Bedtime Stories In The Dying Night

(Editor’s note: This column was written almost 30 years ago as a Veterans Day remembrance of a man who had been a soldier. The story is true, as nearly as my imperfect memory can regenerate it. I have tried to recall this tale again in an effort to remember the spirit of a man who fervently believed that we have forgotten too much.)

I don’t think it was November.

It was early fall, a little cooler than usual as the arctic edged south a bit, its first hint of seasonal death hanging in the air like the omnipresent drizzle stripping the hardwoods of their first brown leafy sacrifices to the approaching god of winter.

We sat bored, our mood damp as the wool and the weather, watching our Boy Scout camping trip soak unceasingly into the soggy, slick Oklahoma hills.

While I certainly think of it now, back then no one questioned how Mr. Norwood was able to keep a fire going under the tent fly with no dry wood and no scorched canvas. It was just one of those things you took for granted, like the extra  clean socks, underwear and jeans in your pack. You would have known your mother put them there if you’d thought about it, but you didn’t. Certainly you didn’t talk about it.

Sort of like Mr. Norwood.

He was just the old man who drove the bus for the Boy Scouts, kind of a sour old guy. Never said too much except to yell at us through the rearview mirror to settle down, sit down and quit all that hollerin’. We just figured he went with the bus, part of the loan to the Scouts like the school gave us the bus and the National Guard let us have the tents and the church let us have the groceries.

Except for the Hershey bars and cupcakes and ginger ale and stuff.

Nobody let us have that but us.

We never figured why old Mr. Norwood gave up his time and his summers to ferry a bunch of howling yard apes to camp. Like all a school bus driver has to do with his summers is haul more kids around.

We never wondered why old Mr. Norwood always slept in the bus instead of in the tents with us.

Until that night.

I guess he figured we were pretty much a mess, all of us running around in the rain, pitching mudball fights and water wars all day, and he took pity on us, starting a fire in one of the few tents still standing despite the weather-bound pranks.

Whoever said it regretted it.

But it didn’t matter. We all joined in it.

We’d  heard that Mr. Norwood was in the war, so we chorused, and repeated the refrain, “Tell us some war stories.”

First he ignored us.

But we would not be ignored.

Like I said, we had a lot of war surplus equipment given to us.

He reached down and picked up an entrenching tool.

It was the first time I’d seen that look. I’ve seen it since, though I’m not sure I can describe it. It’s a hard, brittle look, like glass in a fire; a piercing stare halfway between tears and rage; a maddened searching, demanding look from someplace hidden within the soul, someplace raw, scarred and bloody.

It is the look of a man who sleeps little and dreams much.

“I onct beat a man to death with one of these. He was a mail carrier. Had a picture of his wife and little boys in his boot. I beat him ‘til we was both bloody and he just sat right down there in the trench and scratched his moustache with one finger ‘til he died.”

He fixed us all with that stare, and holding the entrenching tool toward us like a bitter accusation, went on; only now we weren’t sure we wanted him to.

“You want to hear a war story? All right, you little snots. Here’s a war story.

“They come in about three hours before daylight. Barrages. Tons of it. Hear? Hell, you couldn’t even think. Suck th’ air right out of you. Couldn’t draw a breath. Boys down the line from you just got blowed up. One secont they was there and then they wasn’t. Sometimes you’d git buried. Shells and bombs would just cover you plumb up with dirt. Two, three foot deep. You’d lie there and pray for it to stop, and when it did, you’d pray some more that it was just a letup. ‘Cause when it quit, that meant they was comin’.

“You’d get up and knock the mud out of the action best you could and lock out the box, git you a handful of rounds and start killin’ single-shot at five, six hundred yards. They kept comin’, us killin’ ’em the whole time. When they hit our wire, you unlocked the box and used them last five rounds fast as you could. Then it got down to whatever was handy.

“They jist kept on ‘til there wasn’t no more of ‘em to keep on. I seen ‘em come over them trenches with arms, heads blowed off, jist run over th’ top and fall down dead. Shovels was the best. We’d sit around and whet ‘em like a knife. Some boys used a pick axe, butcher knife or jist a good stout stick of stovewood. Bayonets wasn’t much good when a bunch of ‘em got in on you like that.

“Sometimes one of us would jist go crazy. Turn to water when they come over the top. Best thing when that happent was just to grab him quick as you could and shove him down in the trench and stand on him. Hope if it ever happent to you — and it happent to everbidy sometime — somebody’d do th’ same for you ‘cause if they ever seen you wallerin’ around like that, cryin’, screamin’, they’d stick you f’r sure. Like they couldn’t stand it. Skeert it would happen to them, I figgered, like it was catchin’.

“Then all of a sudden there just wouldn’ be nobidy there. Nobidy left to kill. Then you’d git your rifle, or somebody’s, and git ready. Whistles would blow most times and we’d go right back at ‘em. They’d commence to shellin’ us again when we hit no man’s land.

“It was like a warshed out cotton patch out there. But it was better for them barrages than in the trenches. They didn’t always git your range. ‘Course when they used gas it was worse. It run downhill. If you jumped in a shell hole, it was full of gas. If you didn’t you got shot or blowed up. Sometimes wind would come up and it blowed back on ‘em. We run up on their trenches an’ they was jist full of dead men, gassed.”

He stretched out a partially clenched, somehow imperfect but not scarred or misshapen hand, over the fire. It quivvered slightly, uncontrolled, suspended in the smoky dampness. Then he pronounced like some undeniable horror:

“Gas.”

He went on through the night to the soft stacatto on the canvas. He took us from the troopships to death’s quagmire, barely trained boys denied knowledge that could have saved them on the theory that, had they known what they faced, they might have deserted. Some units were not even taught how to clean their rifles on that same theory, reasoning that  after the first action, only half would need to know how.

How little the theorists knew who they were.

Together we crawled back through the dark terrors of no man’s land after some aborted raid or ill-conceived assault. We learned the feel of fire in in our chests, Satan’s faith in a mustard seed. We heard a comrade’s cough that became constant by nightfall, fatal by morning. We thought how one should word a letter that a son died of a cold in a distant place where colds kill. We ate horses and rats and Christmas candy that tasted of cordite. Our teeth fell out. Our toes rotted. We shot, stabbed, strangled and were done the same. We learned it all.

Except why.

It was a long night.

But we had our war story.

None of us went back to our tents that night. We slept where we sat, huddled close in a crowded tent, often awakening to one another’s fretful stirrings, and each time, there, tending the fire, a man made old by time and events, sat at the edge of the night holding an entrenching tool like a crucifix.

At 11 a.m. on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of each year, there is a special memorial that I have always recalled, a special tribute I always pay.

Norwood, Owenby

Sergeant

American Expeditionary Force.

Who once killed a postman with a shovel, and made sure a troop of would-be warriors never forgot it.