“None from our battalion, I don’t think,” says Doyle, surveying the fire one last time over his shoulder. “Shall we, Captain?”
“We shall.” Jim turns away from this scene, and from the roaring fuel fire, and he moves up to near the front of the company and shouts a marching order, and Able Company marches up the slope of the ridge and into slit trenches that have been previously dug, shoddy half-dug trenches, and the men dig themselves in deeper into the reverse slope as the shells streak across the sky and the return fire from the Germans increases, and they sit and wait, many trying to sleep, helmets over faces, arms crossed over knees folded up, huddled up under gas capes or blankets, and others ride out the waiting hours by talking, by smoking, by playing cards; a few read by the firelight of small gasoline fires at the base of the ridge, brewing tea and chatting and risking the bombardments.
Later in the night, between bouts of fitful sleep, he gets reports that the first attack has broken through the German outpost positions in the valley, and that the first companies are engaged in a bitter melee on the ridge, fighting against dug-in positions, fortified farmhouses, tanks and self-propelled guns. There are German counterattacks. He raises his head. Slanted coils of razor wire scrawl across his view, the very signature of suspicion. Peering over the sandbagged lip of the trench, between the scribbles of wire, he experiences a phantasmagoria of sight and sound, awesome and unearthly—tracers of machine-gun and cannon fire unseam the sky in thudding stitches; overhead streak and sparkle whistling, shrieking, moaning, howling, roaring shells; guns flash and explosions effloresce in concussive thunder, and the earth bucks and trembles. The glow of fires here and there outlines and wreathes the profile of the ridge as buildings and positions burn from incendiary shells and bombs. Oh Marianne, if only you could see this, he thinks, if only you could hear this, if only you could smell this … if only I could relate all this to you someday. Wish I could send you a postcard now from Sunny Italy. Wish you were here. He laughs to himself, but can scarcely hear his laughter for the din of destruction. He sips water from his canteen and the last of his hangover headache is gone at last, and he crouches down into the corner of his small trench, his pack beside him, Cavanagh’s No. 18 radio set at his feet, Cavanagh sitting knees up to his chest, Cooley beside him, three men huddled up against themselves in a hole as the world tears itself apart over their heads. There is a spectral wash of light overhead as a parachute flare bursts over their position, followed by several others. They crouch lower into the hole as shells come crashing in nearby, about thirty yards away, atop the ridge. No one speaks, three silent men, unknowable, riding out the storm. He stops laughing, and his eyes well up, and he feels tears coming on, he feels devastated about the letter, the letter, the letter. Do you love me anymore? Do you? Over, finally over. She had left him. She had left him shivering and huddling in a hole in the north of Italy, left him to call out to his mother in the night, amid the thunder and lightning and its terrible spectacle. How on earth did you not see this coming? You idiot. Of course she left you. You left her two, three years ago, you selfish fool, you goddamn idiot, of course she left you! She finished what you started! Comprenez-vous? He sobs into his hands, his helmet over his face, oily and rubbery smelling, he sobs and he snivels and feels very much alone at the edge of the world, at the edge of reason, perched uneasily upon the shaking precipice of the present.
“Smoke?” he offers after a time, helmet pushed aside, silver cigarette case open, and the three of them take a cigarette each, and he lights them one by one, three on a match. The sweet herbal smell of cigarettes mingles with the dry, caked smell of dirt.
“Are we having fun yet?” he shouts over the noise.
“Pardon, sir?” yells Cavanagh. Cooley turns his head toward him.
“I said, are we having fun yet?” he shouts louder.
“Yes, we’re having a grand old time!” barks Cooley, huddling himself in his corner of the trench, wrapped in his gas cape, fervidly smoking his cigarette.
“Good to hear, gentlemen!”
The barrage builds in intensity and abates, and builds again, waxing and waning through the midnight hours, the unearthly wail of shellfire and the relentless explosions entering dreams, becoming thunderstorms, volcanoes, freight trains, brass bands and carnivals; and eyes flutter open and the furnace roar of combat becomes what it is again, reality asserts itself with the stony, earthy smell of dirt, the overbearing noise, the smell of smoke, of cordite. In and out of sleep moment by moment, hours become minutes, and minutes become hours.
