The Coldest Night

by Robert Olmstead

  The home place had roaring fires, laden tables, games and excursions. We took evening walks through the snow. Even at so young an age I felt the mortality in that season and knew it could not go on forever . . .

  But tonight the oil lamps are being lit again and I am thinking of the old soldiers drinking and remembering their horses.

  The old soldiers, they killed countless men. Your grandfathers and your uncles were not innocent. In taking you away I had hoped to save you from that. Little did I know it was not for me to decide. Little did I know the futility in our departing the home place. Little did I know that all things truly wicked start from innocence.

  It is only when something starts to hurt that you understand it.

  I have recently had a very bad diagnosis. If the doctor’s word is honest I may not be here when you return. But I am safe. Adelita is with me.

  Humble yourself, do not close the door to your heart . . . You are the inheritor. You are held aloft by the singular strength and the will of your grandfathers. Know that you walk with the King for you have been to Calvary.

  His mother’s words struck deep at his heart. She was the only one given to him in this life, and like his own father, he had abandoned her. His chest washed with the ache of sadness and in his throat he felt a soundless lament. In one hand he held the knife and in the other her letter.

  “What is it this time,” Lew asked, gumdrops melting in his mouth.

  “Nothing,” Henry said.

  “Young hearts break hard.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Nothing good ever comes in a letter,” Lew said. He spit away the gumdrop and fed a stick of gum into his mouth.

  Word came to them a fire team was being gathered to go out and bring in a distant stranded outpost. They were ordered to move east by northeast and assume a forward position overlooking the reservoir and the main supply route.

  “Let’s go!” said a young officer.

  They loaded their backs with all the ammunition they could carry. They shouldered their weapons. There was a radio with good range and fresh batteries and the airships hunting from aloft. They fell in and on command stepped off onto unknown ground. It wasn’t until noon they came to the base of a hill that was their destination marked by the spoils cuffed to the fighting holes. The holes were in a crescent-­shaped arc overlooking the frozen reservoir on one side, and on the other was a valley strewn with bodies. The killed of both sides were everywhere, their bones arrayed in the midst of mangled limbs.

  The young officer took out a map the wind blew away before he could read it. Lew stepped forward and yelled out.

  “Anyone there?”

  “Who won the World Series?” a high, thin voice returned.

  “Fuck you, dimwit,” Lew yelled back. “We’re coming in.”

  He was a boy not much older than Henry and he was the lone survivor. The firing pin in his M1 had snapped and he’d lost his shoes and most of his teeth. The heavy machine gun was jammed and a bullet had pierced the water jacket and its water hung to the ground in icicles. All about the gun emplacements ammo belts were draped over boulders and brush. Blood-­soaked battle dressings littered the ridge. Every­where was the detritus of war: cartridge belts, pack straps, rifle slings, empty cartridge cases, ammo boxes, clips and the bodies of men in all poses of death.

  The boy’s only weapons were a knife and a pile of grenades. Why he was not insane, no one could know.

  “That fighting hole smells like shit. I ain’t getting in there,” one of them said.

  “It’s a good hole,” the boy said. “But you suit yourself.”

  “Where is everyone?” the young officer asked.

  “I told them not to send no one,” the boy said, and looked away to the shrouded bodies he’d dragged into long file.

  “We’ll tie in on the left,” Lew said, spurring the young officer to command.

  They set out trip flares and registered their weapons. They tried the radio, but it failed them, the freezing temperatures depleting the batteries.

  The young officer sent back a runner and then another. He told them they only had to last the night and they would return in the morning.

  Their work finally done, they settled in for the night. Henry tucked his feet and legs into his sleeping bag, propped himself against a boulder, and under the slow wheel of the stars he peered into the blue darkness. There was a silence and as the hours of darkness passed, his mind became susceptible to the night, alive with a presence he could not see, but was translated through the earth and into his body.

  “If the bastards come tonight, that’s where they will come from,” Lew said with a wave of his hand.

