as long as bravery and valor are honored and respected.
Major General R. O. Barton
U.S. Army Commanding
[p. 377 /AG 201.22]
While the “burden of neutralizing frantically defended enemy fortifications fell heavily on the shoulders of the foot soldier,” it fell even more heavily on their feet. The leather combat boots soaked up water in a thaw and froze solid in the cold nights. Waterproof, insulated L.L. Bean–type boots were available, but to the “everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel,” who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December, not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed. Three days before the Battle of the Bulge, a colonel of the Ninetieth Division noted that “every day more men are falling out due to trench foot . . . [they] can’t walk and are being carried from sheltered pillbox positions at night to firing positions in the day time.” During the winter of 1944–45, forty-five thousand men were taken off the front line because of trench foot.
My father said that no matter what, he will always be grateful to his mother, who knit him socks and sent them to him in the mail, each and every week, throughout the war. He told me it saved his life in the foxholes that winter; he was the only guy he knew with dry feet. “Saved my life”—I used to think this was in the same category of language as a well-fed American boy asking his mother what’s for supper and saying, “I’m starving.” I was too young to realize that there can be extreme situations in life where language is stripped of the cloak of hyperbole. Narrative breaks down and becomes the language of the body, a moan, a wrung breast, vacant eyes, living skeletons. I understand in many ways why the story “For Esmé” falls silent when it does. If one does recover language, it is not narrative with its Aristotelian wholeness of beginning, middle, and end; but rather, a poem—midway between a moan and a story—reflecting the shape of shards and fragments of life blown apart.
It was during that awful winter that Louise Bogan, poetry editor for The New Yorker during the war, wrote to William Maxwell telling him that “a young man, J. D. Salinger, has been bombarding me with poems for a week or so.” 17
As the poet Lord Byron wrote:
No words suffice the secret soul to show,
For truth denies all eloquence to woe.
—“The Corsair,”
Canto iii, Stanza 22, line 551
E XHAUSTED FROM THE T ERRIBLE H ÜRTGEN Forest, the Twelfth scarcely had a breath before it was once again in the thick of things in the defense of Luxembourg and the Battle of the Bulge. 18 So bad were the losses at Echternach that Salinger’s friends and family feared him dead or captured. 19 December 26 brought a call to Mrs. Salinger with the news that “Salinger is all right.” 20 New Year’s Day, 1945, was Staff Sergeant Salinger’s twenty-sixth birthday. Of this day and the following three months, the division commander writes:
On those days, melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been used to pull enemy supply vehicles. Most of the small towns had been either partially or completely destroyed and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12 th had ever fought through. 21
In April, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was assigned to “mopping up.” This meant, among other tasks, that all units picked up many prisoners of war in their areas and
Major General R. O. Barton
U.S. Army Commanding
[p. 377 /AG 201.22]
While the “burden of neutralizing frantically defended enemy fortifications fell heavily on the shoulders of the foot soldier,” it fell even more heavily on their feet. The leather combat boots soaked up water in a thaw and froze solid in the cold nights. Waterproof, insulated L.L. Bean–type boots were available, but to the “everlasting disgrace of the quartermasters and all other rear-echelon personnel,” who were nearly all wearing them by mid-December, not until late January did the boots get to where they were needed. Three days before the Battle of the Bulge, a colonel of the Ninetieth Division noted that “every day more men are falling out due to trench foot . . . [they] can’t walk and are being carried from sheltered pillbox positions at night to firing positions in the day time.” During the winter of 1944–45, forty-five thousand men were taken off the front line because of trench foot.
My father said that no matter what, he will always be grateful to his mother, who knit him socks and sent them to him in the mail, each and every week, throughout the war. He told me it saved his life in the foxholes that winter; he was the only guy he knew with dry feet. “Saved my life”—I used to think this was in the same category of language as a well-fed American boy asking his mother what’s for supper and saying, “I’m starving.” I was too young to realize that there can be extreme situations in life where language is stripped of the cloak of hyperbole. Narrative breaks down and becomes the language of the body, a moan, a wrung breast, vacant eyes, living skeletons. I understand in many ways why the story “For Esmé” falls silent when it does. If one does recover language, it is not narrative with its Aristotelian wholeness of beginning, middle, and end; but rather, a poem—midway between a moan and a story—reflecting the shape of shards and fragments of life blown apart.
It was during that awful winter that Louise Bogan, poetry editor for The New Yorker during the war, wrote to William Maxwell telling him that “a young man, J. D. Salinger, has been bombarding me with poems for a week or so.” 17
As the poet Lord Byron wrote:
No words suffice the secret soul to show,
For truth denies all eloquence to woe.
—“The Corsair,”
Canto iii, Stanza 22, line 551
E XHAUSTED FROM THE T ERRIBLE H ÜRTGEN Forest, the Twelfth scarcely had a breath before it was once again in the thick of things in the defense of Luxembourg and the Battle of the Bulge. 18 So bad were the losses at Echternach that Salinger’s friends and family feared him dead or captured. 19 December 26 brought a call to Mrs. Salinger with the news that “Salinger is all right.” 20 New Year’s Day, 1945, was Staff Sergeant Salinger’s twenty-sixth birthday. Of this day and the following three months, the division commander writes:
On those days, melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been used to pull enemy supply vehicles. Most of the small towns had been either partially or completely destroyed and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12 th had ever fought through. 21
In April, the Twelfth Infantry Regiment was assigned to “mopping up.” This meant, among other tasks, that all units picked up many prisoners of war in their areas and
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