Jim chews his cheeks and counts down again until it is time to move. In the distance Coriano becomes vaguely visible. Smoke and mist are intermingled; the horizon is dewed in water and blood, a dawn of day and of death. Still, the guns pound; machine guns and rifles crackle and rattle in the distance, airy and light sounding between the bigger bangs of shells and bombs.
26
H-Hour. Forward, into the waiting jaws of the enemy. The first company to march out is Dog, under Captain Van Der Hecke, and they leave their holes and trenches alongside the men of Able and disappear into the darkness of the valley in the blue-grey of the predawn, to cover the engineers bridging the stream fording the valley, a bridge for the supporting tanks to cross. Cavanagh picks up radio signals from his set, scratchy coded transmissions of progress; shells fall amid Dog as they cover the bridging operation, and the soldiers trade fire with German forces overlooking them from their heights.
Jim is ordered to advance, and the men of Able Company shed their haversacks and move slowly and alertly from their slit trenches after a hot breakfast delivered to them under fire. They cautiously creep ahead down the grassy slopes, heads up, hunched over, tensely meeting the day’s arraignment; first Therrien’s platoon, then Doyle’s, then Stringer’s, Jim in the middle along with Cooley, Cavanagh, Neidhart, Lafontaine, Tillman and Witchewski; and they make their way to the river, marching briskly and silently over a Stygian land of destruction, mist and smoke hanging over the ground in a vapourous shroud. They pass a dead Canadian soldier lying on his back, one leg bent under the other, arms upraised as if in supplication to some deaf god, blood staining dark around him like old spilled wine in the dust of the roadside. Shell craters here and there. A freshly tilled field gently sloping upward into the smoke and the mist, pocked with holes. Blasted trees. A battered rock pile where a house stood, only a single wall remaining, a wall with a window upon the sill of which there stands an empty vase. Ahead, the dusty rattle of a small engine, and a jeep drives toward them from a distance, two stretchers laden with men lashed across the hood, two others in the back, four pairs of splayed feet whisking across their gaze as the jeep passes by. One of the men is writhing, moaning, whimpering. The medics nod grimly at the passing line of soldiers making their way to the front. Heading the opposite direction further in the distance, a troop of carriers, small and open, their two-man crews sitting tall in the cockpits, ferrying mortar crews and anti-tank gun crews, the men flinching from the bursts and the shrapnel, the passengers hunkered low and clinging to the metal sides of the hulls. Two of the carriers tow two-wheeled 6-pounder anti-tank guns, and the grooved rubber tires of the guns bounce over the ruts and potholes in the road, and the hitches that bind them to the carriers bend at the joints, and the segmented assemblies, vaguely insectoid in their construction, grumble and creep past. Onward. Beyond them, the ridge is plumed with covering artillery fire, a constant, wailing, rolling, rumbling curtain of sound, a driving, pounding metal rain. Ahead is a stream, the Torrente di Besanigo, a small flowing brook cutting between two ravaged farmers’ fields. They slosh through the water and muck, weapons held overhead, and it soaks into their boots and through their pants. As he emerges back on the ground, he thinks as he trudges with soaked boots, Jesus Christ, another water obstacle, here we go into the fray and we get a bath first, a wee bath and—
An impossibly loud, unnatural and unnerving moan bearing do
wn from the sky, a tailed meteor of flame. A moment of frozen terror. As he throws himself to the earth, there is a mighty impact to the side. A jarring crash. Deafness. Like a punch in the face. Vacuum. Push-pull. A furnace blast of heat. Dirt stinging the eyes, a pelting rain of matchsticks and clots of earth.
“Take cover!” Before the order is fully out of his mouth, he has rolled himself into a roadside depression as the earth pounds and palsies under another impact, and another and another, beside, behind, ahead, along with the howl of metal through sky. He looks up a moment to a scene of destruction, of blasting columns of flame and dirt and black smoke, showers of sparks, flying debris, rockets crashing all about right next to Able Company. The noise is absolute, all-encompassing, a sonic totality of consciousness. Then, nothing. The sudden silence is as deafening as the noise it replaced.
