The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  The men of the line fired methodically until their guns spanged empty. Then they reloaded and fired again. Rifle barrels heated and glowed red. The BARs caught fire, but there was no end to them. There were thousands upon thousands of them passing through the line without stopping, killing on their way with bullets, grenades, and bayonets. Henry fired to his front, and the dead and wounded fell at the muzzle of his rifle. His fear was hammer-­striking at the walls of his heart and he was desperate to kill and not be killed. He could hear a cry pounding in his eardrums and realized it was his own screaming voice searing his throat. Then he was firing over his head and then behind him and then they came back through and did it all over again as he squeezed off round after round, the butt plate thumping his shoulder.

  The sweeps of bullets scathed the frozen air. They tore frozen dirt from the earth and blasted shards of granite from the stones that slivered their way inside legs, arms, eyes. His right calf suddenly burned hot for what tore through his pant leg and into his flesh, lead or stone, he did not know.

  The words kept coming, “Marine, you die. Marine, you die,” as they left more death in their shredding wake.

  He could not know his unhope and his desperation, could not know it and still choose to live. He shot his rifle dry, reloaded, and again the rifle spanged empty. Lew ran for ammunition while Henry piled the white-­robed bodies around their new position. He wanted to rest and wondered if they wanted to rest too.

  Men were screaming in rage and fear. Men were weeping without restraint, their fierce sobs caving their chests. Somewhere someone was gibbering, his mind broken.

  Someone called for the corpsman. Everyone was calling for the corpsman, but he did not come because the first call he’d answered was phony and now the corpsman was dead with his throat cut.

  They came three more times that night and each time it was the same. Bugles blared and whistles shrilled. The explosions that tore through them left them dead and wounded from lead, from steel, from stone, from each other’s skull and teeth and bone fragments from the air it pushed. Henry listened to the cries and groans and convulsions of the men by his side, their eyes dim, half closed, and sunk to the place inside them where a remnant of heat and life still flickered. At first he did not understand their murmurings and then he did. They were praying and they were begging. They believed in the only thing that was left to them, but there was no hymn, no anthem, no incantation, no talisman to save them, only death and its awful plenitude of horrors.

  Illumination fired throughout the night.

  A marine with a flamethrower walked the ridge methodically dispatching the enemy wounded. He lashed out with roaring flames thirty feet long, burning to death anyone of them that still moved and each time was the splattering noise of napalm liquid from the nozzle fire and a cloud of black smoke. He did not stop until his tanks were empty and then he unharnessed them from his back and threw them down the ridge.

  Henry knew he would never get back home and was relieved. No longer was he burdened with the prospect of survival and return. He stabbed his knife into the earth within easy reach.

  “Awful sounds,” Lew said, bringing up more ammunition.

  The cries of the wounded faded away as one by one they froze to death or died of wounds before they could be taken off the ridge, but there was one marine who never lost consciousness and who hung on throughout the night. He was in the darkness beyond the perimeter and some said he wasn’t really one of them, and long after the battle he kept calling out to them, in a young man’s voice, “Here I am . . . here I am.”

  Chapter 20

  IN THE MORNING’S HEATLESS light a dense poison fog hung in the air from so much burned powder, from starting the engines every hour, from torn bowels, from death. Henry’s ears still rang from the infinite explosions, the assaults and their endless cracking frequency. He covered his ears and closed out the world to experience a moment of muffled quiet. Held inside was the ringing sound and his head ached.

  The ground was strewn with bodies coated in frost and the strew of blood was everywhere. Men, weapons, boxes, shell casings, the blown, broken, burned, and used machinery of war was everywhere. The pools of blood were shockingly crimson on the white snow in the yellow light of the bluing sky. So much life he had taken to save his own.

  He flattened the palm of his hand, the letter he would write. Dearest Mother . . . Last night we were overrun . . . A lot of killing went on . . . It’s bad and it will get more bad . . . In moments I think this is where I might live for the rest of my life.

