The Atrocity

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THE ATROCITY

A novel by

JACKSON BURGESS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

Chapter 1 6

Chapter 2 18

Chapter 3 30

Chapter 4 37

Chapter 5 52

Chapter 6 58

Chapter 7 67

Chapter 8 73

Chapter 9 78

Chapter 10 88

Chapter 11 98

Chapter 12 106

Chapter 13 119

Chapter 14 129

Chapter 15 138

Chapter 16 152

Chapter 17 165

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 182

* * *

All names, characters and events in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, which may seem to exist is purely coincidental.

Chapter 1

THE night it happened the first sergeant, whose name was Robbie Merrill, had slept in the file section behind the orderly room. He often sat up there to read or study his Italian or write letters. There was a cot, and when he got sleepy he would kick off his shoes and fall asleep where he could see the light from the orderly room or occasionally hear a movement of the man who was Charge of Quarters, or the click of the telephone switchboard. He was particularly likely to do this when the C.Q. was someone he didn’t altogether trust, but that wasn’t the only reason; he just liked to be near his orderly room and to know, from the few sounds, what the company was doing. Besides, his tent was nothing special to him. Robbie had no nest-making instinct.

He was a tall man who looked stronger than he was, for his shoulders were built very high and wide, giving him a hunched, muscle-bound look. In fact, Robbie was soft-fleshed —not fat, but with little hardness in his muscles—and he was not very active. He never walked where he could ride and he had never done any hard work or any work with his hands except a very simple turning of levers in a cigarette factory in Durham, North Carolina, the summer that he was seventeen. Because he was a Southerner, his preference for sitting rather than standing, for riding instead of walking, was usually put down to laziness, but he was the busiest man in the company. He did everything that got done in the company, everything that mattered, not because he was a busybody or because he let people impose on him, but because the things to be done were always so obvious and easy. He had risen fast in the Army through always doing the easy and obvious thing very quickly and carefully without worrying about the outcome. He could be counted on never to lose his head, and as a result many of his officers and his other non-coms thought that he cared for nothing, had no worries. In fact, this was an illusion: they failed to see that he simply didn’t care about the same things that worried them, about rank and duty and face. The mother and grandmother and older sister who had raised him back in Durham had been, like many of their kind, hypocritically humble: crawling only to get under their enemies and bite at the belly. Robbie had taken this education at face value, and he gave himself no airs. He went around with an expression of chuckling, grinning, amused self-deprecation on his wide, plain, Anglo-Saxon face, and he laughed too much. I am of no importance, his face was always saying, and nothing about me matters, nothing matters to me. And yet, giving himself no airs, he somehow managed to believe in everybody else’s; striking no poses, he honored every other pose. He had kindness like a disease, and a bottomless belief in other people’s feelings.

The night of the trouble was a Saturday. It was a little less than a month after the end of the war in Europe, and the company was twitchy with heat and their anger that the war was over and nothing had changed. The company—324th Ordnance Ammunition Company—worked an ammunition dump, the biggest one in Italy, and the men had had some vague notion that as soon as the fighting stopped they would all be transported, instantly, back to the corner bars or high school football fields of five years before. This particular Saturday the railhead division—the men who did the actual work of the dump—worked all afternoon and then had to go back out to the depot after supper to finish loading a train. Usually Robbie left the company on Saturday afternoon and spent the night in Pisa or Florence, but he didn’t like to be away when the depot was working, and he didn’t like the way the men had sounded as they’d loaded up after chow, so he sat up reading a western and listening to the C.Q. talking on the telephone and between times humming to himself while he wrote a letter to his sister. Around eleven the C.Q. told him that the train was rolling and the company was coming in, so Robbie put on his cap and walked down to the mess hall to be sure that there’d be coffee and toast and jelly ready for them. The company bivouac was in the park of the Palazzo d’Estivo, the big, blackish tents in four long rows under the sycamores and the poplars, and in the moonlight it was romantically beautiful. The only lights were in the supply room—the first floor of a great, stucco barn—and the guard platoon tents and the enormous tarpaulin-roofed mess hall. Out at the stone gate on the main road the small red coals of cigarettes showed where the whores were waiting for the company to come in. Their voices in the night sounded clear and robust and content. A couple of them called to Robbie by name and waved. .

