Ordinary Heroes (2005)

by Scott Turow

  I found the thought of Teedle, still up in the middle of the night, still incensed as he thought about Martin, richly comic. I would have laughed, except that I knew I was going to get killed in the next seven days. That was a certainty. If I didn't, then it would be Biddy. But I said, "Yes, sir."

  "You've done your part. There's a first lieutenant in A who's ready to take over a company. So I'm relieving you, effective January 15. You and Bidwell. You're to follow your prior orders and, when complete, report to General Teedle." The i8th Armored had met the 6th Panzers and contained them, and was now pushing them back. They were south of us in Luxembourg.

  Algar said he'd have written orders in the morning. With them, we'd find he had put Bidwell and me in for medals. The Silver Star, he said. For our jump and for volunteering for combat.

  "A Section Eight would be more appropriate," I said.

  He said he felt a Ditinguished Service Cross was actually in order, but that required an investigation which might reveal the condition of my trousers when I'd hit the ground in Savy.

  We laughed and shook hands. I told him what a privilege it had been to serve under him.

  "I'm going to look you up, if I get to Kindle County, David."

  I promised to do the same when I was in New Jersey, another wish that went unfulfilled. Hamza Algar was killed in July 1945 in Germany, after the surrender, when his jeep ran over a mine. By then, 4,500 soldiers out of the 5,000 men in the 'loth Regiment which had faced the first German assault of the Ardennes campaign along Skyline Drive were dead or wounded. So far as I know, Hamza Algar was the last casualty.

  On the morning of January is, Luke Chester assembled E Company and First Lieutenant Mike Como formally took command. It had been a hard week. The Germans seemed to be resisting Patton and the nth Armored Division, behind whom we'd been fighting, with much greater ferocity than the armies of Montgomery and Hodges coming down from the north. I think Dietrich was unwilling to abandon his dream of capturing Bastogne, or perhaps he simply wanted to waste his last fury on the forces that had stopped him. My company lost six more men that week, and suffered thirteen wounded, all but four seriously. But there would be no casualties now for a few days. Most of the infantry elements in the 5o2nd, including E Company, were being relieved by the 75th Infantry Division. My men would head for Theux for a week's R & R, battlefront style, which meant nothing more than warm quarters and running water. Nonetheless, I told them they would have my enduring envy, because each man was guaranteed a bath. It had been a month since any of us had washed, other than what was possible by warming snow in a helmet over a camp stove, which generally meant a fast shave once a week when we were housed indoors. The smoke and grease from our guns had more or less stuck to our skin, turning all of us an oily black. We looked like a minstrel troupe, which made for a few private jokes between Bidwell and me. Now standing next to Como, I told the men that it had been the greatest honor of my life to command them and that I would remember them as long as I lived. I have never spoken words I meant more.

  The dog, whom the men had named Hercules, presented a problem. Hercules was deaf, probably as the result of getting caught too close to an explosion. He fled yelping at the first flash of light on the battlefield, and we speculated that that was why whoever owned him had turned him out. Despite his handicap, he had made himself increasingly popular in the last two weeks by proving to be an able hunter. He'd snatch rabbits in the woods which he would deposit at my feet several times a day. We packed them in snow until he had caught enough for the cooks to give a ribbon of meat to each man as a treat with his rations. Hercules would sit at the fire and make a meal of the viscera, and, once he'd finished, the soldiers came by to ruffle his ears and praise him. I regarded him as a company mascot, but because Biddy and I fed him, he jumped into our jeep after I'd transferred command. We pushed him out at least three times, only to have him leap back in, and finally gave up. Half the company came to bid Hercules farewell, exhibiting far more affection than they'd shown Gideon and me.

