by Ed Ruggero
42
5 August 1943
1800 hours
Herr Doktor Lindner checked his watch five times in the first hour of waiting in the olive grove. He tried to distract himself by walking around, chatting with the stretcher cases, the walking wounded. The German medics had done a superb job preparing their patients for the move. Every man was comfortable, and most even seemed to be in good spirits. There was not much for him to do but pace and worry.
The Aryan-looking MP—whose name, Lindner learned, was the Nordic-sounding Gustafson—came back after an hour and sent two of the trucks away to other duties. That left four.
Lindner stood, did a quick head count. He could get all of the stretcher cases and about half of the medics and walking wounded into four trucks. And of course he would accompany that batch.
Another thirty minutes went by before Unterfeldwebel Bottcher approached.
“I was going to let the men eat the rations the American gave us, Herr Doktor, unless you have any objection.”
“No, no. Of course not. Whatever you think is best.”
The sergeant passed an order to a corporal who waited nearby, and the noncommissioned officers began to distribute the canned rations the American MPs had given them. Lindner watched for a few minutes as the German soldiers, now used to American food, began to trade the cans with one another, each man looking for his favorites, or the ones he hated least.
“Bottcher,” Lindner called. The sergeant approached, snapped his heels together, and stood looking straight ahead.
“The Americans are taking the trucks away one by one, you see.”
“Yes, sir.”
“If any trucks leave today, I shall be with the first group.”
This went against Wehrmacht tradition, as officers were supposed to ensure that their men—especially wounded men—were taken care of first. It was the same tradition that had prompted Lindner, the ranking doctor in his unit, to volunteer to stay behind with the wounded Germans when their army retreated from Palermo.
Lindner knew it was wrong, and Bottcher certainly knew it, but neither the sergeant’s face nor his voice registered anything amiss.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m a little worried that with all this confusion, they won’t be ready for us whenever we reach the ship.” Lindner sounded like the very kind of officer he detested, one who made excuses for why he should be treated differently, one who waited to be served, rather than looking to serve.
“As you wish, Herr Doktor,” Bottcher said, still looking straight ahead.
Lindner was still studying Bottcher’s face when an American jeep raced up to the lead truck in a cloud of dust. Inside, two GIs, both caked in white. The driver was small-framed; the passenger taller, thin.
Harkins, Lindner thought.
When the jeep stopped about fifty yards away from where Lindner waited with the statue-still Sergeant Bottcher, the dust cloud rolled forward, hiding the passengers completely.
Lindner suddenly felt bile rise in this throat, was afraid he might vomit.
I have failed, he thought. I was ready to abandon my patients, these good men, to save my own skin.
He thought about his brother, Albrecht, a gentle boy conscripted at eighteen and now in a Luftwaffe antiaircraft battery somewhere in Italy. Would the Abwehr really hold a private accountable for his brother’s failure as a spy? Would the authorities allow his family to leave Essen, to get out from under Allied bombs?
“Herr Doktor.”
It was Bottcher, still at attention, watching him now. “Are you feeling well, Colonel?”
Lindner was unable to speak for a moment as he watched the American jeep, still hidden in the roiling dust.
Without answering Bottcher, he walked toward the Americans, stepping out from under the shade of the olive trees, vaguely aware of the German soldiers getting to their feet as he passed by. He was ten yards from the road when he could finally see the men in the jeep, two Negro soldiers.
The passenger, a noncom, was talking to the driver of the lead truck, conferring over a map. The jeep’s driver, seeing Lindner approach, smiled and waved.
Someone said, “Are you the doctor that’s in charge?”
It was the noncom, a staff sergeant with coffee-colored skin, his blouse soaked through with sweat. He’d been wearing goggles, now pushed down to his chest, and there was a dustless stripe across his eyes.
It took Lindner a few seconds to register that the man was talking to him.
“Yes,” he said, trying to swallow with a dry mouth. “Yes, I am.”
