by Dean Hughes
Alex wanted to sleep, but when he closed his eyes, the images of limbs and blood returned, so he kept his eyes open and stared into the darkness. Late in the night he seemed to hit bottom, reach a level of despair he had never known before. He found himself screaming, inside his head, trying to keep the thoughts away, the pictures. But his mind kept racing. He thought of losing his life, of letting Anna down. He thought of seeing more of his men shot up. But behind it all was a general sense that all of this was never going to end, that this winter would go on and on, and the cold, the shelling, the death, would never let up.
What he knew instinctively was that he must not let this panic and fear penetrate his soul. He had to keep moving forward, doing what was required of him. He had to get out of the foxhole in the morning, take what came, and do the same the next day and the day after that. If he thought about it, imagined it, he couldn’t face it.
He also knew that he was drawn toward death, as an escape, and it was hard to find some reason to want life. But that much of Anna was in him, a sense of what he owed her. So there was nothing to do but accept the horror. He just couldn’t live through it tonight, in his head, and then face it again, in the daylight. So he tried to rattle his head, bang it against the side of the foxhole, anything but let the thoughts keep coming.
That only worked so long. Finally he gave way. He let himself visualize the crater, see the two boys–the broken parts of them. And then he saw the charge his men would make in the morning, watched it over and over. At least the repetition seemed to dull his anxiety, wear him out, until he entered a state that was similar to sleep.
Very early, however, long before first light, he was awake again. So was Howie. Alex could tell that Howie’s breathing was strained, that the fear was in him too.
“How are you doing?” Alex asked him.
“Not too bad. I think I can handle it this time.”
“Good. But play it smart. Don’t try to prove anything.”
“I won’t.”
“Did you sleep?”
“Yeah. Some.” And then without explanation he added, “I sure wish our mail would catch up to us.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. In the night, when I can’t sleep, I just think a lot about Mom, and everyone back home. My sister told me way last fall that she was sending me a Christmas package.”
“You’ll probably get some nice warm undies–just in time for summer.”
“Yeah. That’s about right.” He hesitated again, and then he said, “One time you asked me why I didn’t buy Christmas presents for my sisters. I was thinking about that during the night. When I get back, I’m going to do that kind of stuff. My family needs to be more like yours.”
“Every family has its problems. I wasn’t very close to my brother–the one who’s a POW. That’s something I want to change.”
“That’s the only good thing about this mess out here. Maybe it makes you appreciate a few things.”
“Yeah. It does do that.” Alex’s mind was drifting back to what lay ahead. He knew he had to get the men up and get them moved into position. So he pulled himself out of his hole, out into the brittle air, and worked his way around to the other foxholes.
The men ate a little–most of them not really very hungry–and then they fell in as a platoon, and they moved in a line silently through the dark to a position at the top of a little hill, east of the woods they had been clearing. At the bottom of the hill, to the north, only about two hundred meters away, was the village of Foy. There were snow-covered haystacks scattered across the field, and a few little groves of trees, but nothing else would provide cover. The men would not be able to move very fast either, with the deep snow hampering the charge.
For two days German trucks had moved in and out of Foy, on the road from Noville. These could have been supply trucks, hauling in ammunition, but they could also have been troop carriers, bringing reinforcements to the German forces. No one knew for sure.
The men of E Company spread out in a skirmish line along the edge of the woods. First Platoon was on the left flank. Second Platoon, with Alex’s squad, was directly in the middle, with Third Platoon on the right. Headquarters Company had set up machine guns on each side of the line.
As the sun began to rise, the distant hills glowed silver, but the slope in front of the men was gray and flat. The cover fire began. That was the signal for the troops to make their move down the hill. Alex led out, and he tried to keep a hard, steady pace. It was foolish to try to run in this snow.
