Point of No Return

by Gellhorn, Martha;

  This was not, of course, the hotel life of Weilerburg but for a front it was the best thing yet seen. The krauts were beginning to get some sense. Maybe they were running out of men and ammunition, at last, the way you always read in the papers. Maybe the fighting in the north kept them busy. Maybe they were fixing to surrender. Whatever it was, since you had to be at the front, this was the one to pick. Aside from occasional artillery on the roads and occasional mortar fire on the forward positions, and useless machine gun racket at night, and the alleged minefields on the river bank, this was as safe as any Army Headquarters.

  At night, lying in his bedroll on the floor of the disheveled little farmhouse that was Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ CP, Jacob Levy said to himself: it keeps up like this and maybe I’ll get a chance to go back to the city and tell Kathe why we had to leave so she won’t worry. The Colonel might want more liquor, and send him for it. And then he would think: nothing can be this easy, and he would have a sick feeling that there was a catch somewhere. But in the morning the front was the same. The replacements acquired a smug expression: if this was all there was to combat, the old hands were the biggest lineshooters out of jail. The replacements volunteered readily for night patrols. The veterans did not dispute the honor with them.

  Bert Hammer said, “I got nothing serious against this place, Jake. For war, it’s solid. The only thing is we ought to get some good latrines. Closed-in, like real outhouses. So you wouldn’t freeze every time.”

  Royal Lommax said it was foolish to come over here for nothing; they could hold this front as well from Weilerburg. The krauts weren’t up to anything. The krauts were all played out.

  Lieutenant Gaylord said he guessed he’d go out tonight and look around the river. “Okay, Bill,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said. Bill never did know how to wait; but it wouldn’t do him any harm to wear off his energy playing Indian. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought the Division must be even more chewed up than he knew, if they were only fit for sentry duty. You couldn’t call this a front. It was fine by him. He had ceased to thirst for glory long ago. He wanted his Battalion to do whatever was expected of it; if nothing was expected, so much the better.

  He told Captain Willcox to get a few prisoners and to find out about the mines on the river bank. But no one was to pick a fight. They were supposed to stay nice and calm while the real business went on up north, along the Roer. There were seventy-five miles of front here, with four Divisions holding it, and with nothing behind them. The last thing anybody wanted was to excite the Germans.

  “Just bother them a little,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said to Captain Willcox. “So they won’t get fat and happy.”

  You couldn’t ask for a better place to break in the new men. Any soldier who kicked about this ought to get shot. It was so quiet he might even send Levy to Luxembourg and bring Dotty back for supper. She’d be as safe as in town, the way it was here. She would be used to guys disappearing without any excuse but he hated to break a date and not have time to explain. And he certainly wouldn’t be cheating on his work if he took a few hours off to eat with her. There was really nothing to do but sit back and watch the bombers, high, neatly wedged and silver, flying over to Germany. They made vapor trails in the clear sky, like giant chalk marks. It was pleasant to think of the krauts being blown to hell while you drank a cup of coffee and smoked a cigarette and the Battalion operated like a little angel. The only casualties in two days had been a couple of men whose jeep skidded and turned over in a ditch and one dumb bastard who killed himself experimenting with a hand grenade.

  15

  Then with a suddenness the High Command could never quite explain, the Germans attacked this tissue paper front. The weather went over to their side and a thick dripping cloud settled low above the trees. It was iron cold and snow began to fall, as if to order. The Germans attacked through the snow, the pine forests, across the rivers and over the dumpy hills. Nothing like this had been seen; it was no counter-attack. They seemed driven by a final and furious hope. The front broke.

  At the southern extremity of the Germans’ drive, on what was officially called “the shoulder of the penetration”, the 20th Division attempted to hold. It had a better chance than the inexperienced outfits to the immediate north but three Companies in the flank Battalion of the 256th Regiment were overrun; in effect, it was as if the snow had swallowed them. German tanks plowed through this gap all night moving to the west. German infantry, in tight mobile clumps, had infiltrated behind the rest of the Division’s front. German artillery worked over the roads to a depth of ten miles, and Regiments were out of communication with each other and with Division.

