Free A Special Providence by Richard Yates

from the waterfront. The hike went on, past numberless English civilians whose stares made it plain that they were bored half to death with the sight of Americans, and it didn’t end until they had filed aboard a British troopship that smelled of fish and vomit. And the ship, under conditions of strict blackout and radio silence, crept out into the Channel that night.
    Then they were in Normandy, rolling eastward in a train ofshuddering French boxcars, the floors of which were thickly embedded with straw that caused a good deal of sneezing and complaint until it proved to be comfortable. Prentice woke up coughing and feverish soon after dawn and squirmed around to lie with his head near the partly opened door, even though he knew it probably wouldn’t be good for his cold. He wanted to see the snow-covered fields and hedgerows where all the fighting had taken place last summer. Again it seemed that his mother was riding with him – “Oh, look at the
colors
, dear; aren’t they lovely?” – but he fell back to sleep and awoke much later to sounds that would certainly have baffled and distressed her: the clamor of commercial bargaining. They had come to a stop near some town, and a number of ragged men and boys were swarming under the boxcar with offers of money and wine in exchange for cigarettes.
    “… How
much?”
    “Vanty-sank, he says. That’s twenty-five francs for the pack. Go ahead, what the hell.”
    “Shit
no; don’t be an idiot – that’s only half a buck. Make him give you a buck a pack.”
    “Comby-ann for the wine, hey kid? Hey! Buster! You with the runny nose – yeah, you. Comby-ann for the veeno?”
    “Pardon, M’sieur? Comment?
”
    “I said comby-ann cigaretty do you want for the veeno? No, damn it, the
veeno
!”
    Then they were moving again. Prentice would gladly have spent the rest of the day talking with Quint – they could have discussed the countryside and tried to figure out what part of France this was – but Quint said he felt lousy and stayed deep in the straw, either sleeping or trying to sleep. Sam Rand was there to talk to, but he showed no interest in the passing scene. “I just want to get where we’re goin’,” he said, “wherever the hell it is.”
    The phrase “replacement depot” had a comfortingly solid sound – it seemed to promise at least a semblance of garrison life, a place with decent accommodations and decent food and medical attention – but the First Army’s replacement depot proved to be a jumble of bams and hastily pitched squad tents around a badly shelled Belgian village. Prentice’s group got a barn to sleep in instead of a tent, but it leaked wind and snow; the only way to make it bearable was to walk half a mile to where a Belgian farmer sold armfuls of straw for packs of cigarettes, and straw soon became a matter of furious importance:
    “Hey, you’re takin’ all my
straw
!”
    “Fuck you, buddy – this is
my
straw.”
    In the morning they were marched out to a makeshift target range to zero-in the sights of their rifles, and in the afternoon they were given overshoes – ordinary black civilian galoshes which bothered Prentice a little because they looked so unmilitary. Then they were loaded into open trucks and driven away toward an uncertain place from which, it was said, they would be assigned to combat divisions within twenty-four hours.
    “Why the hell don’t they have covers on the
trucks?
” Prentice demanded in the wind, and Quint, who seemed to know a good deal about the First Army from his reading of
Time
magazine, explained that open trucks had been a regulation since the outbreak of the Bulge: the idea was to enable men to get out of them faster in case of enemy attack. The trucks let them down into an encampment of frozen squad tents, and they spent a coughing, sleepless night there before convoys of other open trucks began to arrive from various First Army divisions to claim their men. Prentice, Quint, Rand, and