Ernest Hemingway Meets General Leclerc: France, August 1944
by The French general, Philippe Marie Leclerc, was a tough professional soldier who didn’t suffer fools, or novelists, gladly.
Red Pelkey had, until D-Day, never spoken a word of French, but now, ten weeks later he hardly ever spoke English and if you’d asked him would probably have been unable to tell you which unit of the American Army he belonged to. He was also now known as Jim by the French irregulars, and wore the uniform of a dead GI sergeant. He spent his days driving Hemingway on one reconnaissance trip after another, and his nights drinking and trying to bed any French woman who might find his gap-tooth smile, and French chat-up lines, attractive. Few did. The rest of the time Red was, like everyone else who came into contact with Hemingway at that time, confused and a little ill at ease, but hell it was better than spending time in the cooler, which Pelkey knew was probably where he’d be if he’d stayed in a regular outfit. Anything was better than having some bullshit sergeant bawling at you and getting you to run around the prison parade ground with a full pack in 80 degree heat. Anything was better than that.
Ill at ease or not, and who didn’t feel ill at ease fighting a war and seeing young men of both sides shot to pieces, of witnessing the French irregulars take their bitter, sadistic revenge on some poor French woman for being the mistress of a German NCO who’d long fled leaving her to face the music. Red hated the illogical hatred of it all and the way it reminded him of the Ku Klux Klan and their pitiless, senseless killings. Red also knew that he’d pay in the end for being a witness to those atrocities, you always did. But what could he have done to stop any of it?
Red was living in very dangerous times, and to survive meant going along with things, of being a part of the team, of supporting Hemingway, of fighting for your country, if that was indeed what he was doing? Confusion?
Red loved singing the Hemingway Army Marching Song in his new found French, and invariably with a bottle in his hand, bellowing it out along with the rest of the outfit:
Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins
Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins
Dix bis Avenue des Gobelins
That’s where my Bumby lives
That’s where my Bumby lives.
Liked it
