Not a Creature Was Stirring

Drew Bacigalupa |

12/22/2007 - 12/23/07

Third Place, adult essay

Drew Bacigalupa uses a present-day visitor to his gallery to reach back into his past, stirring memories of the ending of World War II and how a drinking companion's experience of that event could have altered the other man's life. Lost opportunities aside, Bacigalupa convinces us that "a veteran's a veteran" — with lives more closely linked than not.

The young man in our gallery is obviously not interested in Canyon Road paintings or sculpture and is ill-at-ease in an art milieu. He's visiting from Wisconsin, he says, and has sought me out at the request of his grandfather, who said he knew me during the war. He mentions a name I do not recall; nor had I heard of the outfit in which Gramps served. The grandson explains that he'd been planning his Christmas holiday in New Mexico for a full year, and that he and his grandfather had browsed the Internet for Santa Fe sites, researching its history, attractions, accommodations. One of the Web links led to Santa Fe galleries, and to my personal Web page. "I knew that guy!" Gramps exclaimed.

I encountered hundreds of GIs during the European campaigns, and nothing this youngster said rang a bell about where and when I may have run into his granddad. I rattled off a roster of place names: England, Normandy, the Bulge, Rhine Crossings, Central Europe. "No. Someplace I never heard of," was the response. "Biarritz."

Ah, yes. But that wasn't during the war; it was after the guns were silenced, when, for combat soldiers idle in a skeletal Germany, lack of action led to desperate restlessness — drunken brawls, AWOLs, criminal trade within the black market, dangerous liaisons with the human flotsam of a ravaged continent. Among the U.S. Army's counter measures — anything to keep seasoned warriors safely occupied while awaiting shipment home — was the establishment of Biarritz American University in southern France. The faculty boasted top educators from the United States, scholars who'd been denied trips to and study in Europe for six years and more, and who jumped at the chance to return.

For those GIs lucky enough to win assignment to Biarritz, the resort on the Bay of Biscay proved a place in which it was hard to believe one's eyes. Never bombed or shelled, intact, its luxurious hotels, cafes and casino, and wide beaches, if devoid of the European aristocracy of pre-war days, was a world most of us believed no longer existed, possibly never would again. Could somewhere like this remain on the face of the Earth when all we'd known for years was a wasteland? It could, we learned, because it had served as a Rest and Recreation center for German troops within Vichy France throughout the occupation.

I was billeted at the Princess Eugenie Chateau Hotel, built by Napoleon III for his bride; and attended classes in painting, sculpture and creative writing at Villa La Rochefoucault. Basque exiles from Franco's Spain, employed at the hotel and by the university, attended my every need. Luxury on all sides, yet it was not physical comforts, but mental, which let me dare consider that life might eventually be good again. To look on whole, not gutted buildings; to watch laughing children at play, not gaunt waifs rummaging Army garbage pails; to savor intellectual discourse with a French café patron instead of debilitating despair with defeated Germans; to meet civilians seeking new ways to live, not escaping the future with vials of cyanide; to attend concerts and plays produced by the music and drama departments instead of still another evening of drunkenness and blasphemies. Convinced that defeat was worse than war and that living in the midst of defeat would drive me mad, I had applied for and won, after long struggle with superiors who didn't want to release me from battalion duties, these months at Biarritz in late 1945. I was there for my third Christmas in the Army, again away from home but out of Germany.

There seemed no point in attempting to express any of this to the young man in my studio. But I did say I'd elected to make few close friends while at Biarritz, didn't want to form strong bonds that would be broken when our study terms ended. Acutely aware that reprieve from Germany meant sanity regained, I nevertheless sorely missed comrades left behind. I said that I'd preferred casual acquaintances, noncommittal friendships while at Biarritz, and had frequently spent days or evenings alone or in the company of a GI never seen again.

What courses did his grandpa take, and could we possibly have been in a class together?

"Law. He knew that when he returned to the states he'd take over his dad's legal practice."

It had, then, to have been a brief encounter, since I'd known no one studying law. A guy in a bar or cafe, no doubt, where I was drawn for pernod. Some of those distant convenings came back to me.

Wisconsin? Yes, wasn't that tech sergeant I met at a bistro on Christmas Eve from Wisconsin? That night, it seemed, not a creature was stirring. From a distance, the mournful caroling of soldiers, "Silent Night, Holy Night," assembled in a church I couldn't bring myself to enter. No memory of what the Wisconsinite looked like, or most of what he said, though we must have nursed drinks together for a couple of hours. Yet the brief and heated dichotomy over Life After The War now rang in my ears some 60-plus years later. This drinking buddy sought empathy for his dilemma about The Road Back, and resented my apparent indifference to it.

He'd seen a lot of action, and through it all clung to thoughts of home. Mom and Dad, siblings, a girl he was engaged to, an assured profession in his father's legal offices. But now, here at Biarritz, something had happened, changed him, he was no longer certain he wanted the prescribed life. Here, he'd encountered for the first time sophistication, the intelligentsia, the arts, glamour — "I stood in a snack line behind Marlene Dietrich the other night in the cantina!" — and questioned certainties once previously cherished. My silence irked him, and he badgered me for comment. I was 22, he possibly the same age — 22 and nothing new, my buddies back in Germany had often chanted — and much too weary for speculation about anything beyond the moment. Had long since aborted thoughts of home, hopes of again seeing family, reminiscences of the past or considerations of a future. There was no world other than soldiering, and soldiering had put me this day in a bright bistro on a splendid boulevard. Enough. To hell with what the morrow, if there was one, might bring. Have another drink, pal.

I'd merely compounded my companion's anguish, and he fled.

"Ask your grandfather to write me," I said to the young man. "Tell him to give me some details about when and how we met. So many guys at Biarritz. But maybe I'll remember him."

"Gramps hardly ever spoke about the war. And it's too late now. He passed away a few months ago."

Of course. We're all marching on. I'll never know if the tech in the bistro and the grandpa in Wisconsin were the same man. Little difference. A veteran's a veteran, and the bond we share envelops all.