We have been unable to write any letters since our arrival here. Only officers may censor letters, and our officers are up front. Of course, mail pickup is a little irregular here, also. I get panicky at the realization that the last letter you will receive from me will only tell you that I’m in Germany. After that there will be days, perhaps weeks, of silence. I know how bad those days will be for you, and there is nothing I can do to ease them. I have had no mail since leaving Bastogne, but that’s a minor discordancy in a world completely out of tune. It’s harder for you.
The German paper on which I have been writing these notes has a tendency to dissolve in moisture, like flour and water paste. I’ve been keeping these scribbled pages inside my shirt, between shirt and woolen underwear, in the hope of keeping them dry. Even so, I have no real hope that they will survive the coming weeks and get home to you eventually. I keep writing because it’s something to do.
We are told that before we’re assigned to positions within our particular platoons as scouts, antitank grenadiers, BAR men (Browning automatic riflemen), and so on, we will be interviewed individually by the captain. This is a sop to our still-civilian habits of mind, and I am becoming armywise at last. A month ago my hopes would have soared at the possibility of finding a niche tailor-made to fit my special talents. The “interview” news today left me unmoved and... ? Reconciled, is the word, I guess. All I want now is for this to be over so I can go home and feel my kids tumbling over me like fat puppies ... see you smiling serenely from the green chair. I’ll do any kind of dirty job that will help bring that about.
November 25, and it’s still the Hurtgen Forest.
Another clear day, although colder, and our planes appeared in strength this morning to blast the German artillery positions. It’s believed that given a few days of clear weather, we’ll be in Cologne within a week.
It’s a weary and anxious time for us. Having nothing to do, we stand around and talk, hopefully exchanging the latest rumor or inventing a new one, hanging breathlessly on every word uttered by the occasional “old” men who drift back from the front for a few hours’ rest and a hot meal. We leant that the line has advanced four times in the past few days and the battle has settled down to dull waiting. There is little small- arms fire at the present time; casualties are mainly from mortar and artillery fire.
Trying to determine the exact front is very confusing because we have guns all around us. The heaviest barrages are at night, and lying in bed, I feel the ground shake and wonder if our reeling log hut will collapse upon us. The concussion is so great that our internal organs quiver and dance. It’s hard to describe the exact sensation. It’s as though heart and lungs, stomach and liver and lights, were suspended in Jell-O, and the bowl being shaken violently. It’s not too unpleasant after you get used to it, but sleep is frequently difficult.
The men who come back from the front for brief rests or to be treated for trench foot or other army ailments tell us not to be disturbed by the wild tales we may occasionally hear. Very
rarely we meet a man who takes cruel delight in filling our credulous ears with reports of conditions on the front as even worse than they are, a death rate even more appallingly high than it is, and false and misleading tips on what to take with us when we go up, what to do when we get there, et cetera. We haven’t met many like that. Most of them treat our ingenuousness with grave and elderly regard and give us honest and sound advice. It’s bad, they say, but not as bad as we might imagine. And even when we are told of some horror we had not suspected, still it is comforting to be told, to know a little of what it is and what we may expect. It’s the not-knowing that is hard to bear.
Talking to one of those veterans today, I was struck by how old he seemed. Not in physical appearance—in spite of his heavy beard, his haggard eyes, and all the evidences of great weariness, he was still a young man in his early twenties. Nor, in spite of what’s written in war novels, was his age heavily implicit in the tragedy of his eyes. No, it was in the way he spoke of life and death and mutilation, in his calm acceptance of transiency and impermanence, his serene willingness to receive whatever would come instead of the Quixotic rebellion against fate that every young man has a right to enjoy. I felt young and naive before his mature and unbegging resignation.
