by Mark Helprin
Harry was saved by more things than he could count. On the battlefield, in the forests, fording streams, and crossing fields, the threads of chance were woven into a tapestry that could not have assembled itself. Nor, as whole armies of men were tossed and broken like puppets, could chance adequately account for the heart-piercing visions that came to those in great distress. Like souls departing bodies, meaning, explanation, and beauty rose and fused, and then, after fatigue and despair, could not be adequately recounted. Little things, however, seemingly inconsequential, stayed with them—and a soldier might wonder for the rest of his life how it was that they came to save him.
Preserved in Harry’s memory was a flash of white, an object that flew in a weightless arc and landed softly in his arms. Then the choking exhaust of a truck moving off into the snow, and a cold wind herding the clouds in such a way that it opened lakes of blue in the sky, from which uncomfortably bright light rained down upon the motionless soldiers and briefly gilded them with warmth. The miracle of what flew into Harry’s arms before the truck pulled away, and saved his life, is comprehensible only in light of the way they lived and died.
Bullets were important: soldiers carried, fired, dodged, feared, and relied upon them. Bullets, extricated from their casings so as to use the powder to make a fire in ice-saturated wood, are surprisingly light. They rest in the palm of the hand less obtrusively than coins, and when fingers close around them as they are about to be tossed into a pocket they seem as light as cork. Though they are mostly smaller than a lima bean, they do such grievous damage because their immense velocity imparts to them a power greater than that of a spear thousands of times their mass. Despite their speed, they are not, as commonly believed, invisible, and often can be seen, even if not clearly enough or in time to get out of the way, which leads to what is perhaps their most overlooked quality, which is that one becomes aware of them from the inside, not, as one might think, from without. They seem to emerge from the body—like an instantaneous sickness or eruption. The message of their arrival is unfairly sensed as a manifestation, blooming inexplicably from within, of one’s self.
Because they often come unpredictably and as if from nowhere, every minute and every second is filled with their possibility, which makes life seem full if only because it can so quickly become empty. This in turn is more tiring than labor, and saps massive amounts of energy, which in unrelenting cold makes everything seem colder. Living outside in the winter without relief allows inurement to the cold of perhaps ten or twenty percent. Because the other eighty or ninety percent is unrelievable and therefore becomes cumulatively worse, the only way to deal with it is to suffer or outwit it.
To fight the enemy, the 82nd’s paratroopers were armed with an array of light but deadly weapons. To fight the cold, they were less adequately equipped. Their wool uniforms, socks, gloves, and heavy overcoats were not warm enough and had to be supplemented, the best of all improvisations being a doubled wool blanket draped across the shoulders and held at the neck with a clasp or by hand. This kept more men alive than did the steel helmet, and worked well when standing, although in a seated position, or, worse, when lying down, it was far less effective.
The general-issue sleeping roll was too short, hardly waterproof, and filled with about half an inch of down, sufficient perhaps for a September night in a temperate climate, but certainly not for the winter of ’44–’45. Despite blankets emplaced within and around the down, after half an hour of immobility the cold made sleep a torture.
Drinking hot water before sleep, when hot water was available, helped at first, but after a few hours it necessitated unwrapping, rising, stepping outside, and relieving oneself in cold that was close to zero. Any heat or imitation of heat that had slowly built up in the body would then vanish for the rest of the night. If, as often was the practice, three or four men slept jammed together, the one who had to get up would be cursed for shattering the equilibrium and letting in the cold air.
So close to the front, fires were often out of the question, as smoke by day and flame by night invited enemy rifle and artillery ranging. Sterno might covertly heat up a pot of something, but on such a small scale it hardly mattered, and within a hollowed-out earthen shelter half hewn from a bank of soil and covered with a snow-laden poncho or tarp, the fumes were stupefying. Still, anyone who could, did make a fire of some sort, kindling wet and frozen branches with liberal applications of gunpowder.
