by Robert Adams
At battalion headquarters, where he had been ordered to report, Milo dropped off a handful of dog tags with the clerk assigned to handle KIAs, then sought out the harried adjutant, Captain Davies.
Looking up but fleetingly to see who stood before his cluttered field desk, the cadaverous-looking man muttered, "Moray, you're bumped up two notches by order of Major Saxon and some single-star at division. Take over Charlie Company and get ready for another push… soon. You'll be needing a first sergeant, since yours was killed along with Captain Beverley, but, no, I cannot supply you a noncom, or any other warm bodies, for that matter. Maybe soon, but not now. If you can beg, borrow or steal a truck and dragoon a driver for it, I can authorize you to pick up ammo and rations, and that's it. Questions?"
But despite Captain Davies' assurances of new actions, there was no fresh push, not for either battalion or regiment. All had just been too badly chewed up for anything until once more up to at least near strength. They were moved back to their original areas south of the Meuse River.
Slowly, in dribbles and drabs, the decimated units were resupplied and reinforced with replacements, mostly green, partially trained men fresh out of basic training Stateside, with a sprinkling of veterans just released from various medical facilities and dumped into the replacement depots or "repple-depples." When one of these somehow wound up in the unit that had been his before his wounding, the scenes could be heartwarming. This was exactly how Sergeant Bernie Cohen came back to Charlie Company, to be immediately grabbed by Milo and made first sergeant. Chamberlin had declined that job and had also declined an offered commission; he still was running the second platoon, but as a master sergeant.
In November, the other two battalions, the mortar company, the tank company and most of the medical company were sent off to join in the push through the Hurtgenwald, their objective Cologne. But the drive quickly bogged down in the face of the stiff resistance offered by the troops of General Walther Model.
On the banks of the Meuse, the battalion camped, licking its wounds, integrating the trickles of replacements for the men and equipment and weapons lost and serving as perimeter guards for the regimental headquarters complex. They ate class-A rations and loved it, not often having had access to fresh, hot food since leaving England months before, though they still bitched and groused about it as soldiers always have and always will. They were issued winter clothing and, as the weather worsened, devised ways to supplement their bedding and windproof their shelters. Old John Saxon, now a lieutenant colonel, came back with some facial scarring and a slight limp to take over his command, and still the battalion just sat in place. But it was, for them, the calm before the storm of death that awaited too many of them.
In early December, First Sergeant Bernie Cohen and a detail had gone into the regimental complex and there scrounged or "liberated" enough material to construct of wood and corrugated metal a smallish, airtight building centered by a wide firepit filled with coarse gravel and small boulders which would retain heat well. The resulting steam baths had become very popular, and that was where Milo and Bernie were when the CQ runner found them to say that battalion was on the wire for Milo.
John Saxon was clearly agitated when he spoke with the officers gathered in his heavily guarded headquarters tent. "Gentlemen, the fuckin' Krauts have done broke through in the Ardennes. Division is damn near as short-handed as we are, what with all them men tied down up to Hurtgenwald, and the word is to send them ever' swingin' dick can be scraped up here, and that means us, thishere battalion. So git back to yore comp'nies and saddle up, fast. And I mean ever' fucker you got on the mornin' report, too—clerks, cooks and all, ever'body that can shoot a rifle. Full packs, all the clothes they can wear and still fight, three days' worth of C-rations and weapons. Two hunnert rounds for each MI, and ammo in proportion for all the other weapons. Send your tents and records and all up here on the trucks you send to pick up ammo and rations and gas and all. Okay? Git!"
The drive down into the Ardennes was pure hell, as Milo recalled it. A snowstorm of near-blizzard proportions started up soon after the convoy took to the so-called road. Visibility quickly became bare feet, and this meant that each vehicle had to drive close enough to see the vehicle ahead with the narrow, dim "cat's-eye" head beams that were all that regiment would for some reason allow. The inability to see meant that the lead vehicles were plotting direction with map and compass, and this kept the advance painfully slow while the men huddled together for warmth in the backs of the trucks, forbidden to smoke and thoroughly miserable.