There was sporadic rifle fire from Foy–nothing more–and that was a good sign, but the men had a long way to go. Alex knew the action would heat up as they got closer. It was hard going, but Alex slogged along, hoisting his knees, moving as fast as he could. Howie was next to him. When First Platoon, on the left, reached a barn and some outbuildings about halfway down the hill, Alex heard some shooting and the burst of a couple of grenades. He didn’t know exactly what was happening over there, but in the center of the line, Alex saw Captain Wells head toward some haystacks that were maybe seventy or eighty meters from the first buildings in Foy.
“This way!” Wells called out, so Alex and his squad, with the rest of the platoon, fought their way through the snow toward one of the haystacks. Small-arms fire was still popping, here and there, but still no mortars, no heavy machine guns.
“We’ve lost our left flank!” Captain Wells yelled. “Hold right here for now!”
“That’s crazy!” Duncan told Alex. “We’ve got to keep going. If we sit out here, we’re easy targets. They’ll zero in on us with mortars.”
That was exactly what Alex was thinking. Wells was such a fool. “Captain,” Alex called out, “First Platoon went into that barn. They’re all right. We need to keep moving.”
“No! Hold where you are.”
Alex could see the man’s face, full of confusion and fear. He was crouching behind the haystack to Alex’s right, and he obviously had no idea what to do.
In another few minutes, First Platoon, led by Lieutenant Atwood, charged down the hill from the barn and caught up, but they moved in behind haystacks themselves, and Wells still gave no command. Alex was frantic. He knew that in a charge of this kind, speed was everything. The snow had already slowed the men far too much.
“Atwood!” Captain Wells finally yelled. “Take your men around to the left, flank the town, and attack from the other side. We’ll give you cover fire from here.”
Duncan cursed. “That’ll take forever. We’ll all be dead by the time they get into place.”
“Captain,” Atwood yelled. “We’re supposed to go straight in. If we try to–”
“No! Move out! Do what I told you!” Wells shouted back. “Let’s get some machine guns going.”
So Second and Third platoons started some covering fire from the haystacks, and First Platoon took off in single file around the west side of town. They took a path that led past some trees, which they used for cover, but the trees were spaced out enough that they were of little help, and small-arms fire–rifles and machine pistols–began to cut the men down.
Alex could see the men dropping. Those who weren’t hit were pinned down. They had no chance of continuing their flanking move around the town.
Duncan was cursing again, and now Lieutenant Owen was yelling, “We need to go, Captain! We can’t sit here!” But Wells seemed petrified. He didn’t answer, didn’t even move.
By now machine-gun fire had begun to crack and rattle from the buildings in town. Alex knew things would be tough from here on in. The Germans had recovered from whatever surprise might have been on the Americans’ side. Mortars would be striking soon, maybe even artillery fire. Alex and his men were going to die out in this field because a stupid officer didn’t know what he was doing.
Still Wells waited, and he responded to none of the calls from his other officers. Several crucial minutes went by, and then Alex saw Lieutenant Nichols, a platoon leader from D Company, running
down the hill, fighting his way through the snow. Bullets popped overhead, but the man kept coming. When he reached the haystacks, he was breathing hard, but he shouted, “Captain Wells, I’m taking over. Captain Summers sent me.”
Nichols was tough and smart, and all his men spoke well of him. He immediately started shouting out commands as he ran from one haystack to another. He got a mortar team to hit a haystack close to town, where two snipers were apparently hiding, and then he got the machine-gun teams set up and firing. “All right, men!” he finally shouted. “We need to get to those buildings. Don’t stop again. Let’s go!”
And he dashed out first. Lieutenant Nichols was a powerful, athletic man, and he used his long legs to lope through the snow faster than Alex thought anyone could. But Alex went hard, too, tried to pull his men along with him.
Mortar fire had opened up now, and snow and ice and earth began to erupt across the field. Alex saw German tanks maneuvering toward the edge of town, and then he saw their big guns begin to burst with fire. The noise and confusion was tremendous, with machine-gun fire from both sides, mortars thumping into the town from the haystacks, and fire from rifles, grenades, Tommy guns, bazookas. Tracer bullets were streaking through the air, whizzing past him.
