Shrapnel

by William Wharton

  But, we are actually all reamed out, notes are taken. There is going to be a court martial about this after all. The Sergeant of the Guard, that’s me, and these two guys are hauled in and put under guard. We can’t go anywhere. We’re confined to quarters. The quarters are not very impressive; we’re in a mouldy cellar.

  A summary court martial is set up and we hang around. They send us a lawyer who’s supposed to defend us. He’s a Lieutenant and is scared to death of Collier. Major Collier, the son, is going to be a witness and sort of prosecutor. I’m too young and ignorant of the dangers to be concerned enough about a really serious military court martial. I don’t know what’s really going on, but we decide we don’t want this Lieutenant defending us, he’s going to do more harm than good, so we don’t tell him anything. But we work out a plan.

  They decide not to court martial me. I was Sergeant of the Guard, I saw it all and so I’m to be a witness. The guys in trouble work out a scenario with me. We say I’d just been there less than an hour before and there were no women on this post. It’s very hot down there in the cellar and that’s why they didn’t have their helmets and field jackets on. I’m there because I’m manning the cellar door while they’re down doing an inspection of the post. It’s a very flimsy kind of excuse but we work out a couple of tricks. We know the Major’s not very smart.

  For the court martial, there’s to be a bird colonel on the court. They’re all big brass. They’ve taken a building that isn’t in too bad shape, cleaned it out, and are using it as a sort of courtroom. They have a long table with chairs for all the officers. The deposition is made by Major Collier as to what he has seen and he is straight, trying to say exactly what happened. The officer in charge, the Colonel, calls our assigned Lieutenant to have him speak and he does just what we expected he would do. He repeats almost exactly what Major Collier says, agreeing with him, even though he saw nothing. At the same time, he’s making excuses for us, in terms of ‘what these men have been through’ and so on.

  I’m called to testify. It isn’t a regular civil trial. There are only two witnesses; me and Major Collier. I ask if I can question Major Collier. The Colonel nods his head.

  ‘Major Collier, were the gates open, closed, or partially open when you arrived?’

  He says, ‘They were completely open.’

  I say, ‘There were no gates.’ And there weren’t.

  I get him to admit he’s hardly seen the women. I tell how they were a mother and her little girl looking for fire wood and the men on guard had just chased them off when the General arrived.

  Now, the court martial board is against Major Collier because of his relationship to his father. After we’d gone through several of these little scenarios, where it becomes obvious Collier hadn’t really seen anything, he’s well befuddled. The Colonel in charge of the court martial stands up, scraping his chair against the wooden floor as he does so.

  ‘It seems to me, Gentlemen of the court, the evidence for this court martial is not sufficient and has not been properly gathered.’

  He looks around at everyone at the table, they all nod their heads. Then, just like that, we’re dismissed. Well, the poor Major who was hoping to get his oak leaf, doesn’t, and our guys are exonerated. We go out and have a really big K ration celebration afterwards.

  ROLIN CLAIRMONT

  When I first came back to K Company, I’d been assigned as a scout to the second platoon, I guess because I’d been in I&R. I’m assigned along with a new replacement, named Rolin Clairmont. Since we’re the two new arrivals, we’re tent mates, as if we ever got to sleep in tents instead of wet holes.

  We get to know each other reasonably well. He’s tall, at least six three and comes from Bordertown, New York. Before the army, he worked with his father taking hunters into upper New York State and even up into Maine to hunt. Most times they’d fly in. Rolin and his father live on a lake in New York State and they have a plane with pontoons. Rolin has been flying planes illegally since he was thirteen or fourteen years old and knows a lot about them. He also knows a lot about shooting and hunting.

  He makes a good tent/hole mate. Most of the people in K Company are from the South, but he turns out to be better than the southerners at being southern. He’s had much experience with rifles, hunting of all kinds, from deer and bear, to small game hunting; squirrels, rabbits. He also knows how to build a still, and he can speak French. He tells me he speaks Canadian French. We’re not that far into Germany and most of the civilians speak French or German, or both. It’s an intermediate, no-man’s kind of land.