  Constant was the earthshaking barrage of artillery and the scream of the Corsairs and Mustangs tearing the overhead sky. Plane after plane flew in and scraped off its napalm. Plane after plane, denied the night battle, was desperate to get in and eagerly unleashed its rockets, bombs, and machine guns.

  The Chinese were out there, but by day they could not be seen in the snow because of their white uniforms. Their battalions were holed up and in the trees, in caves and lying camouflaged out in the open. He felt the surround of them, sheltered, hovering, waiting for when another night would come and bring its darkness.

  Resigned to the sounds in his mind, Henry let his hands down and joined the turbulent world with a vague sense of restoration. He let the world spin back in and fix in his chest and he lifted himself and rolled onto his back. His wound awakened and his calf began to burn. He pushed with his heels to slide himself below the ridgeline and stood.

  The wounded were flowing into the aid stations. The men of the front line had all been hit at least once, and the half who were still alive and able-­bodied skidded the other half, wounded and dead, off the ridges and down the back slopes and into the positions below. Roped in stretchers, they were lowered down from the slippery rocks. Men carried them in their arms and over their shoulders.

  Down below men milled through the bullet-­riddled warming tents, twenty at a time, desperate for their share of restorative heat before going out again. Fifteen minutes later they rotated out and hiked back to the ridges as the next twenty entered the warmth. Some men fainted as they encountered the heat after being so cold so long.

  Henry turned to shout, but he was too tired. Lew saw him and came up anyway. They watched four men scuttling through the snow, dragging at the corners of a poncho. Slung inside was a wounded marine. The bearers traversed the hill below the ridgeline to take up the downward path. Blood came from the man’s face and throat and a red tide was spreading across his chest. They were moving him as rapidly as they could when one of them slipped and fell and they dumped him. He rolled the last long way and ended in a silent unmoving heap.

  “Remind me not to get wounded too bad,” Henry said.

  Lew swore bitterly for a while and then went back to dragging bodies in white-­quilted coats to fortify their position where they would freeze in place.

  Then it was their turn to go down. Together they led a procession of blinded men off the ridge, stumbling along, slowly picking their way. Lew kept telling them they weren’t hurt, they were okay, they just couldn’t see.

  “Take your time,” he said. “Don’t panic, descend slowly, don’t give them a silhouette.”

  The salvageable had found a place on the damp straw of the aid station while the worst cases were settled into the corners where they might quietly finish their lives. There was an officer, dead or alive they could not tell, his belly torn open and steam rising from between his fingers where he held them entwined. In the cold air was the intense smell of his body inside. Blood clotted bandages, morphine syrettes, broken plasma bottles littered the ground. There was another man shot through both cheekbones and another the curve of his cheek and his nose shot away. There was one had a sucking chest wound, his lungs drawing air through the bullet hole. An unraveled sheath of muscle sprawled from a torn pant leg. Red-­hot fragments driven deeply into a man’s body and his legs were shattered. A fist-­sized hole. The men did not look human after war’s subtraction: no eye, no ear, no nose, no
face, no arm, no leg, no gut, no bowel, no bone, no spine, no muscle, no nerve, no breath, no heart, no brain, no faith.

  The padre moved among them with a vial of oil, and assuming their faith, their contrition, and their wanting absolution, he raised his hand and intoned the words By this anointing may the Lord forgive you in whatsoever you have failed . . .

  They let down their blind men on the straw and caped their shoulders with blankets. Beside them was a man who had no eyes. Lew told them again, in a whisper, they’d be okay, they just couldn’t see, they were in the vision ward.

  “I can’t be here,” Henry said.

  “Quit being a baby,” Lew said, and went down on his knees to bare Henry’s calf. A channel was gouged through the flesh and the underlying meat. The wound was black and crusted, cold and stiff. Lew stopped a corpsman who poked at it. The corpsman told him to bend his leg back and when he did he doused it with iodine and then attended to the more needy. His orders were to get these men patched up and back on the line.

