“You’re going to have to get yourself washed off, soldier,” a man said.
A stout little man stood before Lett wearing a pristine, impenetrable, double-breasted trenchcoat. Rain beaded on the shoulders.
Lett looked down at himself. His legs and feet were soaked through from the stream, but his upper body was still covered in blood and the slime of bodies ripped apart. His neck was thick with it, and it had trickled down under his collar. Intestines hung off his buttons, web belt, ammo pouches, congealing. He felt a sharp pain in his neck, shooting down to his hips. His lungs rattled and he tried to cough but it hurt too much.
“We can’t have that all over men’s bedrolls,” the man said.
Lett couldn’t tell the man’s rank. He could have been anything from a sergeant to a colonel, but he was definitely rear-line. He was possibly supply troop, probably a quartermaster. He wore the same double-buckle boots as Lett. Combat Joes had been dying to get their hands on them for months, but word had it that all the rear-liners were trading high and low for them so they could look like real front-line types. The boots almost never made it to the front.
The rear-line man added a smile. A smile?
“Says you. What the fuck you know?” Lett said. He had shouted it.
Men’s heads turned their way, and someone looked out the aid tent at them.
“Relax, soldier.”
Lett shook his head again but the ache stopped him. It made him cry out in pain. Yet somehow he stood, groaning. The man stepped back. Lett lunged at him, dislodging the slime and entrails on his trenchcoat, hands, face.
The man squealed: “Orderly! Assistance here! This soldier’s hurt awful.”
“No!” Lett shouted, staggering backward. He reached to unsling his carbine but it wasn’t there. “Fuck you,” he muttered, pushing off the orderly that had come out to him, or was it a German? Who the hell knew anymore. “Who knows!” he shouted.
He tried to run, pick up his feet. “I’m going back out!”
He tried to stumble on but the pain seized his neck and his legs seemed to slide out from under him. He was shivering, and it wouldn’t stop. He blacked out.
His eyes popped open. Men were speaking around him, holding him, but he couldn’t understand them. He was on his back? On a litter? The heavy forest canopy above had given way to gray sky, and he imagined the leaden, shifting mass of clouds a dark sea, washing over him.
***
The curse had sold out to damnation. The sea had become an abyss of toil and torment and vengeance. By October 1944, Holger Frings had become a zombie war-sailor living only for the next torpedo run, for keeping his boat in one piece, for saving his fellow crew members from enemy bombers, mines, fast boats, destroyers.
He had written Christiane weekly for a time, pleading and then demanding that she come to her senses. She never wrote back. Scherenberg’s boot-licking lawyers did write to him. They advised him to refrain from further communication. They would tell him when it was his time to know. Frings could only think of his little girls, the situation they were in. They didn’t know better. He wondered if they even asked about him. He wondered if they called that brown bastard Vati.
On October 2, at 1600 hours, Frings’ S-boat formation left the concrete pens at Ijmuiden line abreast, heading for a convoy reported in Quadrant 76. The afternoon promised high winds, rough seas, a hazy clear sky gaining clouds fast. They had seven boats, two flotillas patched together as one.
Hanssen’s S-boat had finally become the lead boat. Flotilla chief Schirakow just had a heart attack, leaving Obersteuermann Baum as slave boat to Hanssen’s now, the other six boats following lined up abreast. Hanssen pushed their rebuilt supercharged motors to the limit, cruising at thirty-five knots all ahead despite warnings of swelling waves to come, the bow riding so high that sailors had to climb uphill to reach the wheelhouse from midships and stern. The newer boats’ heavier armor had made them unstable, pitching them from side to side in his wake.
Frings welcomed Hanssen’s recklessness. This was a race with time, with weather, but it was also their time. They had earned this.
A few miles out from base, a haze had obscured the Dutch coast behind them. Before them, where their quadrant lay, a front of dark clouds loomed.
Frings quivered inside. His organs seemed to press together. He knew the old feeling. Something was not right. He could sense it. But he didn’t tremble. He snickered. Radioman Hahn stiffened at the sight of a possibly crazed helmsman and it only made Frings laugh out loud, the drool slinging in his beard. He pulled his unlit pipe, pocketed it, and reached for his black oilskin Southwester. Engine telegraph man Kammel held it out for him. Good man. Frings had been hard on the seaman but it was paying off. Kammel would make a great Number One someday.
