East of the Mountains

by David Guterson

  At noon they ate turkey and potatoes from their mess kits in celebration of Christmas. The next day they boarded the SS Sestriere and debarked in darkness at Livorno. They went by convoy northeast to Pisa to bivouac at a muddy staging area where the sound of distant artillery was audible, the flash of it visible at night. They encamped in the Tenuta di San Rossore, which had once been the picnic ground of kings, a place to hunt wild boar. Now under handsome poplar trees, men played five-card draw.

  Ben shared a pup tent with Lastenpole, who came from Syracuse. Ben told him about the orchard country, and Lastenpole remembered picking apples in orchards along Lake Ontario. Every year, his father made cider.

  They lined a #10 can with sand, poured it full of gasoline, and tossed a lit wooden match inside to make a lantern of sorts. Then they lolled in their pup tents, while the rain beat hard outside. Lastenpole drew on a hand-rolled cigarette, at rest with an arm behind his head, blowing smoke toward the tent canvas. He insisted that the real action was in Belgium and France: the goal here was to force the German military to divert resources southward. He'd read in Stars and Stripes that a German offensive had been repelled in Luxembourg, that the Russians were closing on Warsaw and Budapest, that at Bastogne the 101st Airborne Division stood face-to-face with the German Fifth Army—but there was no mention of hill towns in the Apennines, or even of Italy. The war, said Lastenpole, would be won when the Rhine was crossed, when the Russians pushed their way into Berlin; the smart thing to do in the meantime, he argued, was to keep out of harms way.

  They convoyed again out of Pisa to the south and made a fresh bivouac at Quercianella, putting up tents by the coastal road along the Ligurian Sea. In the new year the Stars and Stripes reported that the Germans had been halted and routed in the Ardennes; it ran photographs of Montgomery and Patton, and one of Eisenhower in Paris. Lastenpole pronounced the war all but over; everything that happened hereafter, he said, was a mere denouement. Montgomery was about to cross the Rhine.

  A bag of mail was distributed, the letters in it weeks old and full of Christmas salutations. Rachel wrote to Ben from Revigny, where she was billeted in a concrete barn: she and twenty-five other nurses were huddled in the servants' quarters with a charcoal brazier and an array of candles, cutting snowflakes and stars from tin cans in preparation for Christmas. They were stringing red berries, cutting out angels, and making paper snowflakes for children convalescing in the hospital. There were plans afoot for a talent show. They'd salvaged foil wrappers as tinsel, and they were going to eat turkey and fruitcake.

  Arriving that summer in Normandy, she reported, they'd bivouacked in an apple orchard throttled by swags of mistletoe and inundated by hornets. Their camp covered sixty acres, a city of tents laid out in muddy rows, German prisoners of war watching them from behind a barbed-wire stockade. They lived in floorless ward tents and slept on flea-ridden straw. They killed field mice with their GI shoes and ate C and K rations, Spam, hardtack, tins of cheese spread, fruit bars, raisins, canned corn. Their luggage had been lost en route from England, so they had no change of clothes. They had their musette bags and dungarees, but not their class-A uniforms. They sampled the brandy of that region, made from windfall apples. Rachel couldn't stomach calvados, but other nurses were fond of it.

  The hospital ran on kerosene lights. Its first patients were two village children who'd strayed, at play, into land mines. Women came in for difficult births; farmhands appeared with blistered feet, jaundice, and tuberculosis. Soon soldiers from the front arrived. Rachel saw cases of trenchfoot, hepatitis, pneumonia, and gangrene. The burn cases were terrible; at night dark moans could be heard from the ward that made Rachel feel helpless. She was pressed into surgery service and had learned to administer a blood transfusion, start an IV, suction a lung wound, and perform a secondary skin closure. She'd also learned to dig a foxhole and shoot a carbine rifle.

  Paris was liberated while she was stationed in Normandy. The rains began, their tents collapsed, and all were perpetually soaked. They bathed in their helmets, worked double shifts. They chlorinated their drinking water in Lister bags and tinctured it with lemon crystals. Soon it grew cold enough to coat their tents with a thin film of ice. They warmed themselves at coal burners. They could no longer get the Stars and Stripes, but there was the BBC on the radio and a movie tent with leaky seams.