These woods testify mutely to all that preceded us here. In the holly thicket a few steps from my hut are two baby carriages, abandoned by fleeing civilians who left the road to avoid strafing. I have found three oil lamps, two of them of fine porcelain, decorated with hand-painted roses. And there is all manner of equipment that has been discarded as nonessential by GIs: money belts, tubes of toothpaste and shaving cream, a case of C rations that we raid between meals, a blanket, a gas mask, playing cards, books and magazines, stationery and ink—a motley and pathetic array of small possessions. The dregs of German passage are here, also: army blankets of coarse gray wool (we add all blankets, whether GI or German, to our bed), German gas masks, envelopes of “protective clothing” for use in gas-contaminated areas. (Like us, the Germans have apparently decided that poison gas will not be employed in this war.)
The question on everyone’s tongue, repeated a thousand times a day, is: “How long can they hold out?” We’re sure that it can’t last much longer; we’re confident it’s only a matter of days. No real reason for that confidence, it’s what we want to believe.
November 29 now.
Haven’t written for two days. Two reasons for that, one for each day. I spent November 27 trying to dry my clothing over a small fire, and yesterday we moved up and joined our outfit We’re a couple of miles behind the front The outfit was pulled out of the line for a few days in order to reorganize, but we’ll be going back up shortly. I’m now officially at home—a member of the first squad, first platoon, Company G, 16th Infantry Regiment 1st Infantry Division, 1st Army. A helluva lot of firsts.
There is much to tell you. But before I bring you up to date I want to report on two things I had almost forgotten:
(1) We do have fresh meat occasionally. One of our cooks has fallen into the habit (deplorable, but praise the Lord for it!) of wandering off every now and then with an M-l cradled in his arm and knocking off a stray cow—German, of course, and therefore incontrovertibly enemy. The dead animal is loaded on a trailer and brought back to camp where we skin it, butcher it, and eat it. We’ve had steak four times in the past week.
(2) You’ve probably wondered how effective the “Volksturm” is. From all I can discover, it’s not effective at all. It doesn’t even seem to exist, so far as adult Germans are concerned. (I have already mentioned guerrilla bands of teenage boys and girls, but if they are the “Volksturm,” may God have mercy on Germany!) However, we find an increasing number of young German boys, sixteen to eighteen years, in the regular German army. That is, they are in uniform and legitimately a part of the Wehrmacht.
Now for November 28, my day of matriculation. The order to pack up came without warning at nine-thirty a.m. By 9:45 we were ready to go, and at ten we were on the way. (I recall with wonder those Sunday mornings at home when a sudden desire to spend the day at the lake cottage meant two or three frenzied hours of packing food, diapers, bassinets, sweaters, bathing suits, toys, playpens, children, and dogs into the car before setting off at last in a sweaty and Bumpsteadian hugger-mugger.)
We marched about seven miles. After weeks of inactivity we were soft and it was tough going, especially when the roads dissolved into a single flowing stream of mud. Someday someone will write a book about war and tell the truth about the mud ... how you live in it, sleep in it, eat it and drink it, absorb it through your pores, comb it from your hair and shave it from your face, smell of it, wear it like a skin and like a rose in your lapel. I am tempted to paraphrase Bliss Carman:
There is something in the army that is native to my blood—
I think it’s mud...!
Despite the mud, it was a good day to march. Clear, crisp, and fitfully sunny. The briskn
ess of our pace soon warmed us, and excitement added its own special glow to the temperature of our bodies.
It was a vivid and memorable day, and I want to write down what I can remember of it because I’m pretty damn sure there will be many memorable days in the future. The near future... maybe tomorrow.
We moved steadily in the direction of Cologne through towns that were torn to pieces, littered with household goods and the broken wreckage of ancient buildings ... through fields so thickly dotted with shell holes that they seemed scarred as though by the pox. Scores of dead cows lay in the fields and ditches, most of them unwounded. Concussion is apparently more deadly to livestock than shrapnel. (The sight became commonplace in later weeks, and always the majority of casualties were adult cows: young calves by the dozen trotted homeless and hungry about the countryside.) Many of the cattle had been dead so long that they’d begun to collapse into the earth, the ragged pelts and awkward skeletons hugging closer and closer against the ground as though for shelter too late. Once we saw a dead goat, and the small body was somehow more pathetic than that of an equally dead cow, or score of cows. (Why, I wonder? Because the goat is a more personable animal?)
