by Mark Helprin
He might easily have turned and shot them. But it was too early for that. The invasion fleets were unloading. The airborne divisions were deep in their assaults. Let the two bicyclists have their peace for half a day more, and let them wonder what it was that came out of the dark and struck them like an enraged bull. They would be puzzled for the rest of their perhaps short lives, and, meanwhile, he was still on track to blow up their train.
It was necessary to approach the bridge slowly lest he stumble onto a guard or a patrol walking the railbed. To cover not much more than a kilometer took him almost two hours as he zigzagged, paused to listen, and made occasional swings north, away from the railway and the road that paralleled it. Although the shortest route between one thing and another is a straight line, between an attacker and his objective it is hardly ever the best. The virtue of meandering is that it lessens the chance that an enemy will observe you, and increases the chance that you will observe him. Harry broke his time and pace so as not to fall into a pattern, and he avoided places where, although not seeing it, he felt nonetheless the potential presence of the enemy. It was as if he had senses that he could neither explain nor name, but he trusted them to lead him. Well before dawn, he reached a spot that gave him a clear view of the railroad bridge. There were no lights, but moonlight now showed it, the road beyond, and a guardhouse at either end.
Just north of the river, the ground rose to the west. This would offer the best firing position and a means of escape if he could hide in the brush until a train approached from the west, fire the two rockets, follow with a fusillade from his carbine, light the long-fused plastique, run north along the river, and then recross it to the southeast to head back to the forest. Expecting the descent of paratroopers north and west of St. Lô, the Germans, were they able to pursue, would probably stay west of the river, as they knew that heavily laden airborne troops did not make a habit of swimming.
So Harry ran a half mile up the Terrette until he came to a rocky area that wouldn’t show footprints on the bank, and there left everything but the bazooka, the two rockets, two blocks of plastique, his carbine, and four magazines of ammunition. He ferried over in four trips, and then went south toward the bridge. Though not exhausted, he was beginning to tire. As he was trying to settle on a location that would be the best compromise of cover and a good firing point, he felt the oncoming dawn. In summer, the temperature begins to change before the light. Currents of air move differently. Some animals alter the pitch of their cries, and some stop altogether. The sky is transformed in such a way that before one is able to discern the difference one is aware of it nonetheless. The coming of dawn, a knowledge that somewhere in the east the sun was hot and somewhere it was noon, that perhaps in India it was raining and people were already tired from their morning’s work, gave him a sense of urgency. It was hard to find the right place, but he chose a clump of saplings not substantial enough to block the light, so that grass had grown high between them.
He could hide there, and the bar pattern of the saplings would break the sight of any movement he might make either by necessity or inadvertently. From afar and close on, trees and brush efficiently conceal something or someone one is not primed to see, as the eye registers the expected break in consistency and then moves on. Sentries are warned of this, but they forget.
Covering himself with grass, Harry then placed the assembled and loaded bazooka to his right. On either side, the plastique was long-fused for a minute and a half, the two fuses, meeting in front of him, twisted together so they could be lit simultaneously. The loaded carbine was on his left with two magazines next to it, the one remaining magazine in a left-hand pocket. Other pockets were unbuttoned, ready to receive the three other magazines when they were empty. As he waited for full light he made some decisions. The first was that for as long as he could hold out he would neither eat nor drink the little he had. Eating was not merely eating. Were he to lie hidden for hours or days, it was also entertainment and a reward. The second was that after his fusillade he would take the time to put the three empty magazines in his pockets and button them rather than trying to do this on the run. He was certain that he could make better time that way. The third was that, if he could, he would stand for a moment in the open, so the enemy could see his uniform. He hoped anyway that the abandoned bazooka and rations containers would give the Germans cause to believe that airborne troops were active in the sector.
The sun climbed, and when it was white above the trees it hit him blindingly, which meant that he had to stay still and, while thusly illuminated, could not use his monocular to examine the target. The minute flash of a watch crystal, wedding ring, glasses, or polished button or buckle had probably, in the twentieth century alone, led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young fathers, sons, husbands, and brothers.