The GI approached. Lindner knew how Negros were treated in the United States, had seen a man beaten by a white mob in Louisiana for speaking to a white woman. And yet here they were, fighting for their country.
“I’m Staff Sergeant Caruthers,” the American said. “I’ll have five trucks up here in the next few minutes. You want to get your men ready and we’ll run you down to that ship you’re supposed to meet.”
Lindner stepped close to Caruthers, surprised the man by putting out his hand.
“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you very much.”
* * *
Donnelly ran to the front gate, dodging stretcher bearers, piles of rolled tents, and an ambulance that had been left in gear and was rolling forward without a driver.
Just outside the gate the road climbed a small hill, and she was soon breathing heavily, forced to slow down and unable to see over the crest. The pistol jabbed her in the stomach, so she pulled it out and carried it in her hand. She should have left it with Reister.
The road was thick with traffic, most headed to the front, a few to the rear: jeeps and ambulances and trucks, a Dodge staff car idling, its windows rolled up. In most places the track was too narrow for two vehicles to pass abreast, so as far as she could see, vehicles hung to one side or the other, drivers yelling at one another, cursing. A long file of infantry soldiers slogged along in the field left of the road, heads down, moving at a steady, slow place. The men were dusty, sweat-soaked, exhausted looking, and headed for battle. Donnelly knew that, later on, she’d see some of them again, the broken ones.
She was startled when a GI standing on the running board of a truck shouted at her. “Hey, missy, what’s your hurry?”
“Keep it in your pants, Bart,” another man said. “She’s packing a forty-five.”
Donnelly did not look left or right, but kept her eyes on the road in front of her. She wasn’t even sure that Lindner and the German prisoners were still around. It had been several hours since they had moved out.
To her left a grove of olive trees climbed the same slope, and as she looked in that direction she thought she saw some men moving there, heading over the top of the ridge. Germans? A line of engineer vehicles, backhoes and road graders, blocked her view of the road in front.
A sharp pain split her side, a stitch. She stopped, leaned over, and put her hands on her thighs, sucking hot air. She was looking at the ground when a pair of GI shoes appeared. Turning her head, she looked up into the sun at the silhouette of a GI.
“You got a pistol but no canteen?” the man said, holding out his own water. “You might want to rethink your equipment list there, ma’am. No water’ll kill you in this here weather.”
Donnelly managed to right herself, take the canteen.
“Thanks,” she said. She tilted her head back and took a pull; the water was hot enough to make tea.
When she lowered the canteen and her gaze, the trucks in front of her had cleared, and she saw the last of the German medics getting onto the back of a deuce-and-a-half, fifty or sixty yards up the road.
“Hey!” she yelled, pushing the canteen back to the helpful soldier. She pressed her hand against her ribs, where it felt as if she’d been stabbed. Tried to run.
“Wait! Stop!”
The Germans were out of earshot, and even if they’d been closer they wouldn’t hear her over the noise of the struggling convoys.
Donnelly dodged left, into the olive orchard, where the only traffic was the file of heads-down infantrymen. But the ground was soft here, her big GI shoes heavier with each step. Her right foot caught on a tree root and she tumbled, felt the magazine of the pistol, in her front pocket, jab her thigh as she fell. She rose, took two more steps watching the lead truck pull away. Then she stopped, jammed the magazine into the pistol, yanked the action back, and fired two shots into the air.
Most of the infantrymen around her hit the ground, and at least four turned their rifles on her. But nobody shot her, and up ahead, the German medics turned to look.
“Hold it right there!” she yelled, pointing at the Germans.
Hand on her splitting side, she jogged forward, saw a Negro driver stick his head out of the last truck in the column. Then an American sergeant appeared.
“Hold it right there! Just wait!”
* * *
Lindner jumped when he heard the shots. He’d been thinking about firing squads.
