We were to divert two platoons ten miles north, to a small rail yard the air campaign had opted not to bomb on humanitarian grounds, as intel indicated there was a fairly substantial population of political prisoners and “friendlies” working there as slave laborers. They’d done most of the job for us, severing the rail yard from the rest of the world by obliterating the surrounding rail lines. It was no longer capable of distributing materiel to the Reich, but the capability was still there to execute the laborers (if it had not already been done).
I was heartened by this. Rare in the war is there the opportunity to be contributive rather than subtractive. To save rather than destroy.
It was not a military facility. We knew this immediately upon arrival. Virtually all of the capable soldiers had been pushed to the front lines; here the men who guarded this facility were either too old or too young to heft a weapon with any real skill.
Our snipers dispatched two of them, the other two surrendered almost instantaneously. As we secured them, it was evident they were drunk. Horribly so. And grateful. One of them wept, embraced every GI he could—glad to be done with this war—’til someone put the butt of a rifle to him and tied his hands.
We entered the facility. It was apparent someone was living high on the hog here—staff officer, foreman, whoever it was that ran this place—because the office that overlooked the floor was resplendent with looted art and furniture. He apparently left in a hurry too, because a half-full glass of cognac still rested on his desk. (Pedals, of course, drank this.)
In short order we found the laborers. They were sickly things, but because of their exhausted state, were unable to show the same euphoria of liberation the guards had. They cast their gazes down at the floor, as if trying to process. One of the older ones began sobbing, but it struck me as a broken process—as if his parts weren’t working right, like an engine running without oil. He was so dehydrated he could produce no tears. He just rasped and shuddered. I gave him water from my canteen.
We were unsettled, of course. It is one thing to see the dead; it is another thing to see the dead still breathing. As if, though their bodies still persisted, their minds and souls had been destroyed some time back by all that had been done to them.
Pedals was uneasy for a different reason. He kept saying, “There are only ten of them.”
I didn’t get his point.
“You don’t send one hundred twenty men in to save ten.”
But apparently we had, and if the sum total of this operation was two deaths while we’d in turn saved ten, I was willing to take that. As I said, anything contributive is a victory over the subtractive math of war.
We got the laborers back outside to one of the deuce-and-a-halfs. (We had brought three in anticipation of having considerably more laborers to liberate.)
But we were surprised when yet another deuce arrived, bearing General Smith himself.
He had a brief conversation with a couple of the COs. I kept a vague eye on this as I tried to get some K-rations and water into the prisoners.
Then Arguello came back. We were to go back in. I’ll never forget what he said. We’d been ordered to “secure and requisition” what was in the facilities.
We asked what it was. He told us he didn’t know, but those were the orders.
So we went back in. One of the guys that was on Smith’s deuce came with us. He was a quartermaster, it turned out. Which is, as you know, a foreign concept—a quartermaster on the front lines. Like generals, they prefer that none of their five senses be offended by the sights or sounds of war. They just prefer a postcard every now and then.
But there he was, copiously ordering his men to comb through the materiel. We were kept at a remove—tasked with the “securing” part while they were focused on the “requisitioning.” They were not finding what they wanted.
It turned out this was because there was more storage space we’d not yet discovered. There was some sort of an underground extension of the facility, cut into the hillside beyond the rails.
What was in there—and more importantly, how we were expected to get in—was a bit of a mystery.
There was no visible lock. Just a steel door in the earth.
The men tried prying it, shooting it, but the door would not be troubled.
But I tell you, that quartermaster was determined to get in there.
He brought forward a guy with an acetylene torch (he was prepared, wasn’t he?—quartermasters, right?). And after a number of minutes had blazed a hole in the door wide enough that a man might squeeze in.
They peered into that blackness for a few moments, then told us to go in and secure the interior.
Arguello was a little uncomfortable with this, the idea that a quartermaster was now issuing orders. Pedals thought it was funny: “Guess if a man spends all these years in the war doing nothing but ordering which cans of beans go where, which sacks of rice go where, he gets the idea he can mobilize anything.”
Nevertheless, it was clear that the quartermaster was acting as a proxy for Smith. And we weren’t exactly going to say no to Smith.
So Arguello led us in. We went through that breach and into the darkness. It opened up quickly inside—that tiny little door widened into a cavernous underground concrete bunker. We put on our flashlights and could see that the place was stacked wall-to-wall with crates. There was French writing on the side, which, of course, meant nothing to me.
Then it came. This horrible concussion. It rolled through us, felt like it was going to shatter our eyes, eardrums, sternums. Somebody had unloaded a panzerfaust at us. An anti-tank weapon, right there in that claustrophobic little box!
The sound shattered us—so much so that the flaming blast that lit up part of the room seemed almost incidental. And in that tight quarter, it was as if the sound could not escape, but rather caromed around against the cement walls in a perpetual ringing roar.
Our flashlights had gone skittering everywhere—blasted from our hands, dropped in shock. They rolled on the floor, their cones of light gyrating randomly on the cement.
