One Clear Call I

by Upton Sinclair

  They held another conference in whispers. The road led west and obviously must come to a town; should they keep just out of sight of it and parallel to it? What would they find at the end, friends or enemies, a battle between them or a siege? Manifestly they had to find something; they couldn’t stay out in the open indefinitely without food. They had had a chance to shoot a deer, but they were afraid to shoot or to build a fire, and hadn’t yet reached the stage where they could drink raw blood or devour raw meat.

  “Hush!” whispered the sharp-eared Morrison. They listened and caught a new sound—axes. What did that mean? It wasn’t likely that anybody was cutting firewood—unless it was in a well-guarded strong-post. Several axes going at once, and fast—that would mean that men were cutting trees to block a road, and the chances were ten to one that it was Americans. The enemy wasn’t blocking roads, he was using them, while the GIs were trying desperately to delay him.

  The sounds came from the west, where the road led, and they followed its course, but at some distance away, crouching, darting from thicket to thicket—the life of the Belgian hare, a large and meaty animal destined to make Hasenpfeffer. There had been fighting here, a lot of it; there was blood on the snow, the ground had been trampled, and branches of trees shot away and scattered. Presently, under a young fir tree, a body, covered with snow; they brushed it away with their gloved hands and turned the body over. The face had been shot away, a terrible sight; the knees were bent and frozen stiff as rocks. They took the man’s belongings and his dogtag, the little identification disk he wore about his neck. They would turn these things in when they had a chance; they would not turn in the can of K-rations they found in one of the victim’s pockets. They opened that and cut it into four parts; it was frozen hard, and they ate it like popsicles.

  IX

  The ringing of axes is a pleasant sound, especially to a man from Wisconsin where there are lumber camps; it brings memories of hunting and fishing trips, and now it brought hopes of more ration cans, and even of hot food and coffee. When they got near Ike Abramson volunteered to do the scouting; he had been trained for it, he was younger and fresher, and called himself expendable. If he found it was the Army, he would shout “OK”; if he didn’t shout within three minutes by the watch, they had better make a “sneak,” as he called it. Let them go north away from the road, and if he could make his escape he would look for them there. The code word would be “gefüllte Fisch”—one of the Kraut phrases most familiar to a Brooklyn Jew.

  He crept away, and they lay hugging the snow and keeping one eye on their watches. The hands moved, and their hearts began to fail them. The three minutes were up, and they were in the act of starting their sneak when they noticed that the sounds of chopping had ceased; moment later came the gladsome shout, “OK, Monuments!” They turned and ran toward the road and came out into sight of it, holding their hands in the air.

  It was the Army! They didn’t shout, for it was no time for that. They came running, with all the strength they had left, and with joy in their faces. There were half a dozen woodsmen with double-bitted axes, and other GIs with various weapons mounting guard. What they had done to the road was a crime, at least from the point of view of Jerry, otherwise known as Heinie, the Hun, or the Kraut. The woodsmen had cut trees on both sides of the road so that they fell across the road and made a tangle of branches that would take a lot of chopping to remove. Smaller trees underneath and bigger trees on top, an ungodly mess covering perhaps a hundred yards of road. It would hold the Tigers for at least a couple of hours.

  The gang had been just ready to call it a job and get out of there when Ike had put in his appearance, calling his name and his unit. Now came three noncombatants, holding their hands high lest they be taken for an enemy masquerade. There was no need of explanations, for such groups were coming in everywhere, in numbers from one to a thousand, and they all had the same story to tell. The three introduced themselves to the sergeant in command, who saluted and gave his unit: Task Force D, 10th Armored. “We are holding on at Longwilly,” he said. Like all Americans below the commissioned ranks, he was contemptuous of French pronunciations. If they wanted you to say “Lonhveeyee,” why didn’t they spell it that way? These GIs, no doubt, thought of this village as belonging to somebody named William who happened to be tall and thin.

  “Will you take us in with you?” asked the assimilated colonel.

  “Sure thing, sir, if we can. Heinie’s all over the place, and we never know where he’ll show up in force. We sneaked out by a side road and hope to get back the same way. Pile in, boys.”