At four in the morning, if they were not pacing numbly on picket duty, even young men in perfect health would awaken with a feverish heart beating slowly, explosively, and booming in the chest as if calling for help. Their teeth chattering, their lips chapped and bloody, white or blue, they would look out at the darkness and imagine not only that they were about to die, but, despite the slow-motion thinking brought by frigid temperatures, that they saw, suspended in the air, things that were colorful and beckoning. In this unrelieved hell, Harry would see women dressed for a party on a bracing fall evening; the landscapes of the Hudson; animals cavorting above, like the constellations; flying fish rising on the spray of windy green seas; and his father, his mother, himself as a child; cityscapes; ferries; New York in summer, windows open, people speaking as if they did not know that they were suspended in the whitened air above a battlefield. Though they might have been classified as such, these were not hallucinations but, in a failing reality, memories and wishes risen in a new balance of power.
It might have been more tolerable had there been decent or hot food, but seldom was there either, for whatever came in a can was frozen or congealed. The bearded, blackened, rancid soldiers could not bathe, and their undergarments and socks became so filthy that many men were kept alive merely because they were determined not to be buried in them. Harry was too tired to resolve upon anything other than a simple—perhaps simple-minded—desire to come out of the war. This led to a focus on practicalities. He and his six men, fighting as a kind of flying squad, learned to construct in very little time a tolerable shelter partially dug into the earth and covered with ponchos, blankets, and tarpaulins. They survived in such things four or five at once, because at least two were on watch at any time. They learned how to sleep back-to-back, in a horrible clump, with whatever they had to cover themselves arrayed in feverish and inadequate tangles full of cold spots that grew colder as night progressed. When the watch changed and the heat seal was broken, the two men who came in, especially if they had been in the wind, would shiver for an hour before falling asleep.
Bayer, who was six foot four and 280 pounds, was the best heater. “I remember buying a bag of hot roasted chestnuts on Fifth Avenue in February,” he said. “I walked from Fifty-ninth Street to Washington Square. The wind was blowing and the street was empty, but the chestnuts kept me warm all the way. I’m still warm. They were magic chestnuts.” That he half believed himself was confirmed by a crazed look. “The war eats shit, and I shoulda dodged the draft,” he would say, and then go out and fight like a seventh-generation West Pointer. He was such a big target, and yet he had moved through the war as if he were invisible or a sylph, fighting imperturbably, and fearlessly and smoothly working the bolt of his rifle as the enemy drew close.
Sussingham was the second-best heater. Just under six feet tall, he weighed 200 pounds but it was all muscle, so he burned a lot of fuel. This seemed to make sense for a steelworker who came from the hellish blast furnaces and mills of Gary, Indiana, where inside cavernous sheds filled with fleeing smoke winter was made summer as if by harnessed volcanoes. He was the best-humored person Harry had ever met, continually puzzled that other people were not as good as he was, although in his modesty he thought that he was no better than anyone else. He was as steady and dependable as one would expect of someone whose job it was to grapple molten slabs of metal gliding past at high speed.
Reeves, from Colorado, tall and lanky, was a terrible heater, and he had the temperament of a golden retriever. In the midst of war, after shooting people against whom he
held no grudge as they cut through hell to shoot and kill him, he was still kind. He wanted to be a rodeo announcer after the war, and, as if people could not understand English, he would say, “Rodeo announcer, not radio announcer.”
Rice, the lawyer from Ohio, was, like Harry, older and qualified to be an officer, but unlike Harry he had chosen to be an enlisted man. Like almost everyone from Ohio, he wanted to run for Congress, and thought that having been a common soldier would more honestly qualify him. “The mind of a general and the heart of an infantryman,” he once had told Harry, “are what is required to make the decisions politicians make in regard to both war and peace.” Clearly, he was getting ready to run, and not only was he right, Harry thought, but were he to survive he would go far if after the war courage and probity would still count.
