After D-Day in June 1944, the great thrust across the English Channel and into Europe began. Abel was transferred to the First Army under General Omar N. Bradley, and detailed to the Ninth Armored Division. The Allies liberated Paris on August 25, and Abel paraded with the American and Free French soldiers down the Champs Elysees to a heroes’ reception, even if he was some way behind General de Gaulle. He studied the unbombed magnificent city, and decided on the site where he would build the first Baron hotel in Europe.
The Allies moved on through France and crossed the German border in the final push towards Berlin. Local provisions were almost non-existent, because the countryside through which the Allies marched had been ravaged by the retreating German army. Whenever Abel arrived in a new town, he would commandeer the largest hotel and the remaining food supplies before any other American quartermaster had worked out where to start looking. British and American officers were always happy to dine with the Ninth Armored Division, and wondered how it managed to requisition such fresh provisions. On one occasion when General George S. Patton joined General Bradley for dinner, Abel was introduced to the fighting general, who always led his troops into battle brandishing an ivory-handled revolver.
‘The best meal I’ve had in the whole damn war,’ declared Patton.
By February 1945 Abel had been in uniform for nearly three years, and he realized the war in Europe would be over in a matter of months. General Bradley kept sending him congratulatory notes and meaningless decorations to adorn his ever-expanding uniform, but they didn’t help. Abel begged to be allowed to fight in just one battle, but Bradley continued to turn a deaf ear.
Although it was the responsibility of a junior officer to lead the supply trucks up to the front lines and supervise food for the troops, Abel often carried out that duty himself. And as he did in the running of his hotels, he never allowed any of his staff to know when or where he would next appear.
It was the continual flow of blanket-covered soldiers on stretchers into camp that March morning that made Abel decide to take a look for himself. He could no longer bear the one-way traffic of limbless bodies. He rounded up a lieutenant, a sergeant, two corporals and twenty-eight privates, and headed for the front.
The twenty-mile drive was excruciatingly slow that morning. Abel took the wheel of the leading truck - it made him feel a little like General Patton - as his convoy inched its way through heavy rain and thick mud; he had to pull off the road several times to allow ambulance details the right of way as they returned from the front. Wounded bodies took precedence over empty stomachs. Abel prayed that most were no more than wounded, but only an occasional nod or wave suggested any sign of life. It became more obvious to Abel with each mud-clogged mile that something big was going on near Remagen, and he could feel the beat of his heart quicken.
When he finally reached the command post he could hear enemy fire in the near distance. He pounded his leg in anger as he watched stretcher-bearers bringing back yet more dead and wounded comrades. He was sick of learning about the war at second hand. He suspected that any reader of The New York Times was better informed than he was.
Abel brought his convoy to a halt by the side of the field kitchen and jumped out of the truck, shielding himself from the heavy rain, feeling ashamed that others only a few miles away were shielding themselves from bullets. He supervised the unloading of 100 gallons of soup, a ton of corned beef, 200 chickens, half a ton of butter, 3 tons of potatoes and 100 ten-pound cans of baked beans - plus boxes of the inevitable K rations - in readiness for those going to, or returning from, the battlefield. He left his cooks to prepare the meal and the orderlies to peel the potatoes, while he went straight to the tent of the commanding officer, Brigadier General John Leonard, passing yet more dead and wounded soldiers on the way.
As he was about to enter the tent, General Leonard, accompanied by his aide, came rushing out. He conducted a conversation with Abel while on the move.
‘What can I do for you, Colonel?’ Leonard asked.
‘I’ve started preparing the food for your battalion, sir, as requested in overnight orders.’
‘You needn’t bother with the food for now, Colonel. At first light this morning Lieutenant Burrows of the Ninth discovered an undamaged railroad bridge north of Remagen - the Ludendorff Bridge - and I gave orders that it should be crossed immediately and a bridgehead established on the far side of the river. Up to now, the Germans have blown up every bridge across the Rhine long before we got there, so we can’t hang around waiting for lunch before they demolish this one.’
‘Did the Ninth get across?’ asked Abel.
‘Sure did,’ replied the general, ‘but they encountered heavy resistance from a forest on the far side. The first platoons were ambushed, and God knows how many men we lost. So you’d better hold that food, Colonel, because my only interest now is in seeing how many of my men I can get back alive so they can join you for dinner.’
‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ asked Abel.
Leonard stopped walking for a moment, and studied the overweight colonel who had clearly seen no action.
‘How many men do you have under your direct command?’
‘One lieutenant, one sergeant, two corporals and twenty-eight privates. Thirty-three in all, including myself, sir.’
‘Good. Report to the field hospital with your men. Turn them into stretcher-bearers, and bring back as many wounded as you can.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Abel ran all the way back to the field kitchen, where he found most of his men sitting in a corner of the tent, smoking.
‘Get up, you lazy bastards. We’ve got real work to do for a change.’
Thirty-two men snapped to attention.
‘Follow me!’ shouted Abel. ‘On the double!’
