Once there was a war

“Anyway, it was fairly late in the afternoon when we came opposite the city and crept in next to the mole and sneaked through. We were fixed to run if anything shot at us, but nothing did. We went into the harbor and it was really shot to pieces. There were ships sunk all over and twisted cranes and one little Italian destroyer lying over on its side.

“The Air Force really did a job on the waterfront there. Buildings and docks and machinery and boats just blasted into junk. What a junkman’s dream that was! What made me think of it was that the water was oily from the blasted ships and there was a dead woman floating on the oily water, face down and with her hair fanned out and floating behind her. She bobbed up and down when our wake spread out in the harbor.

“At first,” the captain said, “I didn’t know what gave me a queer feeling and then it came to me. There wasn’t anybody moving about on the shore at all. You take a wrecked city, why, there’s usually someone poking around. But not here. I got the idea I’d like to go ashore. So the First I had then and I, we pulled up between two wrecked fishing boats and we got out a tommy gun apiece and we tied up and jumped ashore.

“It’s kind of hard to imagine. Palermo is a pretty big city. Except for the harbor and the waterfront, our bombers hadn’t hurt it very much. Oh, there were some wrecks, but not to amount to anything. I tell you, there wasn’t one living soul in that city. The population moved right out into the hills and the troops hadn’t come yet. There wasn’t a soul.

“You’d walk up a street where there were big houses and the doors would be open and—just not anybody. I did see a cat go streaking across the street, a pure white cat, but that’s the only living thing there was.

“You know those little painted carts the Sicilians have, with scenes painted on them? Well, there were some of those lying on their sides and the donkeys that pulled them were lying there dead, too.

“The First and I walked up into the town. Every once in a while I’d get the idea of going into one of the houses and just seeing what they were like, but I couldn’t. It was quiet and there wasn’t a breath of wind and the doors were open and I just couldn’t make myself go into one of those houses.

“We’d walked quite a good distance up into the town, farther than we thought, when it began to get dark. Neither of us had thought to bring a flashlight. Well, when we saw the dark coming, I think we both got panicky without any reason. We started to walk back to the waterfront and we kept going faster and faster and then we finally broke into a run.

“There was something about that town that didn’t want us there after dark. The open doors were black already and the deep shadows were falling. We dog-trotted through the narrow streets and then I got to thinking—there’s nobody here, but now if I see anybody it’s going to scare me. It gets dark awfully quick there. It was pitch black in the narrow streets, but you could see light above the houses.

“It got so we were really running and when we broke out on the dock and climbed over the wrecks, we were panting. The First said to me, ‘A guy might have got lost in there and not got back all night.’ But he knew we had been scared, and I knew it too.”

A hard dash of spray came over the bow of the PT and splashed him in the face.

“That gave me the willies,” the captain said. “I think that scared me more than I’ve been scared for a long time. I got to thinking about it and once or twice I had a dream about it. Come to think of it, the whole thing was like a dream anyway, from that dead woman right on through. But if I ever wanted to say how it was to be alone and panicky, I think I’d think of that right away.”

SOUVENIR

SOMEWHERE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WAR THEATER, October 12, 1943—It is said, and with some truth, that while the Germans fight for world domination and the English for the defense of England, the Americans fight for souvenirs. This may not be the final end for our dogfaces, but it helps. It is estimated that two divisions of American troops could carry away the Great Pyramid, chip by chip, in twenty-four hours. This writer has seen pup tents piled nearly to the ridge rope with nearly valueless mementos of places the soldiers occupied. Dark back rooms of houses in Algeria and Palermo and Messina, and by now probably Salerno, are roaring with the industry of making bits of colored cloth and celluloid into gadgets to sell the soldiers.