have a rendezvous with
Death, at some disputed

barricade.” wrote the young
man, shortly before he was
Killed if the First World
War. The capitalizing of
“death” and the use of the
havo red “‘barficade”’— tell’ “us
much about Alan Seeger. He-
Was one of the last of ros
.Mantic soldiers — which is
Why his verse still receives
a thousand saccharine read-
‘Ings in schoolrooms and at
Rotary luncheons every year
there’s a cold or hot war
_ S0ing on.

There’s nothing romantic about
death. There’s nothing romantic
about death dropping from the
Skies, whether it's in the form of
an atomic! bomb which disinte-
» Srates you, or napalm gasoline
Which fries you, or high explosive
: Which sends jagged hunks of red
hot Shrapnel ‘ripping through your
Suts, the roar of the blast burst-
ing your eardrums so that you
don’t even hear your own dying
Scream.

; Let me tell you about death,
Not in sentimental or passionate

__,PYose, but in the hard-boiled, cal-
lous manner that all soldiers had
to view it on the battlefield — or
else wind up as “battle fatigue”
Cases in a phychopathic ward.

- Please try to understand that
: the “hard-boiled” shell over our
_ Aearts was as necessary a protec-
tion for our minds as slit trenches
_ Were for our bodies. The only
‘times the “shell” didn’t ,protect us
Was when we viewed dead mothers
B €nd children in the ruins of cities
nd towns which our own or
_ *Memy shells and bombs had de-

_~ &ver met never learned any way
: ee Soncealing their emotions when

ey came upon the shattered, torn
bodies of dead babies. But this
isn’t the story of how war destroy-
ray Cities and innocent people; I
5 Ply want to describe the smell

°f war on the battlefields. ny

' The first dead thing I came
Sse to in Normandy wasn’t a
Man, it Was only a cow. Our mor-
th crew went into position beside

is cow, only a dozen feet away
trom this cow, and when the wind

~n to understand that our friend
the cow
™orning the sun shone and the
Sow stank and we looked at the
1 > rotting thing with her two
8 stiffly in the air and her anus:
side out ‘and. the \ maggots
Swarming happily over her carcass

Whe ~d ’,
} on’t somebody | call the
SPCA>»

That afternoon, moving up to-
_ “8rds Caen, we drove our carrier

_ Stroyed. The “toughest” soldiers’

anged during the night we be-—

was very dead. Next

My number two man said,

‘sta huge bomb crater and there.

There’s nothing

romantic

about death

in the bottom, curled up in a tiny
ball, looking as though he had in-
stinctively tried to crawl back
into his mother’s womb, was a
dead Canadian soldier.

With the mental reflex action
that was to be our safeguard for
the next ten months against dead
regiments of soldiers, we be weke
like this: .

“How in hell did that bastard
get down there in the pottom of
the hole? He snoulda been blow-
ed to hellangone.”

“Musta jumped in for cover and
got it from an airburst.”

“Yeh, that musta been it.”

“Look at the bastard all curled
up. They always told me I’d learn
to hide under a own helmet.
Now I believe ’e ‘
@.. :

Our mortar position near Caen
was in a quarry—where Lee was
killed and my number two got out
of the war with 27 shrapnel
wounds and maybe died, we never
heard, but all that came later. To
begin with there were two stink-
ing dead Germans in the quarry,
and we had to get rid of them.

The first was a real joker. There
he was, looking funny as hell, sit-
ting on his rump trying to wind a
bandage around his wounded leg
—and —with his head Blowey clean
off.

“If he'd hit for a slit, the stupid «try.

bastard, he’d have been okay,”

someone said, as we heaved him
into his slit trench and shovelled
the gravel over him.

The second Jerry was more of a
problem. He had been shaving
and getting a sun-tan on a little
hump of ground in the middle of

the quarry, and when whatever it
was hit him, he just lay back and ~

died, with a razor in his hand and
his bare belly sticking up in the
breeze. That had been at least
‘two days ago, and it was July, and
the sun was hot. ~The sickening
sweet smell of decaying human
flesh—than which there is no

fouler odor—filled the air.

,

* Brown.

When we went to haul him
down, a. German machine-gun
chattered and kicked up spurts of
dust .a few. yards away.
with him,” we said, And so we let
him lie there: His belly ballooned
up with gas, and soimeone idly

. shot a round into it, releasing a

horrible stench which seemed to
settle down over us. It seeped
into our clothing and clung there,
and -even left its taste in our stew.

“This is getting me down,” said.

my number four mortarman,
“Tonight, I’m going up
and haul that sonofabitch offa

that hump.”

About midnight Brown crawled
into our double-slit, smelling to
high heaven. “Christ,” I said,
“what the hell have you been do-
ing? Making love to that goddam
corpse?” “His leg came off,”
Brown explained, “I tied a rope
around his boot and started pul-
ling him down, and his damn leg
come off. So I had to crawl up
and tie it under his arms and drag
him that way.”

