All around him is the dreaded Hürtgen, scene of some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire war. It’s good that Stewie has taken the cue and stayed quiet again, for Bandy plays God in his head and brings the battle alive. He watches ghost soldiers run and dive, hears trees explode, aims his mind’s camera into the recent past. From September to December of last year, Hodges’ First Army tried to penetrate the Hürtgen Forest to reach the Roer River running down its eastern edge. This is the thickest wood Bandy can imagine. Not in Tennessee or the North Carolina Smokies is there a forest like this. The fir trees are dense with low branches. A man couldn’t walk upright among them. Even on a bright day like today, the sun never touches the forest floor, so it stays dark and damp, with no covering underbrush. It’s a forest out of a scary fairy tale. And through the heart of it, like a black knight, runs the stolid Siegfried Line. The Hürtgen is the worst place Bandy has ever seen for a man to go if someone is waiting in there to kill him.
Why did the generals want to take on the Germans in here?
The Roer River. It’s the last natural barrier before the Rhine. First Army had the task of capturing the dams on the Roer, to stop the Germans from blowing them and flooding the Ruhr valley. With the dams safe, the river could be crossed quickly But if the Germans kept the dams, they’d be able to flood the valley and the Allied advance would be halted until the waters receded. That would give the enemy more time to prepare for the final onslaught, and cost more Allied lives.
The journalists have all heard the grumblings. In September, First Army could have assaulted the Roer dams from the south. The Hürtgen could have been bypassed. The forest without the dams is useless. The dams without the forest should have been the goal. But the generals wanted the Hürtgen cleared of enemy before they headed for the Roer. The forest would be in the rear of Montgomery’s precious northern thrust to Berlin. So they went in.
And the Hürtgen chewed up men. First Army crept in there and came limping out, gut shot. In ninety days of fighting the casualty rate was extraordinary, almost twenty-five thousand battle losses. Whole divisions were decimated. The Americans got a bad and bloody reversal.
Now, two months later, the Germans have retreated out of the Hürtgen. They still hold the dams. The current plan is for First Army to advance again through the forest, as well as through a corridor in the southeast. They’ll breach the Siegfried Line and attack the dams. Once they’ve been captured, Ninth Army and Montgomery’s British and Canadian forces can cross the Roer and close to the Rhine, protecting each other’s flanks. Beyond the Rhine there’s nothing but flatland and villages all the way to the Elbe River and on to Berlin. The race for the German capital gets back on track.
Stewie wrestles the jeep down the slope. He avoids the precarious ledge. More overturned vehicles litter the woods below. Tanks, tank destroyers, trucks, not all of them slipped off the road. Some have gaping holes in their sides, some have charred battle scars. Near the bottom of the canyon, many of the conifers have been snapped in half, as though lightning struck. Many more trees have their tops missing. Artillery blasts in these woods would have turned standing timber into a zipping hail of razor blades. A man could get cut to ribbons by flying wood.
How do you fight in there? No visibility through the crowds of firs. Tangled dark terrain. You’re facing an enemy on his own turf, who’s had ten years to dig in.
Stewie guides the jeep around the foot of the hill. In a glen ahead, Bandy gets his first look at the Siegfried Line. He tells Stewie to pull over. He scrambles in his pack for his 35mm Leica to take some shots of the dragon’s teeth.
The Germans have withdrawn from this section of the Line. Even empty, it’s forbidding. The dragon’s teeth protrude from a concrete mat thirty yards wide. The teeth are pyramids of reinforced concrete three feet high in the front, rising to twice that height toward the rear. They’re staggered in such a way that a tank couldn’t drive through them without getting stuck or tipping. Bandy can tell from busted spots that the mat itself is up to six feet thick. Concertina wire runs across all the gaps. An American sign has been posted in front of the barriers warning of trip wires and antitank mines. Placed as bookends are two massive concrete pillboxes, located to give the Germans interlocking fields of fire. Both are darkened to blend with the forest. Spread everywhere are gun pits, foxholes, bunkers, redoubts for artillery pieces. Seventy-five meters back through the trees, Bandy views another line of teeth, pillboxes, and fortifications just as forbidding.
He raises his Leica, meters the light, and squeezes off several shots. He hears the quiet clack of his shutter and thinks how tinny and puny a sound it is next to the missing cacophony of this place. Again, unbidden, he hears and sees the phantom roar of artillery, smashing trees, galloping desperate men. War. The Hürtgen is soaked with war.
Bandy marvels at the labor that must have gone into creating this complex of strongholds. The Siegfried Line runs for hundreds of miles, the length of the German border with Belgium and France. Bandy considers the Egyptian pyramids and the incredible toil that went into building them. He will send a caption with these photos mentioning Egypt. He wonders how many died just building the damned things there, and here in Germany.
Stewie leaves the jeep to walk up beside Bandy. The boy whistles.
“Big.”
