in for? Guy named Willie just asked—”

“Shut up and get in,” said the sergeant.

The three piled uncomfortably into the back seat of the jeep. The sergeant got behind the wheel and the lieutenant loosened his gun in its holster and sat on the little front seat with his body screwed around to face the three. Only the little man wanted to talk. The jeep rattled into the dark streets of Oran and pulled up in front of the MP station, jumped up on the sidewalk, and parked bumper against the building. Inside brilliant lights were blinding after the blacked-out streets. A sergeant and a first lieutenant sat behind a big, high desk and looked over at the three ranged in front of them.

“Take off your dog tags and put them up here,” said the sergeant. He began to make notes on a pad from the dog tags. “Put everything in your pockets in this box.” He shoved a cigar box to the edge of his desk.

“But this here’s my stuff,” the little man protested.

“You’ll get a receipt. Put it up and roll up your sleeves.”

The two men who had been with the little fat man were silent and watchful. “Who was driving the truck?” the desk sergeant asked.

“A fellow named Willie. He jumped out and ran away.”

The sergeant turned to the other two. “Who was driving the truck?” he asked them.

They both nodded their heads toward the little fat man and neither one of them spoke. “You bastards,” the little fat man said quietly. “Oh, you dirty bastards.”

“Roll up your sleeves,” the desk sergeant said, and then: “Good God, four wrist watches. Say, this one is a GI watch. That’s government property. Where did you get it?”

“I lent a fellow money for it. He’s going to get it back when he pays me.”

“Put your wallet up here.”

The little fat man brought out a wallet of red morocco leather and hesitantly put it up. “I want a receipt for this. This is my savings.”

The desk sergeant shook out the wallet. “God Almighty,” he said, and he began to count the mounds of bills and he made notes on his pad. “Ten thousand Algerian francs and three thousand dollars, American,” he said. “You really are packing the stuff away, aren’t you, buddy?”

“That’s my life savings,” the little fat man said plaintively. “I want a receipt for that, that’s my money.”

The lieutenant behind the desk came to life. “Lock them up separately,” he said. “I’ll talk to them. Sergeant, you send a detail out for that truck and tell them to search the place all around there. Tell them to look out for watches, Elgins, GI watches. It will be a case about this size. It would have a thousand in it if they are all there. The Arabs are paying forty bucks for them. Okay, lock these men up.”

“A guy named Willie,” the fat man complained, “a guy named Willie just asked us to come for a ride.” He looked at the other two and his soft face was venomous. “Oh, you dirty bastards,” he said.

OVER THE HILL

A NORTH AFRICAN POST (Via London), September 1, 1943—Sligo and the kid took their forty-eight hour pass listlessly. The bars close in Algeria at eight o’clock but they got pretty drunk on wine before that happened and they took a bottle with them and lay down on the beach. The night was warm and after the two had finished the second bottle of wine they took off their clothes and waded out into the quiet water and then squatted down and sat there with only their heads out. “Pretty nice, eh, kid?” said Sligo. “There’s guys used to pay heavy dough for stuff just like this and we get it for nothing.”

“I’d rather be home on Tenth Avnoo,” said the kid. “I’d rather be there than any place. I’d like to see my old lady. I’d like to see the World Series this year.”

“You’d like maybe a clip in the kisser,” said Sligo.

“I’d like to go into the Greek’s and get me a double chocolate malted with six eggs in it,” said the kid. He bobbed up to keep a little wavelet out of his mouth. “This place is lonely. I like Coney.”

“Too full of people,” said Sligo.

“This place is lonely,” said the kid.

“Talking about the Series, I’d like to do that myself,” said Sligo. “It’s just times like this a fella gets kind of tempted to go over the hill.”