  Late in the fall, they were transferred. They moved closer to the war. During the fighting near Bastogne, Rachel was evacuated—she climbed into the back of an ambulance that soon mired itself in mud, and had to cling to the rear of a half-track all the way to a clearing station in the town of Malmedy. Now here they were in Revigny, her post for the foreseeable future. At the hospital, they were inundated: men lay swaddled in blankets on the floor, in the hallways, even in the boiler room. It was so cold, the morphine froze, as did the plasma supply. There were men in the wards with their spinal cords severed, others who had lost their arms and legs, others whose faces were wrapped in gauze with no holes for their eyes. Rachel remained in the surgery service. She thought of Ben all the time, she confessed. She remembered her summer in the orchard country. Those days seemed like a dream to her now. She missed him very much. She loved him.

  Ben's company practiced digging foxholes, despite the fact that a foot beneath their boots lay an immense slab of marble. They were ordered to remove their insignia, cut away their stripes of rank, and were forbidden to salute outdoors anymore, in order to minimize the exposure of officers to potential sniper fire. This, said Lastenpole, was an ominous sign. It meant they were going into combat.

  It was raining hard on January 8 when they set out for the front in quartermaster trucks and battalion supply vehicles. They traveled through uplands far to the northeast, into the Apennines. The rain became snow settling slowly over fields, and it was cold and still in these gentle, low mountains broken by fallow farmland. Higher up, the roads were more difficult, filled with heavy, wet snow. Snow fell steadily out of a still gray sky, as heavy and fast as spring rain, and by afternoon the hills lay shrouded, there was no way to see any distance. They heard muffled artillery as the road wound up through forests, its sharp bends rising steeply through fields and quiet hill towns.

  They came to the village of San Marcello. Bens rifle platoon was billeted in an abandoned primary school for girls. They slept on a concrete classroom floor and burned slabs of pine on the portico. Overnight, more snow fell, and in the morning the valley opening below sat beneath a foot of it, with vineyard trellises showing. Children waited with wooden pails near the tent kitchen set up in the town square. The muffled, distant artillery had stopped. The world was tense and silent.

  For three nights they patrolled the hillsides. Stackhouse complained about the weight of the BAR clips, since not a round had been fired. Lastenpole smoked his cigarettes and made entries in his journal. Ben went with Stackhouse to drink grappa at a tavèrna. As promised, Stackhouse had spent all his money on whores, so Ben paid for both their drinks and for a bag of figs as well. They ate them looking out over the country, their helmets in their laps. Stackhouse was from Baltimore. He hadn't finished high school. He had begun training to be a machinist and had worked delivering ice. Stackhouse confessed to hating the Army. He was drunk from the grappa and wanted to go home. The whores had been bleak. In Pisa he'd found one who spoke English and paid her to talk with him all night.

  Orders came, and they moved north, first to Lizzano in Belvedere, then toward the town of Querciola, traveling in the dark under heavy loads, working uphill through snow-blown vineyards, fields, and apple orchards. Querciola lay deserted by its citizens because it sat in range of German shells, and the company established surveillance there and probed the countryside. On their fifth night in Querciola, a German patrol in white camouflage penetrated the foxhole perimeter. Ben lay on the ground with other men while the telephone operator called for reinforcements, and in ten minutes reserves came up from positions to the south. They, too, lay on the ground while t
he telephone operator called for artillery, but the reserve unit sergeant grew impatient and ordered his squads to fight. They spilled out toward the German fire, and a Private Zwickert was shot in the back by a BAR man of another rifle squad who had not understood the reserves intentions and had assumed Zwickert was a German. This was the first of Ben's company to be killed in Italy.

  Afterward, the sergeant of the reserves railed long at them, calling out the name of the dead man, telling them all it was John Zwickert they'd killed in their cowardice and stupidity. Then the perimeter fell quiet. They set up trip wires to deliver flares in case the Germans tried again, and they manned their foxholes by the book. At dawn they were shelled by 88s that cut through the trees like scythes. In a lull they were replaced by other men and withdrew to Vidiciatico, where they passed long hours in coal-heated rooms, sleeping or lying about. It was damp in Vidiciatico, the wind coming down from Riva Ridge, the snow melting at the height of day, turning the roads to mud. The jeeps traveled up to their axles in mud, and the men coming up from back of the lines reported that southward it was nearing spring—in the lowlands the air smelled of lemon blossoms.