“Planes!” the spotter shouted.
Frings looked out windows. The bombers were coming out of the North, a line of crows growing bigger, darker. Halifax bombers. No, they were Lancasters.
Spray slapped at the double-glass, the swells pounding at the hull. Frings planted his boots wider, his legs surging warm with strength.
“Sortie canceled! We head back!” Hanssen shouted in the voice tube to radioman Hahn.
Frings banged at the wheel. “Verdammt noch mal!”
Their bunker pens were only a couple miles behind them. Hanssen was ordering the flotilla to return. It was the safe bet, but it would be one ugly race to the pens. They could lose. The Tommy-bombers would lay on the full treatment no matter how much throttle they gave, no matter how much coastal flak they fired. The hopelessness pressed down on Frings, as if the very sky was dirt about to be shoveled on top of him. It would prove little better even if they made it into their battered pens. The din inside that concrete cave during a bombardment bored into the brain, the concussion rattling every fiber, bone, marrow. And boats not reaching the pens got shredded into charred heaps in the port, a hull here, a scrap of wheelhouse there, all smoldering. The port was a butcher’s block. Men got hacked apart, or propelled right through railings and the body parts and entrails stuck to railings and concrete and planks as if glued. Survivors wandered through smoke and flames, crazed from it. One of his long-lost mates, Engel, his fingers scorched to bone yet clawing at Frings shoulders, half his face burned away, muttering, “Mother, mother,” yet he wasn’t calling for his mother—he thought Frings was his mother, and he buried his face in Frings’ oilskins before Frings could stop him. It left the last of Engel’s flesh right there on his leathers. A medic had come, led Engel away. Engel dropped dead before they got him on a litter.
How many times had it happened? It would keep happening. Christiane’s Wonder Weapons would only prolong the madness. They could end up fighting with the Tommies and Amis against Commies. There was no end to it. It was the way men like Scherenberg wanted the world to work. The real men fight so one tin pretender can shine.
The bombers fired through the smoke, coming in low. Their boats fired back but had no stability for aiming on such a wild run. Frings saw how this would go down. One boat would burst, then another. Two might collide. They would run out of smoke.
But Hanssen hadn’t yet commanded Frings to wheel around. They sped on, jostling, leaning into it, the bombs and guns lifting water in geysers and the salvos clinking at their sides, chopping away at their puny plastic armor. They heard a scream astern.
“We go on, forward,” Hanssen shouted in the voice tube. “Stay course!”
“Good, good,” Frings said to his wheel.
“Baum’s boat stays with us. The rest keep going back. Maybe they make it.”
“A good plan,” Frings growled. He grinned at Hahn and Kammel but not even Kammel could force out a smile.
Hanssen ordered the other boats to return as Frings steered his onward, toward the stormy dark horizon. Baum’s followed Frings at starboard quarter. Their two boats would play decoy. The rest of the flotilla turned around, speeding for the pens in zig-zag pattern, pumping out decoy smoke. T
heir two boats released no smoke, and showed the Tommies their bare asses.
The swarm of Lancasters pulled around, bringing darkness on top of the two boats. The planes dropped their loads, the individual missiles seeming to halt in the air a moment like cartoon bombs before plummeting down. The sea erupted around them. They kept going, Hanssen yelling for engines at maximum ahead, all they could give it.
Far behind them the other five boats blended into the horizon, heading toward the coast and the safety of their bunker pens. Maybe they could make it.
“Smoke!” Hanssen yelled in the voice tube. “Zig-zag!”
Frings worked the wheel, grunting, “Come at us, bastards.” Their two boats discharged smoke, kept racing, zig-zagging.
The dark clouds seemed to lunge down at them. The bombers pulled up and away, slicing through the clouds as the weather front came at them and spread like a blanket yanked over them. They had more than clouds and storm in their favor. They ran with eight torpedoes total, and Baum’s boat had new 4cm guns.