He gripped the front edge of the bench seat, waiting for the truck to roll, to take him away from the hospital and General Glass and Palermo and the memory of Captain Stephenson. He almost allowed himself to believe he was going to make it, but the truck did not move.
Lindner was closest to the tailgate. The American sergeant in the front seat of the truck behind his got out and walked back toward the olive grove. Then he heard a woman’s voice; he knew immediately that it was a nurse and why she’d come.
* * *
Kathleen Donnelly had no idea what Lindner would say to her request.
Harkins was convinced that the German was a spy, but she also knew that this was a theory, and so far his theories had not persuaded the provost. Harkins had even admitted to her that he did not have a solid connection between Lindner and the wireless set found in the apartment—he was going on the word of Colianno’s platoon of cousins-for-hire. Nor had Harkins established that Lindner was paying Boone for the privilege of staying at the American hospital.
Still.
“Doctor Lindner,” she called when she saw him sitting by the tailgate of the lead truck. He smiled weakly, waved at her.
“Lieutenant Donnelly,” he said. Cheerful, almost.
She put her foot onto the metal loop below the tailgate, boosted herself up so that she was almost at eye level with the men in the truck.
“Who here speaks English?” she asked as pleasantly as possible. None of the other Germans raised a hand.
“Just me,” Lindner said softly.
Donnelly held the sun-baked steel tailgate, hot as a broiler, and studied Lindner’s handsome face, which just looked sad.
“Are there many casualties?” he asked.
“We’re overwhelmed. We’re losing men who could be saved if we had more hands.”
“I figured as much, from all the traffic.”
Donnelly saw Lindner’s medical bag at his feet. He had painted over the eagle emblem of the Third Reich.
“I have a special case, a soldier who stepped on a mine. Upward blast, flowering of the leg muscles, puncture in the left groin, damage to the glans penis.”
“Are you ready to do the procedures?” He smiled when he asked. Lindner was the only doctor she’d ever told about her dream of medical school. He believed she could do it.
Donnelly couldn’t help grinning, too. “The U.S. Army is a long way from letting me do surgery. A long way from letting any woman do anything like that.”
The sergeant who’d agreed to let Donnelly talk to Lindner appeared beside her.
“Sorry, Lieutenant, but we gotta get moving or we’ll be on those god-awful roads after dark.”
“Thank you, Sergeant,” Donnelly said. “I’ll only be a minute more.”
When she turned back to Lindner, he said, “Is your friend back? Harkins?”
“No,” she said. Then, after a pause, “Not yet.”
Lindner looked around at the other Germans. Without looking back at her, Lindner asked, “Do you know what you’re asking of me?”
Donnelly could not pretend she truly understood his burden any more than Harkins had been able to comprehend what Ronan had been through with Stephenson.
Donnelly climbed down off the tailgate. “My patient is twenty, twenty-one, tops,” she said. “Engaged to a girl back home. I stopped him from killing himself. This is his pistol, in fact.”
Lindner looked down at her, made no move to hand over his medical bag.
“There’ll be more,” she said. “More patients.”
And with that, Herr Doktor Lindner bent over, pulled his medical bag and duffle from the floor of the truck, and tossed them over the tailgate. He turned to the German soldier beside him, said, “Auf Wiedersehen,” and climbed down.
“Where’s he going?” the American sergeant asked Donnelly.
“I’m needed at the hospital,” Lindner said. “I’m a surgeon.”
43
5 August 1943
1830 hours
The coastal road that ran from Palermo to the front was choked with every conceivable piece of American war equipment, most of it stuck in miles-long traffic jams. Somewhere to the east, the war had kicked into high gear and was consuming men and materiel again.
Adams turned from his spot in the front seat to address Harkins, riding in back.
“Word is the big German counterattack sputtered out. Apparently while everybody was panicking because the Krauts were on the move, Patton saw an opportunity. Wants to charge ahead, get at ’em while they’re overextended and vulnerable.”