There was yelling through that hellish ringing—some of it ours, some of it the Germans. The instinct is to grab your gun and start shooting. You know nothing, only that you’re alive, and the quickest way to stay that way is to start shooting. But I didn’t carry a gun. So I did my version of things: I located my syrettes, my satchel, and looked for someone to put back together.
Though I quickly knew that not even God could put some of what I saw back together.
More than one of the flashlights were held by arms no longer attached to bodies.
Blood and viscera were everywhere.
Everyone was shooting. In that moment, it felt more as if the insane roaring echo would kill me faster than the bullets would. It felt as if the sides of my skull would shatter inward from all the noise.
Then there was a lull. Men reloading, taking positions, a few of them grabbing their flashlights again. As suddenly as the gunfire had come, it was gone (for the moment). The echo persisted. Over it, as it dissipated in the darkness, you began to hear men gasping, muttering foul-mouthed prayers and imprecations.
I had one of them in my hands. I’d pulled him back behind one of the crates. It took me some time to realize it was Arguello.
His left ear had been shorn off. The side of his head looked like it had been scalped. From his jaw to the crown of his head, the skin and hair had been blasted away. He looked up at me expectantly. Like there was hope.
Then Luger fire filled the place. From somewhere across that dark space. Funny how we can differentiate between their weapons and ours, isn’t it? How somehow the guttural sound of a Colt is comforting, because you knows it’s coming from your side (and you almost tune it out), while that more refined 9mm sound immediately puts you on high alert. One horrid sound, your friend; the other—indistinguishable to the civilian ear—the sound of oblivion coming.
It was a single Luger in the blackness, its clip rapidly b
eing spent.
The walls strobed like a carnival ride.
Then it was done. And we were left again to the echoing darkness.
But one of our guys had found him with our flashlight. Our assailant.
It was only one man. The cognac-drinking overseer that had fled the other building in such haste. He was across the way, visible in the spill of the flashlights, fumbling to put more rounds into his Luger.
He was a tragic, surreal sight. Sixty, maybe. Still in his SS tunic, but clad in civilian pants and shoes, as if we’d caught him mid-change, just moments before he was going to flee. He was this pale, corpulent thing. Like he had not seen the sun since the war had begun. The fact that he was staggering drunk only heightened these impressions. He was muttering to himself in German, not looking up, focused instead on trying to slide a shell into his Luger. He didn’t react to the lights falling across him. Instead, he just kept talking to himself. It seemed he was mad at himself, mad at God, mad at anyone but us.
A couple of our men came at him. His fingers stopped in their hopeless attempt to load the Luger.
He finally looked up at the light shining in his face.
“I am rich,” he said, in halting English.
He said it as if it was the saddest thing in the world.
Then our guys put a bullet in his face.
We’d lost thirteen men.
I’d done my best, along with Pedals and the other aid men, to get the wounded back to the deuces. CP was ten miles off. The deuces were not fast vehicles. We needed to get moving. Arguello, particularly, was in bad shape. Besides his near-scalping, he had shrapnel wounds all along his rib cage. All the while, the requisitioning was going on. They’d found what they were looking for, and all effort was being made to spirit out the crates from the bunker as quickly as possible. They loaded up the deuces and we were off.
It’s difficult enough to tend to a man on the battlefield, but there at least the ground isn’t moving. It is another thing entirely to tend to a man on a moving vehicle, particularly over war-torn roads.
With every bounce, Arguello groaned, cried out. It is an ignoble thing to see a commanding officer—a man you respect—whimper, lose that edifice of power and control, and regress, as almost all the badly wounded do, to a scared child.
I offered him morphine, this half-faced man. It was difficult for me to look at him, but as a medic you can never let on. Your face must be a deceptive mirror reflected back at them.
He declined, on moral grounds. Which confused me and bemused me in that sick, wry way war did.
“I’m offering you a way out!”
“Christian Scientists don’t do that.”
“Yeah, and you’re not a Christian Scientist.”
“There you’re wrong.”
“I thought you were Catholic.”
“Because I’m, what, Latino?”
He was spot on there, I suppose. Still, a Christian Scientist?
“There are one or two of us in Latin America, or so I’m told.”
We hit a deeper rut in the road, and that split-open face contorted into an even more garish expression.
I told him I was going to give him morphine. He told me no again.
Nevertheless—and I’d done this before—I jabbed him with morphine anyhow, if not expressly to ease his pain, then to ease my own. To see someone suffer like that, it turns your stomach. Then once you see that temporary calm befall them, that painless nowhere-land Pedals was addicted to, you’re allowed a moment to breathe, to escape your own panic and revulsion.
He called me a son of a bitch. But he said it with the faintest of smiles from that torn face. It was the foulest language I ever heard from him.
As I climbed back through the deuce-and-a-half, tending to the other men, I caught view of what we’d requisitioned. It was there in one of the crates near the back, now open, the quartermaster excitedly inspecting it with another SOS man.
It was wine.
What we’d liberated were not just the ten men, but 220 cases of the rarest Chateau Lafite Rothschild, I later learned.
It was supposedly from the finest vineyard in the world, which the Germans had occupied when they’d taken France. It had been one of the many ancillary “priorities” for the Nazi High Command. One of the finest spoils the French culture could offer. And now apparently we’d requisitioned it. There was little doubt that it would not be appearing again in the Rothschild cellars anytime soon.
