Free Before Their Time: A Memoir by Robert Kotlowitz Page A

sudden rush of nostalgia. Did we deserve such bounty? We didn’t ask. It was enough to know that once again the war was somewhere else and good luck to it.
    But in the meantime, while we waited, what were they to do with us?
    While Michael Antonovich lectured C Company on the glories of the great American Middle West, Lieutenant Gallagher decided to offer a series of talks on battles that had changed the world—on the theory, I imagine, that such a course might fire us with a certain zeal for action. But it soon became clear that Gallagher was a total dilettante, at best an ambitious novice on the subject, and always shaky when it came to essential details. Nobody cared. As usual, Gallagher had the right spirit; he knew how to force his ideas on us without stirring resentment. Marathon, Thermopylae, then (a great gap) Lexington, Waterloo, Gettysburg, and the Marne, which was Gallagher’s favorite, especially the part about how the taxis of Paris had helped to save the city—one detail, at least, that he got right.
    In Gallagher’s lectures, every battle soon began to sound exactly like every other, in the general mess of skewed facts, except for the names of the battlefields themselves. Marathon and the Marne, Lexington and Waterloo, they were all one. So were hoplites, redcoats, minutemen, Johnny Rebs, Tommies, and poilus. From his training at OCS, apparently, Gallagher had retained an ideal of Battle, a pure abstraction that served for all battles, and through his bright and disorganized monologues, which followed Antonovich’s on the afternoon schedule, he tried to impose that ideal on the troops of C Company. It was Ira Fedderman who developed this theory for Bern and me—one of his plummier perceptions, I thought.
    Yes, it was absurd, as absurd as Antonovich’s meanderings through the Middle West. We knew it and I hope Gallagher knew it. Yet, despite really ghastly boredom, we stuck loyally to our platoon leader and pretended to be enthralled by his talks. In that way, we proved to ourselves that we loved him. Time had to be killed while the new Ninth Army slowly took shape, and if absurdity would help to hurry the process … well, we could put up with a little absurdity.
    Antonovich and Gallagher were really talking to deadweights after the midday break. Sprawled out on the sweet-smelling ground, a litter of loose Yankee bones at their ease, the third platoon and the rest of the company languished inattentively in front of their commanding officers, trying hard to stay awake. We faked it for Gallagher, nodded off for Antonovich. Every now and then, Master Sergeant Archambault would step lightly through the sprawl and prod our stuffed bodies with a stick if we fell asleep. “Stop that dreaming,” he would mutter dutifully,but we could tell his mind was elsewhere; he could hardly keep from yawning himself.
    Midday meals were huge: meat and poultry requisitioned from Cherbourg depots, Norman potatoes, in theory off-limits; breads baked by our own cooks, in their element at last; steaming gravy that took half a day to digest. It all sat heavy and killed our energy. Up front, facing this postprandial trance and in no hurry to finish, Antonovich talked on about Omaha or Kansas City and trains and beef and the connections among all three, about wheat futures, cattle prices, the humane slaughter of edible beasts, and so on, including an occasional obvious fact about dealing with life on the great prairies in the midst of a hard winter. For example, always wear a hat in freezing weather, he told us, because body heat escapes through the head. Things like that—totally irrelevant and all promptly forgotten.
    Meanwhile, Gallagher was at us about frontal assaults, flanking operations, guerrilla tactics, and the special military skill of the Huns. That was what he called the Germans in his battle recitations, the Huns, as though the YD was still at St.-Mihiel or Belleau Wood. I don’t think Gallagher was thrilled by