This is My Brother

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THIS IS MY BROTHER

A Novel by

LOUIS PAUL

Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."—Abraham Lincoln

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

1 5

2 12

3 19

4 31

5 40

6 47

7 58

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 68

1

It was better for Lenn, I think. My friend Lenn Morrow is dead. For two months we knew it was hopeless. We knew we’d be killed, Lenn and I. The idea wasn’t awfully hard to get used to. It’s not so difficult to die if one is offered no alternative. Counterattacking hopelessly down that ravine, selling our exhausted lives for a few precious moments’ time, battering against an immovable wall of superior numbers and understanding the simple reason why, death entered my friend’s body quickly, almost painlessly. A machine gun bullet made a small blackish hole in his neck. I saw him stumble. Lenn died in maybe a half minute. Another bullet had broken the knuckles of his left hand, and he raised the hand for me to see. The hole in his neck he didn’t mind, his eyes seemed to say. But they needn’t have mangled his hand.

It’s not possible to reason things out in half a minute. I doubt that a drowning man remembers his whole life in the moment before he dies. Lenn’s eyes seemed reproachful for those broken knuckles. In that half minute he thought only of what seemed senseless, and then he died.

In a few days, in a few weeks, I too shall be dead. We are the prisoners of a barbarous enemy. He has the technical excuse to kill us. We exist without the illusion of a reprieve. And so there stirs within me a need to reason away the senselessness of my dying, to scribble down in this dirty notebook the things Lenn Morrow hadn’t time to say. It is no easy task to talk for others. The human intelligence is a curious machine, and I am composing these notes under unnatural circumstances. Perhaps it was better for Lenn to have died as he did, without the need for reasoning away his doubts. But I must try in the little time that’s left. It doesn’t at all matter that no one will read these illegible lines. They are written for me and for me alone.

It is hot and uncomfortable. A square-faced Japanese sentry walks his post in front of our window, a window too small to crawl through. The tropical sun beats down on the corrugated tin roof of our prison. The heat is a heartless torturer, condemning us to a silent spirit-shattering agony. The sentry is a powerful man, not at all the little shuffling monkey we liked to imagine him back home. He is a short muscular savage warrior. My imagination transforms me into an American general, in command of troop training, and I parade a captured company of these powerful and sturdy men before the eyes of my soldiers. Out here in the jungles we met no Japanese houseboys.

I am no general, though, but a corporal of American infantry. I shall die in a little while, unable to advise, unable to tell my insignificant story. Soon I shall die with my four comrades. Lenn had no time to think, as I shall think a thousand times, of cold-faced soldiers aiming their rifles at my body. To die in battle is one thing. To be executed deliberately is another. The five of us will suddenly cease to be, for according to the interpretation of the Japanese lieutenant who commands here we are spies.

To tell ourselves that this is silly is pointless. We know it. The Japanese lieutenant humorlessly smiles. I don’t understand his language, but his wooden grin tells me it amuses him to think we are to die because of a technicality. I deduce that a Japanese soldier is pleased to observe the ease with which our fragile concepts of right and wrong may be fractured. He is perfectly aware that we are not spies, but his very awareness is a demonstration of the futility of our concepts. We have been badly educated, he says with his smile. We have been taught to abhor injustice, to pity the ill-used, to shelter the feeble, befriend the unfortunate. We have subsidized our weaklings, shrugged at our shirkers, admired our fools. And now, because of that, and not because we are violators of international law, we are to die. The irony amuses him. His contempt for our western sentiments is profound.

Will my recollection of these two months of battle matter now? What purpose can the memory of them serve, keeping in mind the meaning of these notes? Indeed, there are no simple words to evoke my sick sensations when first we knew our cause as lost. The hot bullets cracked about our ears. I thought I had not been made for this. That is what I thought in my simplicity. In the incredible confusion of withdrawal, when the brains and the bellies of my comrades spilled out beside me, spattering the leafy verdure with spectacular red, I thought I had not been made for this.

I remembered driving on a September evening in New York, in the narrow lanes made by the New York Central on upper Park Avenue. A cyclist somehow lost his balance; he fell and hit his skull and in that moment ceased to exist. It was my first experience with violent death. The skies, that September evening, were hung with bloody rags of clouds, and this I remembered as we stumbled, battle-deafened, through the tepid jungle. Blood and the incredible confusion of withdrawal, a cyclist dead, a hopeless cause, and all that was left was the waiting to know whenever the rest of us should die. I thought I had not been made for that.

I was Bill Hilton, and somehow I understood I’d been made to write things down for folks to read. No one ever said I owned a talent. I didn’t edit my college magazine. I wasn’t the whiz of the journalism class. It was my imagination that made me suppose that some day I would write. There were little things, intuitions and small brightnesses, in my mind. Music and nature made crude sonnets in my head. Insignificant people who lived pathetic lives stirred in me a hungry desire to compose their rhapsody. This is foolish, but true, for whom should I lie to now? Once I thought I knew what I’d been made for, but spilled guts, a black hole in Lenn’s neck—in short a war—caused me to change my mind. There is the pathos. Is self-preservation the first law of nature, or is it rather that death is the frustration of our dreams?

In those two months our dreams became a nightmare, and we its phantoms. In endless waves they came, the patterns of droning bombers. Our captain, Captain Macey, turned his back and cried. I’d never seen a captain cry before. Do I understand the emotion that made our captain cry? Was it his faith in the greatness of America that was gone? I think so. Our captain tried not to look at us again. He was killed in action soon after that. The bombers still came, unloading their projectiles. Near me a squad of soldiers was blown into the air, their bodies floating crazily through space. Our anti-aircraft fire was pretty at night, crisscrossing the black tropical heavens with tracers. An airplane burst, descended somewhere swiftly like an illuminated sigh. The olive men came toward us each morning, and we slaughtered them from behind our entrenchments. We knew we were going to die soon, and we enjoyed the slaughter. We did not think then about our captain and his broken dream.

Now I have time to think, and I think our captain was weak. All of us loved him. He was brave and not facile with words. Back home he had a wife and a little girl of four. He was a gentleman, an American, an efficient officer. But he was no good, no good for war. He needed the illusion of superiority. America, the United States of America, could never have come into being if another soldier, a gentleman of Virginia, had needed the illusion of superiority. Perhaps I am unfair to my captain, but everything matters now. It matters to me that our captain cried. It matters that we enjoyed our slaughter. It matters that I remember George Washington in this hour.

In this hour I remember the General and his faith, and the discipline of the human soul that conquered on the final