  There’s an interesting thing about border zones, in Europe, anyway. They always seem to be much more sleazy, run down, compared to the rest. It’s almost as if everything stops moving and working right around the border. This is the kind of area we’re in, and putting the war on top of that, it’s quite shabby.

  When Rolin comes up to K Company, we’re in battalion reserve. But two days later we’re moved on to Neuendorf, replacing L Company. It’s been medium hard according to them, they’re going back, and of course they exaggerate, telling us how awful it is and trying to scare us. They say things like, ‘You’ll be sorry’, or ‘Take a last look at the world’ – all those kinds of usual things.

  It’s after midnight when we move into the line, so we’re slipping and stumbling around, going into holes that are already dug and mucked up. We’re two hours on and four off, but when you’re off four, you’re not really in comfort; you’re in another hole, which is dug up against a wall. However, that hole feels like practically going home compared to the outpost hole Rolin and I are sharing guard on. Our hole is the farthest forward, closest to the Germans. It’s maybe forty to a hundred yards out from the hole against the wall.

  We’re out there and we rotate with each other three or four times. Nothing’s really happening. I’ll never know how the army decides when to move and when not to move. Luckily, in the part of the world we’re in, we are neither in attack nor in retreat. I imagine it’s a question of getting supplies up or somebody making up his mind.

  Then when we charge out and do an attack, we’ll settle down to wait again, right after. It’s a strange kind of business. It changes later but this is the way it is then. We’re taking a bit of territory, then consolidating, taking a bit more, consolidating again.

  Rolin and I are out in our hole. It’s a pretty good spot right at the edge of the forest looking down a long hill with a stream at the bottom, and then the hill goes up the other side and there’s another forest edge over there. That’s about four or five hundred yards away. We know the Germans are in the forest. We don’t know exactly where, we try to keep an eye out for them but they aren’t about to reveal their positions and we aren’t going to reveal ours either. We just assume they know where we are but aren’t doing anything any more than we are.

  We’re always careful, we don’t stick our heads up and we don’t rustle around and make noise. It’s a good position to change guard because we have cover almost all the way to the hole and then there’s a slight drop going toward the forest. I imagine that’s why they dug it here.

  Anyway, when we change guard, we come in and the other guys go out, hardly exchanging a word unless something important has happened, and hardly anything has, generally. After that, we’ll sit a while to see if any Germans have seen us make the change. Again, it’s sort of like ‘hide and seek’. Rolin and I are out there a little over an hour into a four hour guard. Night guards are two. Suddenly two German soldiers come out of nowhere, walking right across in front of us. We figure they must be lost or crazy. They come out of the forest on the other side, walking down the hill. They’re strolling along the stream with their guns on their shoulders as if there’s no war going on at all. We both immediately lift our rifles and release the safeties.

  I’m waiting to see Rolin’s hunting skills when it comes to real combat. It’s a terrible thing to say, but you don’t want to take any unnecessary chances. The proper, wa
rlike, military thing to do is to shoot these two guys and duck down, hoping nobody saw you shoot.

  It’s as bad as that, but that’s the way it is. You’re not going to shout and stand up yelling, ‘Give up. We’ve got you covered.’ You’re not about to go down that hill and chase them either. You’re just going to shoot them and duck down as fast as possible. Also, you’re not going to let them just go by, this is the enemy after all. The sad thing is, we have an obligation to do our part. They’re just making the kind of mistake I could easily make myself. I have a rotten sense of direction.

  After a minute, it looks to me as if they’re sort of coming toward us at a diagonal. They come down to the stream, a small stream, find some rocks and cross it. They must be really lost. They’re going at a slow pace with their rifles still slung on their shoulders but they’re getting closer and closer.