  Then we drove south and west, beyond Monty, to find out what had happened to Robert Martin and his team. The hill where they'd fallen had been retaken only in the last thirty-six hours and the bodies of the men who had died there were yet to be removed. Graves Registration Detail had arrived, but most of the GR troops were at work on a hillock to the west. In their gloves, they rooted for dog tags in the shirtfronts of the dead, bagging any possessions they found on a body and tying it to the man's ankle. Then they sorted the corpses by size, so that the cordon they were going to assemble would be stable. Quartermaster Salvage was with them, picking over the inanimate remains. During the stillborn portion of the war in September, Salvage went over some battlefields so closely you couldn't find a piece of barbed wire or a shell casing afterward. But right now they were interested in weapons; ammunition, and unused medical supplies. Even before GR got to most of the corpses, I noticed they had been stripped of their jackets and boots. It was probably the Germans who'd done that, but it could have been our troops, or even locals. I didn't begrudge any of them whatever it had taken to survive the cold.

  Biddy and I walked up the hill. Most of the men in the team Martin had led here had been mowed down as they fled by the machine guns mounted on the Panzers. The corpses were frozen solid like statues. One man, on his knees in an attitude of prayer, had probably died begging for his life. I walked among the dead, using my helmet to clear off enough of the snow that had drifted over them to make out their features, giving each man a moment of respect. By now, their flesh had taken on a yellowish color, although I uncovered one soldier whose head had been blown off. The frozen gray brain matter, looking like what curdles from overcooked meat, was all around him. Somehow the back of his cranium was still intact, resembling a porcelain bowl, through which the stump of his spinal cord protruded.

  Biddy and I passed several minutes looking for Martin. Four weeks ago I had seen nothing like this. Now it remained awful, but routine. And still, as I often did, I found myself in conversation with God. Why am I alive? When will it be my turn? And then as ever: And why would you want any of your creatures treated this way?

  The lodge which had been Martin's observation post was about fifty yards west. According to Barnes and Edgeworthy, it had gone down like a house of cards. Everything had fallen in, except the lower half of the rear wall. The crater from the tank shells reached nearly to the brick footings and was filled with the burned remains of the building--cinders and glass and larger chunks of the timbers, and the blackened stones of the outer walls. We could see the view Martin had as he looked west where the American tanks had emerged like ghosts from the morning blizzard. He had died in a beautiful spot, with a magnificent rolling vista of the hills, plump with snow.

  I summoned the GR officer and he brought over a steam shovel to dig through the stony rubble, but after an hour they were unable to find a whole corpse. In the movies, the dead die so conveniently--they stiffen and fall aside. Here men had been blown apart. The flesh and bone, the shit and blood of buddies had showered over one another. Men in my company had died like that on Christmas Day, and among the burdens I carried, along with the troubled memory of the gratitude I'd experienced that it had been them and not me, was the lesser shame of feeling revolted as the final bits of good men splattered on me. Here, of course, if anything remained of Robert Martin, it probably had been incinerated in the burning debris. Biddy motioned toward a tree about twenty yards off. A ribbon of human entrails hung there, ice-rimed, but literally turning on the wind like a kite tail.

  Edgeworthy and Barnes had placed Martin at the second-floor window, surveying the retreating Germans, when the first tank shell had rocketed in. Working from the foundation, it was not hard to figure the spot, but his remains could have blown anywhere within two hundred yards. The sergeant had his men dig in the area of the west wall for close to an hour. A pair of dog tags turned up, neither Martin's.

  "They don't usually burn up," the sergea
nt said, meaning the tags. He expected eventually to identify Martin somehow. Dental records, fingerprints, laundry marks, school rings. But it would take weeks. As we were getting ready to leave, a hand and arm were discovered, but there was a wedding ring on the third finger. It wasn't Martin.

  "Panzers didn't take many prisoners," said the sergeant, "but the Krauts are the Krauts. They'd have treated an officer better, if they found him alive. Only thing is, anybody who made it through this didn't live by much. Have to be in a POW hospital, wouldn't you think? And the Krauts don't have medicine for their own. I wouldn't think your man would be doing too well."