  All that morning they lugged ammunition up the ridge and helped the wounded off and went back up the ridge again. They humped units of fire, a day’s worth, two day’s worth, three. They made yet another trip. They collected a stockpile of ammunition, a BAR, replacement barrels for the machine guns, binoculars, a cardboard box full of big chocolate bars. The crack of gunfire exploded in the mountains and continued fiercely. The Chinese were hard to find in the snow, but then they’d see movement, a profile. Rifleman watched for puffs of breath and then shot the source of breath.

  “Come on. Come on . . . There,” Lew would say, holding the binoculars to his eyes, and Henry would squeeze the trigger on the BAR and kill a half mile away.

  “God bless the BAR,” Lew would say.

  Gradually the sun began to set on the blackened napalm-­swept land and the deep scars of bomb craters. It was hard to imagine a living thing could be left out there after what the airships had done, but each man alone in the gloaming knew what twilight meant. Flying through the night on the burned land would be phantoms more horrible than any mind of an imaginer could conjure.

  Chapter 21

  AS COLD AS IT was, he still sweated. His arms and back and legs and feet, they sweated for the effort of staying warm and staying alive. He shed his shoepacs and dragged off his socks for dry ones. He wanted to rest. He lay silently in the gritty snow straining to stay awake, because he knew if he fell asleep he would never wake up. He tried to remember something of the past, anything: home, his mother, a horse, but he could not. What he did last night would he be able to do tonight?

  He stood and stomped his feet and pounded his arms to his chest and then he lay down on the cold ground and contemplating the dure of this night he closed his eyes and then Lew was nudging him in the ribs with his boot toe.

  “Lay on this,” he said, and dropped an armful of straw on the ground beside him.

  A flare went up and the sky went blue-­white.

  It was now thirty below zero and just as he stretched out on the pile of straw, green tracers came over the crest of a hill to the north. They bounced off the slopes and zoomed straight up toward the stars and were followed by the yellowish light of flares on the perimeter.

  His turn awake. Isolated mines and trip flares started going off. Their reconnaissance had begun. Dark shadows moved as if wind materialized. Henry stretched forward and peered into the gloom, a mustache of frost growing over his lip. He wondered if only they might pause so he could see them, how fair that would be. He fixed on a shadow and grimly he squeezed the trigger of the BAR and the shadow disappeared as if made invisible by the rifle’s abrupt sound thumping the air.

  He had the passing thought he’d gone a little insane.

  The first rounds of mortars began coming in. They spluttered in flight and then seemed to pause and then they struck. The mortars required of them a fearsome response and close-­in artillery airbursts sent showers of red-­hot steel spiking into the valley. Artillery slammed into the forest, dismasting trees. Flames lashed out and from their yellow flags spun swirls of shrapnel as spotters called in the mortar positions.

  A man on the line staggered through the snow, his eardrums perforated, stretching his neck and clutching at his head before someone tackled him and dragged him down.

  The lunging shadows multiplied. He could not believe it, but they were advancing through their own mortar fire. Searchlights banged the atmosphere, bursting star shells lit the night, tracers and flares and the world were lit with a considerable roar as if the sound of darkness fighting back.

  Suddenly before him were the illuminated columns of thousands and thousands of men advancing. Bullets cracked in the air as the spinning fire sped past his ears. He could hear the cry of his own voice caught in his throat, pounding in his eardrums.

  “Fire!” Gunny yelled from somewhere on the perimeter. “God dammit, fire!”

  The bristling line exploded with gunfire for hundreds of yards. Hot shell casings sizzled on the frozen ground. Their fields of fire concentrated in weaving machines of lead and still they came like an inexorable tide.

  I am nothing, Henry thought.

