Prisoners of War

by C. Alexander London

  Goldsmith didn’t turn around as he shouted at me: “Don’t be a yutz! They need you. Get to work!”

  Right.

  Work.

  I was a medic and someone was hurt. It was time to do my job. I hoped Goldsmith would be okay when I got back. I hoped I wouldn’t be shot down the moment I raised my head. I hoped I wouldn’t mess up before I could prove myself.

  I took a deep breath, braced myself, and climbed out of my foxhole.

  “Medic!”

  “Medic!”

  “Medic!”

  I didn’t know which way to go. Three different people had just shouted for a medic. I hesitated. I heard another slapping sound and then another loud whistle overhead.

  “Incoming!” someone shouted.

  I dove onto the ground, covering my head with my hands, as if that would stop the exploding shell from blowing me to bits. The shell hit a treetop above me. It burst into flames and a huge branch came crashing down. The branch landed just in front of me, and it was bigger than most trees where I grew up. I could smell the pine scent coming off of it, like Christmas.

  Christmas was only a week away.

  I really wanted to live that long.

  I did not want to be on the ground anymore.

  I stood and sprinted as fast as I could, keeping my head down, zigzagging so I wouldn’t be an easy target for the Germans. The ground behind me burst as bullets snapped into the snow at my feet. I saw a foxhole ahead of me and I dove into it.

  “Argh!” a guy grunted when I landed on him. “Medic!” he yelled.

  “I am the medic!” I yelled back.

  “Well, get offa me!” he grunted and shoved me off of him. I rolled over and looked at him. He was a guy about my age, with crystal-blue eyes and pale white skin. Like, really pale. I mean, most of the guys I’d seen in the army had lighter skin than me, but this guy was way too pale even for a white guy.

  Something was wrong.

  I looked down at his leg and I gasped. I had never seen anything like it before. He’d taken a piece of shrapnel from an artillery shell. The cloth was torn on his thigh, his tattered pant leg soaked through with bright-red blood. The blood had pooled at the bottom of the foxhole. He was almost bathing in it.

  I recognized its color. In training we’d learned that if an artery was cut, the blood would be bright red, rich with oxygen, and under high pressure. It would squirt. The arteries carried the most blood through the body, and if they were cut, unless the bleeding could be stopped quickly, that kind of wound would kill a man. This soldier was in mortal danger. He was pale because he didn’t have much blood left in his body. His wound squirted.

  “How’s it look, Doc?” he asked.

  I’d never been called Doc before, although I knew that’s what guys called the medics. It wasn’t like I’d been to medical school or anything. I was just some guy who’d been assigned to be a medic the same way some guys were assigned to drive tanks. In my life before the army, I could no more treat a wound than drive a tank.

  But now I’d been trained. I focused on my training, not on my fear, and I shoved my hand into the wound to try to get out the piece of shrapnel that had cut his artery.

  “Ahh!” he screamed. I could only imagine how much it hurt.

  “What’s your name?” I asked, trying to distract him.

  “Mike,” he said.

  “Hey, me too,” I told him. “Miguel, but it’s basically the same.”

  “Miguel, huh, you from — ahh!” he screamed again. My fingers dug around inside him, soaking my hand in that bright-red blood. I grasped a tiny piece of metal, so small it was hard to imagine it could do so much damage. I pulled it out and dropped it on the ground. Then I packed his wound with bandages and tied a cloth above the wound, tightening it to slow the bleeding.

  “Medic!” I heard from another foxhole. “Medic!”

  “Stretcher!” I called out, hoping someone would come to take Mike from the front lines. I’d stopped the bleeding, but if he didn’t get to the aid station and get a blood transfusion soon, I feared he wouldn’t survive.

  “Medic!” The voice again. Desperate. Afraid. I was afraid too.

  “Go,” Mike said. “I’ll be okay.”

  “You need to stay awake,” I told him.

  “Medic!”

  “Go,” Mike repeated.

  “I’ll be back to check on you,” I said and exhaled, then lifted myself out of the foxhole and ran through the explosions and the gunfire of battle once more.

