Another pair of litter bearers climbed the slope. Before Ben could stand erect with his end of the stretcher, his downhill bearer asked one of the others passing by to switch and help him to the bottom.
‘Sure,’ the new carrier said. He handed to his partner the folded stretcher he bore on his shoulder. ‘Rabbi,’ he said, ‘take a break. You look oysgeshpilt.’
Ben released the stretcher to this boy, a Yiddish speaker.
‘Thank you.’ Ben moved off the trail. He took a seat on a wet fan of ferns, there was nowhere on Hill 122 that was dry, or safe, just a place to be still.
Before lifting, the new carrier looked down at the wounded soldier. ‘Hang on, buddy. We’re gonna sprint.’ He turned to Ben.
‘Hey, Rabbi. Just wanted to say—The boys, they know what you’re doin’ up here on the line. They’re talkin’. All of ‘em, not just the few of us, you know? You’re alright. And don’t feel bad. I got this one for you.’
Ben blew out a breath, nodding. ‘Where you from?’
‘New Yawk, greatest city in the world.’
‘Go Yankees.’
‘Yeah.’ The boy grinned. ‘I hear I’m supposed to say Go Pirates.’ He hefted the stretcher, seemingly tireless. ‘Biz hundert azoi ve tsvantsik.’
Live till a hundred, like a twenty-year-old.
Ben lifted his chin; he didn’t have enough energy to wave. ‘Zay gezunt.’
He watched the Jew and Gentiles descend Mont Castre. Yesterday’s casualty count in the 3rd Battalion alone was eighty-three wounded and nine dead, a fifteen percent loss rate. For that fee, the three rifle companies had taken two thousand yards, crossing the field and road, then moved into the forest at the foot of the hill. The action took place out in the open, away from the bocage, accompanied by four Sherman tanks from the 712th TB. This was the first time the battalion had any effective support from the tanks, and all four Shermans were destroyed in the process. Once in the forest, the 3rd regrouped and fought through the afternoon for another five hundred yards of the slope. There, they dug in, and the stretcher bearers, A&P Platoons, and Ben got to work on the trail.
The big push for the north face of Mont Castre would begin at sunrise. Ben was so tired he didn’t know how he could stay with the men through the morning. His hands ached, but not as bad as his legs and back. He thought to lay in the ferns but didn’t, someone might see him and think he was hurt; that would interfere with the last flow of supplies and wounded. As before, the dead were not carted off the hill but laid aside and covered with tarps, out of sight until the objective was won. The dead had no role to play in the battle. That was the point of killing them.
Ben emptied his canteen down his throat. He felt guilty with every swallow, that the water was not given to a soldier. Ben drank, sorry for dropping the dogface on the trail, sorry that he was thirsty and needy and run-down. He stood, upset that his legs wobbled. He willed them onto the trail and plodded, empty-handed, upward.
He trudged for twenty minutes, thinking of a bed and clean, dry clothes. The morning shroud began to lift. Men passed him on the trail humping ammo and rations, the final runs until nightfall. Soldiers greeted him and Ben could not lift his face from the path to speak back.
In three days Ben could not recall sleeping more than an hour at a time. In combat he ran to the wounded to assist the medic, ran to the dying to ease their passage. The adrenaline squeezing into his veins under fire left him reeling and achy once the shots died down and he slumped to a ditch or a shaded patch, not to sleep but to collapse. In the aftermath of battle he hefted litters, held the hands of scared, wounded soldiers and prayed, dug through the pockets of corpses. He built a dam to hold in his horror at the wounds, the mangled limbs and missing pieces, the mortal holes in the soldiers. He could not ever recoil no matter how ghastly a man lay before him, but had to kneel close every time. Ben listened and calmed terror. He was the last ear for gasps, he tried hard to remember every face and every word said before the specter kneeled beside him. His tunic and pants were stained with the blood of a hundred men in those three days. He spoke beside graves and marked their place on a map for retrieval later. Letters to families piled up, waiting for him like debts. Men who’d not been hit but feared they were next asked him for prayers, chatter, attention.
Ben walked up the trail. He mustered the energy one at a time for each rising step, until he fell to his stomach behind a rotten log, beside Captain Whitcomb.
The young officer eyed Ben on the ground next to him.
‘You look good.’
Ben laid his nose in the dirt. His helmet tipped. ‘Kush meer in toches, mamzer.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘To be honest, Captain, it means kiss my ass, you bastard.’
‘Nice.’
‘Sorry. It slipped out.’
‘You beginning to think a little better about staying back, Chap?’
‘What time is it?’
Whitcomb rustled, checking his watch.
‘Thirty minutes till showtime.’
‘Wake me.’
~ * ~
In his dream, Ben was cold. He shivered. He awoke so abruptly he forgot the dream, recalling only the shivering. He cleared his head with a shake. Booms echoed in the trees and dripping brush, rolling downhill at him behind the rotted log. Captain Whitcomb was gone. The attack had begun and the shuddering was in the ground.
He sought the place of the explosions, up into the green nooks of the hill. A hundred yards farther through the woods showed the backs of scrambling soldiers. The five hundred remaining doughs of 3rd Battalion had moved forward—he pulled at his sleeve to check his watch—an hour ago. He’d slept through dawn and the opening mortar salvos that covered the surge.
