“Take that house, Therrien!” shouts Jim across the street to the building now occupied by much of Therrien’s platoon. Therrien readies a group of men for the task. Under the impact of another high-velocity tank shell, the corner of the house gives way in a pall of dust and smoke.
“In we go!” is Therrien’s battle cry, and into the yawning hole pours a section led by him, and there are the echoing reports of grenades and gunfire from inside. Out they come from another side, baffled, and then they are pinned down by rifle shots from another nearby house. Jim can see the sloping outline of a German soldier’s helmet and, in another window, the ruffling of curtains. What is going on? Jim frets as his perimeter dissolves, what is going on? Anger and fatigue consume him all at once; he throws his helmet to the floor in disgust and paces along the tilted floor, and he spits out of the hole in the wall into the rubble below. His thoughts are unclear; he has no idea what is going on, how to act. He begins to tremble. Where is that bottle? Where is that bottle? he thinks. I need liquor to steady my nerves, where is my whiskey, where is my whiskey! He rummages through his pack and discovers to his dismay no whiskey. None at all. He is filled with a sudden, crawling dread, seized by a feverish confusion. His hands continue trembling, and he feels a prickly, tickly sensation on his skin as he begins to sweat from nerves. Craving a drink, as if he could escape this situation with one in hand.
“Cooley!” he shouts amid the noise of battle. “Cooley!”
“Yes, sir!” comes Cooley’s response from below. Cooley runs up the stairs to where Jim is, the contents of his pack strewn out in front of him. “What’s wrong?” Cooley looks concerned.
“Don’t broadcast this too loudly, but I need a shot of something to steady my nerves.” He glances over his shoulder to ensure that Tillman, crouched and looking out the hole in the wall, and Cavanagh and Neidhart, aiming and firing their rifles from a window, have not heard his words.
“Sir?” Cooley takes a moment to digest what Jim has said. “Sir, there’s a battle on!”
“I know, I know, but I can’t concentrate without a fucking drink, do you understand? Our whole perimeter’s melted, I’m exhausted and I have no idea what the fuck to do. Do you have any whiskey?”
“No. And I had to trade yours away.”
“Why?” Jim is incredulous.
“That’s how I got you out of hot water with the provosts. Don’t you remember?” After a pause: “I guess you wouldn’t remember.”
“Damn it.” There is an explosion. “What about rum?”
“Sir, not now for Christ’s sake! We’re in a battle!”
“Cooley, I’m telling you now, get me one or two shots of rum and I’m back in the game; without it, I’m good for nothing. Go!” Cooley looks at him wide-eyed and unbelieving. “GO!” Cooley goes back the way he came. Jim wonders if he is going to bring back someone to relieve him of his command. He hardly cares.
A messenger runs upstairs; it is Witchewski. “Sir, Therrien’s boys got to the bottom of it. The Jerries have tunnels between buildings; they pop up, shoot, disappear, pop up somewhere else! They had a hell of a fight in there, and tossed some grenades down their hidey hole!”
“Then we’re just going to destroy this town, building by building. I can’t call in the artillery; my radio’s busted. We’ll have to use the tanks and mortars, and we have to get in some AT guns. Get some 6-pounders in here to help take this town apart!”
“Okay, sir, I’m on it!” Jim is dazzled by his own semblance of courage, though as Witchewski departs in search of heavy support weapons, the house is hit by a mortar bomb, and Jim hits the floor, the floor that slopes into a sagging hole wreathed in splinters, and his leg hangs over the hole and his pants are torn and his skin is scratched by a jagged spear of wood, and he feels that tingling, senses the world whiten at the corners, hears all sounds recede into the distance, into the echoey corridors of faintness, and he feels his heart pound, his mind frozen, his breath shallow and heaving; and he reaches to pick up the helmet he has tossed onto the floor, and he picks it up and puts it back on his head and refastens the chinstrap just to focus his mind on something. Fatigue and fear and despair have finally claimed him, have marked him as unfit, have rendered him a shellshocked malingering coward, a failure, a jittering nervous wreck. Someone is now shouting at him, and he looks up and sees Doyle shouting, imploring him for information, for orders, for something.
