The End Of It: A Novel

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Text originally published in 1961 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE END OF IT: A NOVEL

BY

MITCHELL GOODMAN

Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?—title of a painting by Paul Gauguin

The war is fact. All the rest is the truth of imagination. Any resemblance that may seem to exist to real persons is purely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 5

1 7

2 19

3 24

4 28

5 37

6 40

7 48

8 53

9 64

10 75

11 78

12 83

13 89

14 97

15 103

16 107

17 111

18 123

19 134

20 152

21 164

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 173

1

Mid-Atlantic. Mid-winter. A big ship in cold darkness, alone, in a hurry. Waves eighteen feet high. A lonely world of water. The world was full of death. Where were they going? They did not know. Inside the tight steel container the young soldiers tried to sleep, against the creaking and the groaning of the steel. They were afraid. Ten thou-sand men lying side by side. Strangers to one another. Replacements. It was easy for them to believe that the ship might break up under them.

On this night in February the troopship worked through the wilderness of sea alone. Worked hard, heaving and rolling. Inside they waited, silent, hanging on, in fear. God what a sea. Where was the land? Had the world all turned to water?

A big fast liner with no escort, no convoy, hurrying with no lights into darkness. To them inside it was as if the sea had tilted high up to touch the sky, as if the world would turn over. A sea?—it was more like a flood. The Flood. Alone now, no one else on the earth.

These young soldiers—no one had told them. It was new to them, and terrible. The violence of the sea hurled them helpless against one another, sickened them, rolled them in their own vomit. It ripped them from what they knew and hurled them toward what they did not know. As long as they had stood on their own ground the war had been unreal. Now the sea rocked them and made it real. It came at them, howling. The sea. The war. The shuddering drive of the ship’s engines against the swinging, tilting sea was like no machine they had ever known.

Morning. Nothing but the cold steel of the sea. The crew was telling them scare stories about submarines. The poor damned fed-up crew.

Sure they were scared, but not by the crew. They had been scared from the moment they passed Sandy Hook in the early morning and watched the frozen rose facade of New York drop into the sea behind them.

Now Europe. What in Christ’s name was Europe? What’s it got to do with me? And the war—what the hell is a war, what happens?

Look around, on the decks, below: the lean figures of men in battle dress, the half-familiar faces, all wondering (while they make talk), Who’s going to die there in Europe, which one of us?

Maybe it was the sea that made them wonder. The sea was a warning. There were more boys than men among them.

Not frightened? Call it what you like—loneliness, uncertainty. There had never been much enthusiasm. They had belonged to the outfits with which they had trained—it had been their known world, their safety. Now they belonged to nothing. Casual labor, to fill the holes in the line.

They move over a heartless sea toward what they do not know. Whatever it is they do not want it. Someone had said to them, Let’s play soldiers—and they had played. Now that was over.

On deck or below there is hardly room to move. Eating, sleeping, they are pressed up against one another, and they do not know one another. They do their complaining into the air, like people in a tenement who don’t know who their landlord is. At home, far behind them now, are their people, who do not know what they want from the war. It is like a celebration back there—after a lousy ten years of stagnation they need this excitement. They are a people with a need to believe in the purity and heroism of soldiers. The soldiers knew of this need. But at this moment neither the soldiers nor the people knew what war was, and only a relative handful were going to find out. It was a shot in the arm, anyway. That much they knew.

On the ship there was an officer in charge of morale. But he did not try to tell them why they would fight. They did not want to be told any more. They had heard it many times. And against the sound of the sea those big words would not ring for them. A job—let it go at that.

Instead, when the sea allowed, they tried to break their tension with boxing, wrestling, amateur shows on the canvas-covered hatchways. (From the sun-deck the officers and nurses and Red Cross girls looked down—the educated ones who knew what the war was all about.) At other times they were kept busy with cleaning and repairing their equipment. But they found their own surest relief in card games and crap games. Money held its own. The strong taste for money. The next card, the next roll gave them some kind of a future.

They were called replacements and most of them were very young. They had been taken out of infantry divisions and replacement training centers to fill the holes in the line. So they had lost their outfits, their buddies—all the familiar landscape of their army lives—and they did not like it. It had happened in this way to the young field artillery lieutenant, the one called Gil Freeman, who lay stretched out on his bunk in what had been the first-class lounge. He did not like it either, this being broken off from the men he knew and had counted on. But there was a difference: for him the war was right and necessary. And he thought he would find in it something he was looking for. Experience? Excitement? A way into manhood? Who knows. He had no name for it.