Bandy nods behind his camera. He doesn’t want to talk. Stewie’s whistle was out of place. This isn’t a foldout in a girlie mag. It’s a battlefield, a reverent spot. Bandy knows what happens to soldiers in these places, has recorded it, shared it.
“Where’d they all get to?”
Bandy shoots his last two frames. He lets the Leica hang by its strap.
He points into the Hürtgen. “Backing up.”
Stewie puts his hands in his pockets. “Well, I reckon they’re gonna keep backin’ up all the way to Berlin.”
No, Bandy thinks. Not true. The Germans are going to turn and fight. We’re in their homeland now. They’re going to put the Rhine to their backs and bare their teeth. The Nazis, the German soldiers, even the people know full well what they’ve done in this war. They know about the Jews, the treatment of prisoners, the wretchedness they’ve spread over Europe and Russia. They’ll fight back because it’s their only hope to escape their guilt. There are more battlefields in the making, more undug graves and shrines unnamed. But Bandy doesn’t bother to answer the boy’s bravado this way. Stewie will not be among the ones facing the Germans when they make their stand here and in the east against the Reds. He’s a nice kid. A good driver. Probably a decent ballplayer. Bandy and his camera will press forward, will be there.
“Let’s go.”
After another half hour slogging in the jeep without chat, they’re stopped by a guard posted on the road.
“Got to leave the vehicle here, sir,” the soldier says. Bandy notes he’s a paratrooper with the Eighty-second Airborne.
Bandy smiles. Where the Eighty-second is, there’s action. Italy. Normandy. Holland. The Bulge.
The soldier adds, “The road stops here, sir. We haven’t cleared the rest of the mines yet.”
Bandy hands the guard his press credentials. The soldier looks the plastic card over and returns it. “We’re bivouacked about a mile ahead, in Vossenach. Just stay off the road, keep to the left. That’s cleared.”
“All right. Thanks.”
To the right, behind the soldier, a well-trod path heads into the trees.
Bandy asks, “What’s down there?”
The paratrooper shakes his head. “The Kali River, sir. But the trail is off-limits.”
Bandy’s instincts tingle. The Leica around his neck tugs like a divining rod in the direction of the path.
“Why’s it off-limits?”
“Orders from my lieutenant.”
“And where did he get his orders?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Sergeant. You know who I am.”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Bandy. You’re the Life photograph
er.”
“You saw my press credentials. I’m cleared for classified areas.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You understand I’m a captain.”
The trooper wags his head and starts to speak but stops himself. This is bull and he knows it but can’t prevent it.
“So I understand, sir.”
Bandy climbs out of the jeep and shoulders his packs. He raps Stewie on the shoulder.
“Thanks, pal,” he says to the driver. “I’ll take it from here.”
Before Bandy can step away from the jeep, the paratrooper intercepts him.
“Sir.”
Bandy softens. “Son, look. I’m not gonna get you into any trouble. I’ll make sure if anyone asks they know I pulled a rotten trick on you.”
“It’s not that, sir. I just gotta ask you something.”
“Okay.”
“I gotta ask you to be respectful. Down there.”
The soldier’s face, young and strong, has gone solemn, an ancient plea in his eyes. Bandy’s gut quivers. Something bad, ancient as death, has happened in the valley below.
“Always, sergeant.”
The paratrooper nods, believing. Bandy walks away.
Stewie throws the jeep into gear and does a quick half circle. He cuts the engine and uncoils from the seat. He jogs ungainly to Bandy.
“Mind if I tag along?”
“Yes, Stewie.”
The boy considers this for a moment. His voice is polite.
“Mr. Bandy. You said you really wasn’t an officer or nothing. You can’t order me not to come.”
“But I can have that fella back there stop you. Sounds to me like he’d do it.”
“But he’ll let me if I’m with you. I’d like to come, Mr. Bandy. Just partway.”
Bandy cocks his head.
“Like you said. I’m no officer.”
The trail winds through the trees, down into another canyon. Receding patches of snow on the branches and earth cling in the dark forest like vanishing innocence. Bandy strides ahead of the young driver. He does not turn to look back but figures the boy is walking bent double to get under the limbs. Bandy imagines having to fight like that. On all sides of the path is strewn jetsam of battle: brass bullet casings, trash from med kits, tree trunks scalded bare by glancing rounds. Stewie walks without noise. He falls behind. Stewie is stopping to look. Maybe, Bandy thinks, now he sees the ghosts.
But in another minute there are not ghosts but bodies. On all sides of the trail corpses, dozens of dead men, lie in the freeze frame of death, where they fell and how they fell. They’ve been refrigerated by winter, not touched by the living in months. The men look freshly killed, the chill has kept them from bloating and rotting. Their skin looks almost supple. Snow melt has washed the blood from the ground, but darkness stains the soldiers’ uniforms and clings in the crevices of hands and wounds.
In shock, Bandy stops walking.
How can this be? The dead left on the ground like this, uncollected in such numbers? He scrambles in his head for an answer.