  “Keep firing! Keep firing!” I saw a lieutenant running between the foxholes, just like I was, shouting encouragement to the soldiers, telling them where to aim, urging them to fight. He grabbed a grenade from his belt and flung it at an advancing German machine gunner, blasting the unfortunate German soldier to bits. The lieutenant glanced over at me, a proud expression on his face, like he’d just thrown the best fastball of his life. He still wore a smile a second later, when a bullet punched him in the chest and knocked him down.

  I ran to him and dragged him behind a fallen tree for cover. The bark shattered over our heads as bullets sliced the tree to pulp, but it kept us safe.

  “I’m okay,” the lieutenant said, although he was not at all okay. “How old are you?” he asked me, studying my face.

  “Eighteen, sir,” I lied.

  “Not a chance,” he smirked. He saw right through me. “You even old enough to be a medic?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “Old enough to see you need one, sir.”

  He nodded and let me check his wounds. I opened his coat and found the bullet wound that had knocked him down. Then I found another. And another. And another. The blood seeped out of them, soaking into his uniform and mine. His breath wheezed and he coughed up thick red blood. The bullets had hit his lungs. I didn’t even have time to press a bandage to his chest or give him morphine for the pain. He fell unconscious.

  “Sir? Sir?” I shouted. He was our commanding officer. We needed him to tell us our orders, but instead, he died, just like that, right in my arms under a tree. He was only a few years older than me, maybe just out of college, and now he was gone.

  It went like that for hours, wound after wound, frightened soldier after frightened soldier. Some were beyond my help and some just had minor scrapes and cuts. Their screams cut through the battlefield. They didn’t cry out for their mothers. They cried out for their medic. They cried out for me.

  “Medic! Medic!”

  I needed to be in five places at the same time. I ran and jumped and dodged whizzing bullets. I must have gotten something on my boots from one of the injured men, because every step I took left a brownish-red footprint in the snow.

  “Some morning, huh?” Goldsmith shouted at me. I hadn’t even realized I was back in our foxhole.

  I nodded. I couldn’t find the words to speak. The guns did all the talking, while I tried to respond with bandages and painkillers and tourniquets.

  “You okay?” Goldsmith asked me.

  I nodded. “You?”

  He nodded back, but he grinned too. “I was born for this,” he said, and then he returned to shooting at Germans. “You like to pick on Jews!” he yelled at them as he fired. “I’ll give you something to pick on. Pick on this!”

  Pop. Pop. Pop.

  “Medic!” I heard. Time to leave the foxhole again.

  I no longer felt cold. I was too busy to be cold. There were more wounds than one medic could heal. There were gunshot wounds and burns, concussions and cuts and bruises and broken noses and smashed fingers. I found guys curled on the ground at the bottom of their foxholes, shaking and screaming and crying, and I couldn’t find any kind of wounds on them. I did what I could for them, but I’d only been trained to fix their bodies. There wasn’t anything I could do for their minds.

  I scrambled out of one foxhole where a machine gunner had gotten some tiny metal fragments in his eye, and then ran to the next and slid down into it, catching my breath, trying to push away the horrib
le memory of the things I’d seen. Across from me, the sergeant who had dropped me off the night before sat with his back against the far side of the foxhole, his head tipped forward on his knees, napping. I didn’t know his name and I didn’t want to startle him awake. His helmet lay on the ground at his feet and I grabbed it to hand to him.

  “Hey, Sarge?” I said quietly. Then louder, because if he could sleep through this battle, it would take some powerful noise to wake him up. “Sarge!” I yelled.

  I tilted his head up to see what was wrong, but I stopped when I saw his face.

  His eyes were wide open and just above them, his skull had been torn open. The bluish-red of his brains shimmered in the morning sunlight. I screamed and let him go. He slumped away from me into the mud at the bottom of the foxhole, beyond the help of any medic.

  I shut my eyes and slid down to the bottom of the foxhole, and I started shaking. I had never seen so much horror, never even in my worst nightmares. How could so much have happened so quickly?

