Point of No Return

by Gellhorn, Martha;

  The sky sagged over them, solid with heavy grey cloud; the gluey snow stuck and then froze on a man’s face, his gun, his clothes. The snow deadened sound too; it was bad enough to be half blind in this watery light; not being able to hear was like being blind twice. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought of calling for artillery; but he could not risk it. F Company’s position was immediately south and west of this wood, it might even be in the far edge of the wood for all he knew. Nothing to do but rassle those krauts out of there, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers decided.

  “Going back,” he whispered and Jacob Levy and Dave Penny flattened themselves against the side of the ditch so he could pass and take the lead.

  When they had crawled far enough so that Lieutenant Colonel Smithers judged they were safe from observation, he stopped and said, “You stay here, Levy. I’m going to send back to the CP for a platoon. Join up with them when you see them. Keep your eyes open so you can report what happens.”

  Then Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was gone, and Dave Penny with him, and Jacob Levy had the road and the wood and the cotton-soft daybreak to himself.

  This was something you could never understand; it always happened and it was beyond understanding. When things got bad enough, so bad that you knew here was a place where it could be decided for you one way or the other, there was no one around. There was this special silence, in which your own heart beats sounded like a drum and the world—which usually crackled or moved or did something; there was always some kind of noise, even if it was only a rooster or a man talking or a truck passing on a road—sank into this tight stretched silence. And you were alone. Even if there were guys anywhere around you didn’t feel them; you were alone and they were alone and this silence was the sure sign of your danger.

  Now time stopped, for that always happened too. It did not stop and cease to be; it stopped and settled on you, all the time of your life, hours of time, years of time in which you could hear the silence and be alone.

  Where in the hell is that platoon, Jacob Levy thought, those krauts could be moving in a whole Division. He raised his head, slowly, over the side of the ditch and saw a gentle winter landscape: fat snowflakes falling on a peaceful wood. His heart pounded inside him, so that he felt shaken by it and alarmed as if he were calling out his position.

  The platoon, crossing the field behind him in single file with the hill as protection, looked at first like an extra thickness of the snow. Jacob Levy climbed out of the ditch and ran, in the bent shamble that no one needs to be taught, and joined them. Sergeant Postalozzi was leading the platoon.

  “Anything happen, Jake?”

  “Nothing I could see.”

  “Okay, fall in.”

  Sergeant Postalozzi got his men across the road as fast and as silently as possible. The fuzz of snow and ground mist, blurring the road, helped them. Inside, the wood lay in evening shadow. The men advanced slowly, in a loose column. At the end of this line, just ahead of Bert Hammer, Jacob Levy walked with exceeding care. He only felt natural in combat when driving a jeep; being on his feet felt like being naked. The platoon had orders to hold their fire until they were fired on; the first bazooka team had the task of taking on the German tank.

  Before they had gone fifty yards into the black trees, the blast of a mine broke the silence. It was easy to lay mines in that blanket of pine needles and rotting leaves, dusted over with snow. Afterwards, the whole wood seemed to burst apart with noise; the column was well scattered. Jacob Levy and Bert Hammer, alone now, crouching behind round snow-covered bushes, saw Sergeant Postalozzi being carried out. His face was wet and grey, and his eyes were crazy. There was, where his leg or legs had been, a dirty blackish mush. Sergeant Postalozzi had discovered the mine field.

  “You’ll be allright, Sarge,” Jacob Levy whispered. The sight of those legs had taken his voice away. This was what happened when you left a jeep and started walking. He had to move ahead, that was all he knew. A curious momentary silence fell on the forest; this frightened Jacob Levy even more. Breathing through his mouth, he heard only himself, making a muffled roar like a sea-shell. He turned and saw Bert Hammer flattened against a tree. Bert Hammer’s face looked gaunt and old, frozen in attention. Bert looked the way he felt but Bert had done this before, he must know something about it.

  “What do we do now?” Jacob Levy whispered.

  Bert Hammer shrugged and the expression of his face did not change.

  Any noise would be better, Jacob Levy thought. This way you felt someone was watching, you only had to move and you’d be clipped.