The world was burning, armies were on the move, his own country was coming to life. He was young, his body was hard and strong, he was a lieutenant of field artillery who had made the guns roar and seen the targets disappear in fire and blast. In fact, he was a knight and his lady had thrown him a rose, and he would prove himself. But of course he did not think of it in this way. He dropped the book he had been reading and with his eyes open day-dreamed of Anne—the sudden unexpected way she had given herself, the newness and eagerness of her body, its uncertainty and instinctive grace. He felt her eyes on him; he felt himself swept forward with the ship, felt the power of it as it struggled against the sea; he let himself go with it to the point of elation.

His eye was caught again by the gilt of the ceiling and the dark polished wood of the panelling, the remains of a world of luxury and privilege that would never be quite the same again. Never. This was the end of it. He was sure of it, as Anne was sure. Something was happening: he had seen it, in railway stations, on trains, on the streets of Oklahoma City and New York. It was in the air, a common understanding: If there is going to be dying, let it be worth something.

A sense of expectation, arising out of promises. Promises. Things will be different, we promise you that. Something for everybody, no more hogging. Something was wrong—we’ll fix it. A new time. New era. After the war...The President of Harvard says we need American radicals...that there should be no more inheritance of wealth...the end of privilege...equality...The President of the United States says that no man should be allowed to earn more than $25,000 a year. The Vice-President says it will be a new world, he says that—. If you come back. What is it to be killed, now, in two or three months? What happens? To die. To be killed not as by lightning but by the deliberate working hands of another man. What was it the small muscular man had said, the man with the broken face of an old boxer? Whaddya got thumbs for boy? Use ‘em! Stick ‘em in the Jerry’s face and gouge his eyeballs out. Like this! See?

At night, as the sea rolled the helpless bodies against the steel walls of the ship, the fact of a man killing a man was almost believable. The knee in the groin, the knife in the back, the rifle butt in the face. Promises. When the ship strained against the dark sea who could believe the promises that might be believed in the day, under the sun and in sight of the horizon? At night each man is alone on the cold sea, and the war is only a continuation of the angry waters.

But as the ship moved closer to Europe the anticipation of fighting—and of the return to routine—threw them clear of doubt, neither believing nor unbelieving, swept forward into sunlight, the smell of the land—into the oncoming facts of war. First came the destroyer escort to lead them past Gibraltar, then the friendly planes hunting submarines. They saw the dim black hills of Africa as they went in to the Mediterranean, and from there it was all sun and quiet sea, the ship rolling playfully toward Naples. It was a hot sun, a real sun, that shone on the hills and turned fear into exhilaration. Europe, a human landscape, trees on the hills, women. Let it come.

Here was the rush of confidence again. The young lieutenant standing eagerly at the ship’s rail with other men of his country watched it come, watched the land rise to present villages on the hills in the freshness of morning. At this moment the picture of what he was was clear. An officer, Lt. Gilbert Freeman, Army of the United States—boots, pistol belt, helmet, insignia, the close-fitting combat uniform over the tall lean body. Ready, reaching out for what might be in it—the experience. The shared experience, of men in the open, together, depending on each other, moving forward, unlocking prisons.

Along the rail they stand and watch.

Hey look—what the hell are those? Look at ‘em come out of the ‘water. Look at ‘em go. The streaming blue-shining leap of the porpoises made them forget the dark Atlantic. The sun striking the big fish on their arched backs, the ship plowing easily now—things weren’t so bad. The clenched bodies opened up under this sun, the blood ran free, believing again in its own immortality. Around the Mediterranean there has always been more living than dying. The old center of life. Here the sun makes itself known.

At moments like this they let themselves believe they knew what war was. With the heat of this sun in them they could be cocky. But the ship moves closer to the land, and the land is strange. The mood changes. Underneath they knew, they didn’t kid themselves. They knew who they were: they were infantrymen, most of them—riflemen, automatic weapons men, machine gunners. Ditch-diggers. Lousy dangerous work. The army was made of bosses, technicians, clerks and common labor. They were the common labor. And right now they were casual labor, being shipped to strange organizations. Very far from home, among strangers, each a number on an IBM card, destination unknown, alone. I don’t know any of these men. Who are they? Do they know who I am? Do any of them care what happens to me? Where are we? Where are we going? What will they do with us?

Suppressed voices of fear. On the edge of the unknown.

But then again, simple. It was a job. A lousy job. They didn’t like the bosses. But it wasn’t a job you could quit. They had to go through with it. They had their reasons, and these reasons had nothing to do with War Aims. But right now they didn’t have to think. There it was. There was the land, dark green, terraced, with the sun soaking into it, as solid as a good meal. And now into the warm shelter of the Bay of Naples (after the dirty trains and the nameless depots and the transient camps that had led to the windy sheds and the gangplanks of the embarkation center).

Here—look—a luscious fruit of a city hung on hills. One of the oldest, singing and stinking with life. Hey look at that you guys. Sunny Italy. Hey Luigi, where do they keep the women? What’s that? A volcano?