  At 2400 hours on the night this break-through started, Lieutenant Gaylord, purple with cold, came into Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ farmhouse CP in the village of Hackenthal. He announced, with surprise, that a routine patrol had been badly shot up; now what do you suppose made the krauts so energetic all of a sudden? By 0100 hours, the Companies were telephoning in, to say that they could hear motor vehicles and track laying vehicles moving on the other bank of the river. Usually everyone slept soundly in these parts but now it sounded as if the circus had come to town. At 0300 hours, German artillery opened up on the crossroads near Battalion headquarters, and H Company motor park was pounded. Wounded started to walk back to the Battalion aid station, a trickle of slow shadows. By 0400 hours, the outposts and the front line positions were being mortared with deadly intent and the wounded increased. The field telephones carried steady reports from the front: we can hear boats, they’re shouting at each other, they’ve got bridging material.… The observer at the Battalion OP was in the middle of saying, “Tanks, trucks, I don’t …” when his voice was cut off. Fox Company announced they could hear tanks, coming this way and very soon now: and that voice was cut off. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers, calling Regiment to beef up the artillery concentrations, found himself talking into a dead line. The German artillery was working like a giant scissors on the telephone wires, or else the Germans were already swarming over the sector. The last order from Division was to hold; but they could not hold.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers had spent the night and the blurred incomprehensible day trying to extricate his troops, set up a defensive line two ridges back, and keep in touch with his right and left flanks and Regiment. It was a bitter, new experience to see his Battalion mauled into retreat. Now, twenty-six hours after the night patrol had been shot up, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was sitting on the floor in a cheese factory that was the latest Regimental Headquarters, listening to a Division Intelligence officer. The Intelligence officer seemed breathless and at the same time indignantly surprised. He was explaining that the Germans had spearheaded their attack all along the front with soldiers dressed in American uniforms and driving American vehicles. These masqueraders, the officer said, wore red and blue neckscarves to identify themselves, painted white balls on their jeeps, as a recognition signal, and also on farmhouses and trees to signify rallying points. In this shambles, ordinary passwords were not adequate: suspicious characters should be asked questions about Big League baseball. Lieutenant Gaylord muttered that he pitied the poor guys who didn’t follow baseball, they’d be shot like dogs. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers listened, in a stupor of fatigue. He was thinking of the ride back, and wondering whether by now the Germans had pushed in behind his Battalion and if so what Hardcastle was doing about it. He wanted to leave: they had their orders, he wanted to get back to his outfit.

  Then they were in the jeep, crawling along without lights in the steadily falling snow. They were listening and tense, for no one knew where the Germans might be. Here today and more of them here tomorrow, Lieutenant Gaylord had said. That’s the worst, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought: you couldn’t believe how much worse the German weapons sounded when the noise was coming from behind you. The three officers and the radio operator and Jacob Levy listened, and felt this uncertainty in their backs. Suddenly a man’s back had beco
me very large, very cold and very vulnerable. The orders were clear enough, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, though nothing else was. They would hold this east to west line they had fallen back to and protect Luxembourg City: they were to contain the German penetration, as the phrase was. He was planning how he could divide and shift around the force remaining at his disposal. He would send Bill Gaylord to command G Company since Paul Willcox was now dead; two squads of the Ammo and Pioneer Platoon would go to F Company: all the battalion clerks, cooks and cooks helpers would be some use to E Company, and Luke Hermann would replace Rod Blackmer who was hit in the lungs. Doc Weber told him he’d been getting bodies in at Battalion aid station that froze to death before the aidmen could load them on jeeps; he had to do something about that if he could, though with the amount of transport they’d lost in the first night’s shelling it was hard to know where you’d pick up enough vehicles. Considering how big this war was and how much it cost and the millions of people who seemed to be milling around in it somewhere, it was goddam peculiar the way you always had to fight it on a shoe string, with not enough men or materiel when the chips were down. They better raise a new army from those goldbricks in Paris, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, and they better do it fast.

  But he had something more to think about than his work and how to manage it: the phrase “women and children” kept coming to his mind. He’d forget and then, before he knew it, there they were again, and for once they had faces, he had seen them, they truly existed. Luxembourg City was only nine miles away. This army had liberated the place. And now maybe the krauts would re-enter Luxembourg City and all those poor miserable women and children, who had thought the Americans were the second coming of Christ, would have to think again. They’d get a dose of artillery and bombs, too, while they were thinking. And furthermore, how about Dotty? Why by God, the krauts would take Dotty prisoner.

  They had not spoken in the jeep and they stumbled out, rigid with cold, and walked to the farmhouse that was now their CP. The place looked different, abandoned and dead, as if they had already left it. In this silence, you could feel a prickling doubt: who was here now, we or they? Lieutenant Colonel Smithers had opened the door and for a moment a line of light stood like a wand in the darkness. An unseen sentry shouted at them. It was reassuring to hear that voice. Jacob Levy drove the jeep behind the barn, where he would hide it under the trees. He had a feeling of affection for that sentry, doing his job, loud and mean the way they usually were.

  Bert Hammer brought a pot full of coffee into Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ office.

  “Thanks, Hammer,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said, “we can use that.” With coffee and benzedrine tablets, you could keep talking and moving long after you were really asleep. But the sudden warmth made Lieutenant Colonel Smithers drowsy and he hurried to give his orders, while he was still sure of himself and would know that he wasn’t making mistakes from fatigue.

  Lieutenant Gaylord was elated to take over G Company. He went to collect his bedroll and when he came back Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said, “Have fun, Bill.”

  Lieutenant Gaylord grinned; he was already inventing a splendid dream for his new command. His men would rise from foxholes in the snow, and kill Tiger tanks with grenades; they would surround superior forces and annihilate them; they would hold the front no matter what and be awarded the Presidential citation, for heroic conduct above and beyond the call of duty; and they would have their pictures in Life and he would get a leave in Paris, for reasons not yet determined.

  Sergeant Postalozzi brought in the runner who was to lead Lieutenant Gaylord to his company and as they left, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers said, “If you meet any krauts on the way, just shoot them. They got no business around here.”

