David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘Hedgerows,’ Boogie said, baring his teeth.

  Joe Amos nodded. ‘The bocage.’

  The hedges gave the land a patchwork quality. Each field was bordered on four sides by a fence of bush, vine, and bramble, all woven together in a wall of leaves and exposed roots. Each ridge was three to six feet high. Dirt lanes diced between the hedges. From the truck cab Joe Amos could see mile after corduroy mile of the bocage, held by the Germans.

  ‘Man,’ he said, ‘goin’ in there ...’

  ‘Like pickin’ ticks,’ Boogie agreed.

  ‘Off a real mad dog.’

  Boogie whistled. The two drivers could add no more, the rest would only be imagination. Joe Amos drove steadily in his place in the convoy. Boogie never turned his face from the south, the immensity and tangle of the bocage as a battleground.

  In another ten minutes the convoy entered Ste. Mère-Église. This town, seven miles inland from UTAH, had been the target of an airborne assault by the 101st Screaming Eagles the night before the beach invasion. Ste. Mère-Église was now the rally point for American forces on the Cotentin peninsula.

  The convoy slowed and rumbled into the town square. A high-steepled church stood at the west corner, its roof punched in. Burned and busted shells of shops rimmed the rest of the cobblestone. Ste. Mère-Église had been pummeled.

  Quartermaster soldiers scrambled to the truck beds as soon as the wheels stopped. Jerricans and crates were offloaded and stacked everywhere in the square. Joe Amos and Boogie climbed down. At the head of their column, Lieutenant Garner spoke with several officers and a medic.

  Wounded men lined the sidewalks, many standing, many on stretchers. They waited, swathed in gauze in every way. Joe Amos tried not to stare. He glanced at Boogie. The big driver’s eyes were riveted on the wounded.

  ‘Look how many of ‘em,’ Joe Amos murmured.

  Boogie winced. ‘Couple hundred, easy. Man oh man. This is just one day’s worth.’

  Joe Amos shook his head. ‘The hedgerows. The fighting’s gotta be bad out there. For this many.’

  ‘I know what you’re thinkin’,’ Boogie said. ‘Can I tell you somethin’? You gonna listen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You remember the Kraut POWs back at Fort Lee? They were choppin’ wood and clearin’ brush?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You remember on Sundays they could eat in any restaurant in town, long as they were with the MPs? They got to go to any church. They got to take a crap in any bathroom in town. They got to sit anywhere on a bus, in any seat in a movie house. And you and me?’

  ‘Yeah, Boog. I know.’

  Boogie John aimed a quick gesture at the lines of wounded. Some of them, accompanied by armed guards, were German infantry, gray-clad and wrapped like the GIs in bandages.

  ‘Those Kraut sum bitches right there got to put on the uniforms of their country and go fight. You ain’t got that right. You ain’t got as much freedom as a goddam Kraut POW.’

  Boogie spat on the cobblestones.

  ‘So whatever you got in your head, College, get it out.’

  Boogie John turned and climbed into the Jimmy’s driver seat. Joe Amos stayed on the cobblestones until his truck was off-loaded and the bed was empty. From the head of the column, Lieutenant Garner waved to the medic. A whistle blew. The lines of bandaged soldiers shuffled for the convoy. The sighted guided the blind, the walking buttressed the lame. Stretchers floated over the cobbles, hoisted by orderlies and chaplains. The procession had a scary, zombie-like feel, groaning men stumbling for the trucks across the square. Chaplains and buddies murmured encouragement. Joe Amos did not want to be one of these unfortunates. He didn’t want a wound, a hole in his body, taped shut, and needing help just to get across a courtyard. The thought made him cringe. He hoped none of the soldiers saw his shudder, then realized no one was looking at him at all.

  The truck beds filled for the ride back to OMAHA. One soldier patted a comrade on the shoulder after helping heft his stretcher.

  ‘Goin’ home,’ the soldier chirped. His friend on the litter gave a thumbs-up, then laid his bandaged head down. And for what? Was Boogie right? Was he on the money? If you’re going to pay with an eye or a hand, you ought to get something in return. These white soldiers got America. What was waiting for Joe Amos and Boogie if they arrived home on a stretcher or with a cane, or in a box? It damn sure wasn’t the same America.

  If he was this upset just looking at clean, dressed wounds, Joe Amos figured he’d surely be no good in the wicked bocage itself, where the bullets and bombs were flying, where these gashes were made and the blood wasn’t yet wrapped away.

  Best face it. He was no fighter. Fine. His country didn’t want him to be.

  The wounded were loaded into all but the last few Jimmies in line. Once the bandaged men were in the truck beds, the orderlies and chaplains disappeared behind one of the slumped, ruined walls along the courtyard. Some unseen bell tolled a hush over the square. Joe Amos fidgeted, watching.

