Read Online Dream When You're Feeling Blue by Elizabeth Berg - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Elizabeth Berg
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didn’t go down easy. I guess the English are real bad cooks. One guy said the way they served cabbage was to cook it a long time in too much water with not enough salt, serve it lukewarm in too much water, and if you’re lucky a caterpillar would be thrown in.
I share a barracks room with three other guys in my squad. It’s about fourteen feet square, and it’s stuffed full of equipment and clothes. We have one window that we black out every night when the sun starts setting. I’m the one up first every day to take down that grim reminder of what might happen to us during the night, and on mornings when the mist isn’t too heavy, there are the spring buds to greet me. Hitler can’t stop everything.
There are four bunks, two straight chairs, a fireplace, and a rickety old table that serves as a desk. On the walls are maps, greeting cards from home, and the usual assortment of cheesecake: Rita and Rosalind and Greer and Hedy and Betty and Marlene. But the most beautiful girl featured is y-o-u. One of my roommates, Ted Fletcher, spends an inordinate amount of time standing before you. “Those her real eyelashes?” he once asked, and I told him everything about you was real. Good thing he talks about his wife so much or I’d start to get jealous.
Our training is going well—sometimes it seems as though we’re really in combat. I may be using my antitank gun against mock tanks, but the explosives they plant in the field to get us used to shell fire are real enough. I know exactly when to give the “commence firing” command, and I’ve become a whiz at digging foxholes—so in case I don’t stop a tank it can’t roll over me. Sometimes when I dig, I find a piece of bone from the grave of some Roman soldier—I’m training on ground that’s been fought on for over 1,900 years. It makes you think, Louise, about the nature of man and the inevitability of war. It makes you wonder. I lie on my bunk on these dark nights and think about all the men who battled on this ground and who kept their own silent counsel during other dark nights so very long ago. I wonder if they lay there thinking about the women they loved. If they thought of their families and the life they lived before they came to fight. If they prayed or wept or cried out. I hope that they believed in what they were doing, that the cost was worth the price they paid.
But listen, hon, I don’t want you to worry about me. Nothing’s going to hurt me. I’m as well trained as I could possibly be, and I’m in the best shape of my life. On days we don’t practice battles, we go on twenty-five-to thirty-mile hikes through the countryside with sixty-pound packs on our backs. Little kids come out to beg from us, and we give them pennies and gum; they just love that gum.
I’ve seen some beautiful architecture in London. I’ve been to some pubs to play darts and argue with these blokes about who’s got the better country, but a lot of times I don’t go into town on leave—I’d rather stay here and read, or write to you. I want to save seeing London so that I can do it with you, in better times.
If I’m honest, I must admit I’m frightened of the real action to come—and I think it will be coming soon—but I’m also eager to get going. The sooner we fight, the sooner we’ll win, and with the U.S. now in this war, it will be won. And then I can come home to you. What a sweet word “home” is; it has always been a sweet word to me, but never more so than now.
Take care of yourself, darling, and remember every day how very much I love you. It’s for you that I do everything; I can’t wait to be with you and start our married life. Sometimes I think of my coming through the door into the house where we live with our little ones, and it’s all I can do not to cry. We will be so happy together, Louise. We were truly meant for each other. Here’s a kiss to your mouth, and one behind your ear, and one everywhere else on your beautiful face, and
I share a barracks room with three other guys in my squad. It’s about fourteen feet square, and it’s stuffed full of equipment and clothes. We have one window that we black out every night when the sun starts setting. I’m the one up first every day to take down that grim reminder of what might happen to us during the night, and on mornings when the mist isn’t too heavy, there are the spring buds to greet me. Hitler can’t stop everything.
There are four bunks, two straight chairs, a fireplace, and a rickety old table that serves as a desk. On the walls are maps, greeting cards from home, and the usual assortment of cheesecake: Rita and Rosalind and Greer and Hedy and Betty and Marlene. But the most beautiful girl featured is y-o-u. One of my roommates, Ted Fletcher, spends an inordinate amount of time standing before you. “Those her real eyelashes?” he once asked, and I told him everything about you was real. Good thing he talks about his wife so much or I’d start to get jealous.
Our training is going well—sometimes it seems as though we’re really in combat. I may be using my antitank gun against mock tanks, but the explosives they plant in the field to get us used to shell fire are real enough. I know exactly when to give the “commence firing” command, and I’ve become a whiz at digging foxholes—so in case I don’t stop a tank it can’t roll over me. Sometimes when I dig, I find a piece of bone from the grave of some Roman soldier—I’m training on ground that’s been fought on for over 1,900 years. It makes you think, Louise, about the nature of man and the inevitability of war. It makes you wonder. I lie on my bunk on these dark nights and think about all the men who battled on this ground and who kept their own silent counsel during other dark nights so very long ago. I wonder if they lay there thinking about the women they loved. If they thought of their families and the life they lived before they came to fight. If they prayed or wept or cried out. I hope that they believed in what they were doing, that the cost was worth the price they paid.
But listen, hon, I don’t want you to worry about me. Nothing’s going to hurt me. I’m as well trained as I could possibly be, and I’m in the best shape of my life. On days we don’t practice battles, we go on twenty-five-to thirty-mile hikes through the countryside with sixty-pound packs on our backs. Little kids come out to beg from us, and we give them pennies and gum; they just love that gum.
I’ve seen some beautiful architecture in London. I’ve been to some pubs to play darts and argue with these blokes about who’s got the better country, but a lot of times I don’t go into town on leave—I’d rather stay here and read, or write to you. I want to save seeing London so that I can do it with you, in better times.
If I’m honest, I must admit I’m frightened of the real action to come—and I think it will be coming soon—but I’m also eager to get going. The sooner we fight, the sooner we’ll win, and with the U.S. now in this war, it will be won. And then I can come home to you. What a sweet word “home” is; it has always been a sweet word to me, but never more so than now.
Take care of yourself, darling, and remember every day how very much I love you. It’s for you that I do everything; I can’t wait to be with you and start our married life. Sometimes I think of my coming through the door into the house where we live with our little ones, and it’s all I can do not to cry. We will be so happy together, Louise. We were truly meant for each other. Here’s a kiss to your mouth, and one behind your ear, and one everywhere else on your beautiful face, and
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