  Sleep began to descend as if a winding sheet. He felt it at the backs of his eyes and it was as if a hand was lowering his eyelids. He began to wish they would come: so he could kill them and they could kill him.

  “What are you going to do after the war, Lew?”

  “I think I will go to Tahiti.”

  “What’s in Tahiti?”

  “Tahitians.”

  He was five thousand miles from home and this night there was a current running through him. He was not yet broken but completed and final. His mind and his being were fixed and he could not name what he felt, but he did not fear their coming again and he began to wish for the warmth of violence. He tried to remember the letter he received that morning and then he did.

  Chapter 23

  HENRY JERKED AWAKE. SOMEHOW he’d fallen into twitching sleep. The boy was in their midst and was talking to Lew. No one seemed to know what to do with him as he wandered about.

  He was saying, “A person can bleed to death pretty quick.”

  Henry hawked up a gob of phlegm. He rubbed at his face and then he climbed the fire step. It was a moonlit night and with the darkness came an inexplicable warming. Someone was whistling in the dark and someone else told the whistler to shut the fuck up with his whistling.

  Henry kept his eyes fixed on the strip of ground before him. As the hours passed something strange began to grow inside him. He thought of Mercy. He thought, I was wrong to run. I will never run again.

  Star shells and flares hissed in the cold atmosphere and when the shells’ white lights expired, the darkness came back more fiercely. The sound of weapons’ fire could be heard, but it was difficult to place. Across the vast white terrain he could see a thin sharp tongue of white flame, the muzzle blast of a mortar tube and then another. The mortars were finding their range. The first rounds began coming in, the shells marching up the heights and closing in on their position.

  Dearest Mother . . . Your recent letter has caused such concern and there is nothing I can do . . . I am in the hellhole of the earth and it’s getting worse . . . What we do there can be no stopping . . . Not for a moment, not for a second . . . They are determined to kill us and we are determined to kill them . . . I never thought about that before . . . Once it begins it cannot be stopped . . . dearest Mother, please do not die . . .

  Geysers of frozen earth and black smoke stalked in the air and collapsed back to the ground and then the shells were smashing into them, concussing their bodies. It seemed a mere rush of air, but it tore off a man’s cheek and another’s ear and a third was attempting to put back a dislocated thumb when his body was broken in half.

  The granite that surrounded them splintered and fragmented as deadly as shrapnel.

  “Time to beat feet,” Lew yelled and the men on the flank bailed out of their holes and scuttled down the backside of the ridge. They fell into a deep thin gully and clung to the trembling earth, waiting for the barrage to pass above them before crawling back to the ridgeline. Henry took out one of his chocolate bars and passed it around and they ate it while they waited.

  “When I was a little kid,” Henry said, “I’d do anything for a chocolate bar.”

  “Little did you know,” Lew said.

  A distant explosion of guns and mortars began building into a single rumbling sound
that rolled their way as the heavies in the valley responded and they knew that the dying beyond the valley had begun again.

  “Jesus Christ,” one of them intoned, and slid on his belly to be further underground.

  “Just be happy it isn’t you,” the boy said.

  A single bugle sounded from across the valley. Then the night filled with the sounds of bugles. They knew within minutes of the first call another attack would be on the perimeter.

  “My skin will crawl for the rest of my life when I hear a bugle,” one of them said.

  “Pipe down.”

  “Why?” the one said. “They might fucking know we’re here?”

  They scrambled back up the ridge and took their positions. A shower of white-­hot sparks rained down on them. A bullet tore through Henry’s sleeve. He turned to the young officer still in the shadows and held up his arm. They exchanged a knowing look and then a black circle popped in the young officer’s forehead and he was dead.

  A row of shadows rose out of the darkness and then they disappeared and then they appeared again. There were hundreds of them, hunched and clad in white and running with the jut of a gun barrel at their hips. They came on as if born out of the explosions. In his mind he wrote, When this reaches you I will be dead. A lot of us will be that way.