When at long last the trucks ground to a skidding halt, the men were all instructed to leave on the trucks every-thing save their weapons, ammo, rations, entrenching tools and ponchos. Thus stripped for immediate action, they were marched, single-file, past a long line of GI cans fitted with immersion heaters. Each man had his canteen cup filled with hot coffee and was allowed to hurriedly fish a can of C-ration out of the boiling water.
Milo thought that the greasy corned beef hash had never before tasted so good. The coffee could have served equally well as battery acid, but it was hot, and that was just then the important thing to him. But he had had only a single drag on his postprandial cigarette when the order came down to form up and move out into the numbing cold. The snow seemed to be slacking off, but what was still falling was being whipped on by an icy-toothed wind. As he tucked away his canteen cup, he reflected silently that this was damned poor weather in which to be expected to fight, but then any weather was.
Two days later, Milo crouched in the snow among the nineteen men that were what now remained of Charlie's headquarters platoon and first platoon. It could well be all that remained of the entire company for all he knew, since there had been no contact with Chamberlin of the second or Hogan of the third for… ? He was just too tired to remember how long.
There gradually approached unseen an ominous grind-ing-clanking-roaring, and lumbering over a low saddle came a German tank, a big one. A black-capped man stood with his black-leather-clad torso sticking out of the turret hatch, and a dozen or so rifle-armed soldiers rode clinging to the hull behind him. As the tank began to descend the slope into the little vale that lay between his hill and Milo's, the front of the half-track appeared in the saddle behind the lumbering steel behemoth.
"Are there any rockets left for the bazooka, Bernie?" said Milo quietly.
"Yeah, Milo, two," whispered First Sergeant Bernie Cohen. "But they won't do no good—that's a fuckin' Tiger tank. They'll just bounce off the fucker."
Milo nodded. "Well, tell the bazooka man to take out that half-track back there, while the BARs and the rest of us try to kill those infantrymen. They're what we really need to worry about—this slope is too steep for that tank or any other to make it up here."
"He won't need to," said Cohen sadly. "The fuckin' hill ain't too steep for fuckin' eighty-eight shells to climb. He can just sit down there and blow the whole fuckin' top off this fuckin' hill, and us with the fucker."
The flash and whooosh of the launched antitank rocket coincided with the tremendous explosion capped by a huge, black-smoky fireball rising from the saddle and announcing that the vehicle had been carrying gasoline, not troops. These sounds also coincided with the spraying of a deadly hail of small-arms fire on the Tiger below. The black hat spun from off the head of the man in the turret, even as that turret began to turn toward the hilltop, its long-barreled 88mm cannon beginning to rise. The unprotected Panzergrenadieren fared poorly, with no cover or even concealment to shelter them from the rain of death.
"Okay, okay!" Milo shouted. "Cease firing, cease firing, and let's get the hell off this hill before the Krauts blow us all to hell!"
The men needed no further urging, rolling out of their firing positions and running, sliding, rolling down the more gentle reverse slope as fast as was humanly possible. Not until yet another snow-covered hill lay between them and the Tiger did they halt, panting, listening to the main armament of the Tiger bomb
arding their late position relentlessly.
Milo clapped Sergeant Cohen on the shoulder. "Well, it worked, didn't it, Bernie? Why're you still so glum?"
"Yeah, it worked, a'right, Milo, that last time, but it ain't gonna work again, not for us. We down to one rocket for the bazooka now, and damn little fuckin' ammo for any fuckin' thing else. One of the BARs ain't workin' no more, and Bailey's ankle is either busted or sprained real bad. We gotta find either battalion or regiment, Milo."
But they did not; what they found instead and very soon thereafter was a full company of Waffen-SS, who were as much surprised at the encounter as were Milo and his fragments of Charlie Company. The battle was short, of course, and very bloody, and the outcome was certain when it began there amid the whirling snow. Most of it was hand-to-hand, the firearms fired at such short ranges that they often set afire the clothing of those at whom they were aimed.