  It was still morning, I thought, and I could hear the Germans shooting at us and our guys shooting back. German commandos in white snow camouflage came charging from the woods in waves and our big machine gunners cut them down and they fell just like tree branches into the snow. Mud and snow and blood all mixed together and the air smelled like metal and burning, a smell so thick you could taste it.

  I sat there next to the dead sergeant and I just couldn’t imagine climbing out of that hole again. I wasn’t scared of getting killed. That thought didn’t even occur to me. I simply didn’t want to see anyone else hurt or anyone else dead. No more brains. No more blood. No more screaming. I didn’t think I could bear it.

  I don’t know how long I sat there shaking. I heard voices far away, shouts between the explosions. When the loud thump of another artillery barrage came in, smashing the world around me to bits, shaking the earth underneath me, I curled up in the hole and shouted: “Enough! Enough!”

  And then I started laughing, because I was shouting at artillery and it didn’t make any sense at all. I was going nuts, I guess. No wonder the army hadn’t given me a rifle.

  I wished desperately then that they had. In that moment, I wanted nothing more than to remain in the foxhole, a gun at my side, firing into the Germans. I wanted to destroy them because of the fear they’d sparked in me. I was afraid and it was their fault and I wished so deeply to punish them for making me scared.

  But I had no weapon. The best I could do was to help the riflemen fight by patching their wounds, undoing the terrible work of the German weapons. My revenge on the Germans would be in foiling their deadly designs.

  I looked once more at the sergeant. I was too late to help him. I found myself annoyed instead of horrified, as if his dying were an insult to me and to my skill as a medic. He’d died in spite of me, almost like he was doing the Nazis a favor.

  I would not do the Nazis any favors. I would not let them stop me from saving any more lives.

  And yet, I didn’t move.

  My legs simply would not obey my new resolve.

  I was scared.

  It was my first battle, my first chance to prove myself. It was the whole reason I’d enlisted. And I was too scared to move.

  Come on, Rivera, I told myself. Don’t be a coward. Get up. Get up, get up, get up.

  I was about to stand. I felt sure of it — just as an artillery shell smashed into the tree above the sergeant’s foxhole. The great tree came crashing down above me. The branches crunched into the hole and blotted out the hazy sky. I put my arm up to protect myself, as if I could stop an entire tree from falling with just one arm, but it knocked me down beside the sergeant, and then my world went black.

  I woke in dimness. The pine smell filled my nostrils and I sat up, aching. My helmet was on the ground beside me. When I bent down to pick it up, my hand met the cold hand of the sergeant and I yelped. I scrambled out from beneath the fallen tree, sliding through the snow and the mud into the evening.

  I must have been unconscious all day. The sun had set, and all around me was silence. The battle was over and I was alone.

  A hot bolt of fear raced up my spine. It was like I’d woken up in a different place than where I’d fallen asleep. The ground was torn up, trees toppled, snow and mud and blood all mixed together into some kind of unholy stew. And the ground around the foxholes was littered with frozen bodies, Americans and Germans, side by side, never to get up again. Through it all, I saw tank treads in the snow, passing right through.

  The Germans had overrun our position. The Germans had overrun our position and I was alone behind enemy lines now and where were the rest of the Americans?

  Where was Goldsmith?

  I ran through the scarred landscape, tripping and falling over broken branches and jumping over obstacles at which I dared not look. I felt like I was in a nightmare. The foxhole that my friend and I had shared was empty. I jumped down into it, just to make sure, as if the small hole could hide anything.

  “No, no, no,” I muttered to myself, just to hear some sound in the graveyard silence of the battlefield. Worse than the chaos and terror of battle was the sinking feeling that I was totally alone. I was cut off from the rest of the American army by the German advance. I didn’t really even know where I was. I needed to get back to friendly territory. I needed to find Goldsmith. I needed to —

  I heard something.

  There was a sound just above my foxhole — the crunching of snow — and then, a high-pitched whining.

  I sucked in the chilly air and held my breath. I listened. Friend or foe? Was whining some kind of a code?