  From the right, and deeper in the woods, the noise broke out again, the hot clattering of a machine gun, the short hammer of burp guns, and the explosion of hand grenades. Jacob Levy, bending low, ran towards the noise. He wanted to be where there were a lot of men.

  He saw Lieutenant Colonel Smithers directing the bazooka team. The Colonel looked angry which was an unusual way to look. How did he get here, Jacob Levy wondered. The bazooka men looked blank like Bert Hammer, attentive and sort of stupid. The noise of the hand grenades was still farther away. Then Jacob Levy fell flat and began to crawl; even the Colonel ducked and stayed down. That kraut machine gun was too near; the Colonel and the bazooka team showed up very black against the snow.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers saw them and called and when they reached him he said, “Levy, take three men and get that machine gun.”

  Christ, Jacob Levy thought. He started off, bowed over, running, with Bert Hammer behind him. It had not occurred to him to get three men; anyhow where were three men; anyhow how could he tell three men what to do when he didn’t know what to do himself. Now he stopped and tried to isolate the sound of the machine gun. He began to make a wide detour, walking lightly and hoping there were no mines. All you could do about mines was hope. It seemed to him that he and Bert Hammer were again entirely alone in this enormous forest. He had never done a job like this; he wished there was someone who knew the pitch to give him orders. Then he thought he saw a flash coming from behind a mound of snow. The forest floor was lumpy with fallen branches piled over with snow; this mound looked no different from any other. Jacob Levy’s mouth was so dry he could scarcely swallow, and his heart made sloshing bangs against his side. He crawled farther on, keeping the mound to his left, and then risked kneeling behind a tree. That was it allright; he saw their legs, the krauts would be lying on their stomachs in the snow, feeding and firing the gun. Now what do I do, Jacob Levy thought.

  He stood up, with his nerves screaming to him to get down, and stepped out from behind his tree, and threw a grenade on to those grey legs lying in the snow. He did not remember throwing the second grenade, nor did he hear either of them explode. He heard a thin one-note cry, and then he saw a man rise from behind the mound and stagger like a drunk, away from them. All this happened very slowly and very fast. He watched the man with interest. The noise of Bert Hammer’s rifle made him jump. There were four shots and the staggering man fell. Maybe he was dead; maybe the one who yelled but did not run was dead.

  Jacob Levy turned to Bert Hammer and said in a flat voice, “What next?”

  “Get the hell out of here!”

  Bert Hammer was running down towards the edge of the woods. Jacob Levy followed him; it was good to follow anyone. Bert Hammer jumped over what looked like a natural barricade of logs, and squatted in the hollow on the other side. Jacob Levy sat beside him. They did not speak.

  That’s the first German I ever killed, Jacob Levy thought, if I killed him. He drove a jeep; the Germans almost killed him twice but they were far off, they didn’t know who they’d get, you couldn’t fight back with a jeep. Or maybe I mushed up his legs, like the Sarge’s. He hoped he had killed the kraut; it didn’t matter about killing him but he didn’t like the idea of mushing up legs. He felt very sleepy. He was exhausted too, as if he had been marching all day with a heavy pack. He could not stop yawning. Then he took a handful of snow and began to eat it, to get that bitter dr
y taste out of his mouth.

  “We ought to go somewhere,” he said to Bert Hammer.

  “Yeh.”

  They did not move.

  They heard a noise like a stampede of iron cattle, crashing through the trees. It was not coming their way.

  “Tank,” Bert Hammer said.

  Jacob Levy nodded. He felt too tired to speak.

  “Taking off,” Bert Hammer said.

  A Mark IV tank, dun-colored, ornamented with a square black cross, plowed out of the woods, waddled over the field to a fold in the land, turned, and began to fire into the trees. The noise came in a lightning pointed cone and then exploded.

  “That’s no good,” Bert Hammer said.

  “It’s allright here.” The shells were passing over them. “I could go to sleep right now.”

  “Don’t do that! Hey! Wake up, Jake! You’ll freeze to death.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s the first sign. When you feel like sleeping. After that you freeze.”

  “We ought to find the Colonel,” Bert Hammer said.

  “Allright.”

  They did not move. Presently, behind them, they heard men running and they peered over the top of their barricade. Bert Hammer called out, “What’s up?”