  A procession of orderlies carrying stretchers emerged. On every litter lay a corpse, torso covered head-to-ankle by a tucked-in olive blanket. From the laces on some of the boots, a yellow tag dangled. Helmets and weapons lay on the stretchers with the warriors, these would not be taken from them until the last. The corpses were hefted onto the last trucks. The number of bodies—there must have been fifty—stunned Joe Amos. He thought back to the Jimmies that passed him on the way to Carentan, the ones that appeared empty. They must have been transporting dead,

  The platoon revved. Joe Amos climbed beside Boogie. The big driver gestured to the maimed, bandaged, and killed that were now their cargo.

  ‘Yeah, College,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I reckon you could do just as good a job as them. You could get your ass shot off, too.’

  Joe Amos wanted Boogie to stifle. He set his elbow in the. cab window and laid his chin in the crook, looking away from his partner.

  Boogie crept forward in line, gentling the Jimmy, not rattling the wounded in the bed. He double-clutched gently into second. With a less tender touch, he poked Joe Amos in the back.

  ‘I’m not gonna tell you this again,’ he said. ‘No matter what you do, they ain’t ever gonna call you a hero.’

  ~ * ~

  Ben Kahn sifted through the sounds he knew, culling them from the ones he was hearing for the first time.

  Rifle cracks and the dull whumps of artillery and mortar fire he recalled from the trenches of the Great War. These reached him from the fight a mile away west. The bangs tried to transport him backward, decades, yank him to the old bloodletting, but they could not because they were trumped by the louder, newer machineries of war. Bombers, air-to-ground attack fighters, wing-mounted rockets, strafing cannon fire, tanks, self-propelled artillery—the woof and howl of these weapons were new and fearsome. Ben could not picture what they were doing there, beyond the tiers of hedges. The Germans must have these things, too, he thought, listening. He felt old, an ancestor of this war, unsure of so much. He did not have a map and he did not know where he was. He knew only the name of the decimated town where he’d been dropped off. Gueutteville. He knew the fighting in the hedgerows was close.

  ‘Soldier,’ he asked a passing doughboy, ‘where can I find Division HQ?’

  A dirty, hurried hand aimed Ben to a barn at the eastern rim of town. Outside, several jeeps were parked. The fenders of one of the vehicles bore starred flags.

  Ben picked through the rubble of Gueutteville. This brand of destruction, too, was different from the other world war. The fighting then was more static. Armies had dug in and squared off in the great fields, river valleys, and forests of France. They’d circled and pecked at each other for weeks and months and let attrition win battles. Only a few cities, like Verdun, had been laid low. But this street fighting and blasting of homes, churches, businesses, antiquities ... Is the new war going to be so voracious in every town and village, will it smash every wall so thoroughly? Has it
become necessary to stage so much demolition along with the killing of armies?

  We didn’t have this kind of firepower, he thought. Who knows what we would have done with it? The same. Worse. We were men at war, too. I used bayonets and shovels to kill. Can I say I would not have used rockets?

  A guard waved him inside the barn. This private wore the shoulder patch of the 90th Division, two red letters, a tall T standing in an O against an olive background.

  Ben rapped a knuckle on the soldier’s arm. ‘You know, years back, I used to be in the 90th. I was a Tough Ombre, too.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the soldier said, mustering an uninterested smile. The boy needed a razor and a cot.

  Ben nodded at the patch. ‘You know where that T-O comes from, Private?’

  ‘No, sir, I don’t.’

  ‘Well, you ought to. Texas and Oklahoma. That’s where the original division was raised for the first war.’

  ‘You in that, Chaplain?’

  ‘Yes, I was. I was a dough just like you. Right here in France. We’re the ones who made up the name, Tough Ombres. And we were.’

  Ben squeezed the boy’s arm, palm over the patch.

  ‘Just like you, son.’

  The young soldier blinked in confusion. Ben saw in him the twin desires, one canceling the other, to talk and to be left alone—the foot soldier’s urge to go noticed and unnoticed. War does this to you, leaps you out of your skin and shoves you into your guts, all at the same time. You don’t know which way to jump, so you stay in the middle, alone and not alone, surrounded by men feeling the same, men counting on you, the next guy. Scared soldiers wanting only not to be scared, needing you to never be scared. And you watch and find out when everyone else does what you’re made of. That’s the soldier’s question, more important than fate, more than life and death. What are you made of? Looking at this dirty, smooth face, Ben remembered the weight of the rifle across his own shoulder where he wore that patch. He thought of his son, Thomas, the first time he ever saw him in his Army Air Corps uniform, snappy in his waistcoat and wings.

  The soldier guarding the door looked at his boots, seeming a little ashamed. Ben stepped into the barn.

  The building was big and undamaged, an oddity in Gueutteville. No farm animals lived in the stalls but their aroma remained in the straw and clapboard. Field desks stood on rickety, fast-assembly legs; upturned barrels served as stools. Captains and colonels skittered from one to another, carting papers, aiming fingers into maps. Most smoked, an ill-advised thing in a barn full of straw, and haze hung in the bare rafters over these men and their talk. There was something else in the fusty air: Urgency? No. Frustration.

  ‘Chaplain.’

  A Lieutenant Colonel waggled fingers, beckoning Ben into the stall where he stood. Ben rounded one of the old wooden posts holding up the barn.