Everything was in order at the mess tent, so he walked back to the orderly room. Along with the officers’ rooms and the rest of headquarters it was in the back wing of the palace, the part that had been the servants’ wing. As he crossed the cobbled carriageyard below the terrace Robbie looked up at the square, ugly mansion of scabby stucco with its frieze of green and gold tiles—the palace was nineteenth century and already decaying—and felt privileged to be where he was. He strolled, relishing the end of day, into the enormous back hall of the palace—the company day-room— and stood looking up at the arms of the Estivi displayed in painted plaster at the tops of the pillars of the room, two-thirds of the way to the shadowy ceiling. A green ping-pong table stood near the foot of the high, steep stairs at the rear of the hall, wedged between two of the big, square pillars; upon a massive table of carved, oil-blackened oak was an Army ration box in which was jumbled an assortment of paperbound books, mostly Armed Forces Editions of mystery stories and westerns; a poster above the library box announced high school and college credit courses of the Armed Forces Institute. Mixed with the dry, prickling odor of dust there was a mellow, oily scent, faint but deeply rich, as if the walls and wood were breathing out again the luxury they had inhaled for seventy-five years. Two great doors of oak stood on either hand: on the right was the mailroom, closed now with a padlock as big as your fist, and on the left was Robbie’s orderly room. As he went in he admired the decorations on the door: he had papered it with posters depicting, in horrendous blacks and reds, the ravages of syphilis and clap. One showed a thoughtful soldier, a cigarette raised to his lips, eyeing a beckoning whore while above his head, inside a little puff of cloud, his sad-eyed wife and his pallid children appealed to him. Another portrayed a girl slouched in a doorway, her kimono supported by her upcurving teats, very delectable except that for a face she had a death’s head. The men liked the posters, for they made them feel important and opened an easy and even pleasant avenue of defiance to the Army. It was nice to know that by such a simple thing as laying a whore you could hurt, or disappoint, or at least annoy, some general somewhere up there at the fountainhead from which the posters flowed.

Soon after Robbie had returned to his desk, First Lieutenant Andrews, the railhead officer, came in and went directly upstairs to his room, but Robbie waited for the men, first standing by the window and then going back to his book until he heard the trucks out on the road and then the men hollering as they jumped out and ran into the camp slamming doors and stumbling over guy-ropes and yelling for coffee. Robbie looked at his watch and then he went back into the file section, took off his shoes and lay down. He did not go to sleep immediately. He lay for several minutes listening to the sounds down in the bivouac, and unexpectedly, on the heels of his happiness in the carriageyard earlier, came pity. He felt sorry for them, for all of his men, and for their pathetic anger.

Anger lay upon his company all day, every day. It was in the sounds of the place: the shuffle and clump of heavy boots, the voices shouting or laughing or at some extreme, the racing engines, groans and bellows, clatter and roar. The fearful and urgent cries of beggars, whores, urchins and laundry-women: Joel Joe! Joel It was in the smells: in the moldy stench of the cavelike tents, the acrid and antiseptic one of the pro tent, the musty odor of the supply room, and the moist rot-smell of the leaf mold underfoot.

Their wrath had causes, perhaps: their isolation, the strain of working and living for months in the middle of tons of high explosive, the fact that the new men they got were usually somebody’s castoffs. But also, it fed on itself. They knew they had a name as a bad outfit; it was a reputation they had with themselves as much as with anyone else, and they chewed and worried and licked it like a bored and bad-tempered dog with an old, dry bone.

Petty, mindless violence ruled their days, and squalid cruelties. There was a lot of numb drunkenness, soggy and stuporous, without spirit or exhilaration. Thievery was unending. The men stole from each other, from the Italians, from the Army. In May, a two-and-a-half-ton truck had disappeared from the motor pool. They’d court-martialed the sentry, but word got around that a big truck would bring four hundred thousand lire on the black market in Florence, where it was dismantled and sold in parts. The tires alone were worth fifteen thousand lire apiece, at retail. Gas and oil leaked steadily away, and the price of gasoline hung around a dollar and a quarter a quart. Once or twice a week Robbie and the company commander would listen to some farmer’s story of missing chickens or eggs or grain or farm tools. Once it was a donkey, and later the animal was found dead in a ditch out in the ammunition stacks, shot three times.

There were too many accidents—crushed fingers and broken arms and burns and sprains and cuts. Disease. Syphilis and clap were the staples, but flu and dysentery and trench mouth and gut worms ate at them too. Lice and skin diseases came into the camp with the whores.

