David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  Halfway to the CP, Ben sensed the wariness of the officers. Everyone under the tree moved too fast, urgent and unsure like water popping on a hot skillet. Others stood, hands in pockets, waiting. Waiting for what, Ben wondered? He strode forward, eager to get the feel for what was happening up here.

  Closer now, he surveyed the officers. Phineas was not among them.

  Ben stopped. The eyes of every man under the tree lifted from their maps and dials into the still branches, looking beyond them, into the rising gray haze. Five hundred GIs clumped in the field raised their heads, too.

  Artillery was on the way, American guns. The officers and doughs shook their fists to each other under the keening shells.

  The first shells blew behind the hedges two hundred meters off. These blasts grew into a curtain of blows, slamming the ground between the village and bocage like an anvil. Ben felt the shudder in his boots and each whump and fireball on his chest.

  Somebody must have figured the Krauts were laying there, behind the hedge mounds. Probably these officers called in the artillery because they were concerned about another attack. They’d already been hit on the flanks twice this morning, maybe they saw enemy movement straight ahead. Clearly officers of 1st Battalion were nervous on the trigger.

  The artillery began to creep forward, rolling the exploding curtain closer to the soldiers in the grass, to scour German positions on both sides of the hedges.

  Ben stepped ahead toward the CP, then stopped dead again. This time the sound that snagged his ears was not the whistle of shells overhead or the pounding in the earth. He narrowed his eyes toward the last of the high grass before the hedges, and saw helmets rise, then gray camouflage battle dress. The noise he heard over the explosions came from German throats.

  A skirmish line of Kraut paratroopers ran straight at the GIs, firing and screaming. The artillery had flushed the Germans out of their hiding spots on the edge of the field. They couldn’t go backward, that meant death under the shells. So they ran at the Americans, a suicide charge.

  Ben took another step forward, expecting a slaughter of the outmanned Germans. They came out of the grass, maybe sixty of them, shooting and running full tilt. The firefight would be over in seconds when the GIs got off their bellies and returned fire.

  Sam’s hand gripped Ben’s shoulder, stopping him.

  ‘Hang on, Rabbi.’

  Out of the burning and blasted hedges, somehow intact, two German Mark III tanks clattered forward. The rushing Germans let out a roar. One tank followed suit, its turret flashed and a gout of earth beside the CP scooped high on a black blast. The officers dove to their stomachs. The tanks rolled into the field and the running Krauts shot their way forward.

  ‘Get up,’ Ben muttered at the officers.

  Sam’s hand pressed on Ben’s shoulder, urging him to kneel or lie down. Ben pushed the boy’s arm away.

  ‘Sam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fire.’

  The boy dropped a knee, drew a bead on a rushing German, and shot at him. Sam missed. Ben watched the Kraut assault with dread, and listened in awe to the pops of only a few answering guns from the Tough Ombres.

  The Mark Ills came unchallenged across the field. None of the GI officers under the tree was on a radio telling fire command to adjust the shells. Artillery rained chaos on the emptied hedge, behind the Kraut attack. Out in the field, at the running cusp of the Germans, several hundred doughs did nothing to stop them. Ben saw the first American hands go high.

  The Germans fanned out ahead of their tanks, weapons leveled, but no longer firing furiously. GIs stood without their rifles and thrust their arms in the air. Handfuls of Krauts took entire platoons prisoner. Under the tree, a battalion officer stood, hands up. With a German machine pistol aimed at his head, he shouted for his men to cease fire.

  Ben took one step forward before Sam stopped him again, this time with a bear hug.

  ‘No, Rabbi, no. We gotta get outa here.’

  Ben could shout, Shoot! Shoot them! He would run into the field and get the doughs fighting again. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing, a hundred GIs with their hands up, hundreds more scuttling to the rear, their backs turned to just sixty Germans and a pair of tanks. Sam’s grip tightened around his chest. He could scream, Don’t quit, don’t quit! Don’t disappear!

  Sam hoisted Ben off his feet and yanked him from the surrender. Facing the rear, the boy set Ben down but did not let go, and began to run, churning his boots, pushing. Ben tried to gape over his shoulder, unwilling to tear his eyes from the scene, not ready to run away. Sam did not release him, and Ben, to keep from tripping in the tangle of their boots, began to run, too. Behind them, German guns snapped, bullets whizzed past, buzzing in the grass and damp air. On all sides, soldiers sprinted for the river, to the safety of the rear. The sounds of their jangling gear and heaving lungs, their frightened whinnies, churned the morning into a stampede. Frenzy filled the meadow. Brave shouts and harsh commands could no longer rally the doughs. Ben ran with them, shamed and shocked, and for the first moments since he arrived in France, abandoning his son.