  I’m thinking, ‘Boy this guy Clairmont really is a hunter, he never fires until he’s ready.’ He keeps looking over at me and I keep looking at him. I can see he’s getting more and more nervous. I am too. I swear they aren’t more than fifty yards away and we can hear them talking.

  He turns to me and whispers, ‘Would you give a fire order, please?’

  I realise he’s thinking he’s on a rifle range. You aren’t allowed to fire on a rifle range unless you have a firing order.

  ‘For Christ’s sake Rolin, open up, Fire!’ I yell.

  Clairmont takes the front one, and I take the back one. They go down twisting and squirming, then are still. We duck down and wait to see what’s going to happen. Maybe there are other Germans and they’ll start shooting, but all is quiet

  Well, I’ll never know to this day why those two Germans were strolling around as if there was no war going on. The thing I remember most is the control Clairmont had standing there, waiting for a firing order. It was a premonition of things to come.

  A FLIGHT OF FANCY

  Rolin and I get to be good buddies. He’s a chess nut and has a small portable chess set we play on. We share easily and, except for Rolin’s stinky feet and his size, he’s a perfect tent mate. Within a few weeks, while we’re in company reserve, I manage to pick up another small shrapnel wound in my shoulder. Flying shrapnel in those days is almost as common as wasps. I’m sent back to the field hospital and they take it out and put in a few stitches.

  Once again, I milk this little wound as long as I can to stay off the line. And I get my second purple heart. We’re beginning to hear rumblings of a point system for discharging when the war is over. This purple heart is worth five points to me toward discharge.

  When I finally come back to the outfit the guys have had some pretty rough stuff again. In particular, they’ve had a bad time in a place they call ‘the crossroads’. It’s like people talking all the time about a movie you haven’t seen. It’s common with soldiers to name battles as a place personal to themselves. These battles I’m sure have different names and numbers in the military records where such things are kept, but to us, they are private property. When someone is hit or killed we refer to the situation as ‘he got hit at the crossroads’, or whichever private landmark is nominated for that bad time.

  By being in the hospital, I’ve missed the ‘battle of the crossroads’. Because there are so many casualties, and because Rolin is such a natural soldier, he’s been made a squad leader and a staff sergeant while I’ve been gone. He wants me for his assistant squad leader. Normally the squad leader and the assistant don’t share the same tent or hole, but we pull it off.

  For Rolin, the war is like some kind of game, a combination of chess and Russian roulette. He likes it! Of course, I’m still scared out of my mind by the whole thing. So we have a sort of symbiotic relationship in which he plays war hero and I’m his audience. We begin taking patrols together, just the two of us. This is also not the way it should be done. But Rolin always volunteers us for some of the most treacherous patrols and I go along because he’s so persuasive. That’s how I get into my second most ridiculous event of the war, after that D-3 day. And it involves a small airplane again, my little personal history repeating itself.

  We’re roaming around on a vague patrol, looking for an L4 airplane that’s been shot down, not too different from the one I was dumped out of at the start of my personal war.

  Rolin is acting as combination scout and squad leader. We’re in an area where there’s been tons of artillery thrown against the enemy, directed by little Piper cubs called L4 artillery observers. The Germans keep trying to shoot them down, but it must be harder than one would think because it’s rare they get one. But this time they do, and Rolin swears he saw where it went down.

  We, as ground troops, are not too happy having these planes fly over top of us because they give the Germans an idea as to where we are on the ground. Also, there’s some shrapnel fallout from the ack-ack of anti-aircraft guns.

  Our patrol, as designed by Rolin, is to see if we can locate this L4. He’s convinced it’s been shot down in something of a no-man’s land between the two meandering front lines. Everything is fairly fluid right now.

  It’s coming on to early spring and Rolin is all hopped up. We’re just wandering and, as usual, I’m scared half to death. I’m trying to keep track with my compass so we can get back, shooting azimuths about every ten minutes.

  ‘You don’t need to do that, Will,’ Rolin tells me. ‘I know my way back. Remember, I used to take these Wild Bill hunters into the deep woods of New York and Maine. I know just where we are.’