It was almost as uncomfortable as a staring contest, and soon grew far worse. Harry had always enjoyed the occasional skillful use of foul language, which was like a hot pepper in a dish of rice. In the right circumstances and the right hands, it could be powerful and, at times, poetic. Often the use of other words instead would have been, in fact, obscene, but the thoughtless overuse of obscenities common in the army was annoying and painful because of its persistent insufficiency of expression. In his view, people whose every other word was fuck were like dogs that will eat themselves to death. As a consequence, he swore less in the army than he had at home, so as not to add to the ever-swelling symphony of curses. But now, blinded by the sun, beginning to sweat, unable to move a muscle lest something flash or someone see, and looking to perhaps another bout of this the next day, he said “Shit!” And he said it out loud, but so that even he could barely hear it.
For hours and hours he listened for a train to the west, knowing that its approach would sharpen everything. Were that explained simply by adrenaline, one might attribute to adrenaline the power of opening another dimension in life, in which the color of color, the sound of sound, and the depth of field were so intensified as to impart to time a limitless velocity while simultaneously rendering it completely still. For very long, he hardly moved at all, and dreamt of the moment when the sun would move high and southwest enough so that with the monocular he could take in the details of the target.
Without the monocular, he could see soldiers at their mundane tasks, milling on the west side of the bridge, sometimes walking over it to the east side. They seemed overfamiliar with their surroundings. This he could tell, for example, from their gait as they crossed the bridge. They took the ties, which have never on any continent been spaced to fit the stride of a human being, so smoothly as to suggest perfect adaptation. One soldier, filling a bucket at the end of a rope by tossing it into the river below, did it so skillfully Harry guessed that he might have been guarding this bridge since the summer of 1940. After so long a time in which nothing had happened, and as yet uninformed of the Allied tidal wave approaching, they were such an open and easy target that he could hardly believe it.
When the sun was nearly overhead, with the angle of incidence such that only pilots could be struck by the angle of reflection, Harry lifted himself on his elbows so that air could flow beneath him. It cooled him with evaporation—for his front, which had been pressed on the mat of grass, was soaking wet. He stretched carefully. He unbuckled his chin strap and lifted his helmet so that the air could cool his head. This small pleasure was here as satisfying as any of the major sensations constantly sought in civilian life. He thought that the feeling of his forehead cooling as the wet hair that had fallen from the rim of the helmet dried in the slight breeze would be better than a night with Cleopatra.
Through the monocular, he saw that the soldiers whom he was going to kill looked much like the soldiers he himself knew and commanded, and like himself. The heat and a rarity of officers had made them careless of their uniforms. They looked depressed and lonely, and had the air of those who cannot know what will be required of them next. New roses had begun to open on a bush lodged
improbably at the juncture of the riverbank and the eastern abutment of the bridge. Though the guard force could not see them, Harry could. Close up and clear in the glass of the monocular, they waved in the air flowing beneath the bridge. He counted them: twenty, perfect for a florist. Late in the morning, smoke had begun to come from a pipe projecting from a small cookhouse. When the wind carried it to Harry, he knew that they would have no meat for lunch. One of the soldiers was doing laundry. At each end of the bridge two helmeted men were on duty, with submachine guns slung from their shoulders. Not once did a sentry look toward Harry or upriver. They sometimes stared east or west along the track, but most of the time they looked down, they kicked gravel, they stopped to talk to one another or soldiers off duty. Probably at some fixed time there would be a patrol, but Harry saw that no path was worn anywhere near where he was: they would stick to the roads, the fastest and easiest way to cover ground in fulfilling their eventless obligations.
Lunch came and went, shifts changed, laughter rang out a few times, an argument, the sun cut a trail deep into afternoon, and still there was no train. The night before, Harry had judged that a long drink of water would see him through the next day, especially if he were motionless and in cover, but he had been so wrong that now he considered crawling down to the river to drink. He didn’t, but he thought of water continuously, except when, because of the heat, he was only half conscious. Then, with extraordinary fidelity, dreams carried him elsewhere.