“Permission to move up the street from Tom and capture Dick and Harry! We will move up with a tank and we will blow our way through those houses!”
“Yes, go ahead,” Jim says, picking himself up, addressing Doyle with dazed eyes and withdrawn voice. “Go ahead, you have my permission. Sorry, I’m just stunned is all, just stunned.” Doyle pierces him with a barbed and lingering glance before dismissing himself to undertake the task of advancing up the road; he can clearly see that Jim is wobbling, that his command over his own faculties, and therefore the company, is uncertain. Another mortar round impacts nearby, called in, in all likelihood, from the heights of the nearby castle, and Jim feels an electrical charge surge through his nerves, an involuntary contraction of muscles, a zap of fear. Get it together Jim, get it together. He hums with a trembling voice, rock a bye baby on the treetops, when the wind blows the cradle will rock, when the bough breaks, rocking and swaying gently—
“Here you go, sir,” Cooley says to Jim, putting a metal flask of rum up to his nose, the fumes of alcohol wafting upward into his nostrils, “Drink up.” He takes two large gulps of strong, syrupy rum, and as it burns its way down his gullet it kindles a strength within him that brings with it both focus and a deadening of awareness, and he hands the flask to Cooley to share a sip and thanks him for his effort. Down the creaking steps piled with dust he goes, into the main room, shouting orders: “Okay, Doyle, up you go, that’s it, go, go, all others provide covering fire! Let’s kick these Jerries out of town! Let’s go!”
Members of Doyle’s platoon charge out, a tank lumbering its way down the street to cover them, crunching over rubble, and the tank blasts into a house again and again, blasting the bombed-out ruin into a shell of itself, and the infantrymen charge into the house in search of defenders holed up in the basement. Other members of the company fire from windows of captured houses, from slit trenches in yards, from ragged roof holes. After a brief shootout the house is in company hands, and two dazed prisoners are whisked out, one of them a stunned blonde boy with dusty, floppy hair and a bloodied face, and the other a shorter, wider man shaved bald and a look of resolute hatred on his face; they are waved off by a corporal and fall into the hands of men in Therrien’s platoon, and they are marched off to the rear. As they stumble by, someone whistles as if whistling to a comely woman.
31
All about small battles rage, small fires blending into one monstrous inferno. Two companies and numerous tanks are now engaged in the battle for the town, shooting their way through the bombed-out streets, blasted gardens and shells of shops and houses, and fighting on the outskirts, trading fire with the defenders of the surrounding farms and the Malatesta castle holding sway over all. Overhead is the drone of airplanes, vast swarms of buzzing, rumbling planes that bomb and strafe German positions and German reinforcements, and go back to land, reload, and do it again and again and again, an aerial highway of obliteration and liquidation. Through tunnels German soldiers scramble and emerge into buildings, firing and disappearing, and houses cave in consequently under the blasting of tanks and mortars. A pall of dust and smoke obscures the town, fires burn, guns and mortars pound, small arms crackle, grenades concuss, and men yell and swear and scream in English and German; others groan unheard, holding in their innards, praying and trembling and cursing in the midst of the chaos around them.
Into the town grumble a small troop of open carriers towing 6-pounder anti-tank guns and carrying their crews. Into the acrid fog they arrive, and the crews dismount a
nd pull their guns into positions and join the fray, gun crews ducking behind the blast shields of their long-nosed guns, jamming in shells and aiming and firing and breaching the walls of houses and gardens, giving close and accurate supporting fire to the beleaguered infantry. Into the yawning holes and broken doors of buildings blasted open by the guns and tanks, into the heaps of rubble and broken furniture move small parties of anxious infantrymen, guns at the hip at the ready, to engage in ruthless hand-to-hand combat in those houses where the defenders decide to make a stand; a melee of grenades and submachine guns, riflebutts and spades, fists and teeth and knives and bayonets; of snarling shouting spitting naked violence, the stubborn bluntness of different countries’ policies toward one another, a hot and fevered intercourse, an explosive consummation of the rising tension of suspicion and threats.