  Then the flanks exploded with gunfire and grenades until there was no sound at all but the long unceasing sound of the world’s endless thunder concentrated in one place.

  They held the perimeter, but they could not kill them fast enough. The machine guns hammered again and again and still could not kill them fast enough. Henry took up the BAR and moved down the line to cover the machine gunner as he changed out the barrel. He fired clip after clip when suddenly the machine gunner made a rattling sound and stood and another bullet speared his chest and he fell on his back, breathing heavily.

  “Don’t let them get me,” the machine gunner said. Henry lay across his body firing the BAR.

  “It’s okay now,” the machine gunner said into Henry’s ear, and then he died.

  And then they were everywhere and there were so many they were killing each other just to kill one of them. He drew his .45 and fired point-­blank into the running bodies lancing across the slope when two grenades rolled into his position and concussed him badly, his blood trickling from his nose and ears. He sank to his knees and fell forward on top of the BAR, the hot gun barrel burning into his parka and for some time he lay there as if dead and then he crawled in with the gathered dead. He slid beneath them, dragging a body on top of him.

  As they stepped over him he slowed his heart and willed himself deeper into the frozen earth. Someone was gibbering the Lord’s Prayer and then was bayoneted.

  His only hope was to remain still, to not breathe and stay buried under the piles of bodies as he felt the earth for a clip of ammunition. He felt not fear but terror inside himself and determined he would rise up and kill again, not because they were trying to kill him but because the terror they made inside him was killing him. A hand grasped his wrist. Henry turned his head and it was Lew beside him flat on his belly. They waited but a moment before they climbed out. Henry raised the BAR to fire, but it was empty. He threw down the empty rifle and picked up a Thompson machine gun and pulled the trigger. The gun rose with fire each time and each time he pulled it back down until he emptied the clip into their backs, the bullets destroying spines, ribs and shoulder blades, macerating lungs and hearts.

  Another flare arched overhead and in its flash of light, he found Gunny in the chaos. His lower extremities were missing, but like all the rest, something was driving him to survive. He’d pulled himself erect and was walking forward on his stumps, a knife clutched in his hand, but already they had left the battlefield and fled into the snow.

  That was the first wave. They would come again, and like a wounded bear, the division curled in on itself and with its paws it swiped out madly at the enemy. The division clung to their ever-­shrinking perimeter. They fought with rifles and carbines, with knives, axes, shovels, rocks, their bare hands, and their teeth.

  Chapter 22

  THE MOR
NING WAS LOW and gray, but a wind had kicked up and would increase every hour whipping up the snow like flung gravel. All that morning Koreans kept coming in from the mountains, civilians. There were hundreds of them who’d been forced to work in the Monazite mines. They wanted to know which way it was to the sea. No one knew what else to do except point down the road in a southeasterly direction.

  Henry hovered over the slat grill of an ambulance jeep and gasped for the odd strangeness of heat that blasted his body. He watched a lone figure ascending to the skyline on a distant ridge and standing erect.

  “God damn fool,” someone muttered, and then a single shot rang out and the figure crumpled and fell from sight.

  “Whose was he?” someone else said, rocking from foot to foot.

  “Damned if I know,” the first one said.

  “Sometimes you just can’t take the waiting,” Lew said.

  However inconceivable, there was mail and he was handed a letter from his mother. He took off his glove and slit the seal with his sheath knife. She addressed him as My Dearest Son and confessed to missing him so very much and told him she loved him more than anyone else on earth.

  They say it’s going to be a bad winter and I think it will be. I remember when I was a little girl the snow always came early and it was deep and the cold was most thorough and enduring. We laid up for winter barrels of apples, huge crocks of brined pork and smaller crocks of kraut. There were smoked bacons and sausages, bins of flour and meal, preserved cherries, peaches, plums, apples, and pears. On the hoof we had beef and milk, and from milk there would be cheese and butter. In coops were chickens and eggs. For sweet there was syrup and molasses . . .