Milo fired off the magazine in his Thompson, but had no time to put in a fresh one. He used the submachine gun as a club until his icy-slick gloves lost their grip on it. He managed to draw and arm his pistol then, but had fired off only two shots when something struck the back of his neck and darkness descended on him.
When things had been sorted out and the Hauptschar-fuhrer had made his report, Obersturmfuhrer Karl Greisser waited until the Sanitatsmann had finished dabbing ointment on his powder-burned face before remarking, "There weren't many of them, God be thanked, for just look at the mess those few made of this company. Did any get away?"
Untersturmfuhrer Egon Lenge shrugged. "One would doubt it, but in this snow and wind, who can say? There are a few wounded Amis. What do we do with them?"
Greisser raised his eyebrows. "On the advance, Egon? You know what to do."
Lenge nodded and tried vainly to click his bootheels. "Zu Behfel, mein Hen Obersturmfuhrer."
Pacing over to a knot of soldiers, he bespoke a Rot-tenfuhrer. "Get two men and fix your bayonets."
Milo came slowly out of his stupor and groggily raised his body up on his elbows. That was when the Rotten-fuhrer. "Get two men and fix your bayonets."
Milo came slowly out of his stupor and groggily raised his body up on his elbows. That was when the Rotten-fuhrer jammed the full length of his bayonet into Milo's chest, then again and yet a third time. With a groan, Milo sank back into the trampled, bloody snow.
Satisfied, the Rottenfuhrer moved on to perform another mercy killing. He thought well of the company commander for ordering this. Only a very humane man would take time out from an advance to see to it that wounded enemies were not simply left to die of pain and shock and freezing.
Although in severe pain from the penetrating stabs of the bayonet, Milo stayed completely still until the last sounds of men and vehicles had faded into the distance. Although someone had taken his wristwatch, he discovered that the American weapons and clothing and equipment had been left where they lay by the Germans.
"The bastards must be running on a tight time schedule," he muttered to himself. "They didn't even search us for cigarettes… not that they'd have found any on this bunch."
His own searching showed him fourteen bodies, fifteen, including his. So as many as five could have gotten away clean. Of course, there could be some he had not found in the deep snow, too, and some of those not here could have crawled away wounded to die nearby.
He found his Thompson, checked the action, cleaned and dried it as best he could, then jammed his last full magazine into it. His pistol still hung by his side on a lanyard he affected, and he cleared and holstered it. A careful search of the bodies of his men gave him a handful of dog tags, a few more rounds of .45 ammo for his weapons and nothing else; they had all been down to the bare essentials days ago.
Search as he might, however, he could not find his map case, and as he thought of it, he could not recall seeing it within the last twenty-four hours or so. He re-flected that it and its contents would not do him much good anyway, because he did not know where he was except in the very broadest sense, and he could spot no prominent terrain features or landmarks amid the wind-blown clouds of snow and the very low overcast. He did still have his compass, however, hanging unbroken in its case on his pistol belt; thank God for small favors. If he took a course a few degrees west of due north, he should eventually come out of the Ardennes somewhere in friendly territory, unless the German counteroffensive had rolled the invading Allies clear back to Antwerp by then.
Colonel John Saxon was in an exceedingly foul mood when he hustled into the commo tent, not liking at all being bothered for any reason at his daily bowel movement.
Taking the microphone into his hairy paw and appropriating the radio operator's seat, he growled, "Saxon here. What is so fuckin' all-fired important, Mr. Whoever-you-are? And I'm warnin' you, it better be fuckin' good! Like capturin' old Schickelgroober, that kinda good."
A cool, precise, obviously unflustered voice replied, "Colonel Saxon, your regimental headquarters says that you have or at least had an officer named Milo Moray, a captain and company commander, in your battalion. Is this true?"
"Yeah, it's so," attested Saxon, the still-recent hurt of loss taking a good bit of the fire of anger out of him. "The fuckin' Krauts wounded him and then bay'neted him and a whole bunch of other wounded fellas to death. Two, three boys come to get away and make it back and tell us 'bout it. Why? Have you found his body?"