Dan Hemphill, from the western mountains of Virginia, was not affable. Though courteous and efficient, he actually felt out of place fighting for the Union. Because his side had been defeated, he had to prove that he was a better soldier than anyone else, and time after time he did. “Go easy,” Harry would tell him, and the look he got in return was one of amused contempt. It wasn’t that Hemphill could not be trusted, but that he was distant, and remained so in spite of circumstances that alloyed all the others until they thought almost as one.
And then there was Johnson, studious and alone, an English teacher from Superior, Wisconsin. He didn’t mind the cold, and was a good heater. He hated the war as much as anyone else, but his wife had died, and the war was his penance. He suffered it quietly, always soft-spoken, waiting for what he thought would inevitably be his death, to which he looked forward as rest and perhaps a reunion with the one he had loved the most.
Harry was Harry, and having crossed the Siegfried Line, with the rest of Germany to punch through—they never knew where they would meet up with the Russians—one of the many things that saved him started one night with a sound. He was on watch, it was 0330, and although with two blankets around his shoulders the rest of him was almost warm, he could no longer feel his feet. Falling snow presented him with the image of a dancer amid the snowflakes, appearing and disappearing in the dark spaces, moving when the wind bent the straight falling lines into curves and tangles. He tried to give her a face and a body, but he couldn’t. Though she was inchoate and out of reach, she was as strongly felt as if she were there. Then he tensed his grip on the carbine and brought it level. All his senses came alive, charged by a faint but undeniable whimpering.
At first he thought it was a wounded soldier, or perhaps the imitation of a wounded soldier, made to lure him to his death. And if it were a child, lost in the middle of the night? In a war that left scores of millions dead, how many bombs, shells, and bursts of machine-gun fire had destroyed houses, killed parents, and left children to fend for themselves because their parents had hidden them in safe places? “Run and hide!” was a theme that predated history. But how long could a child continue to move and speak in ten degrees and wind that charged in from the distant Russian steppes?
As the moaning continued, it sounded hardly human. “Kommen Sie hier,” Harry urged, “ich nicht schiessen.” Whoever heard this understood it and drew closer. Harry had to keep the carbine trained on the sound and his finger on the trigger, but what if accidentally he shot a child? “Kommen Sie.”
He sensed movement directly ahead as a disturbance of the falling snow. It was low to the ground, crawling like an infant. But a very young child could not walk in a foot of snow. The first real sight of it was of snow being tossed forward of the movement of its legs. The whimpering had stopped. Then two eyes, briefly visible when the snow thinned and the wind paused, receded into the dark.
Harry took his flashlight from its pouch, held it away from him at arm’s length should someone fire at it, and swept the area in front of him. A foot above the ground, electrically green eyes opened wide and were fixed in the beam. “Dog,” Harry said, and it ran to him.
It was short-haired, lucky to be alive in the cold, a beagle, or, as it seemed to understand when Harry greeted it, a kleiner Spürhund, a “little detective hound,” and like all beagles it was timid and yet devastatingly friendly. It wanted Harry to like it, but seemed to think itself unworthy. The combination of its modesty, trust, and apparent self-deprecation gave it a philosophical air, and its kindly look was commanded by its natural features into an expression of perpetual inquiry. By nature, it was immune to sin. Had it lived with Nazis, which it may have, it would not have known, on any level, what they were about, whereas a Doberman would know exactly. Because the little beagle was totally innocent, Harry had no choice but to take him in.
Soon they discovered that she was a she, and at Johnson’s insistence they named her Debra. After she heard it twice, she responded to it. There was enough affection, and there were enough scraps—although at first she wisely refused to eat C-rations—to keep her going as long as she and they could stay alive. In that regard, she enjoyed better odds than they did. She was a smaller target and neither a valuable nor an active one, she was better camouflaged, she shied from weaponry, was terrified by artillery, and would dig herself into the snow or wiggle under a log at the first report of a rifle.