  “Comb it out,” Lew yelled, and Henry opened fire with the BAR held in his arms and beat off the attack. He changed out the magazine and triggered again and down the line the machine gunner triggered and sent forth the mangling fire of the flat tracking machine gun, its bloody, wearying cadence the race of their pulses, the pounding of their hearts.

  Still, they came on, sifting through the night, wearing their quilted jackets and fur hats and they were shot down as fast as they came.

  In Henry’s fighting hole the cartridge cases were now knee deep. He climbed to a higher parapet to see the fields beyond the glacis. The sheer number of dead that lay before him was overwhelming to his mind, blood and human viscera and men dragging themselves from the field of battle.

  Then they were coming again and both flanks were caving in until it was as if the men were islanded on the summit and stood back to back fighting them off the ridge.

  “Fix bayonets,” Lew ordered, and the men fixed their bayonets, their only chance to enter their midst and break their attack.

  Henry stepped out of a mortar’s explosion and heaved a bayoneted carbine through the chest of the first man he encountered. He picked up the man’s Thompson, held it locked to his hip, and fired; its fire climbed into the night. The cries of the wounded faded as one by one, their guts ripped open, their limbs broken, they froze to death or died of their wounds in the low brush and on the open ground.

  Near morning the boy came walking in his direction. His right arm was dangling at his side and he was saying he could not make it work. He said he believed it broken, but was not sure. Just then there was an explosion and a shard of knifing shrapnel nicked the boy’s carotid artery. A hot jet of blood, and he collapsed clutching at his neck. Henry applied a compress, but the boy was bleeding out. Henry cradled him in his arms until he died.

  “We cannot hold,” Lew said, and somehow brought the radio to life and called for artillery.

  They waited for the answer to Lew’s call, but it never came.

  A whistle blew. Their fire faded and ceased altogether. The attack ended and there was silence and the enemy was gone and then the sound of firing began again. The enemy had flowed past them and moved on the perimeter, cutting them off. The perimeter now was encircled and they were on its outside, a half mile beyond its laagered surround.

  Chapter 24

  IN THE MORNING THE radio crackled with the order to withdraw, and so they were headed back down the road they’d come up. The road would be a gauntlet of enemy soldiers. They’d have to get riflemen onto the heights to secure the ridgelines and cover the flanks. For seventy-­eight miles, every hill commanding the road had to be taken.

  Words crackled through the radio, guide on the bright star, and then the radio died.

  As the darkness began to lift there came Corsairs and dive bombers firing rockets, dropping bombs, and strafing the dead. Into the valley dropped silvery canisters of napalm. Then came the flying boxcars parachuting food, ammo, and supplies, much of it going to the enemy.

  The men gathered around Lew and he told them to burn everything of a personal nature: photos, cards, letters, wallets, rabbits’ feet.

  “Etcetera,” he said.

  They were to keep their weapon, ammunition, bayonet, pack, and one pair socks. All else was to be burned. Everything, and then they’d start back. All that they emptied from their pockets was thrown to the ground, doused with Sterno, and incinerated. Similar fires began lighting the hilltops and ridgelines, and in the valley stronghold huge bonfires began.

  Lew took out his Hawaiian shirt and paused to consider the loss of it. He stripped off and pulled on the shirt, his upper body, naked and pink, losing heat at a furious rate.

  “Sweet, Lew,” one of them said, and whistled.

  On Henry’s cartridge belt were ten clips of M1 ammunition, a wound packet, and a bayonet. He rolled his sleeping bag into a long horseshoe, tied it off, and looped it over his shoulder. He slung his rifle, picked up a BAR, and gathered what clips he could find. He charged the .45 and sheathed his knife. He kissed the letters he carried and committed them to the fire pit.

  “Quit your monkeying around,” Lew was saying.

  “I got the hiccups,” a marine was saying.

  “How the hell can you get the hiccups?”

  “It’s time to go,” Henry said, and looked to Lew—which way?

  “Thataway,” Lew said, pointing to the stone spur behind them.