  ‘Yeah, but do you know where we’re going?’ I ask. ‘Remember those two Krauts we shot, just wandering around? Something like that could happen to us, too.’

  About five minutes later we look out from the edge of a wood, and sure enough, see that L4 we’re looking for. We sit for about half an hour trying to see if anybody’s around, either the guys who were flying it, or some Kraut keeping watch on it. We don’t see a thing.

  ‘Hell, I’m getting tired of just sitting around, Will. You cover me.’

  With that, he’s off with his rifle unslung, moving toward the airplane. I have an M1, I lost my carbine with the filed off sear somewhere in the trip back to the hospital. I keep the rifle lined up on him, scanning as he goes.

  He walks right up to the plane, turns back, and waves for me to come on down. I move toward him cautiously, expecting someone to pick me off. God, how do I get in situations like this?

  Rolin’s all excited. He’s sitting in the cockpit by the time I get there. He wants me to give the prop a twist to start the engine. I’ve never done anything like that, so he jumps out and demonstrates a few times how to do it, with both hands, pull hard clockwise, then jump out of the way. I do that and he’s inside trying to get the motor started but nothing happens. He smiles and jumps out.

  ‘No gas. Could those idiots have just let this thing go down because they didn’t fill it with gas?’

  He looks in back of the plane and finds two Jerry cans full of high octane gas. He passes them out to me.

  ‘I’ll bet some lucky Kraut bastard managed to put a bullet hole into the gas tank, or maybe one of those puffs of anti-aircraft smoke we see actually had some shrapnel in it. So there’s most likely a hole and the gas drained right on out. Boy, those guys in this bird must have been scared shitless. I don’t see any blood in the cockpit so either they got back somehow, or the Krauts took them prisoner.’

  While he’s saying this, he’s looking around under the airplane. He pushes his finger into a hole.

  ‘Here it is. Those guys were lucky this thing didn’t just blow up on them or burst into flames.’

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Rolin. Those Germans could have a guard on this plane. They must have seen it come down, too.’

  ‘What, leave a perfectly good plane out here in this field because of an iddy biddy hole? Let’s see if we can get this baby off the ground again.’

  He’s already crawled back into the fuselage and is pounding with a wrench against the in
side of the gas tank. He tells me to put the butt of my rifle against the hole on the outside. In five minutes he has that hole pounded out just about smooth.

  ‘We’re lucky,’ he says. ‘The gas stopped the bullet or piece of shrapnel, or whatever it was, so there’s only one hole. Wait a minute.’

  He’s searching through his field jacket pockets. He pulls out two sticks of gum and starts chewing one. He gives me the other.

  ‘My ten year old brother sent these. He knows how much I like to chew bubble gum. Boy, he’ll appreciate the way we’re going to use it.’

  When we have the gum chewed up, he starts sticking it down on the remains of the hole. He smears it tight into the cracks of the hole pressing it inside and out.

  ‘Man, I hope gum isn’t soluble in gasoline, but it doesn’t really matter. We probably won’t be going that far.’

  So we fill the tank with the two Jerry cans and Rolin gets into the cockpit again. After five or six tries, I spin the propeller right and the motor turns over. Rolin motions me into the plane.

  ‘Come on, Will, we’re going to have some fun.’

  I’ve never been in an airplane before except for those parachute jumps at Benning, that channel-hopping ride where I was pushed out, and the short ride with my Dad. But I climb in. In some strange way, I’m mesmerised.

  Rolin taxies the plane uphill to the edge of the forest. He turns it around, guns the motor and starts going downhill at full speed. I duck down expecting we’re going to crash at any minute. Imagine an infantryman being killed in a little airplane like this in the middle of a field. I can hardly think. Rolin is laughing.

  He clears the trees on the other side of the field by about two feet and we’re in the air. He waggles the wings for fun.

  ‘Stop it, Rolin. I can’t take it. You’ll have me upchucking all over this thing.’