As Able Company fights its way deeper into the town, Jim finds himself charging into the fray and into the broken shell of another house, its roof gone, the second floor completely collapsed, cleared moments ago by soldiers in his company just ahead of him after being holed numerous times by two tanks and a 6-pounder gun. He steps over the mound of rubble in the centre of the house and avoids the plaster- and dust-covered corpse of a German soldier, the head flattened by a swing from a shovel, like a squashed pumpkin, black blood soaking through the surrounding plaster dust, a failed infusion of life into clay. Beside the body lies the disused metal tube of a faustpatrone, an anti-tank rocket launcher. Soldiers comb through the wreckage, room to room, to see if there are any others lying in wait. A tall, bewildered-looking soldier with jug ears and a beret instead of a helmet, a new recruit, stands with his spade, stunned and impressed by his own handiwork.
“Come on! Outcha come, outcha come!” come the hoarse commands of Witchewski from the doorway leading down into the darkness of the cellar. “Let’s go, let’s go, outcha come!”
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot, we are coming!” exhorts a ragged, exhausted-sounding voice from the cellar. Three prisoners stagger out of the basement, two of them supporting another, helping him walk; the legs of the wounded one are badly mangled, blood soaking through the shredded tatters of his pantleg. Witchewski grabs the lead German by his lapels and yanks him through the doorway, and the others are yanked along with him, almost losing their grip, and the wounded one winces in pain, eyes squeezed shut; and they are shoved into the street to be herded along to a prisoners’ cage somewhere in the rear. Pistol drawn, Jim stalks through the ravaged interior and out the back door into the untended and overgrown garden, and he can see through a blasted break in the wall of the yard men pushing a 6-pounder along on its rubber tires, grunting and sweating and heaving and shouting as they do so, the axle of the wheels squeaking. Another German emerges from the mouth of a tunnel in the garden in an attempt to escape; as Jim catches sight of him the man is promptly shot in the back and falls forward, doubled over, his legs still in the hole from which he tried to crawl to safety; blood blooms through his shirt, patterned into and dying its dusty fibres. His Schmeisser machine pistol lies discarded beside him. Another shot to the head, and a final electric twitch through the arm, a final shiver of life.
“Got ‘im!” yells out a voice from behind, that of a man impressed with himself. There is a loud bang and a shudder in the earth, from under the centre of the house, as engineers detonate the cellar, and the remainder of the house falls in on itself into a rock pile in a great shroud of dust, no longer usable as an enemy strongpoint. Jim is reminded of the mining blasts underfoot from his childhood, many years ago.
The house effectively silenced, Jim ducks in the garden to plan his next moves. There is a momentary lull in his sector; most of the fighting he can hear now comes from beyond, where Charlie Company, under the command of Major Rowlands, is fighting. Overhead streak shells, a barrage from behind the lines onward to German positions elsewhere in the massive battle in which he plays a small part. Jim takes another slurp from the flask of rum and surveys the town through the break in the wall, the jagged stalagmites of ruin that jut up from the ground, the swirls and roils of smoke. He can hear little out of his damaged ear; its hearing has been muffled, the sounds all sounding as though from far away. He sensibly chases the slurp of rum with one of water from his canteen, and water runs down his face, and he wipes the water from his face with his forearm and puts the canteen away, and he suddenly finds himself at a loss for what to do. He sees the waver of his fevered, adrenal pulse beat at the corner of his gaze; he longs for a cigarette but knows that the curl of smoke could send a signal to an awaiting sniper, and that he could end up caught in a stranger’s sights … and this for the moment does not bother him. Not at all. He considers lighting up a cigarette, considers pulling out his pistol and raising it high, revealing himself beyond all doubt to be an officer, and yelling “Charge!” and advancing toward the central piazza, where a German tank holds sway, into the booby-trapped centre of the enemy’s defensive works, into the sights of any and every weapon that could be brought to bear on him. He would be at least assured an honourable memory. Doyle or Therrien could take command of the company, or they could hand it over to Olczyk, left out of battle and sitting and waiting in reserve. This whole thought occurs to him in a visual sequence, with almost no words, a dumb show prologue of the action to come.