  The officer stretched his hand to Ben. The man was remarkably tall, maybe six and a half feet. His arm was so long, the hand reached across the desk before Ben was ready. The officer’s uniform was neatly tucked, his chin strap was buckled. The only weapon Ben saw on him was a .45 at his belt.

  The two shook hands. The Lieutenant Colonel gestured to a large milk pail.

  ‘Grab a bucket, Rabbi.’

  Ben arranged himself on the pail. The officer sat behind his table on an upturned feed trough.

  ‘Tom Meadow, Division G-2. And you are...?’

  Ben had his orders in hand. He held them out.

  ‘Late!’

  The word was barked from behind, outside the stall. Meadow, the personnel officer, rose from his trough. Ben stood also.

  A short, thick General stamped up. He appraised Ben up and down, hands on hips. He snorted, making Ben think of a bad-tempered pony.

  ‘Where the hell you been, Chaplain? We were expecting you six days ago.’

  ‘I know, sir. I was -’

  ‘Wait. I’ve seen you before.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Captain Ben Kahn.’

  ‘You were on the Susan B. Anthony.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Same as you.’

  ‘Aw, hell. You got on the wrong boat. You followed some of my dummies, didn’t you?’

  The General clapped Ben on the shoulder. He glanced at Meadow.

  ‘You know this story, Colonel?’

  Meadow shook his head. ‘Not the whole thing, General. I know we’re still missing about a hundred men out of the 359th.’

  ‘Billups. Assistant CO.’ The General thrust a mitt at Ben, then burst into the tale for Meadow.

  ‘Typical SNAFU. Morning of the 7th, mile off UTAH, our transport hits a mine. The Susan B. Anthony. She takes two hours to go down. Before she slides under, two British destroyers pull up on the port side and save our asses. Right, Chaplain?’

  ‘Carry on, sir.’

  General Billups took up residence on Ben’s milk pail. He short-armed the air, building tilted images of the doomed ship.

  ‘She’s sinking by the stern, see. We manage to get most of the 359th and everyone else off and up on the first destroyer, about three thousand total. But somehow, half of G Company figures they’ll run all the way across the deck...’ Billups shook his head and rubbed his brow under his helmet. ‘...and go climb onto the second destroyer tied outboard of the first one. The first destroyer pulls away from the wreck and transfers everybody to landing craft. These men all make it to shore. But the second ship... Tell him, Rabbi.’

  Ben winced at the floor. ‘Went back to England.’

  ‘Back to England,’ the General repeated heartily. ‘But here you are, Chaplain. Glad you decided to make it. I assume the rest of my boys are somewhere behind you?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I got here as fast as I could on my own. I got my orders to report to the 90th this morning.’

  ‘I see. Well, sad to say, we can damn well use another chaplain.’

  The personnel officer agreed. Ben figured there was something going unuttered between these two, the same black, hovering air he sensed when he walked through the barn door. Ben recognized and understood the strain in these men’s voices, of thwarted control, slipping hope. He felt kinship; he was the father of a downed, missing pilot, and there was always that thing wrong with every moment, something he could not fix or end, no matter how hard he wished, prayed, or tried. What was he getting into here? What was wrong in the Tough Ombres?

  He had come back to France for one reason—to push the war, make it conclude as fast as it could. He believed that was the only way his son’s fate would be known. If the boy had been captured, he’d be set free. If he was dead, he’d be accounted for. God had returned Ben to his old division. But was this nervous-Nellie bunch, the new 90th, going to lead him to his son?

  Propped on the milk pail, the General read Ben’s orders, tapping a boot toe in the straw.

  Nerves, thought Ben.

  Billups handed the sheet to the Colonel. He addressed Ben.

  ‘Alright, Chaplain. Welcome to the 90th. We’re going to keep you with Division. I want you assigned to Headquarters.’

  ‘General, I was hoping to be given a unit. My own unit, a battalion. I’d like to be up with the infantry, sir.’

  Billups shook this off.

  ‘No. We’ve got three regiments of infantry, one of artillery, seven battalions of support troops. I got Jews all over the place, Chaplain, but not enough in any one unit to warrant their own rabbi. I need you to be able to get to all of them. You’ll work out of Division for a while. Then we’ll see.’

  ‘Sir.’

  The General threw Ben a baleful eye.

  ‘What, Captain?’

  ‘Sir, I’m a chaplain in the U.S. Army first. I’m a rabbi second. My training is to minister to every soldier, whatever religion or none. I respectfully request assignment to an infantry battalion.’

  The General rose from the milk pail. He was half a head shorter than Ben, and stocky.

  ‘Chaplain, I’ll tell you straight: You are not a young man.’

  ‘No, sir
, I am not. And this is not my first war.’

  Billups hooked his thumbs in his pockets. He glanced at Colonel Meadow. ‘Tommy, you might have said something.’

  ‘I didn’t know, General.’

  Billups gave Ben another appraisal. ‘The Argonne?’

  ‘And St. Mihiel.’

  Billups whistled, looking back to Meadow before crossing his arms and gazing at Ben.