  I sent a signal to Camello reporting on our findings and asking for the Third Army to contact the Red Cross, which reported on POWs. At this stage, it could take a month at least to be sure the Germans didn't have Martin, and even that wouldn't be definitive. General Teedle had another suggestion on how to fully investigate Martin's fate. The idea had occurred to me, but I had been unwilling. Lying in that snowy field on Christmas Day seemed to have put an end to my curiosity. Now I had a direct order, a three-word telegraphic response.

  Find the girl

  Chapter 23.

  REUNION

  I gave no credence to what Martin had told me in Savy about Gita's whereabouts, even though it had been vaguely corroborated by the little private, Barnes, and his memory of the girl with the farm family Martin contacted near Skyline Drive. Instead, we decided to retrace the initial intelligence which had placed Gita near Houffalize. After several signals, we were advised to see the leader there of the Belgian resistance, the Geheim Leger, the Secret Army, a woman named Marthe Trausch.

  Traveling took two days, because Houffalize was not fully liberated until January 16, when the First Army's 84th Infantry and Patton's 11th Armored met at the town and began driving east. Like so much of the Ardennes, Houffalize sat handsomely in a snowy forest valley carved by the Ourthe River, a narrow tributary of the Meuse, but the town itself was now all but obliterated. The American bombers had leveled every structure large enough to be used by the Germans as a command center, killing hundreds of Nazis, but dozens of Houffalize residents as well. We rode in to indifferent greetings. For these people, when it came to war and warriors, the sides were less and less consequential.

  Madame Trausch proved to be a seventy-year-old tavern keeper, a fleshy widow with a bright skirt scraping the floor. She had taken over her husband's role in the resistance when he died, her saloon providing an excellent site both for eavesdropping on the Nazis and for passing information. About half of the old stone inn had survived and I found her calmly clearing debris with two of her grandchildren. Her native tongue was Luxembourgian, a kind of Low German, and her accent made her French hard for me to follow, but she responded promptly when I mentioned Martin and Gita.

  For once, Robert Martin appeared to have told the truth. Madame Trausch said Martin had been intent on getting into southern Germany, and asked for help setting up Gita in Luxembourg near the German border. The Luxembourgers had not put up the same fight against the Nazis as the Belgians, but a loose network existed there of residents who assisted the Geheim Leger when they could. More than a month ago, Gita had been placed with one of these families on a small farm in sight of the Ourthe River, on the steep hills beneath Marnach. Gita posed as a milkmaid, taking the family cows to pasture and back each day. These rambles allowed her to watch the movement of the German troops from the heights over the river, leading to her unheeded warnings about tank activity near the German town of Dasburg.

  In war, it is all noise, no one listens," said Madame Trausch. She had no idea whether Gita or the farmer or their house had survived the battles. No one had yet been heard from, but it was unclear whether the Germans had even been pushed back there. We started east, were roadblocked by combat, and did not get to the hamlet of Roder until the afternoon of January 19. By then the fighting was about two miles east.

  Here, as in Belgium, the ocher farmhouses and barns, rather than being scattered over the landscape, were arranged in the feudal manner around a common courtyard with each family's land stretching behind their abode. The medieval notion was common protection, but now this clustering had made all the structures equally vulnerable to modern explosives. Every house was damaged, and one had fallen in entirely, with only two walls of jointed stone partially standing in broken shapes like dragon's teeth. The round crosshatched rafters of the roof lay camelbacked between them, beside a heap of timber and stone over which a family and several of their neighbors were climbing. Apparently searching for any useful remains, they proceeded in a determined and utterly stoic manner. At the top of the hill of rubble a man picked up scraps of paper, sorting them in a fashion, some in his trouser pockets, others in his coat. Another fellow was already at work with a hammer, knocking loose pieces of mortar from the stones, probably quarried a century ago, and stacking them so that they could be used to rebuild.

  But I sensed this was the place I was looking for, due not so much to Madame Trausch's information as to what I'd heard from Private Barnes. He'd described the lady of the house as "a round old doll," and there would never be better words for the woman wobbling along near the top of the pile.