Before he can catch his breath, another volley of rockets dives in with the frightening sound of inverted air raid sirens, intoning upward their frightening, deafening, blaring wail before erupting this time nearer. Blast by blast, shock by shock, concussion by concussion. Trees splinter and crash, branches fly. There is a plunk next to him and he is shoved aside. He looks over his shoulder to see Sergeant Stringer, his jowly cheeks pulled back in a rictus as he grimaces through clenched teeth and closed eyes, as he always does during bombardments. The bombardment stops again for a moment and then restarts, now in the form of shells, shrapnel raking through the grass and singing over his head. He faces downward again and he hugs the dirt his mother’s knee in a flower-print dress in church under a pew a helmet on his face, explosions ricocheting off the hills the trees the walls and floor and pews of the church and he can taste the dust and the cordite and feel the shellfire rippling underneath in waves, primal waves of discord and decay shaking the bonds between man and man, atom and atom. Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Amen. Amen more than ever more than ever just stop the fire—and with that it is over.
Sand in his mouth, a lingering ringing in the ears, tintinnabulations so loud that outside of the clanging echo chamber of his own head all is silent, a thick cottony silence as though his head were swaddled in bandages. A desire to break and run, to desert, to hide under hay and avoid the provosts, to pay a farmer to hide in his flatbed truck and take him to Ancona, and then jump a train to Rome, to melt away into the underground of deserters there, to hitch a ride out on a tramp steamer to somewhere, anywhere where there is no one around, no one to fight: the North Pole, Antarctica, Deepest Darkest Africa, El Dorado, the edge of the world. Malingering ringing in his soul, oh why do you dwell on these things? Get on with your command!
He pulls himself to his feet in the cratered, upturned, smoking earth to the sounds of moaning penetrating through the thick haze of his perception. There are, it appears to his surprise, only four casualties, the bombardment having been inaccurate. In the distance, shells continue to fall, flashing in the smoke ahead and erupting like beacons of destruction. The medical runners tend to the wounded.
He attempts to rally his men to move. “Able Company! We must keep going!” There is a waver in his voice. “We have to get moving or they’ll do it again. Every approach is marked for shells, got it? Come on, get together, fall back into your sections, let’s go!” Platoon and section leaders shout as they gather their men back together in their small groups and continue their advance. Ahead, a line of explosions along the ridge. And ahead they continue, Jim again in the middle, now with Stringer’s platoon. Alongside is Cavanagh, looking dazed, his radio set babbling away, hissing and popping coded reports, fading out here and there with the distortion of battle and the ruggedness of the landscape. Jim grabs the microphone and dons the spare headphones attached to Cavanagh’s set and calls in smoke from the artillery to obscure their advance, and in moments lines of phosphorous smoke shells burst in front of and beside them, and it covers the area in a heavy pall of noxious yellow smoke through which the company marches. More German shells fall, but in looser concentrations, here, there, a steady peppering of artillery fire as the company advances ahead, ahead toward the shadowy profiled rise of the ridge emerging from the smoke and the mist, the smokescreen through which they march heavy and yellowy and clinging to and crawling along the ground like the feelers of some phantom intelligence; and they advance ahead toward the houses of the town amid the trees, through the smoke and mist, ahead to their objective. Behind them, to the east, the first milky light of the sun’s spectral reconnaissance, weak probing beams feeling their way through mist and smoke and the reluctant rearguard of the retreating darkness. The sharp crack and rattle of small arms combat become louder, nearer; the artillery continues to fall, and the riflemen of Able Company bow over in a quick march, rifles in their hands or strapped loosely to their shoulders, teeth clenched, eyes wide, single-minded on their objective, the thunder beside them, behind them, ahead of them, over them, and they move, move, move, up the tilled and cratered and blasted slope of the hill to form a base of attack; and as they trot ahead he finds himself whistling the dogged, tired strain of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” the fatigue and melancholy of which is so perfectly captured in its slow, swaying melody and dragging rhythm. Stringer joins him, as do others, and he can hear their voices between the bursts of shells both far and near, giving expression to the tautness of their nerves.