Everywhere was the litter of German retreat—helmets, gas masks, belts, packs, blankets, mess gear. Occasionally an unexploded hand grenade, either the potato-masher concussion type or the more deadly fragmentation variety, in shape like our own hand grenades. Once I saw the hilt of a German knife protruding from the bank, but I dared not go after it because the shoulders of the road had not yet been cleared of mines. German mines were freely in evidence, heaped on the edge of the road as they’d been discovered and rendered harmless by our engineers.
In the ditches flanking the road were foxholes and prone shelters at intervals of only a few yards, striking evidence of the kind of fighting it had been—advancing a little, digging in, advancing a little more, digging in. Backbreaking, heartbreaking labor. The woods on either side of the road were splintered matchwood, with not a single tree standing for thousands of yards at a stretch.
In the towns the churches were pretty badly damaged. That surprised me until I was told that the church steeples, being the highest points in any village, had been used by the Germans as artillery observation posts and such employment of churches made them legitimate targets for our artillery.
The sky was filled with our planes. I’ve just realized that I have not yet seen a German plane. Where the hell is this much vaunted Luftwaffe, anyway? Except for ack-ack, our own planes are unmolested. Today, flight after flight of our bombers and fighter escorts swarmed over, dropped their eggs on Cologne, and sped homeward. I did not see any of our aircraft fall, though surely there must have been some casualties.
The evidence of civilian tragedy is sometimes too poignant for easy dismissal. My heart lurched when I saw a toy automobile, just Geoff’s size, hanging drunkenly by one wheel from the shattered window of a ruined building. It was painted red. And a sick taste filled my mouth when I saw a Sukey-size teddy bear peering with one blue yam eye from under a pile of broken stone—all that was left of a home. And there were books and china and home-canned fruits and vegetables, and embroidered tablecloths and doilies and all the female frip-frap so beloved of the German hausfrau, now spilled on the dirty cobbles, half buried under the ruins. In the few habitable houses we passed, GIs were at work, trying to get the stoves to function. Mattresses and quilts padded broken windows and the shell holes in the walls. Once, I saw a green satin comforter in a deserted bivouac area, abandoned to the mud. A little startling.
All of the villages seemed to be occupied by our troops, and we encountered no civilians. As we passed one house, a shell hole in the roof and side revealed an American jeep placidly resting in the dining room, its blunt nose nudging a large and garish lithograph of Christ blessing the loaves and fishes.
We moved along steadily, a ten-yard interval between men as a precaution against enemy shells. In the fields that stretched between the little villages were sugar beets, rotting in the ground for lack of hands to harvest them. Once, we passed a bed of white chrysanthemums, cool and undisturbed, that stretched a hundred yards in length. At one end of this floral exclamation point an immense shell crater made an emphatic period. Affirmation and rebuttal.
We reached our destination about midday, a cement factory near Eschweiler. It was a new and modern building and not severely damaged, barring shell and bullet holes. Two dead Germans lay beside one of the buildings. Someone had covered them carelessly with their own overcoats, from which their feet protruded awkwardly. Their shoes were very muddy and very large.
Following chow we were assigned to platoons and squads. The few old men in the company seemed like good Joes. I liked the look and manner of the captain, and the way the men spoke of him, the shy understatement that revealed their love for the guy. (Note: This was the famous and well-loved Captain Shelby.) Looked like a good setup.
And that brings me up to date. What happens next is what I’ve been in the army eight months for. I’m scared, but at the same time keyed up with a kind of eagerness for an experience that is now so common that I feel poor lacking it That sounds like comic book or Horatio Alger dialogue, but you will understand what I mean. I think any man not in this business, or in it but rotting helplessly back in the States and thus not a part of it, will understand that feeling, too.