The point is,. as one of the boys
remarked a few hundred dead
soldiers later in the war, nothing
—no horse, no pig, no cow, abso- -
lutely nothing—smells as bad as
we do when we've had it and been
left out to broil. “Nobody back
home will ever believe it,” he said,
“and we'll never, never be able to
tell ’em, no matter how hard we
That . damn, jeesly sweet
stink!” _ :

I think my worst experience
was in May sur Orne, a village of
death. I needed some shovels —
ours had all been blown up when
a shell hit our mortar pit the day

-before—and so I werft scrounging,

knowing that among all that mess
of rotting Canadian and German
dead I would surely find the short-
handled shovels we favored.
Rows and rows of dead. Here a
Black Watch and an SS man
locked in deadly embrace — the
maggots pouring in a never-end-

ing stream through nose and

Thel.

BY BERT WHYTE

mouth and eye sockets, the teeth

exposed ‘by the eaten-away lips in’

fixed, ghastly smiles, There a Ger-
man draped over a fence, neatly
drilled through the head. (Lucky

bastard, he got out the quick, easy .

way). Again a Canuck, only two
feet from a slit trench,
blown away by a hand-thrown
grenade.

It wasn’t the dead — we were
all plenty used to dead soldiers by
this time — it was tne smell, the
stench, the rotten, all-pervading
foul perfume of death....

I got my shovels, finally,

in a pleasant meadow at least 50
yards from the nearest dead man,
I lay awake and choked and
gagged over the death odor cling-
ing to my test Si and to my
hands.

chest"

all that night, lying in my slit dug |

Dead and more dead everywhere
. across France, and Belgium,
and Holland, and Germany. The
shell we built around our minds
conditioned us to death, made us
indifferent of death, caused us to
joke about death. In the midst ©
of death we were glad to be alive.
We thumbed our noses at death.
We- had a rendezvous with life,
not death; and that is why, in the
final few weeks of a war that we
knew would soon be ended—were-
n't the Russians hammering at
the gates of Berlin—we, the tough
ones, the guys who had watched
others crack up but who had
taken all war could throw at us
and sneered back defiantly, began
to become human again.

Who would die in the last few
weeks, the last few days, the last
day, the last hour, the last minute
of the war? Somebody, some-
where. What if it’s me, we asked
ourselves, fear returning as our
minds ran ahead, took off their
khaki, returned to life, to warmth,
to our loved ones at home. Why
me? Hell, at Caen, at Falaise, the
Scheldt, the Hochwald, there we
knew we'd die, our chances were-
n't worth a tinker’s dam, the law
of percentages, sucker, what's the
matter, you wanta live forever?

Like sleepwalkers awakening,
we got the Word. The war was
over. The war was ‘ended. We
were going to live, love, get drunk,
shoot pool, kiss our wives, read
books, walk picket lines, listen to
music, go bowling... .

Six years ago last week, we
heard the Word. The word that |
said life, not death. Just six years
go.

And now they want to do it all .
over again—the munition makers,
the fat-assed politicians, the un-
employed generals who are now all
back at work and rarin’ to go. Not
to defeat fascism this time (for
our war was just, for all its foul-
ness, and that’s why we fought,
and would fight again under simi-
lar circumstances) but to resur-
rect fascism, to bring fascism to
our own country—all in the name
of “democracy” — to carry on
where Hitler left off, to accomp-
lish what Hitler and Mussolini
and Tojo failed to do — to try and
destroy socialism and workers’
governments, for the sake of the
Almighty Dollar and Wall Street.

Listen Truman, listen Mac-
Arthur, listen St. Laurent, Pear-
son, the whole bunch of you.
You're finished. Your plan won’t

~

work. And one of the reasons
[it won’t work is because we, who

went through the last war and
know what death is, know the’
smell and the stench of death,
won't play ball on your team this
time, for you’re wearing . the
wrong uniforms; even if you hide
the ‘swastika, we recognize the
uniforms.

Keep off

the grass

“‘Marxist culture in Poland .. . Little of this would constitute
culture by Western standards.’ —London Times.

LL fares the land, to mass sheds
a prey,
That takes its culture in the
* Marxist way.

And instigates deliberately the
lower

Classes to trespass in the avery
tower,—

‘Prefers its poetry widely read, not
heard

Obscurely, late at night, upon the -

Third,—

Ignores the joys of angst, frustra-
tion, doom, ;

Those glories of our Western sense
of gloom.

Pity the child, in Marxism’s iron

grip,
} Without a single Yankee comic

strip;

Weep for the wives, condemned
to languish bleakly,

Unsolaced by a glossy woman's
weekly;

‘Sigh for a cinema that fails’ to
i win
The war on every front through
Errol Flynn .
(Helped by a blonde in undress

uniform, o

And twelve GI’s in a psychotic
storm.) eae

How crude and harsh a literary —
‘scene

Untutored in the school of om.
hame Greene, ‘ :

arg g Unies ey nia memes,

Bathe with murder,
and gin. -

‘Come, Gide and Kafka, Ellot and
Auden,

Add dedeisind sta Meaie Aactlig-ous
_ culture broaden.

-—_JAMES THORNLEY,
: with apologies to
or Oliver Goldsmith.

eneen TRIBUNE — MAY ll, 1951 — PAGE 5

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