  Henry jammed his fist into a crevice and pulled himself up the first height. The rest followed as he made his way between the rocks and climbed again until he found a little path.

  “So this will be easy,” Lew said, and all around them the hilltops began exploding as the howitzers fired a barrage from the south. Fifteen hundred feet below them and distant in the valley, the enemy were running into the flames of the abandoned stores to save what food and clothing they could.

  Inside the burning piles explosives began to detonate. White phosphorous burst in cottony plumes. Blown and burning remnants shot through the air; fountains of flame spurted out and pirouetted through the sky. The explosions carried all manner of waste and discard. They killed the soldiers they’d fought for days and still there were thousands more between them and the column.

  Below them the long column staggered into movement, black and spectral, the long march of miniature slow-­moving men, deep in the coma of war, walking back down that frozen road. Inside the column was the medical train, a hundred vehicles long. Dead men had found their place on every means of conveyance possible. They were slung across the hoods of jeeps and stockpiled in trucks. They were lashed to the gun tails. They were strapped to the gun tubes, icicles of blood hanging from their bodies.

  Dearest Mother . . . We are on the run . . .

  On the next crest they found a lone marine, sentry to the valley below.

  “Whatta ya say, Ace?” Lew said, but the marine said nothing as he maintained his vigil.

  “What about him?” Henry said.

  “We’re going,” Lew said, as if in answer to his question.

  “S’long,” Henry said.

  “S’long,” the marine said.

  At a high lookout point Henry lifted the glasses and to the east was the corrugation of rugged mountains as far as a hundred mile reach. Out there were the artillerists, their mouths gaped open to equalize the pressure in their ears, their shells timed to explode in the trees and above the ground sending splinters of wood and steel and shock waves flying through the air. Here and there were towers of risen black smoke.

  A shot clipped the air and Lew fell to the snow. Tongues of flame blinked in the gray. Henry stepped forward, leaned his back against the
wind, and opened fire. The others came up and began to fire also. The wind collapsed and they stumbled to keep from falling.

  Lew chastised them for their lack of fire discipline, the waste of so much precious ammunition.

  “I am truly shot to pieces,” one of the soldiers said, and fought back a fit of despair. Bullets had broken the bones in the man’s legs and another bullet had gone clear through him and out the other side.

  With agitated fingers he kept trying to light the cigarette. He began to cry and asked for help and Henry lit one for him. They helped him into the rocks and handed him their grenades.

  Lew sent a man ahead to recon the next saddle. Henry fished a cigarette from his pack.

  The returning marine half raised an arm and a gush of blood spewed from his neck. Bullets ripped combs of snow at their ankles and they returned fire. Henry pulled himself forward and held the man’s head back to open his air passage, but it was too late. He was drowning in his own blood.

  “How is he?” Lew yelled.

  “They got him real bad,” Henry yelled back.

  He’d been shot through the armpit. The bullet’s violent dig had found a heart line and blood swelled from the pumping wound.

  “I will die soon,” the man said, his voice drowning.

  “Hush,” Henry said, holding him to his chest.

  “I’m all fucked up inside,” the man managed to say. His chest was like a bloody sponge. The ground was frozen and so the pumping blood that slugged from the severed artery pooled bright red. For all Henry had seen it was still hard to believe there was so much blood in a man.

  “You got any bombs on you?” the man said, his breath rapid and shallow. Between gasps he purred in his throat.

  “You won’t need them,” Lew said softly.

  “Lew,” the man said, his torment so great, and Lew knelt down and took him in his arms. Lew held his face, his gurgling mouth to his neck, a .45 between them. He held him like that and then Lew pulled the trigger.

  On the next ridge there came the clatter of traversing fire. Henry ducked his head and started to run, clambering up a knob and throwing himself beneath a pointed outcrop in shallow defilade. A head came up from the lip of a trench and he fired the BAR. Two grenades went off, concussing the man next to him. In a state trancelike, he began speaking what sounded to be an incomprehensible language.