  “F Company,” someone answered. “Joined up.”

  “Okay,” Jacob Levy said.

  “I guess it’s in the bag,” Bert Hammer said.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers, reconnoitering the edge of the wood, found them.

  “Stay here and dig in,” he said.

  “Yes sir.” That was just about what he and Bert Hammer had planned to do. My God, it’s long, Jacob Levy thought. I wonder when we’ll ever get out of these lousy woods. The action had lasted fifty-six minutes.

  16

  Sergeant Postalozzi lost his left foot and his right leg to above the knee. Royal Lommax was wounded in the stomach by a shell fragment from the tank cannon. Dan Thompson’s hip was smashed by a machine gun bullet. Marvin Busch had been killed by a mortar two days earlier, so he did not count. Aside from these, eight men whom Jacob Levy saw every day, talked to, called by their names, and did not know, were killed in the little wood. That night the Divisional front was withdrawn 1100 yards, leaving the wood open to the Germans who entered it in the morning.

  Jacob Levy realized that he had never thought about the war before. Now he was concerned for every foot of this grey snowscape. If they kept on giving ground to the krauts, what would happen to Kathe? This was not a battle like other battles, where you did your job and tried to stay alive and wanted to win so the war would finish. This was the way men must feel when they were fighting at home.

  And besides he had personally contributed to cleaning out the wood; it was the first real part he had taken in the war. What was the use, for anybody, if they threw your work away? And how about Sergeant Postalozzi’s legs? It was a dirty deal for a man to lose his legs for life, doing a job that didn’t matter. To say nothing of the eight guys who might as well be alive if they were just going to hand that wood right back to the krauts.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was bitter too. He had believed it was essential to link his front and hold it; if they had all been killed doing this, and failed, that would be hard but reasonable. Had he known they were only putting on a delaying action, he would have used his men differently. An unwanted, eating doubt returned: did the big brass know what it was doing? They don’t pay me to worry, he thought, they got to take the rap if it goes bad. Still it seemed easier to take the rap for mistakes if you weren’t around where the mistakes could kill you.

  They were back where they had started. The whole thing disgusted Jacob Levy. The krauts kicked them back fifteen miles and then they kicked the krauts back fifteen miles and what did it prove? For seven days the Battalion had counterattacked through brilliant unmarred snow, which piled deeper and deeper until they were wading in it. The Battalion had been ahead of the front, and cut off; and behind the front and shot up by Germans who were behind them. Everyone had heard, closely, the grinding rumble of German tanks, since short tank battles developed, anywhere, anytime. They had been dived on, strafed and bombed, with the greatest daring and precision, by their own planes. They had constantly met wandering soldiers who were separated from their units, and had themselves unceasingly wondered where they were. They huddled, freezing, through the nights in foxholes that were scarcely more than dents in the iron ground; exhausted, hungry and tormented by the wind, they had fought their way north through the endless days. Now the fields sprouted dead Germans in dark swollen lumps. The American dead were carted off in trucks to be buried decently. In the burned villages, German bodies were thrown into jeep trailers like cordwood and taken away somewhere, and half-frozen soldiers would dig a hole for them in soil like stone. Who could find any sense in it? It was enough to drive you crazy just thinking about it.

  The snow had fallen over the garbage of battle, covering smoothly tank tracks and shell holes and dirty papers and tin cans and live mines and excrement and all the other byproducts of war. The ruin of Hackenthal was softened by the snow. A German self-propelled 88 tilted against a low stone wall; its treads were ripped off. In the disturbed snow, the possessions of the gun’s crew were blown about it; a pair of bedroom slippers, a diary, two helmets, a first aid kit, rations, and a woman’s embroidered handkerchief. Nearby an old farmer was shovelling grain, from split burned sacks, into a box lashed to a child’s sled. Two dead horses, bloated and greenish black, lay with stiff legs in the doorway of another barn. Some soldiers were trying to clean up Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ old command post; a shell had fallen through the roof and the rooms looked as if a wind machine had stirred up this thick stew of broken glass, papers and the torn pieces of furniture.