Yeah man, this is one hot town. (All along the rail they leaned in their laughing excitement, watching it come at them pink and brown with blurs of green leaf here and there.) Lotsa stuff here, huh? Might be worth the ride over. They’re supposed to know a thing or two. A guy in the crew told me. Yeah. Hey doc, what’s Italian for tail? (And then there were the quiet ones who stood and stared.)

Flat against the hills the color-washed travel poster moved toward them, changing, and they began to see the detail of the corpse—the city—paint peeling, ripped open and beginning to rot. It was not yet completely plundered. It was wide open. They saw it as a woman, to be taken. To be raped.

Some guy in the crew says you can buy anything here, and he means anything.

You men better not be forgetting these guinea bastards is the enemy.

Or they was. Now they ain’t nothin’ at all. Man, this is shit creek itself we’re sailing up.

What the hell—they asked for it, didn’t they?

So this is Italy—of all the goddamn stinking—

(There was garbage on the oil slick on the blue bay. British and American garbage—the Italians were eating theirs.)

Boy it sure makes you appreciate what we’ve got in the good old U.S.—

What the hell you want boy, there’s a war on. You’re seein’ the world aintchya?

The sun poured its heat into the dirty corpse of the city. They came in closer; they saw it move. Life. The corpse would not lie still. Flies, rats, men, women, children. It stank, it festered, but it lived.

They came crowding to the rail to see the land, Vesuvius, its ashes, and the whole great pastel-colored junk pile of history under it. Hey, look at the goddamned castle, willy a? Palm trees, get a load o’ that. Boy what a pastin’ these guinzos did get. A loaded harbor; live ships bobbing and swaying, in and out; dead ships, belly up, nose down, leaning twisted superstructure quiet in the gay water. What a shithole. Ain’t these wops got any idea how to live? The loudmouths spilled their fear; the others stared in awe at the revealed guts, the private parts of the city. The smell of drains, and death. Brown and gray ruin; buildings sliced, gouged and crushed to rubble. Plumbing. Wallpaper. The tumbled tilted gutted harbor, its shells and skeletons, came close as they came up the bay to dock at one of the concrete causeways built over the hulls of sunken ships. Luxuriant naked death. Along the curve of the promenade the cracked shells of the pink and white and blue hotels, the elegant apartment houses. Dead balconies, hanging. On the walls: VIVA! VIVA IL DUCE! VIVA STALIN! VIVA! VIVA! Long live anything and everything.

When he got down on the dock a public relations officer wrote in his notebook: The squalor depressed the men and at the same time by contrast reminded them of the kind of life they were on their way to fight for. That’s the kind of thing that would go good when they got ready to write the history of the Fifth Army in the Mediterranean theater. Pretty soon they would have a radio station set up. Morale booster. The voice of the salesman. You had to keep selling it to them, at home and abroad.

Naples. With nothing to live for—as we measure it—they live. The dirty inextinguishable wops. Singing, crying, grinning in the teeth of death, they lived as the Germans and the Englishmen and the Americans had never lived. And these hated them for it. Before they were off the boat they were busy hating the wops. A few came to love them; but for most of them it did not change. Contempt, hate—it was hard to conceive of such hate. Sigarette! Caramelle! Amore! Hey Joey mia sorella—My sister is a virgin, clean. Capito? Mille cinque cento lire. Cheap.

The Italians had taken so much shit from so many armies—to live. The simple fact of being alive. They gripped it and hung on. They hung on with their teeth. The persistence-over and over, everywhere: Sigarette Sigarette Cambio. Hey Joe. I gotta cousin in Bridgeport. Wanna sell something. Hey Joe. They’d been waiting for a miracle, America was miracles, and now they were getting their miracle. Lucky Strike, Baby Ruth, Milky Way, Hershey.—Mia sorella...In Naples a miracle is a miracle. Immaculate con-Conception. Consumption. Contraception. Contempt.

If the guinzos get in your way, knock ‘em the hell off the sidewalk. They asked for it.

Their city a corpse—but they go on loving it, pumping their life into it with the big open gestures of love. No matter what happened. Bellissima Napoli. Their city. They cared. The warmest damn people on earth, some of them stealing, some pimping, some scavenging—taking what they could get to live, only to live, any way they could get it. If there is work, they work hard, with love of the work.

Watch ‘em Eddie, they’re tricky as hell.

Tricky my ass—we’ve got ‘em where we want ‘em, ain’t we?