Another June, Cambridge, on the day of his graduation. His father was there, in an old-fashioned suit which that day was by no means the only one of its kind. In a portion of the Yard that now, after three hundred years, was pompously called the Tercentenary Theater, bow ties floated like butterflies, and morning wind made young leaves in the trees seem to applaud more vigorously than the self-conscious crowd. After the ceremony, of which Harry was almost completely oblivious, they sat for a while in the Yard as it emptied, and then his father gave him instructions that he did not hear, and left to catch a train back to New York. Harry was going to stay the two weeks until his lease expired, during which he would live quietly, pack up his things, and think of what he would do next. With his diploma in hand and his robe open to the breeze, he remained as the thunderous bustle came to an end and groups broke up and disappeared like ice melting in a stream, until he himself was the very last straggler. Except for a dog or two, usually a Labrador crossing the Yard as if on an official mission, everyone was gone. All afternoon the sun tracked across stone and brick, and only the birds were busy. In the near silence, Harry heard things slight and far away: the hum of traffic on Mass. Ave., the barely registered passage of an occasional breeze, air whistling past the wings of swooping birds—a delicate sound that stops at the instant the bird touches ground, and gives way to a throbbing vibration so minor it probably is that of the bird’s beating heart. This long-ago summer was as prepossessing as storm. Nothing in his four years of study had prepared him for the stillness of the Yard when the business of the world had moved someplace else and only the shell of what once had been remained, echoing with an ocean sound, saturated with the beauties that present themselves only to solitude. He had remained there, hardly moving, his black robe pulling-in the sun, because of a presence that had filled the place and from which he could not tear himself away. At first he had thought about plans and problems, things to do and things undone, but in the end, after something had descended through the trees as invisibly as a current of cool air, after the birds had been pressed out of the branches by its passing and hopped about on the ground as if puzzled, he had no thought at all, just an awareness as taut as the string of the heaviest bow. That was when he finally understood, in language that could not be uttered, that those who are alone are never alone. And having been brought to this in such a way, with force both absolute and gentle, he was as confident of it as were the many physicists, in their laboratories nearby, of the elegant laws of nature they had so recently divined.
Listening for trains as if it were his profession, he found himself in a combat of endurance with the sun, until in late afternoon the shadows of the hill relieved him of this struggle so he could assume another. A train was in the west. It had chanced Allied strafing and was headed to St. Lô, its flatcars loaded with some of the tanks and assault guns of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen. Without knowing why, Harry stirred, having heard it before he knew he had heard it. And then he did hear it, and before he was sure of what it was, his heart began to pound anyway. As it got closer and louder, he could feel the rumble, and then he heard the sharp exhalations of steam from the pistons as, with their angry, stuttered rhythms, they seemed to curse the countryside.
He looked left, right, and behind. He checked his weapons. Though in the heat-filled hours he had mentally rehearsed many times what he was going to do, he began to tremble slightly with fear. It was the kind of fear, however, that never fails to be transformed into a heavy calm. And he understood that the next few minutes might be his last. At some point, uncontrolled by either will or the prospects of success, something apart from oneself takes over, working alongside and flooding the body with grace, or perhaps failing to do so entirely.
Fear turned to light and heat when Harry saw even puffs of steam scoring a cloud-white line against the sky above the sheds and hedges west of the bridge. Like the charge of a whole brigade, the oncoming train transformed everything into action. He sighted the carbine on one of the two sentries standing on the east side of the bridge. They had moved off the track and were looking into the headlight of the oncoming locomotive as it rounded a slight bend. Harry shot one, and then the other not a second later. Both crumpled forward onto the rails nearest them. The first remained motionless, and would be hit by the train; the other rolled back and fell into the river, where he would drown. By that time, Harry had shot the two on the west abutment, who, deafened by the train, had heard only muted reports or perhaps nothing at all. For the same reason, no one in the guardhouses rushed out.