  Down the street, a woman stood before her house, crying and shouting. Her house looked better than most of Hackenthal; it was standing, the second floor windows were not even cracked, but it was roped off with white mine tapes. A red-haired soldier, a runner from the message center, was arguing with her.

  “You can’t go in there, lady. If it’s got mine tapes that means it ain’t safe, see? Go away now, lady. Go on and visit with one of your friends for a while.”

  The woman understood nothing and went on crying and talking to herself. Suddenly she turned on the soldier and raised her arm to strike him.

  “What goes on here?” the soldier asked. “Somebody get the interpreter.”

  Jacob Levy called to Sergeant Black, who was coming out of the CP. The woman had started to run up and down before her front door, with short steps like a frightened dog. Sergeant Black sent Pfc Wedemeyer across the street and Pfc Wedemeyer, speaking German, calmed the woman so that she would talk reasonably.

  “She says you stole her sheets,” Pfc Wedemeyer announced to the red-haired soldier.

  “I stole her sheets?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  “When in the hell would I steal her sheets? What in the hell would I do with her sheets? Why goddam her anyhow, I been fighting around here, I ain’t got no time for stealing sheets. You tell her for me she should of been here when the fighting was going on and she wouldn’t stand there talking about her goddam sheets.”

  “Maybe she’s crazy,” Pfc Wedemeyer said.

  “You’re damn right she’s crazy.” The red-haired soldier turned and walked up the street. “She can go back in her house,” he called, “and blow her ass off for all I care.”

  Pfc Wedemeyer spoke to the frantic crying woman. She listened in silence, and rubbed her sleeve over her face. Then she walked down the road away from the village, empty-handed and alone. She looked very strange to the soldiers who had gathered to watch.

  “The poor old dame,” Bert Hammer said. “I guess it’s pretty rough on them when you think about it.”

  Two little boys, who had been hiding in a barn, climbed over the dead horses and went up to the nearest soldiers. “Gum?” one said. The other sho
ok his head, correcting. “Manger,” he said, and made chewing gestures and pretended to put food into his mouth. “This way,” a soldier answered, and herded the two in front of him towards the Battalion kitchen. There seemed to be no one else in Hackenthal except the silent old man, who went on shovelling grain.

  “It’s sure beat up,” Bert Hammer said.

  “It wasn’t much, before,” Jacob Levy observed.

  “I wonder where the civilians get to? Does anybody look out for them?”

  This was what he had dreaded for Kathe, all during the confused fearful days. This might have happened to Kathe. They had been bad days but if you had to fight, it made you feel better to know you were doing it for a good reason. If nothing else had been accomplished, anyhow they kept the Germans from Kathe.

  The krauts had either given up Luxembourg City or it was always a sideshow; their real business lay elsewhere. They were headed for Antwerp and the battle went on, roughly in the shape of a great triangle pointed towards the sea. The fighting was hard and costly: to live in such weather was a trial of strength. The Battle of the Bulge, as the newspapers named it, continued with the Germans still on the offensive, and Christmas was just another ominous day of it.

  But at Hackenthal and along this short southern front the krauts had been pushed back. One shoulder of the penetration was contained. Comparatively speaking, they could take it easy.

  At Christmas, the army made a serious effort to get turkey to whatever troops were not too occupied to eat. If a man was homesick, bored, cold and liable to danger at any moment, give him turkey and he’ll feel better. Probably the army was right. It was rumored in the Second Battalion that turkey had reached as far as Regiment. The Regimental C.O. came over on Christmas morning and gave Lieutenant Colonel Smithers a bottle of whiskey.

  The Catholic chaplain arrived in Hackenthal at 0930 hours and celebrated Mass in a barn. At 0940 hours, the krauts sent in some shells which gouged holes in a nearby field and worried no one. Jacob Levy wanted to go and watch the Mass; he thought it would be a good idea to get all the pointers he could on Kathe’s religion. If possible, he would like to straighten out religion before they married so it would be easier for Kathe. He straggled behind the other soldiers, across the shining snow, and stopped twelve feet away from the barn. It didn’t seem right; they might feel sore about an outsider sneaking in on their church. Now that Sergeant Postalozzi wasn’t around, he did not know anyone to ask.