So anyways, Maia and I went to a birthday party in Nakatsu on Saturday night for our friend Kate and stayed out pretty far past our bedtime. Kate let us crash at her apartment, but we brought only the bare minimum bedding, which was little protection against the concrete floor and zero protection against the persistent hum of traffic whizzing by just outside the window. This may not have been quite so debilitating if Maia hadn't wanted to wake up at 7:30 to get to aikido practice in Amagase (her practice days are dwindling after all) and I hadn't wanted to meet my friend, Mayumi, for lunch in Oita City at 11:30. Oh, and I forgot to mention I was up until 3:00AM on Friday night finalizing my resume and cover letter for an editorial post at the Public Library of Science. (Wish me luck on that when their applicant submission period ends July 10.)
So we were burning our candles at both ends when Sunday night rolls around and one of us brought up the subject of the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith strip, the strip that founded the term "heeby-jeeby" and has been continuously running since 19-fucking-19! How many other strips were that old, we thought. I knew Blondie had been pretty aged as well, and the conversation turned from pitifully educated inbred hicks to the bumbling sandwich devouring demon, Dagwood Bumstead. Now Blondie's been around since 1930 meaning that if Murat Bernard Young kept his comic topical, and obeyed the normal laws of time and space, then the Bumsteads would have lived through WWII, but have you ever seen propaganda strips or posters of Dagwood punching Mussolini, or running a comically illustrated Hitler through with a bayonet? We all know that DC comic characters were enlisted/pimped out in the ideological war against the Empire of Japan and the Third Reich, but what of Dagwood, a man seemingly of able mind and body to storm the beaches of Normandy? So the mind wanders to the land of What If...
--December 21, 1944, Bastogne, The Ardennes--
The 5th Panzer Army's siege of the Belgian hamlet of Bastogne has begun, and Dagwood is stuck within it's confines of crumbling stone architecture and bomb-pitted streets. He'd seen so many of his division mates fall to machine gun fire and pulled under the oncoming treads of German rolling steel that he doesn't think he can ever look at a caterpillar tractor, or any mechanized farm machinery for that matter, the same again. He can hear the dull, mechanical sound of those grinding treads as they circle the city, just as a pack of jackals circle prey looking for an opening. Or waiting for friends.
It's Monday night, Dagwood's company's turn for watch. They'd been under attack for the past thirty-six hours almost continuously and the Germans had nearly overrun the southeast artillery position only that afternoon, following their narrow defeat with surrender terms. Word was going around among the men of the brigadier general's planned response to the offer that would be relayed in the morning: "Nuts!"
They were all going to die, it was just a matter of time, Dagwood thought.
Herb Woodley, the Bumstead's ever-present neighbor, served together with Dagwood in the same company and shared Bumstead's bleak outlook on the coming decisive battle. He appeared at his post late yet bearing an armful of stale Belgian bread, the last of the dwindling loaves in town which he'd had to shank a feeble, malnourished teenage boy for not twenty minutes before. He'd be tried as a war criminal if anybody ever found out, but he couldn't really give a damn at this juncture.
Herb handed Dagwood a loaf, hesitating a moment during the hand-off as if trying to communicate to his friend without words exactly what he went through to procure this bounty--this blood bread. The former construction company office drone couldn't have noticed less, for he was too busy clutching his walnut-stocked 1917 Enfield, pointing it's muzzle towards the inky forest. He cradled it closer and more firmly then he'd ever held Blondie, and as far as he was concerned this was his wife and lover now. Dagwood and Herb had been speaking in hushed tones of dark sentiments earlier during a lull in the fighting and they were both convinced Blondie and Tootsie were cheating on them back home. Nothing would ever be the same for them on the real home front or the one in their minds.
There's that old saying, how does it go..."focus on the tree and you'll miss the forest." For Dagwood that literally was the case tonight, for as he focused on the distant treeline he didn't take notice of the advancing German commando team until their opening salvo of fire had deafened him and sent him firing round after round randomly at shadows and what he thought were muzzle flashes, though they could very well have been friendly tracers striking cedar. Herb, a coward ever since his traumatizing experience with strikebreakers in Chicago a decade earlier, jumped a foot in the air and dove for cover as soon as gravity forgave his stupidity. There were bread and bullets everywhere.
"Remember your training" Herb thought as he crawled his way towards Dagwood's position of relative safety from the dead soldier's foxhole he had temporarily scavenged. Dagwood was mostly too busy firing and reloading, firing and reloading to pay much attention to his friend. Herb had always been good to and supportive of Dagwood, but secretly the former son of a rich industrialist had never quite escaped his pedigree and looked down on the suburbanite as commoner riff-raff, and besides, this was battle--there's only Number One to look out for in the end. However, he couldn't ignore the sniveling little coward much longer, not after a Kraut commando leaped from behind a hedge to stick Herb with his knife like a pig. Herb put up as good a struggle as his quivering body would allow and, impressively, even managed to pull the cord from one of the type-24 "potato masher" grenades hanging in a bundle of three, like garlic, off the German's belt.
The explosion was fantastic, like a hundred July 4 county fair firework displays going off at once right in front of your face. Dagwood's face. He was thrown to the ground, into a pile of three filthy loaves of the scattered Belgian bread and several hefty chunk of what was left of Herb and the German, where he lost recollection of the following several hours.
***************
The Germans were pushed back by a close-range artillery barrage, but Dagwood never recalled what exactly happened for the rest of the night. The doctors told him later he had what was called disassociative amnesia, a common condition for soldiers after traumatic events in battle. They also told him that when they found him Dagwood was halfway through a two-foot-tall sandwich made from stale Belgian bread and some unidentified meat. How or why the young corporal would stash so much meat into a combat operation of that magnitude was the talk of the trauma ward for several days after that, but Dagwood wasn't feeling particularly forthcoming with that bit of info.
--Matt
Posts
2 comments:
So, no one asked me, but having done a lot of research on this era (working on a game that has some events in the 40s & 50s), it seems to me that Blondie was always more of a "home life" sort of strip. It probably wouldn't've seemed right to attach the characters to anything other than comfort items (Camels, apparently!) or cleaning products or whatever. The radio show seems like a Fibber McGee & Molly sort of thing (Fibber thought mistakenly he'd been drafted in one episode, f'rinstance, but it was All Back to Normal by the end, also BUY JOHNSON'S WAX), wherein the characters have to deal with things like wartime food shortages, but not so much with the front lines. More's the pity. (Also I can't find anything at all for Blondie strips from before like 2004 - copyright owners must be extra draconian. The jerks.)
Barney Google, on the other hand, demonstrably used to be friggin awesome, and if you're super bored here's my one first page post on Mefi wherein some of the awesomer strips from that archive site are duly lunk. See especially Ella Cinders.
Matt, I enjoyed reading this blog. It kept my interest all the way to the end. I will not think of Dagwood the same anymore. It was well written. Thank you for writing it.
Post a Comment