  Ben was shaved by an Italian barber with large, callused hands. He acquired new woolen underwear and a new helmet liner. With Lastenpole and Stackhouse he went to a trattoria and ate polenta and farina of chestnut and drank the wine of the country. A boy of twelve in a jersey of sheep's wool followed them to where they were quartered, until Bill gave him cigarettes. At Ben's request the boy named trees—the abete, the pini; and the castagno, which Ben recognized as a chestnut. In pidgin English the boy explained that the clay of the region made excellent plates, that the wild pears tasted sour, and that the berries growing in summer on the ginepro were especially good for ones digestion. Bill gave him more cigarettes, and the boy showed them the biancospino bush, whose berries, he made theatrically evident, were a chore to gather but delicious.

  The weather turned sharply cold thereafter, and the snow fell hard overnight. Powder settled in the ravines and defiles, and the cliffs turned to ice. Ordered to patrol, the men went out in mattress covers sewn into snow tunics and in creepers made of tightly knotted rope. In darkness they crossed the Dardagna torrent and climbed by way of gullies and buttresses onto outcroppings of crumbling shale, searching for a route up Cappelbusso to serve as a supply trail. Lastenpole complained of frozen fingers. He insisted that their endeavor was useless, until the sergeant told him to shut up.

  In the second week of February, the snow began to melt. The south slopes of hills were laid partially bare, and the air felt comfortable, balmy. At night a fog rose thick from the earth and concealed the movement of troops. All along the roads now, behind turns and under banks, lay stocks of rations, gasoline cans, and crates of ammunition. Ben and Stackhouse were sent to the rear on a mission to retrieve white phosphorus grenades, rucksacks, K rations, and mountain jackets. In the curves above Lizzano-in-Belvedere they encountered trucks and men moving up, mules driven slowly by Italian alpini sporting jaunty Tyrol hats, more big guns being hauled toward the front, and tractors sent by engineers to scour out the road mud. Farther to the rear, the boxes of materiel—rations, wire, ammunition, GI cans of drinking water—were stacked openly along the roads, where they resembled a kind of wooden hedge too high to see over. In the fields below were the encampments of the engineers, the signal corps, the truck companies, and the armored infantry. By the following night Vidiciatico was thronged with concealed soldiers and munitions, and there were new gun emplacements hidden in the hillside facing the long-entrenched German positions on the ridge from Spigolino northeast toward Mount Belvedere. Ben and Stackhouse sat with an infantry map, memorizing the names of promontories—Mancinello, Serrasiccia, Cappelbusso, and finally Campiano, where the ridge fell away toward Rocca Corneta, a hamlet occupied by the Germans. Through field glasses they watched the place: stucco peeling from the stone walls of a barn, willows hanging over a road, red roof tiles fallen from a house, a shutter dangling against a wall of crumbling white plaster. Bare earth showed in the pockets of snowmelt, and the hillsides were covered with leafless chestnuts. The main road, now that the snow had cleared, revealed last year's layer of fine white sand where it wound downhill to Lizzano.

  On a frigid night of low-lying fog, Bens company left Vidiciatico and traveled in refitted quartermaster trucks to the foot of Mount Belvedere. From there they hiked to the line of departure, and in the dark they dug slit trenches in the rocky earth. Fresh snow had fallen earlier that day against the steep rock faces. The valley was a bowl of darkness. The wind from the ridge bore down on them.

  After one o'clock, Ben heard the far-off crack of gunfire and the detonations of mortars. A blister on his left heel troubled him, and he treated it with Mercurochrome, bandaged it and adjusted the boot, tightening the laces a little. He drank long from his canteen. Stackhouse chewed on his fingernails, checked his watch from time to time, and sat on his knees to relieve himself.

