The Spool

They splay at a bend of the road, rifles slung, the

shadows minimal, their hands tugging their slings by

the upper swivel to ease the routine of the march.

They have been moving since morning, and over each

has descended that singleness, mournful and

comatose, which is the mysterious gift of the march.

Their helmets shadow their eyes, their chinstraps

dangling. In the raddle of grasses their solitude

floats in a drift of identities, a common melancholy.

A captain enters the frame at the head of his

company. His face flashes. With his left hand he tilts

back his helmet, while with his right he draws the

length of an elbow across forehead and nose, his

stained armpits showing dark. A bracelet flashes

behind him. The column recedes, rifles close over the

canted belts, moving up, the packed backs vulnerable:

(Cut)

Late afternoon. In the half-light a handful of blazing

sticks, four infantrymen heating mess tins over an

eddy of smoke, a fifth on his hams, his eyes upcast

from the rim of his metal cup. Nearby a corporal

works a patch into the chamber of his rifle;

he repeats four syllables and smiles sleepily into

the camera. The camera moves to the bivouac area;

a group, their meat-cans close to their mouths,

spooning the compost, Chinese-fashion, and clowning

between mouthfuls. Very close. Their jaws,

lightly bearded, the necks in their jacket collars

strained in an easy horseplay, the Adam’s apples

rapidly raised and released in the human exertion

of eating. In deep shadow, the light failing,

very close. A private tugs at his boot by the toe

and the round of the heel. Deliberately, he draws

the boot clear of his foot, sets it aside with deep

satisfaction, massages his instep over a maternal

thickness of socks. He bends toward the other foot,

camera-shy, a half smile breaking;

(Cut)

It is not yet possible to distinguish the forms

behind the camouflage netting. They move in the

central darkness of the gun, stacking shells and

bringing up powder charges. Only the bulk of the

howitzer is sure, the gun-barrel crossing the line

of the valley under the tented netting.

A village is burning in the valley. In the watery light,

smoke deepens over three hearthbeds of brightness.

A spire. A siding. A ladder of rooftops.

The gun fires. The picture trembles.

(Cut)

An iron darkening.

The hip of a tank darkens a frame,

foreshortened, the treads close to the lens,

a rushing of hammers, rings. The lens is cleared.

A cobbled street. A row of country-houses,

walled. A rosebush in the heavy light, blown

forward. Dust falls in the afterdraft,

a grain at a time. The camera is watchful.

A rifleman moves up the frame, his rifle at low port,

his shadow buffing the cobbles, crouched. He pauses

under the rosebush, his rifle hiked. A second figure

breaks through the frame, freezing between the

foreground and the far doorway. The man under

the rosetree sights carefully. The second man listens.

He raises his rifle, barrel backwards, and brings

the butt down heavily on the door-panels.

The rifle rebounds.

He measures a second blow, his teeth bared

slightly in a reflex of anxiety. His eye is large.

The butt-plate smashes over doorknob and lock,

the knocker flies upward once, the panel splinters

all at once. The man kicks the door open easily

with a booted foot. He listens, bent toward his

rifle-sights. He signals to the second man and enters

the doorway, stooped like a man entering a cave—

(Cut)

Brightness through trees. A damascene.

At the edge of a clearing, a parked jeep.

Two medical corpsmen lash litters to the jeep

engine a few hundred yards behind front lines.

The litter-poles enter the lens over the arch

of the engine. On the litter, a swathed head, a shock

of broken hair, motionless, a fall of blankets.

The stretcher-bearers vault lightly to their seats

and move off at a crawl.

Roadmarker: Battalion Aid Station. A corner of

charred wall, rubble, glass, timber. Legend: Épicerie.

The stretcher-bearers dismount.

The film is bad.

Presently a gloved hand in a surgeon’s sheath,

holding a forceps. Briskly the hand moves over a

circlet of maimed flesh noosed in a bloody bandage.

A scalpel flashes between the living hand and the

human hurt, forcing the rind of the wound,

filling the frame. The camera submits, framing

the wound like a surgeon’s retractor, its gaze

nerveless and saline. The gauzes blacken swiftly,

too heavy for the jaws of the forceps....

The surgeon at full figure. A breeze finds the fold

of his tunic. In the distance the litter-bearers are

leaning for the litter-poles. His eyes hold the optical

center of the lens, unanswered. His mouth rejects

contemplation, not yet relaxed. His hands are void

in their glimmering cicatrix of rubber.

Copyright Credit: Ben Belitt, “The Spool” from Wilderness Stair (New York: Grove Press, 1955). Used by permission of the Estate of Ben Belitt.

Source: This Scribe My Hand: The Complete Poems of Ben Belitt (Louisiana State University Press, 1998)