Screw the ass off ‘em. Watch ‘em crawl. Outsmart ‘em every-time. Buncha wop bastards—

The life of the city rising like some wild growth from the rubble. Coming from deep down—under every house Roman stones, and under those, Greek. But America, they want to know about America, what it’s like there, how much money you can make. Crazy to get to America. For the good life. On all the big streets, in the Galleria, they come to stare at the Americans. Fascinated. They come from the narrow streets where they have lived for a thousand years to see the new men, the men who carry no past on their backs, who eat well off a new world. The father, Duce, was gone, and they were waiting for a miracle.

And here down the crawling street come the long-legged men, the Americans. Heads up. Embarrassed, defiant, tough, cocky and bewildered. Conquerors, who can’t help it. Operators of an almost automatic war machine. Serving the machine and waiting for the chance to go home. Immaculate contraption.

2

During his first days in Naples the Lieutenant was uneasy. All around him were these people who had been the fascists, the enemy. Now they pretended to be something else. They shifted with the wind. Or did they? He watched them as he walked their streets. From old dark doorways of crumbling houses they watched him pass by. He was the conqueror; they watched him to see what he would do with his power. The children out of their great starved hollow black eyes looked up at him. He was not like them. He was tall, his body was loose and rambling as it moved; his long high-boned face and the deep-set eyes were alive with energy and good blood. They were small, and shrunken with hunger. Serious dark faces, gentle eyes. The enemy.

In a small cobblestoned square he stopped by a fountain, awkwardly, to look around him. The children approached in a ragged half-circle. When he smiled they met his eyes and smiled. A warmth and a directness of a kind he had never seen before. Farther back, in the doorways, the women watched and smiled. Not sadly. Not to prove anything. Only glad of any sign of life. From one of the windows a song, a woman singing. He looked up. Fullness of arms and breasts stretching to push back the shutters. She stopped singing. Frankly she looked at him, as a woman who knows herself as a woman will look at a man, a man of another kind than she has known. Her eyes told him, You are a man, you are a man worth looking at. And I am a woman. The soft impact of her womanliness was altogether new to him; he lowered his eyes. She turned away, satisfied, and was singing again. The children came closer, closer—to touch him and examine the ornaments of his uniform. Where do you come from, they asked. Where are you going? What is your name?

This, the enemy?

From day to day he walked the steep narrow streets of this ancient maze, looking down into deep wells of humanity, deeper than anything he had imagined to exist. They were defeated, they accepted it. But they would not give up their lives. Life was to be lived. Bread, wine, the sun, a song. The deep heat of the women. The joy of a man whose house has burned down, who feels his need deep in his soul and waits to build anew.

On his fourth day among them they were not the enemy. On the sixth day he began to try to talk with them. Because he tried to speak their language, they gave him their warmth. Soon he loved them, opened himself to them in a rush of naked feeling, glad of the heat of their lives that entered him and lifted him to a new kind of joy in life. They gave him their wine. They sang to him. They withheld nothing. With wide open gestures they welcomed him and embraced him, showed him the secret places of their much loved city. And asked for nothing.

Death hovered in this city. But the shout, the gesturing hands, the sudden song were thrown in its face. The kids rolled and scattered and grinned and clustered, springing like weeds out of the old stone of their city. Lives had fallen on lives to make of this stone a kind of soil, as trees and leaves fall to make the earth new. The Lieutenant watched, listened, and went with them. Vitality, a willingness to live, like nothing he had ever known.

Death had its hand in. There were many funerals that moved through this fight for life. The plumed horses, the plumed and gilded black hearses of ornamental wood. The procession, led by the priest. The smell of death, the sour smell of drains, as if all the sewers had been broken open by the explosions. Typhoid fever. The plague. And still the life kept rising out of the death and the rubbled ground; it spurted up in fountains and geysers everywhere, and fell to make a warm mist.

Sightseeing: The rusting corrugated iron of the public urinal. Men selling a handful of oranges. Women waiting for bread. The elaborate carved stone of palaces pocked by gunfire. A girl thrown from a hotel window by Americans having a party. Small boys looting the bodies of drunken soldiers. A city broken open.

Some of the sightseers knew what they wanted: the guys on leave from the front going straight to the sources of warmth and nourishment. Making love against any wall, standing up, lying in hallways, amid the rubble of a deserted inner court, the sour stench of wet broken plaster, brick dust, pipes broken open. Empty windows. The smell of cheap perfume and urine and dead flesh, mixed. Sneer at them, buy the warmth of their bodies (and get more than you paid for); but look: how they grip their lives, how the warmth flows from them. A few miles to the north the old barbarians and the young primitives are slaughtering each other in a cold muddy dream. And here is life, piled up like fruit: the soft worn faces of women, their slow sure bodies waiting to be filled—all glowing in the face of death.

Once they had come back to this city from the slaughter—those who had fought and lived (on leave, in a hospital)—how could they make themselves go back to it again? After a taste of this?—And some did not go back. They had gotten the taste of death in their mouths and spat it out and turned