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Soldier’s Heart

It begins in France in June of’ 44 . Manare lying face down on the earth. The air is filled with sounds, shrieks thatcome out of the sky and terminate with an explosion. This may be a matter ofseconds. If the sounds continue, the men will be seen scraping the surface ofthe earth with shovels and burying themselves in it until, like a species ofanimal, they vanish from sight. 

 

　　Or the men are walking up a road in twoparallel lines. They are heavily burdened, carrying rifles, machine guns, andmortars. If the shrieking from the sky begins, they will turn quickly off theroad and lie face down. Or they have spread out and are walking in an openfield. An embankment runs across it—the railroad. There is a brief purringsound, then a rhythmic drumming. If you should happen to be with these men, itwould sound as though the air were being torn. One of them falls. The other runforward and crouch in the shelter of the embankment.

 

　　Such is the life or death of an infantrysoldier in France in the summer of 1944. These actions will be repeated manytimes…the scenery will change, from small fields separated by hedgerows to aflat landscape with windmills to a forest covered with snow. The soldiers willpass through villages. Now they are on the banks of a river, and rowing acrossin rubber boats. Finally they are among mountains.

 

　　I was discharged from the US army in 1945and went home. I returned to the university. I have a vague recollection ofsitting with other students in a room—only a few around a long table. Somegreat book was being discussed; it was the course for upper division studentsknown as the Colloquium. I was reading furiously about…everything. When I wasnot reading I was writing stories, essays, poems…

 

　　What followed I do not know. One personhad it that I lost my key to the apartment I was sharing, and was found lyingunconscious outside the door. A friend would inform me in a letter that I hadbeen wandering in the streets and picked up by the police, and that I resistedviolently.

 

　　I was in a hospital ward. It wasn’t anarmy hospital, but Kings Park on Long Island. I suppose that was because afterthe war the veterans’ hospitals were too crowded, and the rest had to be put inother places.

 

　　What name have they given it now, the illnessI had as a result of being shot at and shelled for months on end? I don’tsuppose many of our soldiers in the Gulf War have suffered from it—they werespared a long engagement. After Vietnam it was called “post-traumatic stressdisorder.” In World War II it was called “combat fatigue.” In the Great War (Iprefer that name, for the Great War was what people at the time thought it was)it was called “shell shock.” In the Civil War it was “soldier’s heart.” Thename strikes me as the best, for it describes an illness that involved my heartas much as my head. My heart would beat faster, I would tremble and sweat and,on occasion, pass out.

 

　　The patients in this hospital saw verylittle of the doctors. There was one who would come now and then, but I don’trecall any conversation with him that lasted more than a minute. There were twowomen—one was a nurse, the other seemed to have some training in psychology.Their main duty was to see that the patients were quiet or harmlessly busyplaying cards or board games or reading a magazine. There were also threeguards. Much of the time, especially during the evening and night hours, theyran the ward.

 

　　Two of the guards were the kind Chekhovdescribes in “Ward No. 6.” One was a skinny man with a dull face. The triggerfinger of his right hand was missing. Once he waggled the stump under my facewith a sly smile. This, he gave me to understand, was why he had been excusedfrom military service. The other was stocky and muscular, with a bullet head.He was dangerous—he liked to beat up the patients. He informed me that he wasthe one who had knocked out my front teeth when I was first brought to theward. He seemed to think it was a joke I would like to share.

 

　　I received shock treatments, and later Iwas assigned to help the doctor, lifting each patient onto the table. I watchedas the current passed through and the body convulsed. There has been muchcontroversy over shock treatments—whether or not they did irremediable harm.Speaking only for myself, I think they brought me out of the fog in which I hadbeen walking.

 

One of the symptoms of my illness had beenhearing voices. But one day-and this was after I came out of the fog and I wasquite calm and rational-looking out of the cage, the barred windows behindwhich we lived, at grass and trees and clouds. I heard a voice say “praisedGod, they resist, they resist!” Who was it who was resisting? Others likemyself, I suppose. I believe with Shakespeare that there are more things inheaven and earth than are dreamed of in the philosophy of those who serve theworld, and who administer its institutions, and grow rich.

 

When I was finally discharged from Kingspark, the more evident symptoms of my illness had disappeared so that I wasthought of as reasonable and level-headed man.