Ben got to his knees. He was hungry and had to piss. Flakes and dirt clung to his cheek, he brushed them away. He peered up the slope into the morning, where gun-smoke hung like early fog. The blisters in his hands stung, the memory of exhaustion staggered through him. Standing, he took a few steps down the hill.
Behind and above him, the battle waged. He looped his arm around a thin trunk. Hanging on his elbow, he allowed himself the piss. When he was done, he couldn’t let the tree go. He was surprised that he was failing. He’d never considered it, and saw how naive he’d been.
Ben’s hand went to his breast pocket. Inside was the pack of cigarettes given him by General Billups. Tucked behind that lay the letter, the last written by Capt. Thomas Kahn. Ben patted the pocket and gazed down at his unmoving boots.
The battle sounds were vicious, at close quarters, against an entrenched enemy holding high ground. He could not stop patting his pocket.
Steps stumbled from behind. Ben whirled to see a soldier with one arm strapped to his waist in white gauze. A red stain marked the bullet in his biceps.
He saw Ben and stopped.
‘Chap.’
‘Yeah.’
The soldier shook his head. ‘Don’t go up there.’
The boy kept moving. The way was so steep it was hard for him to go without grabbing on to something. The dough grunted, disappearing into the green leaves. Ben turned to the battle, believing in the cunning of God to send him such a message.
Branches and trunks braced his climb. He headed straight for the steepness of the face, the shortest distance to the fight. His legs churned on a reserve he didn’t know he had until he found himself mounting the slope in bounds. The letter in his pocket stoked his climb. Hitching and pulling himself up, slipping and retaking ground he lost, Ben accepted that the only way God had to stop him was death.
Everywhere, gunfire rang through the dripping, emerald forest. The trees and boulders pealed with machine guns, zinged from ricocheted rounds, and clapped with the thunder of lobbed mortar shells. Ben clambered past the first German bodies of the morning. Several were not dead but squirming. An Army medic skittered between them. Ben had no time for the foe, even for the call of ‘Jude’ from one close by. He climbed past sandbag re
doubts, silent machine guns, and draped bodies. He dove into the fray, to the side of Captain Whitcomb.
The officer had an SCR 536 hand talkie pressed to mouth and ear, shouting orders to a platoon leader in Lima Company. He did not acknowledge Ben’s awkward landing. Ben was glad for a moment to catch his breath without explaining to Whitcomb what he was doing on the line again.
‘I know, I know! But you gotta make ‘em move, Lieutenant! Don’t sit on one spot, fire and go, fire and go! That goddam hilltop has got to be ours tonight if it’s only you and me....’
Whitcomb snapped his head around to Ben. He grinned.
‘...and Chaplain Kahn left on top of it. Now move up! I want 2nd Platoon on that ridge in ten minutes. Call me when you got it!’
The young captain handed off the radio. He rolled to his stomach and surveyed the slope. The chainsaw bursts of Kraut MG42S spurted far to the right, as though lumberjacks were there chopping trees. These sounds were answered by the thumps of grenades and the distinct pops of M-1 rifle fire. Ben listened and envisioned the lieutenant that Whitcomb had just belted over the walkie, rousing his unit, tossing grenades into an enemy machine-gun nest, exposing himself to the worst dangers in order to be their leader. In his vision Ben saw this unknown boy with one silver bar on his collar mouthing a last and tragic plea for a prayer from the running rabbi.
‘Good morning,’ Whitcomb said. ‘Have a good nap?’
‘I’m not a vulgar man, Captain. But you push me.’
‘That’s what I’m here for. Though keep it in English for me, will ya? So, you want to know what we got?’
Ben eyed the slope, left and right. Where doubts and exhaustion had been minutes before, military instinct took over.
Clearly, the Krauts were not going to surrender Hill 122. Ben guessed the crest lay another 100 to 150 meters away. He rolled to one shoulder and looked behind him. Even on a grim, clouded day like this, Mont Castre rewarded anyone gazing off it with a view for miles to the east, west, and north, the directions of the American advance through Normandy. The Krauts would defend this precious vantage point with every gun they could spare. Every German soldier who retreated southward in front of the Americans through the bocage would have come here. The enemy was not going to hand this mound over. The Mahlman Line existed for one purpose only: to keep Mont Castre.
Tanks were not coming up this slope. Close air support would be impossible under these trees. The trenches and forest of Mont Castre were being contested with rifles and artillery. These were the same tools the Krauts and Ben’s Tough Ombres used in 1918. That made this hillside another piece of the eternal war, ugly, slow, and personal. Ben knew what Captain Whitcomb had got.
He had troops scared to advance into the gun sights of an enemy looking down on them. Under his command were as many green replacement soldiers and officers as there were veterans. Every dogface had a buddy in a shallow grave from the past forty-eight hours. He had a slim hold on his slice of the battlefield and on the soldiers who took it for him. Young Captain Whitcomb, L Company, 3rd Battalion, and the whole 359th Regiment were surely sharing this hill with a German force of equal and perhaps superior numbers. Lastly, all of the GIs had orders to capture Mont Castre.