  I had started toward her, when I heard my name. On the far side of the heap, Gita held a hand to her eye. She was dressed in a makeshift outfit--a headscarf, a cloth overcoat with fur trim on the sleeves, and torn work pants.

  "Doo-bean?" She seemed only mildly surprised to see me, as if she presumed I'd been searching for her for weeks. She climbed up grinning and struck me on the shoulder, speaking English. It was only my physical appearance that seemed to inspire her wonder.

  "You soldier!" she cried.

  Despite all the vows I had made on the battlefield, I found myself enjoying her admiration. I offered her a cigarette. She shrieked when she saw the pack and dragged on the smoke so hungrily that I thought she would consume the butt in one breath. I told her to keep the package, which she literally crushed to her heart in gratitude.

  We reverted to French. I said I was looking for Martin.

  "Pourquoi? Still all this with Teedle?"

  "There are questions. Have you seen him?"

  "Moir She laughed in surprise. The round old doll teetered over to see about me. Soon, the whole family was describing the last month. In Marnach, like everywhere else, collaborators with the Germans had been severely punished when the Allies took control, and thus, once the Germans returned, those known to have aided the Americans were endangered, less by the SS than by their vengeful neighbors. Gita and the Hurles had endured many close calls. For several days, they had scurried like wood mice through the forest, eventually stealing back here and remaining in the woodshed of family friends. No one had food, and there was little way to know which side would bomb or shoot them first. The Hurles still had no idea who had destroyed their house, nor did it matter. All was lost, except two of their twelve cows. But the father, the mother, and their two married daughters were safe, and they all continued to hold out hope for their sons, who like most of the young men in Luxembourg had been forced into the German Army and sent to the eastern front. Madame Hurle remained on the Americans' side, but wished they would hurry up and win the war.

  "Qu'est-ce gulls nous ont mis!" The Germans, she said, had beaten the hell out of them.

  "But no sign of Martin?" I asked Gita. She had not really answered the question.

  "Quelle mouche ea pique?" she answered. What's eating you? You are angry with Martin, no? Because he played a trick. And me, too, I suppose."

  "I received your postcard," I answered.

  "Robert was very put out when I told him I wrote. But I owed you a word. I was afraid you would be hurt when you woke."

  "And so I was."

  "It was a moment, Dubin. An impulse. War is not a time when impulse is contained."

  "I have had the very same thoughts in the days since.''

  "Ah," she said. "So between us, peace is declared."r />
  "Of course," I said. We were both smiling, if still somewhat shyly. "But I must know about Martin. Tell me when you last saw him."

  "A month, I would say. More. Since I am with the Hurles. When the battle is done, he will find me here. He always does." She was blithe, even childish in her conviction. Assaying her reactions, the question I had been sent here to pose seemed answered. Martin had made no miraculous escape, had sent no secret emissaries.

  "Then I am afraid Martin is dead," I said. "Qu'est-ce que to dis?"

  I repeated it. A tremor passed through her small face, briefly erasing the indomitable look that was always there. Then she gave a resolute shake to her short curls and addressed me in English to make her meaning clear.

  "Is said before. Many times. Is not dead."

  "The men in his company saw him fall, Gita. Tank shells struck the building where he was. He died bravely.), "Non!" she said, in the French way, through the nose.

  I had watched myself, as it were, throughout this exchange. Even now, I could not completely fight off the fragment in me that was dashed that she took Martin so much to heart. But I felt for her as well. When I wondered where she would go next, I recognized much of the motive for her attachment to him. She was again a Polish orphan in a broken country. Even her time as warrior was over without Martin.

  "I had very faint hopes, Gita. Hope against hope, we say. That is why I came. If he survived, I knew he would have contacted you."

  She agreed with that in a murmur. I had toyed with the truth in my role of interrogator, and she might well have shaded her answers to me. After all, she wanted to be Bernhardt. But her grief looked genuine. She wandered down the mound by herself. She was not crying, though. Then again, I wondered if Gita ever wept. She stood alone, looking out at a field where a dead cow was frozen in the snow.

  I asked Biddy how she appeared to him.