 

For some years I was subject to the suddenonsets I have mentioned: a heart that beat faster, and shaking, and sweating. Iwould imagine shells falling and hear the sound of guns. I could not standbeing confined. And I had the habits that remain with soldiers. One inparticular: when I went walking I would keep an eye peeled for an enemyposition. If there was an open field I would think, how are we going to getacross that? I imagined lying again on a railroad embankment in Normandy, waitingto be hold to go over it in spite of the bullets that were sweeping to and frodirectly above me. That day I was sure I would be killed. Or I was in agraveyard in Holland with shells falling and the living getting mixed in withthe dead. I was in the Ardennes, standing in a fox-hole among trees coveredwith snow and stamping my feet. They were freezing.

 

 

 

The university informed me that before Icould return I had to be cleared by their doctor. He picked up a folder andsaid, "You aren't going to be so taken up with your music, are you?"the question was probably one of their tricks, to test my sanity. He spokeagain, saying that I ought to go out in the world and "meet the commonman." I was silent. I had seen the common man... his guts spilled in aroad, his limbs strewn in a field. The doctor told me that he could notrecommend my returning to the college. It was only on the way home that Irealized that he had been looking at the wrong folder.

 

So I look for work and found it as acopyboy on a newspaper. If I stayed with it, I might someday be a reporter. Butthis didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t have the fascination with gossip that areporter needs to have—whether it is about a quarrel between nations or about apolitician and his mistress. Then I worked for an import-export firm. But thistoo did not appeal to me; to succeed in this kind of business you have to thinkabout the money you can make, and I preferred to think about other things.

 

I went back to university, but not by thefront entrance. I slipped in by a side door, the School of general Studies,which wasn’t so particular about whom whey let in. I took courses in theevening and I worked at writing…

 

I relived the war almost every night in mydreams. This continued for years. After Miriam and I were married, she woke onenight to sounds that were coming from different parts of the room: sounds ofbattle, shelling and gunfire. They were coming from me!

 

　　I dreamed of encounters with the Germansthat I never had. But I had anticipated such meeting as I walked alone amongtrees or over fields, carrying a message from G Company to Battalion. Or Idreamed about horrors… the field in Holland I had to walk through night afternight. It was strewn with the dead bodies of German infantry and Americanparatroopers who had shot each other at close range.

 

　　

 

I used to think that having such dreams wasa thing to be ashamed of. For what had I suffered in comparison with others?When I thought of them, the dead, and those who were in wheel-chairs, orblinded, or insane, had I really known war at all? What have we to complain ofwho have only known "soldier's heart"? Nothing, sir, nothing at all.

 

Why write about such things? Are they notbetter forgotten? After a war, the millions who have been through it want toforget. It was terrible, and sordid, and boring. Besides, everyone knows thethings you do. But time passes and the number of those who remember is suddenlydiminished. Who remembers the Great War?

 

When I was a teacher and the subject of warcame up, I would write a name on the blackboard: Somme. Who, I would ask, hadheard of it? None of the students would answer. Only one or two knew anythingat all about the Great War. I would tell them that the Somme was a battle inthat war, a terrible war in which thousands were killed or wounded---sixtythousand casualties in the British army on the first morning alone. It was hellon earth, but the men who went through it consoled themselves with a thought:Generations will remember what we did here, it will never be forgotten. Yet notone of the young people in front of me had ever heard of it.

 

I have not forgotten the men I knew in the101st Airborne Division. The men and women I worked with in universities werepale and unreal in comparison. They were hollow and filled with words.

 

What was I to think of the new breed ofuniversity professors, structuralist, poststructuralists, deconstructionists,who taught that experience had no meaning, that the only reality was language,one word referring to another, one "sign" to another, with no stop inany kind of truth?

 

It is right to remember such things as Ihave described----in the first place, because those who have lived and diedbefore us should be remembered, insofar as it is possible. Otherwise our ownlives seem worthless. In the second place, war is a permanent human condition,and men and women will have to face it. It may help them to know how people nostronger physically or mentally than they have faced it.

 

The war and its aftermath changed me. Itgave me a respect and affection for the so-called common man that I have neverlost. As if any life were common! The men I knew in the 101st, most of them,had no education beyond high school. And they weren't stunning physicalspecimens either, though they could carry a pack, trench tool, rifle orcarbine, machine gun, tripod or ammunition boxes, for miles a a good pace.

 

So the war gave me poetry. I had a drivingneed to write... A few lines for a poem, a paragraph of prose... Anything! Evenat the university there were very few who felt about things as I did.

 

What did that matter? What if the onlything I could do was held in contempt by others, or met with indifference? Mostpeople cared nothing about the kind of writing that mattered to me more thananything else. They were deaf to the music, So what! I was alive and doing whatI liked.