There is no smell, the sap in the pines is thick with the cold. The valley is silent, no birds, no wind, not a voice. But there are hands and feet and eyes and guns everywhere. Three months ago there was too much noise and smell, hand-to-hand fighting, hot horror. Now it’s frozen, as though Nature took her own photograph of the war this way.
Stewie comes behind him. The boy’s face, a full head above Bandy’s eyes, is stamped in terror. This is the great dread for a soldier, for every man in uniform in every capacity of arms, that he will die and be abandoned on the ground. His sacrifice unknown, eaten into the earth. To give your life and in return be forgotten.
Stewie doubles over and tries to retch. Bandy walks on.
He could say something to the boy but chooses not to. He’s not responsible for Stewie, who pivots on the trail and flees. Bandy answers to America; his camera answers to history. And here both he.
Bandy is alone now with the bodies. Americans and Germans rest side by side. Bandy sees ultimate stories in their positions and final gestures, hieroglyphs of how grisly the fighting must have been here in the Hürtgen. Men have their hands on rifle stocks ramming bayonets into the enemy, to be killed from behind by another man who himself was felled somehow by one of the attackers or defenders. Kindled tanks and trucks rest farther off the trail where they were destroyed, some have charred men hanging from them, their attempts to escape their blasted vehicles thwarted. Strange, Bandy thinks, when there’s only a fortress or a field of quiet weapons before him, the air bristles full in his mind with battle sounds. But here, with the dead flung on the ground, his brain stays mum.
Bandy kneels on the trail. He takes from the pack his Speed Graphic and stows the Leica. The Speed Graphic is a big camera, bulky once it’s folded out of its case. It is the more difficult camera to use but it produces a four-by-five-inch negative, providing unchallenged clarity. Bandy has entered the valley of death, it is an honor to be here. He’ll be respectful, as requested. He slides the expanding leather bellows into place with a snap. The metal click flits off among the corpses, a petty and alive sound. Bandy shoulders his pack and walks farther down into the canyon almost on tiptoe.
Between every photo, Bandy has to slide out from the camera’s rear a thin, two-shot film pack, reverse it or get out a new pack and slip it in. His hands and eyes are absorbed. His heart stays nimble, dodging out of the way, negotiating the scene as carefully as do his feet. He does not feel ghoulish or inappropriate busy among the dead. He’s exhilarated. The job, the opportunity, courses through his veins. The clink of the shutter is the armor around his life, the flipping mirror is his shield; the camera’s quiet clatter keeps emotion at bay. So long as he looks through the camera lens, he sees this scene the way a reader of Life will later see the images on the page, from a distance. Bandy is moved, yes, but also removed. There’s no other way, if he or any war photographer is to do this work.
And it is vital work. Images of war must be on coffee tables and in breakfast nooks back home. Mom and Pop and Sissy must behold war. Bandy can’t make them smell it or hear or touch it from their sofas and church pews but he can help them see it. The costs must be made true, real and horrible for everyone, so nations will be cautious before choosing conflict. History repeats when the lessons go unchronicled.
Bandy is careful not to take pictures showing the faces of American dead. He frames them to avoid name patches or divisional insignia. No mother at home will see a Charles Bandy photo and recognize her fallen son. With German bodies, he is not so cautious.
The men wear the “Bloody Bucket,” the red keystone emblem of the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division. They must have fought through this canyon towards the Kali River valley in the late fall before the first snow. The combat was savage. But afterward, how could these bodies not have been retrieved and buried? How could Army Headquarters not have been aware of the disaster down here?
Bandy imagines the canyon filled with snow soon after the battle. The steep trail from the west would have become impassable with the first storm. The Germans withdrew east from this part of the Hürtgen, perhaps planning on coming back but never making it. So the dead, hundreds of comrades from both armies, were left winterbound and neglected. In the thaw of the past week the bodies resurfaced. The Americans have only now returned to the Hürtgen and found them.
Bandy tucks in his lips, boggled. How to explain this? War, he thinks. It’s just war, the catastrophic made commonplace. No one will take responsibility for this. The Kali River canyon, so hideous right now, will be tidied up by administrators, washed white not with snow, but more permanently, with paper and some lies.
The trail leads a half mile to the bottom of the canyon. There, Bandy finds a mountain stream swollen with run-off. The water makes a peaceful riffle. He follows the stream around a wooded bend. Emerging into a clearing Bandy sees an abandoned American aid station. The pretty water surges past two large canvas tents. There
is a jeep marked with a red cross. Litter cases, more than two dozen of them, are arranged in a neat line beside the stream, like railroad ties. The eerie silence of the Hürtgen is not chased by the moving water, the almost antiseptic air hovers sharp and empty. The forest seems asleep.
Bandy steps towards the tents. A cold suspicion rises in him that the bundles on the stretchers are not empty blankets. His approach soon reveals they are dead U.S. soldiers.
On reflex he halts far enough away to encompass the whole scene through the viewfinder of his Speed Graphic. Once the aid station is inside the metal square, he prepares to release the shutter.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 14