  I peeked up from the foxhole and I saw a man lying on his back in the snow. He wore a heavy gray German officer’s coat, and on his collar he had pinned two lightning bolts, the insignia of the Waffen-SS, the most feared of Hitler’s soldiers. The whining seemed to come from him. He must have been in great pain to make such a noise, but his chest neither rose nor fell. There was no movement in him at all.

  Still, however, he whined.

  I lifted myself higher from the foxhole and the whining stopped. I didn’t move. The man didn’t move either. His eyes — wide open, lifeless — gazed up at the sky. I heard a growl.

  I didn’t know what to think. I had to ask myself: Could the dead growl?

  And then, from behind him, a streak of black fur lunged at me, slobbering jowls and bright-white teeth. I fell back into the foxhole and held my arms up as a barking and snapping dog with raging eyes and wet, pink gums charged at me. The dog looked like the devil himself, come to collect my soul.

  Just as the dog reached the top edge of the foxhole, it was yanked back at the end of its own leash, its leather collar jerking it to a stop.

  The dog scratched at the snow with its paws and barked down at me, straining to jump into my hole and tear me to shreds.

  I had never a seen a dog like this before.

  It was a big, barrel-chested creature, with black fur and a brown belly and snout. Its ears pointed up like devil horns from the sides of its narrow head. Beady black eyes fixed on me. I didn’t know a lot about dogs, but I remembered seeing something in the paper about the Marine Corps using this same kind of dog, the Doberman pinscher. If US Marines used them, they must be fearsome.

  “Easy, doggy, easy,” I tried to calm it.

  It stopped barking and cocked its head at me, curious. I stood slowly, my hands raised in the air, almost like I was surrendering. I kept my back pressed against the opposite side of the foxhole, as far away from that dog’s jaws as I could be. It watched me stand.

  “Good dog,” I cooed. “Good devil doggy.”

  As soon as I went to climb out of the hole on the opposite side, the dog lunged again, barking like mad, and I slipped, sliding right back into the foxhole. The dog strained against its leash and inched forward. I saw that the leash was held by the SS officer, frozen in the dead man’s hand. When the dog lunged, it dragged its master’s whole body forward through
the snow.

  The dog had cut the distance between us in half and now towered over me in my foxhole, just out of reach. Every time I moved, it lunged, gaining a few inches each time.

  I really needed to get out of this hole before more German soldiers came along. I did not want to be taken prisoner by a dog.

  Or get eaten by one.

  My teeth chattered so hard, I thought they might shatter. The forest was pitch-black. The moon hid itself behind the clouds, as if the war below was just too terrible to witness. I could hear the sound of gunfire in the distance, and the blast of more artillery. Someone somewhere was putting up a fight.

  Not here, though. Here it was just me and the devil dog, and we’d both been tired out.

  I leaned back against the far edge of the foxhole while the dog lay beside its master above me. Whenever I moved, it growled. When I stayed still, it stayed quiet. In the quiet I could hear vehicles in the distance and the pop of faraway gunfire. If the dog started barking again, it might just let the wrong people know I was here.

  Listening above me, I heard the sound of the dog’s tongue lapping at its master’s frozen face, heard the unmistakable whine. I had never really liked dogs and definitely didn’t like Nazis, but the sound of the dog whining for its master, who lay cold on the ground, filled me with sadness. It was like that whine said everything anyone needed to know about war.

  I dared to lift my head up. The dog had his head resting on his dead master’s chest. I admit: I felt bad for the mutt. But it was time for me to go find the Americans. I was cold and I was afraid, and I didn’t want to die out here in the wilderness.

  I made my move, pulling myself out of the foxhole as quickly as I could.

  The moment my feet cleared the top of the hole, I rolled away so that the dog couldn’t get me. He was up — the dog was definitely a he — and he rushed in my direction again, barking and slobbering. I saw the leash pull tight against his neck, lifting the frozen hand of the man on the ground as the dog dove at me. But he’d pulled too hard. Both the dog and his late master’s body fell into the foxhole that I’d just escaped.