Used to fires, Debra would lie near them. Harry let her curl up next to his sleeping bag, threw a blanket over both the dog and himself, and for the first time since he had been sent into the winter was warm enough to sleep. She was almost better than a woodstove. He could relax, drift off, and not be awakened by fingers of freezing air or a world’s worth of chill rising from the earth itself. In the daytime, others held her on their laps, but at night, because Harry had found her and she answered first to him, she was his hot water bottle.
She was so afraid of gunfire, and she could hear so well, that if a tank or an artillery piece were to report anywhere within a twenty-mile range she would tremble uncontrollably. There was hardly a minute during which a shell was not fired, a bomb not dropped, or a demolition charge not detonated within that radius. When the paratroopers could not hear a distant thud, she could, and no amount of petting could stop the trembling.
Harry thought that, stressed without letup, she would die. She seemed too innocent to die, but he could think of nothing that would help her except to stop the war or finish it more quickly. “It’s a dog,” said Bayer. “She’s had a good life. If she dies, she dies—like us.”
Reeves said, “In the mountains in summer, watching the flocks, we’ll kill a sheep every four or five days. That’s how we eat. That’s just the way it is.”
“What about earplugs?” asked Johnson, who was fond of disputations in which he represented both sides. “No, the low frequency goes right through her skull: earplugs wouldn’t work.”
“I don’t know much about dogs,” Sussingham told Harry. “I never had a dog.”
“It’s a pity,” said Rice, “but maybe she can weather it. We’re all under the same sort of strain, even if we’re not dogs. Her trembling is equivalent to our worry.”
“Swaddle her,” said Hemphill, as if speaking to idiots.
“What?”
“Swaddle her. Wrap her up. That’s what you do to a dog that’s afraid of thunder, or maybe up there in Yankee-land you send it to a dog psychiatrist or get it addicted to dope.”
“Yeah, that’s what we do,” Harry answered. “We get our dogs addicted to dope, then we take them to dog psychiatrists. How’dja know? And that was the cause of the Civil War. Lincoln wanted to addict the dogs of Alabama to dope. Aren’t most wars caused by that?”
Hemphill snorted contemptuously.
“With what?” Harry asked about the swaddling.
“That’s not my problem, Captain.”
It was, however, a problem. In the foxholes and lean-tos they had no swaddling; every bit of cloth they had, had been sewn into a shape to clad or make a shelter for a body. As they moved slowly east, mainly on foot—fighting and resting in alternation—the dog, as if she did not want to go into Germany, becam
e a mental case. One rifle report was enough to set her trembling for half the night. It seemed unfair to take her with them, but without them she would have frozen to death, starved, or been eaten. Winter came down so hard that they fought and moved in slow motion. To walk a hundred yards in thigh-deep snow dangerously sapped their strength. Many a soldier separated from his unit died of the cold, because no boy scouts or village search parties would be there for a private who, after his platoon had been outflanked, had been driven into the forest, where he then slowly turned blue, slept, and died.
Harry’s stick was ordered to help hold a section of the front thirty miles east of the breached Siegfried Line. They reinforced a company that had dug in at the edge of a wood overlooking a broad prospect of open country dotted with villages and small stands of pine. Larger forces and armor would be on their way when they could disengage from what they were doing elsewhere, to push onto the peaceful-looking killing fields beyond the trees on the hill. Until those columns could be diverted, the task was to hold against counterattack. In the forest, Harry’s men dug in on the south side of a snow-covered dirt road that led down across the fields and to the first village. Though they could see assembled German armor to the east, all they had to stop it were bazookas and PIATs. The ground was so hard frozen it could be excavated only near the roots of trees, where the loamy soil was relatively soft. So they dug in at the base of the pines flanking the road, and lived among the roots. Evergreen boughs burned well when thick fogs allowed the soldiers to make small fires that would go undetected. Nonetheless, the cold was doing them in, and it was dangerous to be among the trees, the branches of which could fuse enemy shells so they would blast down from above instead of partially slaking their force in the earth.
