Free A Special Providence by Richard Yates Page A

several hundred others went into the trucks whose drivers wore a shoulder patch of a design worked around the numerals “57.”
    “Is this supposed to be a good outfit, the Fifty-seventh?” Prentice asked.
    “How the hell should I know?” Quint said. “Am I supposed to know everything?”
    “Well, Jesus, you don’t have to get sore. I just thought you might know, is all.”
    “Well, I don’t.”
    And there was no more talk in the truck for a long time, as they drew deep inside their snow-encrusted overcoats and tried to expose as little flesh as possible to the wind.
    “I wonder if they’ll put us out into line companies right away,” Prentice said, “or if they’ll keep us at division headquarters a while first.”
    Quint’s round, stubbled, wind-chapped face turned slowly to stare at him as if at a tiresome child. “God
damn
it, Prentice,” he said without opening his teeth, “will you quit asking
questions
?”
    “I wasn’t asking a question. I just said I wondered.”
    “Well, quit wondering, then. Try shutting up for a while. You might learn something.”
    They learned all they needed to know about the division that night, against a distant boom and rumble of artillery fire, when they were assembled in a barn to hear a welcoming talk by an earnest, pulpit-voiced chaplain. “You men are now members of the Fifty-seventh Division,” he said, standing with his thumbs in his pistol belt and his paunch sucked in, “and I think you’ll soon find you have every reason to be proud of that fact.” He went on to say that the 57th was not an old division, even by standards that measured a division as old if it had served in Normandy last summer. The 57th had still been in the States last summer. It had come overseas in October, taken advanced training in Wales, and been committed to action here in Belgium a little less than a month ago. But the chaplain pointed out, with a righteousquivering of his cheeks, that in the past month the boys of the 57th had become men. They had “engaged in some of the bitterest fighting yet known in the Second World War, and in some companies the casualty rate has been as high as 60 per cent.” He then said a number of other things, using phrases that could have been lifted whole from
Yank
magazine or
Readers Digest
, and Prentice paid more attention to the sound of the artillery than to his voice.
    The place they were assigned to sleep in was the second floor of an abandoned grain mill, an ice-cold room with wind humming steadily through its broken windows. Prentice and Quint went on sick call and received a supply of aspirin and some dark, foul-tasting pellets that were the size and texture of rabbit turds.
    “Actually they’re damn good medicine if you can stand the taste,” Quint said. “Hold it in your mouth till it dissolves; let it coat your throat.” But Prentice couldn’t. He would swallow the thing after a minute and go on coughing, with the awful taste still in his mouth and nose.
    On the second night Sam Rand found a farmer down the road who agreed to let the three of them sleep in his kitchen in exchange for three packs of cigarettes, and it was unbelievably warm. They sat with their socked feet on the fender of a great iron stove, drinking K-ration coffee and listening to the artillery. But Quint said they’d better stay here only for the one night: it was risky because they might miss their orders to move up to the line. They had drawn their company assignments that day, and it pleased Prentice to know that they would all three be in the same unit – “A” Company of the 189th Regiment.
    “What are the other regiments again?” he said.
    “One ninetieth and One ninety-first.”
    “Right. And there’s only those three, right?”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Prentice. Yes, there are three regiments in a division.” And Quint went on in the chanting, singsong tone of a grammar-school teacher, closing his eyes. “There are three battalions in each