  But he hated to see Bill go; he hated to think what Bill would do when he wasn’t around to clamp down on Bill’s imagination. And now he would have to worry alone, for there was no one besides Bill to whom he would dare admit doubt. The field telephone was buzzing again, and he forgot Bill Gaylord. The benzedrine tablets kept him awake, and all night he moved and directed men who were groggy with sleeplessness and numb with cold and hungry and desperately uncertain, and who accepted this condition without complaint. As always before, in the bad times, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ pride in his Battalion grew in him, and drove from his mind any other emotion. He had only one duty: he must see these men through the night. The night was the limit of all time, and what he felt for his men was the strongest and richest passion of his life.

  Jacob Levy crawled into his bedroll, in the hall outside Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ office, and worked himself into the shape of a doughnut so that he could massage his feet. They weren’t cold anymore, they were white bloodless lumps. He was thinking of the map: Bleifall-Luxembourg City, nine miles. The krauts would probably bomb Luxembourg City, it was an Army Group Headquarters, and just the sort of target they’d want. And there was Kathe, on the third floor, alone in her cold little room with no one to look after her. Nine miles was nothing: he wished he had never spoken to Kathe. If the krauts came back they would find out she’d been going with an American soldier, he had brought danger to her; the krauts would take it out on any of the natives who had been friendly to Americans. She’d never know enough to light out on the roads and walk south.

  Bert Hammer stepped over Jacob Levy’s circular body and pushed into his bedroll, farther down the hall.

  “Jake?”

  “Yeh?”

  “You hear anything at Regiment?”

  “No.”

  “Are we cut off?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s kind of like the movies,” Bert Hammer said.

  “What is?”

  “The way it is up here. You know, when the white men were in a fort or something and the Indians riding around outside shooting at them.”

  “I guess so.”

  “The Colonel don’t seem upset.”

  “No.” But the Colonel didn’t know about Kathe; he didn’t know what it would be like for a young girl to look after herself if all hell broke loose and the army had to retreat and leave the people alone.

  Oh God, Jacob Levy whispered, keep an eye on her, see nothing happens to her. Then he was so surprised that he stopped rubbing his feet and straightened out in his bedroll and lay on his back, staring into the dark. I’m praying, he thought, I never prayed before; it don’t make sense, I haven’t got any arrangement with God, I don’t even know whose God I’d be talking to. I must be goofy, he told himself, if I think that’s going to help Kathe. But Kathe was religious and had her own God and believed in Him and worked at it. Allright, allright, he thought, funny things happen, how do I know how it is with God, it can’t hurt to put in a word for her.

  At daylight, shrunken into themselves with cold, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers and Jacob Levy and Dave Penny, a radio operator, got into the jeep and set out for F Company. F Company had reported it was having a fire fight but the account came in, excited and garbled over the radio, and they seemed in a bad way, so Lieutenant Colonel Smithers decided to go and check for himself. The rutted mud road curved around a small hill and straightened out, flanked on one side by a frozen field and on the other by a tight diamond-shaped wood. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was thinking about F Company, far understrength, and strung out above the base of a hill where two roads intersected; Jacob Levy was thinking that to drive the jeep over this cowpath was like riding a bronco and they’d sure as hell knock off the oil pan before they got through; and Dave Penny was thinking that it was a funny feeling to have your nose full of icicles, and maybe that was because snot froze on all those little hairs. The road was ominously empty and still. They did not notice this, being deceived by the quietness that falling snow lays on the earth.

  From the diamond-shaped wood, a machine gun cracked out three short bursts and snow rose in puffs from the road and the bank of the field, ahead of them. Jacob Levy skidded the jeep to a stop, tilte
d over the side of the ditch away from the wood. They were out of the jeep and in the ditch, as fast as breathing. They waited and nothing happened. Snow fell; the wood appeared to be harmless and deserted; there were no tire tracks or footprints on the fresh snow of the road.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers focussed his binoculars on the wood and could see nothing except the thickly planted black trunks of the pine trees. There was also a screen of underbrush and second growth; behind this any number of krauts could be lying comfortably, waiting for them to move from their ditch. They had better get away from the jeep. He turned, using the binoculars on the road, and thought he saw a disturbance in the snow some forty yards ahead. The light was poor and this downward whirl of snowflakes marred his vision.

  “Follow me,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers whispered. “Keep down and quiet.”

  They crawled along the bottom of the ditch until they were safely distant from the jeep; then Lieutenant Colonel Smithers kneeled and stared again at that unsmooth portion of the road. It showed up clearly in the lenses now: tank tracks, with snow settling in them and hiding them. So the krauts had moved into that wood, sometime during the night, and there they were, hidden and happy, with a tank to keep them company.

  From deep inside the wood, they heard the cough of a mortar and after the interval of silence, they heard the shell landing behind them in the direction of the Battalion CP. The mortar coughed again. Well, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, that makes a mortar, a tank, an undecided number of krauts and God knows what else besides. This kraut-laden wood now separated him from F Company. You couldn’t have a front like a sieve.