Robert Cormier

Maimed and disfigured in the war, Francis is tormented by the secret of the past and the desire for revenge. He waits with a gun in his duffel bag for the return of a supposed hero.

Heroes

Tillie Baker

We were only there. Scared kids, not born to fight and kill. Who were not only there but who stayed, did not run away, fought the good war. And never talk about it. And didn't receive a Silver Star. But heroes, anyway. The real heroes.

Write about it, Francis. Maybe you can find the answer that way… Have a good life, Francis. Be whatever will make you happy.

I knew all the time we were talking that we were filling up the empty spaces between us with words. I knew I had lost her, had lost her a long time ago.

Now I’m starting to find out what I am, who I really am.

What’s one more death after the others in the villages and fields of France? The innocent faces of the two young Germans appear in my mind.

Then I realised that the doctors and nurses had probably become so accustomed to the wounded and the maimed that the abnormal had become normal to them.

No heroes in that scrap-book, Francis. Only us, the boys of Frenchtown… Nothing glamorous like the write-ups in the papers or the newsreels. We weren’t heroes. We were only there.

When I looked down at them, in one of those eerie pauses that happens in an attack - a sudden silence that's even more terrible than exploding shells - I saw how young they were, boys with apple cheeks, too young to shave. 

When will it be enough? When will the bloodshed finally dry? How many blindingly white carved headstones littering the fields of northern France will it take to send a message home? 

We are probably taking the final steps of our lives in this village whose name we don't even know and other villages are waiting ahead of us and Eddie Richards asks of nobody in particular: "What the hell are we doig here, anyway?"

I close my eyes and see them advancing in scattered groups through the abandoned village, ruined homes and debris-cluttered streets, our rifles ready, late afternoon shadows obscuring the windows and doorways and the alley entrances, and we are all tense and nervous and scared because the last village seemed peaceful and vacant until sudden gunfire from snipers erupted from those windows and doorways and cut down the advance patrol just ahead of our platoon.

I don't want to think about them, those GIs in my platoon. I don't want to recite their names. I want to forget what happened there in France but every night the recitation begins, like a litany, the names of the GIs like beads on a rosary.

Heroes

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