  Each of the Monuments had a seat, and then took a man on his knees. The man was armed with a “burp” gun, and he had to be prepared to use it in the tenth part of a lightning flash. There were six jeeps, and they started with a rush; they turned off the highway onto an unpaved track, and just then there was a tremendous explosion behind them. “Tank,” said the man in Lanny’s lap. “We put some of his own Tellers there for him, and I hope they got it.” The Teller was a German land mine, round and flat like a plate; in a paved road you chipped out a chunk of the pavement of the right size, set the mine in the hole, and laid the block of pavement gently on top. When a tank came along and its tread hit that spot—“Zowie!” said the man with the “burp” gun. He was talkative, but all the time he sat with his head high, turning it swiftly this way and that, for all the world like a scared partridge on a tree branch.

  The jeeps bounced and almost threw people out, but not quite. Their axles did not break, they went through snow and mud, and if ever they got stuck you could lift them; they were marvels for dependability, and the Army loved them. They sped through the forest, down into ravines and up again, and presently came to open fields with houses; presumably that was the town of the man named William who was tall and thin. Shots were fired at them and bullets whined overhead; they hit it up to sixty or seventy miles an hour, and it was most exhilarating. “We’re surrounded,” shouted the “burp” man, “but we don’t know it!”

  X

  So here was Lanny Budd, back with the Army, where he had wanted to be, and right in the midst of action, which he hadn’t wanted. Now and then a shell came in and crashed near by; the line was out on the ridges beyond the village, the GIs explained. They stopped in front of the town hall, which was the CP, busy as a beehive. The passengers got out and announced themselves.

  The commander here was Lieutenant Colonel Cherry, who came from Georgia and was courteous, like all Southerners; he was a much worried officer and looked as if he hadn’t slept or eaten since the day before yesterday. “I hope that I can send you out, gentlemen, but at present all communications are cut, including our telephone lines.” He turned the visitors over to one of his staff officers, Captain May, who took them into an improvised dining-room, it being lunchtime. They tried to remember their manners in the presence of a plate of hot beef stew, coffee with milk and sugar, and bread with canned butter. Never had there been any food like that!

  “Let us be of use while we stay here,” Lanny said, and the staff officer asked what they could do. The P.A. told how he had served as an interrogation officer with the Seventh Army, all the way up from Cannes to Lyon; having lived most of his life in Europe, he knew French and German well, and the other two Monuments officers had scholars’ knowledge and could soon pick up various German dialects. “If you have prisoners,” Lanny added.

  The other replied that they had not a few; some had come in of their own impulse, anxious to get out of the mess. “But they’re right in it,” he added. “If we’re forced out of here we may not be able to hold them. Meantime, of course, the more we can get out of them the better. We’ve been pretty well blinded; we have only the radiophone and have to be careful what we ask or tell over that, since the enemy will be recording everything.”

  Lanny said, “The weather is against us,” and the answer was, “Oh, God, yes! If it were clear there’d be a swarm of planes helping us. As it is, we’ve hear
d some but we haven’t seen a single one.”

  The three “Docs” bade good-by to the eager Brooklyn boy who had been so great a help to them. The boy would have a sleep, and then he would go into the line, which now had men from a score or two of units who had come straggling in. Lanny told him, “When the war’s over, go and see my father in Newcastle, Connecticut, and he’ll give you a good job.” It was the first time the boy had known that this “Colonel” Budd was Budd-Erling, and he was quite awe-stricken.

  The three officers also had a sleep, undisturbed by the thunder of guns all around them. Out there in the woods and thickets tanks and tank-killers were chasing one another about like prehistoric pachyderms; men crouching behind trees and rocks and in trenches were shooting streams of steel at one another and throwing deadly grenades when they got a chance. Guns small and medium were hurling shells into the village and out of it—that was referred to as “arty,” meaning artillery. Here, as everywhere in the Ardennes, the American forces knew only what was within a couple of miles of them, and had no idea what might be coming in the next half hour. “Intelligence” had failed; or, rather, as Lanny learned later on, “Topside” had failed to pay attention to what “Intelligence” had sent it. This “Bulge” represented the greatest defeat the Army had sustained since Bataan, and its greatest peril since the beginning of the war.