There were a lot of whores around the bivouac. From suppertime until morning they buzzed around the gates. They did business in the greenhouses below the camp, in the tents, in the wheatfields, in haystacks, on the dusty and mildewed leather seats of the carriages in the palace sheds. The men abused the whores badly, beating them, insulting them, stealing from them. They were not so bad with the laundry-women, because the laundrywomen came and went in threes and fours and were never at the gates after dark.

The bivouac could have been pleasant. The tall old trees cut the heat and the glare and the rich black soil stayed cool and moist there in the shade. You’d think that the men would be glad to come back to that after a day out in the stacks breathing stifling dust, baking between the glowing wheatfields and the incandescent sky, when the metal of the trucks got so hot you couldn’t touch it and it seemed that any minute the whole dump would go up in one blast from its own heat; but the men were no happier in the camp than in the stacks. They huddled in their stinking tents, five and six to a tent, nursing their wrath, or they prowled out into the villages with it, looking for some object.

They went among the peasants and the laundrywomen and the beggars and the whores and they felt all about them poverty and misery and helplessness, and that was what hurt them worst of all, the thing that kept their anger raw: they were treading water, weary and afraid, and any time you stopped working your hands and feet you might sink and drown, feeling your mouth and your throat and your breast filling and choking and bursting with other people’s pain.

Robbie woke with the C.Q. bending over him and he saw through the open door to the orderly room that it was just barely day. The light over the switchboard was still on, looking pale in the early sun, and his watch showed just after five. The C.Q. was a thin, nervous boy named Steel, and he was telling Robbie something about a girl who had been hurt. Without really trying to understand, the first sergeant bent over and put on his shoes. It was a trick, a delay until he could understand, for Robbie often had a hard time thinking right after he woke up, and he had learned that he might say something stupid if he didn’t wait a bit.

She’s down in the pro tent, Steel said.

Now where did you say they found her? He had gotten that much—she had been found.

Out by the railhead.

Who’s down at the pro tent now?

West, I guess. It was him that called. West was the guard sergeant, and that made Robbie feel better, for Norm West was not the kind to wake anybody for nothing.

Robbie said, I’ll go down and see what’s the deal. He stood up and stretched. Never fear, good buddy. Merrill’s on hand.

He heard the girl’s voice as soon as he came out of the palace. She was shouting, then groaning, then shouting again, but it wasn’t until he got down to the company street that he could make out the word that she was repeating. "Bambino. In the gray light, three men stood in front of the pro tent; one of them was West’s corporal of the guard and another was wearing a helmet liner and carrying a carbine, so he would be the patrol driver who had found the girl. The third man was an Italian soldier from the outfit down the road called Battaglione Quattro"; they did the walking guard in the stacks and one of them rode with each of the patrol jeeps. He stood a little apart in his green uniform, looking thoughtfully up into the trees. He looked like a house guest caught in a family quarrel: tactfully gazing out the window, but catching every word.

The guard corporal was a thin, round-shouldered man with a mousy, grayish face. He was one of the oldest men in the outfit, and shrewd. He gave Robbie a cunning, knowing smile. He was pleased; he liked seeing his superiors faced with trouble; it gave him a chance to size them up. Robbie said, What’s up, Starky? with no answering smile, and the corporal licked his lips.

One of the whores got her ass beat.

What’s she doing here?

Ask him. Starky jerked his thumb at the soldier with the carbine on his shoulder. He was a young guy, named Burton. He looked embarrassed.

You bring her in?

The girl inside gave a high, thin squeal that held its peak for a moment and then dropped rapidly and ended in a choking sob. She gagged a couple of times and cried hysterically: "Mio bambino! Mio bambino!"

Where’d you find her?

Across from the railhead, in the ditch.

She sounds like she’s hurt pretty bad.

She looks bad, Burton said, pulling himself up at this sign that perhaps he had done the right thing. He was pimply faced and slight and his hair fell into his eyes in an untidy forelock. His rumpled fatigue uniform gave off a sweetish, clothes-hamper odor.

Inside the tent, Norm West stood by the head of the cot on which the girl lay. The sides of the tent were down and the only light was a single bulb on a dropcord. There was a blanket wrapped around the girl and she lay with her face to the wall, her knees drawn up and the blanket pulled over her face so that Robbie couldn’t see anything of her but her hair—stringy and full of the dust of the road, black at the part and dyed bronze.