The captain told us that there is one wooded section between us and the plains of Cologne. It’s not in our sector, so it may not be our job. And he repeated what I have heard countless times from other sources: General Eisenhower has stated that the 1st Division is through when it hits the Rhine. We have less than twenty miles to go.
December 1.
A sunrise so beautiful this morning that I am persuaded it’s a good omen. We’re still in the cement factory, but we were alerted last night and are prepared to move out on a moment’s notice.
Day before yesterday, I had a shower. I mean a real shower, not standing naked in a rainfall. Twenty of us piled into a truck, drove sixteen miles to the rear, had hot showers, and were issued clean clothing. I’m cold without my dirt
Yesterday we walked to a makeshift range for a practice session with the bazooka. There was a tragic footnote to this semblance of basic training days. One of the men in another company was carrying a hand grenade in his hip pocket, and when he reached for his handkerchief, he accidentally pulled the pin. He was unable to get the grenade from his pocket in time and the explosion tore his hip away. He bled to death very quickly, lying in the mud on the side of the road.
To our incredulous disgust, we had a session of close order drill this morning. Shades of Camp Wheeler, is that what we’re in Germany for?
Noon chow is just over, served today with an unscheduled aperitif to stimulate digestion. We had finished eating and were standing in the wash-up line, waiting to clean our mess gear, when a Jerry plane suddenly screamed down upon us. We broke and hit for cover like a bunch of big- assed birds. (That’s a favorite army phrase that delights me.) Expecting strafing, we were sure it was upon us when we heard machine-gun fire. But it turned out to be our own guns, firing at the plane from defense emplacements in the field. Our ack-ack opened up at the same time, and to us, new and very green, it really seemed like war for a moment. The plane did not return the fire. It came over the factory twice, then fled.
Today was a day for disappointment, too, so bitter that I wanted to hide in a dark corner. We had a mail call, the first one, and there was no mail for me. “Shorty” Fennell and Bill Dillon—two names I’ll mention frequently from here on— got big bundles, but not even a postcard for me. There is a special pang to my grief because we are likely to move out at any time and no one can guess when the next mail call will be. I won’t dwell longer on my unhappiness. You know how it feels when the postman passes your door without even glancing up.
The two dead Germans I mentioned earlier have not yet been buried. Their bodies lie very near the place where we line
up for chow three times a day, and we squat beside them on upturned helmets to eat our meals. No appetite seems impaired by the presence of these silent guests. Fortunately, the weather remains cold.
The old men of the company have received us, the new replacements, with understanding tolerance. As you probably have surmised from the bitching in my letters, a replacement’s lot is not an ’appy one, and we’ve been kicked around a helluva lot. So, as we approached our final assignation, we felt a certain trepidation; we expected a supercritical appraisal from the old men, a look of scorn as if to say, “Oh, my Christ, look what they sent us!” Appraisal there has been, but thus far no scorn. We’ve had the sensation of being welcomed, and that is so rare an experience after eight months in this damn army that it’s like coming home. Combat will tell the tale, of course, but at least we have no feeling of being here on sufferance, even if in fact we are. The old men have been patient with our ignorance, kindly in their tutelage, and generous in their sharing of experience. It’s pretty damn wonderful, the way they’ve greeted us.
Note: In one of the letters I wrote Ree from the cement factory, I enclosed a clipping from Stars and Stripes that had made me sick and angry. My letter crossed one of hers, mailed at the same time, which contained the same news item, as it had appeared in one of the local papers, datelined November 29, 1944, St. Joseph, Missouri:
The little bakery shop was crowded and a woman was clearly heard to say, “I hope this war lasts awhile longer so we can pay off our mortgage.”
Another woman turned quickly to the clerk. “Forget that cake,” she said. “I’ll take that lemon meringue pie—and don’t wrap it”
She laid down the money, picked up the pie, hit the other woman squarely in the face with it, and stalked from the shop.
Roll Me Over Page 5