A muffled shout from the side of his buzzing left ear. He turns to face Cooley.
“Huh? I can’t hear out of that ear, Cooley, you have to speak up!”
“Sir, Staff Sergeant Nichols’ been wounded. Covered in shrapnel from a mortar round trying to get us ammo.”
“Did the ammo manage to arrive?”
“Yes sir, it’s on its way into town.”
“Okay, thanks Cooley.”
“Sir, how’re you faring?” A hint of a concerned smile.
“I’m okay, thanks Cooley, just catching my breath.” Jim tries to clear his head, to focus on the action at hand, though the rum is starting to dull not only his sensations, but also his thoughts. Other soldiers rally together and await Jim’s order, the house now taken, the strongpoint destroyed. Where to, sir? What next, Captain? Expectant eyes stare upon him. He realizes that they must halt their forward advance toward the central piazza, where the German tank reigns supreme, and try to link up with Charlie Company, engaged in furious combat on Able’s flank and under fire from the battlements of the medieval castle, to try to bridge the gulf between them, to try to cut the German defence in two, to seal as many of the defenders off in a pocket as is possible and destroy them thus. He relates all this in words he barely registers as he speaks them.
To this end, Doyle holds his position on the company’s front. Members of Therrien’s platoon veer right to draw out and engage a sniper who has opened up from the window of a house; mortars are summoned by Tillman to augment this attack. Therrien then sends another section to comb down an adjacent street to draw fire, so that Jim, with the aid of Tillman and Neidhart, can relay orders to nearby tanks and mortars to destroy any enemy positions that reveal themselves. Jim sticks by Stringer’s platoon, and together they take positions to provide covering fire and direct the fire of nearby mortar and tank crews. Sure enough, a sniper shot cracks and a soldier is felled. Soldiers scramble to cover, and there is another shot. The source is located, the roof of a house, and soldiers begin cracking away with their rifles and letting loose with machine guns. Mortar rounds bear down on the sniper’s house, called in by Tillman who is by Jim’s side. Another house-clearing struggle ensues. It is time for he himself to move forward, to try to close the gap between companies.
Jim shouts and waves men onward, and as they crouch and move ahead to catch up with their compatriots, into a leafy lane lined with trees and the walls of closely packed backyard gardens, overlooked by tall houses eyed with windows and blast holes, there is a shot from behind, another sniper. Perhaps the one who was just firing at them from another house. As they dash ahead into the smoke, h
e sees ahead of him two medical runners carrying a stretcher laden with a wounded soldier toward them. The wounded man contorts in agony, grasping at the sheet as if to life itself. A pair of mortar rounds crash down into the lane, and there is a correspondent rain of debris. The medics fall to their knees, the stretcher and the wounded soldier falling to the ground. Jim can see that the wounded man has no legs below the knees; there is only a bloody mass of ragged bandages. One of the medics himself has his head swaddled in a dressing. The stretcher-bearers pick up their gravely wounded charge and continue their trot to the aid post beyond the perimeter of the town. More mortar rounds dive in and crash about the houses and the streets.
The platoon makes a break for it down the lane, into the smoke, section by section, quickened by the sudden bombardment, dashing in a low hunch, weapons in hand, followed by Jim and his small entourage. A distant machine gun pronounces upon them from on high a rapid and staccato death sentence. Two soldiers, Carson and Symic, are caught by the sweep of the machine gun and crumple over as if punched by the air itself. Carson lies still, unconscious or dead, while Symic writhes in agony, clutching his gut and his pelvis, and bullets beat and disrupt the earth all round. Nearby, a grenade bursts, flung from a window; the rest of the platoon duck from the shower of debris, crouching by the wall, protected partly by it and by the staccato hail of covering fire from their comrades.
Beckoning War Page 25