Ben scooted to his feet. He stepped over Whitcomb’s rear and batted the young man on the helmet. Bent at the waist, he took off on oddly crisp legs to dash along the line.
He called over his shoulder, ‘Right now, Captain, I figure you got bupkis.’
Whitcomb raised a hand.
‘Hey, I know that one! I got nothin’!’
‘Right!’
‘Where you goin’?’
Ben pointed to the gunplay.
‘2nd Platoon.’
Any reply from the captain was lost under the sawing of guns ahead. Ben ran behind a hundred doughs. Many of them popped up to fire a few rounds to cover the running rabbi. Some shouted, ‘Go, Chap!’
German bullets chewed branches and leaves several feet above Ben’s head. He galloped through the cheers of the doughs and the slaps of rounds into the trees. The firefight of 2nd Platoon was easy to find, they were the unit farthest up the slope, the only ones close enough to the Krauts to fling hand grenades. He took cover behind a cool, mossy boulder.
Twenty yards uphill, a young lieutenant crept at the head of his forty-man unit. Ben lay at the foot of the rock to observe the assault.
Every man in 2nd Platoon was on the move. Sergeants waggled fingers and fists, battle hand-signs to direct squads to slide forward, fire, and move. Two corporals raked the slope with BARs, triggering in bursts to keep their long barrels from overheating. The platoon’s machine gun railed tracers at the unseen Krauts above; the close confines of the forest multiplied this gun’s howl. Riflemen creased at the waist to stay low, to grab a few more feet of Mont Castre, then take a knee or belly flop to empty a clip at anything that moved ahead. The lieutenant, a big man, under cover of his platoon’s fusillade, hurled another grenade onto a ledge where the Germans had their best angle of fire. The grenade blew, men cried out on both sides of the burst, GIs screamed ‘Go, go!’ wounded foreign tongues wailed somewhere out of sight.
Ben watched 2nd Platoon use their fire and maneuver tactic to perfection on this slope, a better fit here than in the knotted fields of the bocage. Thirty-eight rifles and the barking machine gun worked in tandem with the advance. Men gained ground in units, supporting each other in leapfrog fashion, fire, move, go, fire, move, go! The Germans, holding every card of firepower and placement, could not get their guns in action. If a head popped up, it was convinced to duck mighty quick. The doughs were inexorable, and this plus the lieutenant’s grit kept them alive. Ben smacked a balled fist against the rock, joining the men’s calls for ‘Get ‘em, get ‘em!’ rising above the blasts. When he heard the shouts in German, ‘Wir können nicht sie halten! Fall zurück!’ 2nd Platoon had the ridge.
Ben scurried forward then, with no reason or purpose other than to be in the midst of the doughs when they took the ledge. Remarkably, the platoon had suffered not one casualty in the action. Ben stayed low and jogged forward, catching up with a filthy sergeant. He tapped the man on the back. The squad leader touched Ben in return. Ben moved into the line of the platoon, forty men spread out, each walking a little taller. The lieutenant clambered over a shale shelf onto the lip of the ridge. Kneeling and leveling his rifle to his rib cage, he sniffed through the smoking barrel for trouble around him. He gazed into the woods up the hill. The Germans had melted away into other prepared positions on the slope. Now they were pushed closer to the crest.
The platoon assembled into the Kraut positions. Ben collected surprised glances.
‘What are you doin’ here, Chap?’
‘Where’d you come from?’
‘Hey, those Jerries took one look at the rabbi here and took a powder.’
Ben accepted pats and elbow bumps, he smiled for the boys like an old mascot. Soldiers sidled past, taking firing positions facing uphill. The two-man machine-gun crew grabbed their weapon and tripod and belts to hustle up the slope. The trench felt warm, the Krauts’ absence in it was recent. The GIs breathed this in, happily, as if the slash in the dirt were fresh bread.
The lieutenant came to slump beside Ben. The man was broad, with a square jaw below Irish green eyes.
‘Can you say some thanks, Padre?’
Ben nodded. He held out his hand. The lieutenant gripped it, and reached to the private beside him bearing the walkie-talkie. This boy took another in hand, and within seconds the forty men of the platoon linked themselves to Ben. He looked down the line. Each man kept his chest against the hill, the stock of his weapon propped at his shoulder, but all had put both hands in those of his buddies on either side.
Ben spoke loud enough for everyone to hear, even any Germans in range of their former trench.
‘God, we are not finished. We cannot thank You for victory yet. We can only ask You to allow us to continue to fight until our job is done. We ask
You to buck us up with Your courage. Protect these boys. Give them strength the way You’ve given them each other. Hold them in Your hand, too.’
Ben squeezed the lieutenant’s hand, wanting the young officer to feel it and send it down the line, a surge of spirit.
‘Look at us, God. We’ve come. We’re here. We’re staying. This is our duty. This is our worship, and our thanks.’
He was done. The lieutenant released his hand. Ben saw that the young officer’s eyes were closed. The big man still held the hand of the private beside him. With his head lowered, he made the sign of the cross. He uttered, ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 21