Ahead, Alex saw the muzzle fire from windows and alleys, but he kept going. When he got close to the nearest building, a stone house, he dropped down and tossed a grenade at the front door. When the explosion blew the door away, he jumped up, ran to the house, and this time rolled a grenade inside. The blast shook the house, filling it with smoke, but Alex ran in, Duncan with him. They checked for Germans downstairs, and then heard machine-gun fire upstairs. Alex charged up the stairs, pulled the pin on another grenade, and rolled it into an upstairs room. He heard a shout of panic, movement, and then the burst. As soon as the smoke cleared a little, Alex and Duncan charged, their rifles ready. Two Germans were down on their faces, both apparently dead.
Without saying a word, Alex ran back down the stairs. He and Duncan, with other men from the squad joining them outside, ran behind the house. Alex could hear another machine gun close by, and then he spotted the house, down the street to the right, where fire was coming from an upstairs window. Alex shot with his M-1 several times, and so did some of the others, but the angle was wrong, and the shooting from the window continued.
Alex knew he had to get to the house with the snipers. He ran across the street and then stayed close to the buildings as he moved in under the fire. Once again, he led his men into the house and up the stairs. Another grenade took out the machine-gun team.
As the men moved back outside, Alex saw the Panzers, three of them, rumbling away from town, with perhaps a platoon of men alongside them. The Germans were falling back from Foy, north along the road toward Noville. Alex and his men fired a few rounds toward the retreating platoon, but Alex was more concerned about any enemy left in the houses. He led his men through the little main street. They checked one house after another. But they were finding nothing, and Alex was enormously relieved. The operation had gone much better than he had ever expected. Clearly, most of the Germans had abandoned Foy the night before. There had been only a skeleton force there to fight a rear-guard action. If the company had kept moving in the beginning, instead of holding up the way Wells had commanded them to do, E Company would have taken hardly any casualties.
Clearing houses took some time, and some of the men had taken prisoners, who had to be guarded. In all the confusion, there had been some scattering. Alex realized that he’d better round his men up and account for everyone. He had known at some point that Howie wasn’t with him, but he hadn’t had time to deal with that. “Where’s Howie?” he asked now, but none of his men knew. Alex hoped Howie hadn’t lost his nerve and stayed back at the haystacks.
When Alex spotted Davis walking down the street toward him, he waved him over and then asked, “Did you see what happened to Private Douglas.”
“I saw him get hit and go down,” Davis said. “Right after we came out from behind the haystacks.”
Alex felt stunned. He had to find him, make sure he had gotten some medical help by now. “Stay here,” he told his men. “I’m going up to look for him.”
Alex ran through the town and then trudged up the hill through the snow. As he neared the haystack, he saw a man lying face down. And then, as he took a few more steps, he recognized Howie’s muddy field jacket.
Alex stopped. He didn’t want to deal with this. But then he told himself that the boy might still be alive. He hurried forward and dropped down by Howie, rolling him over. “Howie!” he shouted, and he slapped his face. But there was nothing there, and Alex knew it. Howie’s chest was covered with blood, his face pallid, almost blue.
Alex’s body seemed to shut down, his breath coming to a stop, even his pulse. This couldn’t happen. This just couldn’t happen.
“Howie, come on. Don’t,” he said, hardly knowing what he was saying. And then, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He sat down in the snow, pulled the boy’s body onto his lap, and embraced him. “I was going to get you through.”
But the enormity of that lie struck Alex now. He’d had no right to make such guarantees. There was no protecting anyone out here.
He wanted to feel something–rage perhaps, at least with himself. But he sat there on the hillside, holding the boy, and the only thing he felt was the ice in his chest.