He turned and started running again, this time towards the field hospital. A young doctor was briefing sixteen medical corpsmen when Abel and his out-of-breath, unfit, untrained unit appeared at the entrance of the tent.
‘Can I help you, sir?’ asked the doctor.
‘No, but I hope I can help you. I have thirty-two men who’ve been detailed by General Leonard to join your group.’ It was the first his men had heard of it.
The doctor stared in amazement at the colonel. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Don’t call me sir,’ said Abel. ‘We’re here to assist you.’
‘Yes, sir,’ the doctor repeated.
He handed Abel a carton of Red Cross armbands, which the cooks, kitchen orderlies and potato peelers put on as the doctor briefed them on what was taking place in the forest on the other side of the Ludendorff Bridge.
‘The Ninth has sustained heavy casualties. Those of you with medical expertise will remain in the battle zone, while the rest will bring back as many of the wounded as possible.’
Abel was delighted to be taking an active part in the war at last. The doctor, now in command of forty-nine men, allocated eighteen stretchers, and each soldier received a full medical pack. He then led his motley band through the mud and rain towards the Ludendorff Bridge, with Abel only a yard behind. When they reached the Rhine they saw row upon row of blankets, covering lifeless bodies. They marched silently across the bridge in single file, passing the remnants of the German explosion that had failed to destroy the foundations of the bridge.
On up towards the forest they marched, the sound of gunfire growing in intensity. Abel found himself simultaneously exhilarated by being so close to the enemy, and horrified by the evidence of what modern weaponry was capable of inflicting on his fellow man. From everywhere came cries of anguish from his comrades who until that day had wistfully thought the end of the war was near. For many of them, it was over.
The young doctor stopped again and again, doing the best he could for each man he came across. Sometimes he would mercifully put an end to a wounded man’s suffering with a single shot of his pistol. Abel guided the walking wounded back towards the Ludendorff Bridge, and organized the stretcher-bearers to assist
those unable to help themselves. By the time they reached the edge of the forest, only the doctor, one of the potato peelers and Abel were left of the original party; all the others were assisting the wounded back to the field hospital.
As the three of them entered the forest, they could hear enemy guns roaring ahead of them. Abel saw the outline of a big German gun, hidden in undergrowth and still pointing towards the bridge, but damaged beyond repair. Then he heard a volley of bullets that sounded so loud he realized the enemy must only be a few hundred yards away.
He dropped to one knee, his senses heightened to screaming pitch. Suddenly there was another burst of fire in front of him. Abel got to his feet and ran forward, reluctantly followed by the doctor and the potato peeler. They ran on for a hundred yards, until they came to a lush green meadow covered with white crocuses and littered with bodies.
‘It’s a massacre!’ screamed Abel, as he heard the retreating fire. The doctor made no comment; he had screamed three years before.
‘Don’t worry about the dead,’ was all the doctor said. ‘Just see if you can find anyone who has half a chance of surviving.’
‘Over here,’ shouted Abel, kneeling beside a sergeant lying in the German mud. He couldn’t see Abel - both his eyes were missing. Abel placed little bits of gauze in the sockets and waited impatiently.
‘He’s dead, Colonel,’ said the doctor, not giving the man a second glance. Abel ran on to another body and then another, but it was always the same, and only the sight of a severed head standing upright in the mud stopped him in his tracks. He found himself reciting words he had learned at the feet of the Baron: ‘Blood and destruction shall be so in use and dreadful objects so familiar that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infants quartered by the hands of war.’
‘Does nothing change?’ he asked.
‘Only the battlefield,’ replied the doctor.
When Abel had checked thirty - or was it forty? - men, he once again turned to the doctor, who was trying to save the life of a captain whose head, but for a closed eye and his mouth, was swathed in blood-soaked bandages.
Abel stood over the doctor, watching helplessly, studying the captain’s shoulder patch - the Ninth Armored. He recalled General Leonard’s words, ‘God knows how many men we’ve lost’.
‘Fucking Germans,’ said Abel.
‘Yes, sir,’ said the doctor.
‘Is he dead?’ asked Abel.
‘Might as well be,’ the doctor replied mechanically. ‘He’s losing so much blood it can only be a matter of time.’ He looked up. ‘There’s nothing left for you to do here, Colonel. Why don’t you try to get this one back to the field hospital. He just might have a chance. And let the base commander know that I intend to go forward, and I need every man he can spare.’
Abel helped the doctor carefully lift the captain onto a stretcher, then he and the potato peeler tramped slowly through the forest and back across the bridge, the doctor having warned him that any sudden movement to the stretcher could result in a fatal loss of blood. Abel didn’t allow the potato peeler to rest for a moment during the two-mile trek to the field hospital. He wanted to give the captain every chance to live. Afterwards he would return to assist the doctor in the forest.
When they finally reached the field hospital both men were exhausted. As they passed the stretcher over to a medical team, Abel felt certain the captain was already dead.
As the captain was wheeled slowly away he opened his unbandaged eye, which focused on Abel. He tried to raise an arm. Abel could have leapt with joy at the sight of the open eye and the moving hand. He saluted, and prayed the man would live.