  At first light, word came down the line that Riva Ridge had been taken. Yet they stayed in their slit trenches all day long, stiffening in the February cold, hearing the German counterbarrage and the artillery fire to the north, which finally quieted at dusk. Ben field-stripped and cleaned his BAR, then ate the tinned cornbread and peaches in his pack. In the dark he defecated on his entrenching tool blade and flipped its contents into the night; later, Stackhouse did the same.

  The sky was lit by brilliant flares, and the German artillery began firing. Stackhouse directed the light from his headlamp on the face of his watch and timed the rockets fired down Belvedere by the Germans on the summit. They were smoke throwers, he said—six rounds every ninety seconds—and later in the night he announced with a curse that the Germans had gone to 88s, which traveled hard for twelve miles and weighed twenty pounds.

  They stayed in their trenches while tracers behind them lit the slopes high above. The 88s arrived without warning, roaring directly overhead, while the grinding rise and fall of the smoke throwers—screaming meemies, Stackhouse called them—caused Ben to hold his breath. Later, shards of hot steel fell out of the illuminated sky, and beyond the dark silhouette of limbs, trees toppled and settled against other trees, into the forks of branches. Ben blew into his numb fingers and felt himself drawn tight. Stackhouse held silent beneath his helmet, but whenever the long low moan of a shell grew ominously loud in their direction, he swore under his breath.

  At dawn, P-47S roared over, shadowy bombs beneath their wings, which they dropped on the summit of Belvedere. Bens company was ordered to move up the slope and secure itself behind the front. The men did so and hunkered behind chestnut trees, and at 0700 the company commander issued the news that Mount Belvedere had been taken by the 85th, and shortly thereafter Gorgolesco, and the Third and First of the 85th had been ordered by General Hays to defend these new gains at all cost against counterattacks. The Third of the 86th, Bens unit, was to move up through the lines at the front to take Monte Della Torraccia.

  They came out of the pines in single file and slogged toward Mazzancana. On the trail they met a party of mules with dead GIs lashed across their backs, driven by Italian alpini. As the mules picked their way down the pocked, hard slope, the corpses pitched and settled. The line of infantrymen moving to the front slowed to watch the procession. The dead were skewed and twisted unnaturally on the backs of the silent mules.

  Ben's heart beat harder. He climbed upslope past trees sheared high where 88s had slashed through them, then under chestnuts where wounded men sprawled, some of them smoking stuporously, others prone with their heads on their helmets, awaiting escort to the aid station by litter-bearing squads. Later they passed a dead German sitting upright, his back against a tree, a neatly rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth; then a GI with his left foot, inside its boot, severed from the rest of him. When someone turned him over to have a look, it was Gavin Neider-hoff. He'd tripped a mine, plainly; he lay in a perfectly round depression, his helmet tipp
ed to one side. At midday they found Leonard Campbell, whom Ben knew from chess at the Camp Hale Service Club: he'd been hit in the throat and chest by mortar fire, and the snow around him, pierced by artillery, was strewn here and there with pine twigs. Leonard had bared his wound to the sky and died with his dog tag twisted.

  They passed through beeches ravaged by mortar fire, some splintered, cracked, and toppled, others sheared of prominent branches, which speared and festooned the ground. They passed through a snow-covered pasture, always climbing steadily. In the trees beyond, men were digging in, and the company paused behind them to check orders by telephone lines laid up the mountain. They sat waiting in the damp woods, where Ben changed the bandage on his foot. The blister had opened and oozed a clear fluid. He dressed it carefully, laced up his boot, and examined the sear on his BAR.

  The platoon leader, Lieutenant Daniels, told them that at dusk they would proceed across the shoulder of Hill 1018 and onto the slopes of Della Torraccia, where they were authorized to hold until daybreak in the thick pines there. The front lay directly forward, he said. There were no more troops between them and the enemy. In the morning they would make their assault, but only after artillery fire had prepared the way for them. The Second of the 85th, previously covering the ground before them, had taken considerable casualties; now their unit composed a second wave aimed at the defended crest. They would move up at dusk and dig in for the night. It was advisable to go deep, if possible; otherwise, to dig a slit trench. The BAR men should be prepared for the task of providing heavy fire in full support of a frontal attack, and the ammo bearers should stay close, since the guns were useless without them.