  XI

  The three Monuments officers received only the briefest briefing. Lanny knew the job, and the other two listened, and after they had learned how to proceed they were put off in a corner by themselves. A stern-faced soldier brought in a prisoner and stood on guard while the officer asked questions. There should have been a stenographer, but in a jam like this each interrogator had a pad on his knee and made his own notes of what seemed to him important. What is your name? Where do you live? How long have you been in the service? What is your unit? Who is your commander? Where did you start from? What other units have you seen? Where were you captured? And so on.

  Some of the men lied, of course; some were cocky and defiant, victory being in their hands at last. Others were humble and talked freely, hoping to win favors; for the promise of a cigarette they would betray the German Army. Many of them were sick of the war; many of them hated the Nazis—when they got behind the American lines. It was necessary to speak sternly because that was what they were used to. “Ich bin ein einfacher, gewöhnlicher Mensch. Was konnte ich tun?” Lanny had heard it a hundred times. I am a poor, common man. What could I do? Lanny didn’t say that he had heard a hundred thousand such poor common men yelling their heads off for Hitler in the old days.

  When you put all this together a pattern emerged, its outline blurred and dim, but still it was there. The offensive had been in preparation for weeks, with extraordinary precautions being taken to keep the troops hidden in forests. The assault had been made on a front of at least fifty miles, and there were more than a score of divisions named as taking part: Paratroopers, Panzers, Panzer grenadiers, Volksgrenadiers, everything the enemy had. Field Marshal von Rundstedt was commanding, and the Führer himself had come to the Rhineland and briefed the higher officers, telling them that this was the great crisis of the war, that they were going to take the huge American supply base at Liége, break through to the port of Antwerp, cut off the American First Army and the British to the north and annihilate them. Word of this had been spread among the troops, and now they were sure it was all coming true. Their great armored forces weren’t bothering with small towns and villages like Longwilly, but were leaving them to be mopped up later; they were driving straight through for the great strategic bases, Sedan and Namur and Liége. Sieg Heil!

  Buy O Shepherd, Speak! Now!

  Acknowledgments

  A historical novelist is dependent upon many sources for his local color, scenery, costumes, and what not. The present writer is indebted for a few such details to several excellent books which he is happy to recommend: for Palestine, Fulton Oursler’s A Skeptic in the Holy Land (Farrar and Rinehart); for the Third Army in its Nancy headquarters, Robert S. Allen’s Lucky Forward (Vanguard Press); for the liberation of Paris, A. J. Liebling’s The Republic of Silence (Harcourt, Brace); and Milton Shulman’s Defeat in the West (E. P. Dutton).

  I present this ninth of the Lanny Budd volumes, together with all the others, to my beloved wife, Mary Craig Sinclair, without whose patience and wisdom none of the series would have pleased its public so well. I learned about women from her!

  About the Author

  Upton Sinclair (1878–1968) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author, activist, and politician whose novel The Jungle (1906) led to the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act. Born into an impoverished family in Baltimore, Maryland, Sinclair entered City College of New York five days before his fourteenth birthday. He wrote dime novels and articles for pulp magazines to pay for his tuition, and continued his writing career as a graduate student at Columbia University. To research The Jungle, he spent seven weeks working undercover in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. The book received great critical and commercial success, and Sinclair used the proceeds to start a utopian community in New Jersey. In 1915, he moved to California, where he founded the state’s ACLU chapter and became an influential political figure, running for governor as the Democratic nominee in 1934. Sinclair wrote close to one hundred books during his lifetime, including Oil! (1927), the inspiration for the 2007 movie There Will Be Blood; Boston (1928), a documentary novel revolving around the Sacco and Vanzetti case; The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism, and the eleven novels in Pulitzer Prize–winning Lanny Budd series.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1948 by Upton Beale Sinclair

  Cover design by Kat JK Lee

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2653-6

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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