“Quadrant 76!” Hanssen yelled to the navigator poring over charts. “We go hunting.”
1900 hours: The clouds hung so low above that dusk had lost out. Darkness had enveloped the two boats. They had entered their quadrant. The lay in wait in Lauerstellung, just like the old days—their two-boat Rotte ready to strike, bobbing along the swells, hiding behind a wall of fog. Right before a convoy came, when the wind was right, they could smell the peppery-rich odor of a coal steamer.
The mist thickened. The deck crew was wearing rain gear. Frings had pulled his southwester tight on his head. Hahn’s radio crackled, fuzzed. Frings could see Baum’ boat signaling, but the semaphores blurred and signal lamps fared little better. Such poor visibility was just what they wanted. Enemy planes and destroyers would have a tough time finding them before it was too late. Even with radar, a gap in detection existed between pinpointing an area and the exact location. This was also the horror of it. Escort ships hunting them down at close range sometimes ended right on top of them.
They scanned the horizon for bow shapes, for one juicy convoy goose. The wind was not right though. They had smelled nothing telltale in the air. Now rain surged down as sheets and rolled down their decks, windows and floppy southwesters.
In the wheelhouse, Frings felt a twinge in his fingers, a slight vibration of the wheel.
“Flares!”
Gun bursts pierced through the wet blur, the hits clattered against their boats like gravel. MTBs. British motor torpedo boats charged at them two by two. Hanssen shouted “All maximum speed” as the MTBs passed with guns swinging around, Hanssen’s and Baum’s boats firing back. Hanssen called for more smoke and shock bombs—floating charges that burst in their attacker’s path. They sped away.
A massive bow appeared, like an island erupting from ocean—a light destroyer. Baum’s boat veered starboard and the wall of steel passed between their two boats. To avoid keeling, Frings steered into its tsunami wake and they crashed into it, the sea washing over them like poured wet concrete. Sailors might have gone over. He had no choice.
They sped on firing at the massive stern and the ship’s smaller guns fired back, its big barrels too close for a good shot.
The shock bombs had exploded half a mile off starboard but burst only sea water and their effect was lost in the chaos.
The MTBs had vanished. Where was Baum? They couldn’t see him. Hanssen had Frings wheel back around, the smoke canisters still pumping as more flares and search lights lit up the low clouds, creating a cave of flashing whites and reds and yellows.
Off portside they spotted an MTB burning, sinking fast, black smoke piling out the back as sailors scrambled along the deck.
They sped on, Frings still wheeling around, searching out Baum.
An object came at their starboard midship. The crash lifted them off their feet in the wheelhouse as they listed hard, Hahn and Kammel slamming into each other, wires snapping and charts flying. Frings kept one hand on a wheel handle and pulled himself back up. A hatch hung open and black smoke rolled in, burning in their lungs. Sailors coughed, shouted.
Frings saw Baum’s boat starboard, burning midships, just meters from them.
They had collided. Frings steadied his wheel and heard Baum yelling from his open bridge. His engines had to be dead.
Where was Hanssen? “Herr Oberleutnant!?” Frings shouted into the voice tube.
Sailors flung out lines. They would tow Baum’s boat. Frings worked the wheel for it.
Salvos spewed water, rattled their armor and ricocheted off railings, the bridge. MTBs came at them again. They held on, firing back. Frings’ head swirled from the flashes of guns, the rain like rocks, swells flickering, shouts and cries, MTBs coming back around firing, men in the water, arms flailing.
The wheelhouse double glass went dark with a chunky red liquid. Blood.
Frings screamed, he didn’t know what. Hahn had crumpled into a ball, shrieking, howling. Kammel stood stiff, bloodied. Frings ran out the hatch and bridge wing onto the rocking deck, stomping across the planks and grabbing at railings. He saw seamen only as shapes in the smoke and flames and bursts coming at them, the water flogging them. Baum’s boat had sunk lower, the bow underwater now. His men jumped off, some trying to leap across, others hanging on a rescue ladder Frings’ men had thrust out for them.
The MTBs passed again, this time slower, using searchlights to pick out targets. Single shots clanked at metal. The midships gun was unmanned. Frings scrambled over and worked the wheel to lay the barrel on an MTB, staggering with the rising swells. He fired screaming.