As the first of tandem locomotives began to cross the bridge, Harry shouldered the bazooka, aimed at the boiler, and, following it in a smooth leftward traverse, pulled the trigger. Though he was close, he was still far enough away so that he had had to elevate for distance when he shot the sentries, but with a rocket no such reckoning was required: it was a point-blank weapon with no ballistic trajectory. It closed upon its unknowing target, passed through the bridge frame, and struck, its detonation followed by the great concussion of a pressurized boiler blowing with explosive assist.
Harry had already reloaded. Bringing up the bazooka, he watched what was left of the lead locomotive turn sideways and tip onto the track, squealing miserably as it ripped against the rails. The second then derailed and went into the river, taking with it three flatcars on which were two StuG IVs and a French tank that had been defaced with an iron cross. There was a terrible noise as the rest of the train derailed, tumbling its heavy vehicles upside down. Soldiers rushed forward, cocking their weapons, shouting, not knowing where to fire. Some looked up, thinking they had been attacked from the air.
Aiming at a boxcar leaning halfway over the water, Harry launched the second rocket. The soldiers running onto the bridge saw it coming and turned back, only to collide with newly dismounted guards from the rear of the train, but it was too late for all of them. The rocket went through the wood walls of the boxcar with a thump like that of an arrow in a straw target, and then it blew. Even Harry was thrown back. He had hit an ammunition carriage, which took down the bridge, all the buildings, and several flatcars behind it loaded with StuG IVs.
The explosion was so powerful that Harry was deafened and stunned. Nauseated and shaken, he picked up the carbine and waited for others to appear. None did. So he stood up. As his ears slowly cleared, he saw that what he had wrought was far beyond his expectations—although nothing more than what might have come from the single pass of a fighter plane. As he stared at the ruins he had
made, some Germans who were doing the same walked into view as if from stage right. He saw them first, and could have dropped down, but he remembered what he was supposed to accomplish. He lifted the carbine and took aim, but waited until they would look in his direction. What seemed like a long time passed, but when they did, they saw him clearly enough in the instant before he started shooting to know that they were now fighting Americans. He hit at least two of them, and then both parties took cover and, to little avail, began firing. For Harry it was a question of emptying his magazines fast enough so they would think they faced at least a squad. He shot left and right, at the remains of the locomotive to make a series of pings from the east, at the one window left in a shack on the hillside, so as to smash it dramatically, and in a line across the entire front, as if the fire were coming from different angles. With half a magazine left, he stopped. His hands steady, he lit the twisted fuses. Then he put the two empty magazines in his right pocket, fired fifteen more rounds very quickly, reloaded with the full magazine, pocketed the empty third, buttoned the pockets, pushed himself backward down the slope, turned, and ran. In boots, steel helmet, and a heavy tunic, carrying a loaded carbine and three empty magazines, he ran faster than he had ever run in his life. The more speed he developed, the more he sought. Halfway to the bend where he would cross back, he heard the first explosion of plastique, but did not turn around. Then he heard another sound, another thump like an arrow, and he tumbled down and forward, having been pushed there by a bullet striking just above his left shoulder blade.
He gasped as he tumbled, still gripping the carbine with his right hand while the left seemed no longer to exist. When the second explosion came, he turned as best he could to fight, but saw no one. Surprised to see that the fields were empty, he resumed his flight, with pain at each step and blood running warmly down his front. Struggling for breath, he slowed to a walk, and while still walking removed a pressure bandage from a pocket, opened it, kept the wrapping balled up in his right hand for fear of leaving a trace, and, carbine slung against his back, applied the bandage as best he could. In a minute or two he reached the place where he had ferried the river, and threw himself violently into the water both from urgency and because he had lost his balance. He sank all the way and swallowed some of the muddy Terrette, but then began to swim with his right arm and kicks. He tried not to choke on the water that was choking him, to keep the carbine, to retain the bandage, to get to the other side. He thought that when he would reach the east bank his pursuers would take careful aim and he would die. But with no time to look back he fought through foam and bubbles, swallowing river water mixed with his own blood.