He limped out of the hospital, eager to return to the forest, but was stopped by the duty officer.
‘Colonel,’ he said, ‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere. There are over three hundred men who need feeding. Christ, man, where have you been?’
‘Doing something worthwhile for a change.’
Abel thought about the young captain as he slowly headed back to the field kitchen.
For both of them the war was over.
40
THE CAPTAIN was taken into the tent and laid gently on an operating table.
William could see a nurse looking down at him, but was unable to hear what she was saying. He wasn’t sure if it was because his head was swathed in bandages, or because he’d lost his hearing. He shut his eye, and thought. He thought a lot about the past; he thought a little about the future; he thought quickly in case he died. If he lived, there would be plenty of time for thinking. His mind turned to Kate. The nurse saw a tear trickling out of the corner of his one eye.
Kate hadn’t understood his determination to enlist. He had accepted that she would never understand, and that he would not be able to justify his reasons to her, so he had stopped trying. The memory of her desperate face when they parted still haunted him. He had never really thought about death - no young man ever does - but now he wanted desperately to live and return to his family.
William had left Lester’s under the joint control of Ted Leach and Tony Simmons until he returned. Until he returned … He had given no instructions for them in case he did not return. Both of them had begged him not to go. Two others who didn’t understand. When he had finally signed up, he couldn’t face the children. Richard, aged nine, had held back the tears until his father told him that he could not come with him to fight the Germans. Virginia and Lucy, thank God, were too young to understand.
They sent William first to Officers’ Candidate School in Vermont. The last time he had visited Vermont was to go skiing with Matthew, slowly up the hills and quickly down; Matthew always in front of him both on the way up and on the way down. One thing was certain. Had Matthew lived, he would surely have signed up. The course lasted for three months, and made him fitter than he’d been since he left Harvard.
His first assignment was in a London full of Yanks, where he acted as a liaison officer between the Americans and the British. He was billeted at the Dorchester, which the British War Office had seconded for use by the American High Command. William read somewhere that Abel Rosnovski had offered the Baron in New York for the same purpose, and silently applauded his magnanimity. The blackouts, the doodlebugs and the air raid sirens all made him realize that he was involved in a war, but he felt strangely detached from what was going on only a hundred miles south-east of Hyde Park Corner. Throughout his life he had always taken the initiative; never been an onlooker. Moving between Eisenhower’s staff headquarters in St James’s and Churchill’s War Operations room in Storey’s Gate wasn’t William’s idea of initiative. It didn’t look as if he was going to meet a German face-to-face for the entire duration of the war, unless Hitler marched down Whitehall and into Trafalgar Square, when surely even Nelson would climb down from his column and join in the fighting.
When a division of the US First Army was posted to Scotland for training exercises with the Black Watch, William was sent along as an observer. During the long, slow rail journey north he began to realize that he was no more than a glorified messenger boy, and wondered why he’d ever signed up. But once he was in Scotland, everything changed. There the air was filled with the noise of battle, as soldiers prepared themselves to face the enemy. When he returned to London he put in a request for an immediate transfer to the First Army. His commanding officer, who never believed in keeping a man who wanted to see action behind a desk, released him.
Once they considered William Kane was fit enough to die, he returned to Scotland and joined his new regiment at Inveraray, preparing for the invasion they all knew had to come soon. Training was hard and intense. Nights spent in the Scottish hills fighting mock battles with the Black Watch were a marked contrast to evenings at the Dorchester writing reports, scurrying down to the safety of the basement whenever an air raid siren was heard.
Three months later Captain William Kane was parachuted into northern France to join General Bradley’s army as it advanced across Europ
e. The scent of victory was in the air, and William wanted to be the first Allied soldier in Berlin.
The First Army advanced towards the Rhine, determined to cross any bridge they could find. Captain Kane received orders that morning, that his division was to cross the Ludendorff Bridge and engage the enemy a mile north-east of Remagen, in a forest on the far side of the river. From the crest of a hill he watched the Ninth Armored cross the bridge, expecting it to be blown sky high at any moment.
Captain Kane followed with 120 men under his command, most of them, like himself, going into action for the first time. No more exercises with wily Scots pretending to kill each other with blank cartridges - followed by a meal together in the mess. These were real Germans, with real bullets, real death - and certainly few would be dining together afterwards.
When William reached the edge of the forest, he and his men met with no resistance, so they decided to press on. He was beginning to think the Ninth must have done such a thorough job that his platoon would only have to follow them through, when from nowhere there was a sudden hail of bullets and mortars. Everything seemed to be coming at them at once. The men went down, trying to find a tree to protect them, but over half the platoon was lost in a matter of seconds. The battle, if that’s how it could be described, had lasted for less than a minute, and William hadn’t even seen a German. As he crouched behind a tree in the wet undergrowth he saw, to his horror, the next wave of the Ninth Division coming through the forest. Without a thought, he ran from his shelter out into the open to warn them of the ambush.
Kane and Abel Page 39