He got off a few bursts but the gun kicked up into the sky. The ammo ran out. A jolt seized him and pulled him backward, his feet swinging out from under him.
***
Wendell Lett moved from a battalion aid station to a field hospital, then to a rear-line Army hospital in Western Belgium. He got white sheets. The whole place was white. He saw white in a new way, as a new color. It didn’t uplift a guy. Take white far enough and it turned to black. Men around him were muttering and whimpering, snoring through raw inflammations, exuding strange noises from unnatural holes and crevices in their bodies. Under these conditions, Lett could only welcome the strong smells of antiseptic. He never thought he’d see any manner of cleanliness again. They had a few Army nurses, beautiful things all of them despite their blood-soiled OD fatigues. One of them shaved his beard with the touch of a butterfly. Natural light streamed in from the high windows. The place had been a church, it turned out. The ambience only made everything seem all the more unreal.
A gaunt young doctor had given him the lowdown: He had whiplash, dysentery, pneumonia, various infections and boils, lice, bits of shrapnel and wood slivers embedded in him, and early signs of trench foot, and that was just the physical part. He suffered from a clear case of battle fatigue, what doctors used to call shell shock. “All out of change,” they called it up on the line. His treatments included a neck collar, assisted movement, infusions, pills, copious liquids, more pills, and stern words from a mousy chaplain about the horrors and temptations of battle fatigue.
He tried to bolt the joint after a couple days and make it back to his unit but the orderlies followed him. After that he gave in to the rigmarole, only so he could get to the line sooner. They were going to return him anyway, so why not get it over with? His horror was fixed, death predestined. Anything else was fooling. His limbo had let him do some thinking. He realized that his existence, and those of all true dogfaces, had become something out of an Edgar Allen Poe horror, or a strange terror tale from the writer H.P. Lovecraft. They were worms. They were ants. They had no eyes, no arms for grasping free. They would be crushed. There was no way out of it, and the universe cared not one wit. Gods were a cruel joke. Nightmare was the reality, not the aberration.
They kept him off the line for a little over two weeks. After his release he was supposed to rotate through a repple depple. He skipped it and hitched a ri
de back with a combat engineer unit doing their magic to punch holes in the dragon’s teeth of the Siegfried Line, the Germans’ concrete obstacle stumps used to stop tanks. They were really going to need those tanks.
Lett and Tom Godfrey hugged and didn’t give a shit who saw it. They held each other by the shoulders to get a good look at one another. Lett couldn’t stop staring at the burn scar on Tom Godfrey’s upper lip. Godfrey’s new mustache couldn’t fully hide it.
“It’s not bad. Hey, you still have your lip,” Lett said.
“The old silver lining,” Godfrey said. “I’ve never seen you without the beard. You’re just a laddie. Look like your own son.”
It was raining, the middle of October, and the sun was already going down in the afternoon. Lett had returned to a new surreality, ad hoc as it was—his battalion had been pulled off the line. The Army had no choice. Guys were breaking well before those 200 days straight if they weren’t dead already. Patrol after patrol, assault after assault had been beaten back in the Hürtgen and tree bursts were finishing off the rest. Casualties were higher than ever. Crackup cases had skyrocketed. Some doggies had up and walked off, never to be seen again.
They billeted in a forest area near the German border south of the Hürtgen, inside a Belgian forest region called the Ardennes. The post was sodden and remote, among a few stone farmhouses and huts—not what the guys wanted, but probably better for their heads than an extended warm bender in a wild town. By staying put, they found ways to keep the water out. And Lett had a new skin: He had gotten new underwear, shirt, trousers, battle jacket, most any other gear he wanted. Some of his old gear he kept as good luck, including his trench knife.
In his new windcheater, belted overcoat and double-buckle boots, Godfrey might have been another rear-line swell. They chuckled at that, shaking their heads. To get out of the rain they sat under a half tent on a bench cut out of a log some wiseacre had painted with the words “Central Park East.”
Godfrey said the burn injuries were second degree, most superficial except for the scar.
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