The quartermaster was handing out bottles (though being judicious; he was doing a mental count of not just the crates on our truck, but on the two vehicles ahead; he leaned out over the road, peering ahead, notching as precise a count as he could). Pedals had already carved out the cork from his bottle with his combat knife. He was a sight to see—face smeared in cordite powder and the blood of his comrades, swigging from a $1,000 bottle of wine like it was rotgut.
I was, of course, putting pieces together. The supposed humanitarian mission. The quartermaster calling the shots. The three extra deuce-and-a-halfs brought along, ostensibly to fill with liberated slave laborers.
They knew what they were looking for.
Pedals and I sat together for a long time in silence as we bounced through the landscape, our minds attuned to the same thing. Pedals was doing his best to finish the bottle.
“No need to be mad,” he finally said. He hefted the bottle, surveyed its complex, elegant label. “It’s just the way it is.”
I surveyed our wounded; I’d done what I could to stabilize them. Now it was a matter of being patient, which was often the hardest part, and hope that they make it to the aid station alive.
“Don’t make this mistake of thinking you’re still alive, Gray.”
I looked at him then. He shrugged in the most perfect, broken-hearted resignation. Smiled like he’d once and for all thrown in the towel, and was now free because of it. “You think any of us are still alive? We died the moment we signed up.”
He offered me the bottle. I felt like I’d throw up if I drank from it. He took another swig: “They say the most hellish thing about hell is trying to get out. Not acknowledging you’re there forever. Once you finally accept it—that fire and brimstone is your lot—the flames don’t burn so much—they just sort of keep you toasty. And sometimes it’s nice to be toasty, isn’t it?” He drank again.
He offered me the bottle again.
And this time, brother, I drank.
I confess I took it and drank it.
And it was good.
While our dead brothers lay unceremoniously splayed on the bouncing floor, their souls cast into the horror of infinity, I drank. While they took with them on that horrid sojourn the lives of their unborn children, I drank. While their wives and families would be consigned to a thousand tiny deaths forevermore going forward because of their absence, I drank. It all radiated out from each of those dead men on that truck—that horrible, invisible, seismic ripple, racing across continents and oceans, killing the hearts and souls of the innocent, none of whom had anything to do with the war. Maybe that—that exponential unseen devastation—was why I drank. It is not one man that dies when his heart stops beating; it is his world.
So while those blast waves worked their way toward America, I drank a 1919 bottle of Chateau Lafite Rothschild. It was exquisite.
Maybe Pedals is right: we are cursed souls. Hell’s denizens. It seems as right to me as anything else at this point. I am trying to accept that. But the lick of those flames is not yet any less intense around me.
God, I pray you have seen another way over there.
Yours,
G.
22 March 1945
Lieutenant Arguello died.
Infection took over his face. One of the more horrid ways I’d seen men go.
With luck he is in the arms of his Lord, but I don’t think so perfect a creature—as God is deemed to be—could be so schizophrenic as to subject a man to the sort of hell Arguello endured, then a few momen
ts later, in a magical kingdom on the other side of death, embrace him like a long lost child. I don’t buy it.
We’re nearing Berlin. The war in Europe is nearly over. We have free rein on the autobahns now—they’re in fact populated with nothing but Allied vehicles as far as the eye can see.
Why doesn’t Germany give up? Why do they by their resistance only make the desolation worse? There are pockets of resistance—the odd, lonely sniper in the bell tower taking potshots at our divisions as we roll past. By pulling that trigger rather than slinking away back into society anonymously, he guarantees his death. And yet he still does it. Kills maybe one or two men in our inexorable march of half a million. A few minutes later we range him with a Sherman or artillery, knock him down, then he is no more.
Why does he do it—why as a pebble before the tsunami does he still try to resist? He is either suicidal or a steadfast believer. Maybe they are the same thing.
I’ve come to see men like that as my brethren. Caught by the unholy torrent of war, spellbound by it, resisting like fools despite the odds. I fight the same losing battle in my medical attempts. Waves of the wounded and dying come at me, though I am no more of a surgeon or doctor than I was when this started. I’ve learned a few tricks, but they are just smoke and mirrors. I still rely on morphine a lot, and stopgap measures like safety pins and duct tape. In this way, day after day, I try to save them. But for every one I save, another dozen die. It’s not just GIs. I try to take shrapnel out of civilians, breathe life back into their children; I even attend to German prisoners—yesterday a whole battalion, 2,000 men, surrendered to two marines; they are malnourished, half-crazed like we are. Someone will win this war, but it is not the soldiers.
Yesterday was another day of mop-up. For the most part, though the Nazi High Command in Berlin refuses to surrender, and there are the odd holdouts in bell towers, the common German soldier knows the war is lost. We can scarcely accommodate all the surrenders. Sometimes we just pass them by, and they have this horrible jilted look on their face—these men that were for years hell-bent on killing us are now almost heartbroken that we aren’t acknowledging their existence. If it were not paid for in blood, war would be farce.
The Far Shore Page 11