"In a manner of speaking, colonel, in a manner of speaking. This is S-2, Second Armored Division. I'm Major George Smith. A man was captured by one of our advance units a few kilometers southwest of here yesterday. He was wandering around alone in bloodstained clothing, and that in itself made him suspicious, since there were no wounds to be found on him. After the regimental S-2 questioned him, found that his German was as fluent as his English and that, although he claimed to be a captain, there were no indications of rank on his uniform or in his effects and his identity tags carry an enlisted man's service number, he was sent back here under guard."
"Whoever he is, colonel, he is a linguist. He speaks not only English and German, but French, Dutch, Flemish, Yiddish, Scottish, Spanish and Romanian, and those are only the ones we've been able to check out. He has the order of battle of your battalion and regiment down pat and about as much of that of your division and First Army as one could expect the captain of a line company to know. I like the man and I'd like to believe his story… and it's a hair-raising one, too. But I've got to have more proof of his identity than he can give me, or has given me up to now, anyway. With all these phony GIs wandering around the countryside and speaking German when they think they aren't overheard, we have no choice but to be damned sure just who or what we've got."
"I unnerstand, major," said Saxon. "You cain't be too fuckin' careful, out in hostile country. I tell you what— you got this man there with you?"
"In the next room, colonel," replied Smith.
"Then ask him or have somebody else ask him these-here questions I'm gonna tell you and then tell me what he answers."
When the major resumed transmission, he said, "Colonel, the man states that his high-ranking buddy is Brigadier General Jethro Stiles, that the clapped-up cardshark of your battalion was a Belgian named Jaquot, that the name and rank of the man who tried to kill him back in the States was Sergeant Luigi Moffa, and that—"
"Never mind, major, never mind," crowed Saxon, grinning from ear to ear. "You got the genyewine article there, not no Kraut. Send Milo home."
When he finally got through to Brigadier General Stiles, Saxon said, "I hope you sittin' down, gen'rul. Okay? Milo ain't dead. Naw, he turned up and was picked up by some Secon' Armored fellas, two, three days back, and their fuckin' S-2s has had him sincet then, tryin' to figger if he was who he said or a fuckin' Kraut in GI clothes. I give the dumbass fuckers some questions could'n anybody but Milo answer right, and when I got the right answers, I told the bastards to send him back to battalion. I thought you'd wanta know, gen'rul."
During his l
ong, solitary sojourn through the winter wastes of the Ardennes, dodging German panzers and infantry units and finding himself forced by these and by natural obstacles to bear farther and farther east of north, Milo had had much time to think. He now was pretty certain that there was something extremely odd, to say the very least, about the way he was put together. He had been knifed in Chicago by the late Jaan Brettmann, shot by Moffa back at Jackson, shot again by that German sniper and now bayoneted two or three times over by that SS man, yet he still was here to think about it all, and any one of the wounds he had suffered could have, should have, killed him outright. Not only was he still alive, he didn't even have any scars from these terrible wounds.
All around him since D-Day, men—good men, strong men, healthy and well-trained and intelligent men—had been dying, many of them of injuries far less outwardly serious than those he had sustained and survived. So, why? He was human in every other way saving that he never sickened and that he could come unscathed out of patently deadly situations and incidents. He breathed, ate, digested, defecated and urinated. He functioned perfectly well sexually (at least no woman had voiced any complaints about his performances). He slept when he could. He was capable of pity, disgust, hate, respect, anger, possibly love too (but he had never found himself "in love," not in the classic sense, so how could he be sure?), the whole gamut of human emotions. So what made him so different?
He did not formulate any answer before he stumbled across a tank crew engaged in replacing a damaged track link on their Sherman, screaming profane and obscene invective at the tank and each other and offering prime targets, had he been a German.
First Sergeant Bernie Cohen had been in a state approaching traumatic shock since battalion had called down to announce that their long-lost company commander, Captain Milo Moray, had somehow gotten out of the Ardennes alive and well and would be along whenever Second Armored could get him in. He still could not believe it even when Milo alit from a jeep and came into the Quonset hut orderly room of the reforming company.
