Sandhills Boy by Elmer Kelton

Author:Elmer Kelton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780765354280
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

CHAPTER

TEN

My foot recovered enough that I quit the crutches, though I walked with a limp and considerable pain. I had to bind the ankle tightly to prevent its giving way. The Army decided it was time to send me back to the outfit after a three-day pass in Paris. I saw the usual tourist sights, though walking was uncomfortable. I passed up the famous hot spots, for I had been brought up to look askance at honkytonks, beer joints, and the like. I went to a couple of movies instead, seeing Humphrey Bogart’s To Have and Have Not in English and Errol Flynn’s Captain Blood in French. My excuse, had anyone asked, would have been that I was studying the art of storytelling. The truth was that I simply loved movies and had not seen one since leaving the States.

During the final days of the war the Twenty-sixth Division had crossed over the border into Czechoslovakia. My company came up against the Russians a few miles outside a town known in German as Budweis, in Czech as esk Budějovice.

It took me at least three weeks to work my way back to my company, one replacement depot at a time. Every time the Army moved me it lost my vaccination records, and I had to take the shots over again. Moreover, it seemed that every time I traveled I was hit by diarrhea. I took prescription codeine and ate a lot of cheese, trying to get regular.

In an ironic accident before my return, a sergeant who had survived the entire conflict was killed by another soldier’s carelessness just days after the end of the war. Someone had leaned a Browning automatic rifle against a tree. It slid down and fired a burst as it struck the ground. The sergeant lived just long enough to ask what had happened to him. He may not have heard the answer.

When I reached the company I found that we shared a roadblock with the Russians. They were on one side of a graded road. We were on the other. The Russian soldiers were friendly and joyful for having survived the war, because so many of their comrades had not. The Russian officers, however, were a cold, contemptuous lot, who looked through us as if we did not exist and abused their men shamefully.

The Russian soldiers had received their pay after months of doing without and eagerly looked for something to spend it on. They would pay any price for a Mickey Mouse watch. Unfortunately I did not have one. They were glad to buy anything American. We heard later that when they went home those items were confiscated. The Communist government did not want the men contaminated by American luxuries, nor did it want them to show the poverty-stricken people at home how much better life might be somewhere else.

Supply lines were badly stretched in the weeks after the war. For a time we were fed only two meals a day, and those were meager.

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