Harkins held on to the backs of Adams’ and Colianno’s seats to keep from falling backward as the paratrooper gunned the engine and shot through an opening between two fuel trucks.
“Like boxing,” Harkins shouted.
“What’s that?” Adams yelled over the sound of the engines all around them.
“Guy throws a jab and misses, that’s an opportunity.”
It had taken them nearly two hours to climb to the plateau south of the city, a run that should have lasted thirty, forty minutes. The main road leading to the hospital was a river of olive drab vehicles, all flowing north and east toward the front. Harkins and company were swimming upstream.
Harkins told Colianno to pull over, and the driver found a flat spot just off the track and above a ditch that ran beside. Harkins and Adams got out, jumped the ditch, and climbed to a rise some fifty yards away. From there they could see the long line of vehicles, some moving, some stopped, some barely rolling, an accordion of wasted effort and resources that were needed elsewhere, and in a hurry.
“Looks like Constitution Avenue on a Friday afternoon,” Adams said. “Everybody trying to get out of town all at once.”
Harkins and Adams walked back to the jeep; Colianno had gotten out and was pacing alongside. He had an M1 Garand slung on his shoulder.
“Where’d you get that?” Harkins asked.
Colianno cocked his head slightly.
“Never mind,” Harkins said. “I don’t want to know.”
When the three men were in the jeep, Harkins directed Colianno to head out cross-country, parallel to the narrow road everyone else was using to get to battle. They bounced and slipped and skidded across open country for another hour, Harkins’ ribs sore from sliding around the back of the jeep. He was amazed that they did not break an axle.
“Half the place is packed up,” Colianno said as they rounded a curve and rolled downhill toward where the gate had been. The sign that said 11TH FIELD HOSPITAL was still in place, but there was very little behind it. An entire small town of tents was moving.
“Colonel Meigs ordered me to keep out of here,” Harkins said to Adams.
“He also ordered you to deliver Ronan to me and be back at your unit by eighteen hundred hours.”
Adams held up his wrist, showed Harkins his watch. “Right now you’re oh for two; why not make it oh for three?”
“I think we should split up,” Colianno said as h
e nosed the jeep around a line of ambulances.
“Sounds good to me,” Adams said.
“Negative,” Harkins said. “Colianno, you stick with me.”
Colianno cursed under his breath. He wanted to go off on his own to find Ronan.
“If you’re by yourself it looks like you escaped from the stockade. If you’re with me, it’s my problem to explain. We’re looking for Boone and Ronan,” Harkins continued, “and we want to move them, separately, out of the hospital area. But we can’t interfere if they’re taking care of patients, especially Boone. It won’t be good if I haul him away from an operating table and some GI dies. Park the jeep and we’ll meet back here in a half hour.”
The three men got out of the vehicle.
“OK,” Harkins said. “Let’s roll.”
* * *
Boone had been inside the one remaining surgical tent for nearly four hours. When a nurse told him the teams were finally getting ahead of the flow of incoming wounded, he directed another surgeon to close up the patient and he stepped outside, stripping off his mask and bloody gown.
There did seem to be some order, finally. The line of stretcher teams waiting near the surgical tables had shrunk. A nurse in triage—he thought her name was Savio—wasn’t running from place to place any longer.
The nurse named Haus came out of surgery behind him, wiping her forehead with her sleeve.
“Haus,” Boone said. “Since we no longer have post-surgery wards, we’re going to need to move patients to the hospital in Palermo, or set up someplace they can be held and stabilized so that we can head out of here.”
“We’re still jumping, sir?” She looked exhausted, Boone thought, but they were all exhausted.
“Of course we’re still goddamn jumping,” Boone said. “Find out how many ambulances we have at our disposal.”
Haus walked toward the gate, and Boone stepped around the end of the surgical tent. About twenty yards away, two operating tables were set up in the open air, each with a team huddled around a patient.
That’s where he saw Lindner.