How is she?

Hell if I know, West said.

Have you looked at her?

I wouldn’t know what I was looking at if I did. I just gave her some bandages to stick between her legs.

What?

They looked at each other for a moment and then West saw that Robbie didn’t know and he said, She miscarriaged.

Sweet Jesus.

"That’s why she keeps hollering ‘Mio bambino.’"

Robbie found himself edging away from the bed. He stepped back up to it and said, Hadn’t we better get a doctor?

That’s why I sent for you. Where does she go? Do we take her to an Italian hospital, or an Army aid station, or what? Or maybe we shouldn’t move her.

All Robbie knew about a miscarriage was that it was very serious. We could take her in a truck, and fix up a bed in it.

She was bleeding pretty heavy when we took her out of the kid’s jeep. God knows how much she’s lost. West was no fool, and he seemed to think she shouldn’t travel, so Robbie nodded and said, We’ll send one of the K.P.’s up to the village for an Italian doctor. Send Burton with him in the jeep, to save a little time.

Okay. Better stand up here and keep an eye on her. She almost flung herself out of bed a couple of times.

At the head of the cot, Robbie could look down upon the girl and see her ear and part of one cheek. It was all muddy, and at first he didn’t understand where she had gotten muddy until he realized that her tears had run into the dirt on her face. She gave a sharp cry, muffling it with her knuckles and the hem of the blanket while her knees came up convulsively against her belly. He put his hand on her shoulder softly and she cringed away going: Ah-h-h-h! and gagging again on her sobs. There was dried blood between the fingers of the hand that clutched the edge of the blanket.

He looked around the room. A sign in large black type was tacked to a board on the centerpole: 1—Wash hands thoroughly with medicated cloth in kit. There followed 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6, with pictures for anyone who didn’t understand medical terms like penis and scrotum. The air in the place was a battlefield where urine and a suffocating antiseptic fought it out. There was a trash basket between the urinal trough and the table where they kept the pro kits and the condoms and stuff, and it had overflowed and sopped up water splashed from the sinks until the floor was a mush of soggy paper towels, discarded tubes and wrappers and instruction leaflets, bits of soapy cloth, and the glittering blue foil off the condoms. He turned back to the girl, drawing a deep breath through his teeth, and she stopped sobbing and choking and after a second began to say, over and over, "Mio bambino, mio bambino, mio bambino."

Robbie said, "Stia tranquilla, signorina, and she quieted and after a few seconds pulled the blanket away from her eyes and looked up at him. He was bent over the head of the cot, so when she moved the blanket he looked straight down into her eyes. It wasn’t long, for as soon as she saw who it was she covered her face again and began to work her legs and moan, going Oh, oh, oh," but it was long enough. He straightened up and looked again at the filthy tent where he stood, just to clear his eyes of the look she’d given him.

In a moment West was back and said that Burton was on his way with one of the Italian K.P.’s who knew where there was a doctor in the next village over. Starky came in and perched on the edge of the table, first brushing some of the litter to the floor.

Robbie said, Starky told me she got a beating. Didn’t he know?

West cocked his head at his corporal and licked his lips. Starky hesitated only a second. Naw, I didn’t know, he said. Know what?

She had a miscarriage.

No stuff? That’s pretty rough.

Why’d you say she got a beating?

The corporal shrugged. That was what I heard.

Robbie looked from one of them to the other. West very slowly took out a package of cigarettes. His brows were together and he was thinking hard, making no secret of the fact that he was deciding, at his own good time, on what he should say. He was an ugly man, with ears the shape of saucers and almost the size; bandy-legged and clumsy-looking, he was still a good man, and a careful one.

Was she beat? Robbie asked.

West thought for a little longer while the first sergeant waited and Starky happily swung his crossed feet before him. The girl was making little gasping, snorting sounds, now, softer than before, sounding weak.

Yeah, she was beat, Robbie, he said.

By who?

That I ain’t going to say, because I don’t know. You’d have heard about it sooner or later. There was a little party out at the railhead last night, and she was the guest of honor.

What happened?

After quitting time some of the boys set her up in business in one of the boxcars. Somebody took her out in a truck, I guess. Anyway, she spread it for about half the railhead division, I hear, at two packs of cigarettes a throw. Then the boys came on in. That’s all I know.

Yeah, but you said she was beat.

"That’s the part I don’t