Up the slope, they pass blasted-out slit trenches and dugouts, the remains of a German soldier lying in a shallow weapons pit, perforated with bullets, grey uniform caked and stained with dried blood, lying with his legs sticking upward over the edge of the hole, shrivelled mismatched socks on his feet, one green, one navy, his boots having been removed as spoil; his wallet lies discarded on the ground, pilfered from for valuables, a string of family photographs shivering naked in the breeze. Another weapons pit, revetted by torn sandbags, with a broken black machine-gun barrel hanging limply on its tripod, and the two operators, dead in frozen frenzy and heaped on top of each other, partially buried in sand and dirt dumped on them from a blast. One of them is draped over shoulders and chest with heavy belts of bullets like strings of teeth, as though mummified in the chain-linked aggression of his trade. A burning barn, smoke spiralling and twisting into the sky as if sucked into an atmospheric maelstrom. Piles of rubble that were very recently occupied houses. Past a German Panzer IV tank, severe black iron crosses painted on its sides, still burning after an hour or more, its turret lopsided and canted at an angle, fire hissing up like that of a blowtorch and swirling in translucent streamers of funnelled flame from the turret hatch, fire that culminates in a noxious pillar of roiling, sooty black smoke; beside it are littered the bodies of two of the crew, one still wearing a radio headset, both of them gunned down as they tried to escape their knocked-out vehicle. Alongside, a ruined copse of trees, trees blasted to ragged stumps and split kindling in the battle to secure the hill during the night, and in the shelling this morning. Around are strewn bits of human viscera, blotches and smears of blood on the grass and on the road. From the branch of a lone sycamore tree hangs a length of intestine, like ivy or garland or a vine.
Behind them as they march, silently and with increasing apprehension, the sky turns from a milky greyish white and brightens into a soft rosy hue in anticipation of sunrise. Above, a drone of fighter-bombers, a squadron of single-engine Spitfires, their deep throaty growl loudening, throbbing the ground underfoot as they swoop in over the horizon, lower, lower, out of sight, and there follows a series of deep, rippling, overlapping booms, vibrating underfoot, as yet another German position is doused with bombs. A shell lands mere yards away. Soldiers duck. Another explosion, and a pelting of grapes.
“Keep it up, keep on ahead!” His left ear is still cottony and fuzzy and stunned with ringing from the Moaning Minny stonk, and he can scarcely hear with it and his thoughts are scattered; he is unable to focus. A particula
rly intense volley of artillery on the horizon, sprouting up in great black columns of dust and smoke and debris. Judging by the direction of the moan of shells overhead, it is an Allied volley, a covering barrage for an advance ahead of them. From the radio, updates from Dog Company’s adventure covering the bridging. They are taking fire not only from artillery, but also from machine guns and snipers ensconced in the castle overlooking the valley, now behind and to their left, deeper into the waning blue-grey remnants of the night. They make it to the staging point.
27
“Give me the radio,” he says to Cavanagh.
“Yes, sir.” They squat by the roadside and Jim takes the extra set of headphones from Cavanagh’s set. He grabs the handheld microphone and says into it, “This is Sunray Victor 1. Victor 1 is leaping at Tango 7, Victor 1 is leaping at Tango 7, do you read? Over.”
“Roger Sunray Victor 1, you are leaping at Tango 7, over. Dance to Hotel 3-0 and check in. Repeat, dance to Hotel 3-0 and check in. Over.”
“Will comply. Dancing to Hotel 3-0 for check-in. Over and out.” He stands, and shouts at the men, “Move ahead, the Sydneys are just ahead of us!” And they trudge onward, briskly now, and they come upon a cluster of collapsed houses and scraggly hedges and shattered trees, and all about are shell craters, bomb craters, and ruin—blasted trench complexes, twisted wire, a smoking Bren carrier abandoned and upended front first out of a crater, its thin armour casing bent and warped, a track broken and hanging off the metal bogie wheels; a German halftrack troop carrier, part truck, part caterpillar-treaded armoured vehicle, burns yards away from it. A slight breeze, and the sooty smoke from both vehicles blows into their faces, bringing with it a noxious, acrid, oily reek. Soldiers dug into slit trenches wave at the men of Able Company as they approach their staging point, and they yell out from their holes, “Took yez long enough!” “Glad yeh made it!” “Give ‘em hell, yeh Irish bastards!” “We leftcha some Jerries there in the village, we didn’t wanna take all the credit!”
Beckoning War Page 22