After a time he saw his men coming to him, Duncan leading the way. They tromped up the hill and stood around him, but no one said anything. No one smoked; no one spoke of eating. They simply waited.
Alex didn’t know what to do. He had to put Howie down, had to get on about his business. He was the squad leader, and the younger men didn’t need to see him locked up like this.
Duncan finally muttered, “At least he died quick.”
It was what every man hoped for. He would rather take a bullet in the heart than to have a leg ripped off by a mortar or a shoe mine and have to bleed to death in horrible pain. Still, to Alex, it hardly seemed a compensation.
Davis said, “I saw him come out from behind that haystack, and then he stopped. He raised his rifle and aimed at something. Then I saw him go down, straight on his face.”
“Did he fire his weapon?” Alex asked.
“I don’t know.”
Alex laid Howie down, and then he got hold of his rifle and yanked it out of the snow. He sniffed the barrel and knew immediately that it had been fired. “We taught him to kill–just in time to die,” he whispered. He tossed the rifle back onto the snow and then slammed his fist into his thigh.
Curtis dropped down next to Alex and put his arms around his shoulders. “You did what you could do,” he said, but Alex felt the weakness of that. What he could do was nothing at all.
Alex got up. “Duncan, go find us a house,” he said. “We’ll sleep inside tonight.”
“Yeah. All right. What are you going to do?”
“Just stay here for a minute.”
“All right.” But no one moved. “Deacon, don’t put this on yourself.”
“Why don’t you come on down with us now?” Curtis said. “There’s nothing more to do up here.”
“I’ll be down in a few minutes.”
So the men walked back down the hill into Foy. Alex picked up Howie’s rifle and stuck it, barrel first, into the snow. He set Howie’s helmet over the butt of the rifle, and then he looked out across the valley. The sun was up now, and the snow was glistening, as though this were just a nice winter day in Belgium. What Alex knew was that the pretty morning had brought one more horror to pile on top of all the others, to fill his head with memories he would have to live with forever.
He wanted to cry. He thought it would do him some good. But he had worked too hard, too long, to keep everything out, and he had become good at it. He felt like lead now, like a statue, cold and hard and heartless.
He looked down at Howie again, and he thought of the young man’s mother, who had wo
rked so hard all her life to keep her family going. He thought of the sisters Howie had planned to buy Christmas presents for–next year. He thought of the dance hall in Boise, and Howie deciding to sign up with the paratroopers so he could be a war hero and impress the girls. That was plenty to cry about, but Alex couldn’t do it. So he walked down the hill, and he thought how much Howie would have liked getting inside a house to sleep warm for one night.
Chapter 35
It was almost three weeks after Bobbi had gotten her telegram from the Hammonds that she finally got a letter from Richard. His hands had been burned and were still wrapped. “I don’t really know how bad my hands are going to be,” he told Bobbi. “The doc here wants to send me to your hospital. I guess your burn ward is better than the one here.”
He didn’t say exactly how he had gotten burned, and he mentioned only briefly that after his ship had sunk he had made it to land, in the Philippines. “That was a very hard time,” he said, but he gave no details. In fact, the letter seemed rather impersonal. Part of that, surely, was that someone–a nurse or a Red Cross volunteer–was writing it for him, but Bobbi was left confused and a little worried. There was no expression of feeling for her, no hint of what his plans were–or how she might fit into his future. He did say, “My doctor told me I’ll probably have to have some surgery.” And he said, “I won’t be going back to sea. I guess I’ll be leaving the navy at some point.”
Only at the end did he drop a little hint as to his feelings. “Bobbi,” he said, “I hope you didn’t go through too bad of a time while you were waiting for word. There was nothing I could do to let you know I was alive.” But then, just when Bobbi was expecting some expression of affection, he only said, “I hope I do get transferred to Pearl. We need to talk things over.”
What did that mean? Bobbi didn’t like the hesitancy. The last time they had seen each other, they had made promises. Why couldn’t he at least say that he was still committed?