  The tatters of 1st Battalion, maybe three hundred boys, dashed over the meadow. 2nd Battalion was dug in another eight hundred yards off, across the featureless field these doughs had fought through yesterday. They shouted while they ran, warnings for the approaching A&P boys still ferrying supplies: Germans! Tanks! These soldiers dropped their supplies and joined the panicked retreat.

  Ben pumped his arms and legs, Sam at his side. He glanced at the white, wide-eyed faces bounding around him. Replacements and experienced hands, all running alike, the same, scared, leaderless boy.

  Ben heard firing. He thought the Germans might be chasing them, shooting at their backs. He saw GIs at the head of their running pack crumple, shot down. He pulled up, breathing hard, confused and frozen in place with the rest of the battalion.

  Out of the grass, hidden and flashless, two German machine guns cut loose.

  The MGs had been secreted into the high weeds, they’d been there all morning. Five minutes earlier, unaware, Ben and Sam had walked past them. Now they ripped the open field, killing the stock-still boys of 1st Battalion. Ten, fifteen, twenty went down before someone hollered, ‘Hit the damn dirt!’ Soldiers spun as bullets tore into legs, arms, and torsos. Sam dove. He looked up at Ben and screamed, ‘Rabbi!’

  No, Ben thought. I do not stop here.

  ‘Sam, get up!’

  Ben did not wait to see if the boy followed. He took off running for the river. The machine guns pivoted for him, rounds clipped the reeds at his legs, but he did not slow or go to ground. He ran until the guns turned elsewhere, searching out better targets in the meadow, motionless ones. Then he looked back.

  His decision to risk the guns and escape had been taken up by half the doughs in the field. The others, badly wounded, dead, or petrified, were left behind. Far back, one of the Kraut tanks closed on the surrendering officers, leveling its guns at point-blank range at the men under the lone and undefended tree.

  Ben spun around to run with Sam and the last hundred of 1st Battalion, almost every one of them shouting, ‘Go, go!’ Ben shouting, too. Exhausted, disgraced, they staggered to the river. Soldiers from 2nd Battalion jogged over the grass to meet them in the eroding mist.

  ~ * ~

  Wounded overflowed the two aid-station tents. Doctors and medics of the 358th were bloody as butchers moving between men sitting up, lying on the ground or on litters, many just standing with confusion and hurt. The medical staff had no time to tend to anything more than the physical damage to these men. Ben followed behind the sulfa sprinkles and bandages, walking through the red copper stench of the men who’d run from battle. No one called to him and Ben offered no consolation. Shame bent every neck. The boys suffered their wounds quietly, as though they were welcome punishments that evened the scale for running.

  A Catholic chaplain strode among the cots. He wore a white stole over his sh
oulders and carried a Bible. Ben watched him kneel beside soldiers who turned their faces. The priest laid his hand on chests and the backs of heads and moved on. He saw Ben near the door and approached.

  The priest was younger than Ben, softer, with a narrow face and wire-rimmed glasses. He extended a pudgy hand.

  ‘Chaplain,’ he said.

  ‘Chaplain.’

  The priest looked back at the wounded. ‘You were out there with them. What happened?’

  They turned tail, Ben thought. A whole battalion run off by a platoon of Krauts. And these boys had made him run with them, had spattered their guilt on him.

  ‘A small German unit got flushed out of the grass by artillery,’ Ben said instead. ‘They attacked straight at the CP. No one shot back. The officers surrendered. Then half the battalion put their hands up. The rest tried to make it back to the river. A couple of MGs were waiting in the field. We got cut up pretty bad. Some of us kept running, the others stayed behind, one way or another.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The priest noted the dingy tape and dirt covering the Red Cross symbol on Ben’s helmet.

  ‘I’m Edgar McGwire, from Sacramento. You must be a friend of Phineas’s. He wears his helmet like that.’

  ‘I’ve been looking for him. Is he here?’

  ‘No, I haven’t seen him.’

  A raven chill landed in Ben’s gut. Phineas had not been among the wounded at the aid station. There were only two places left: either he was lying in the field in no-man’s-land, or taken prisoner.

  Leaving McGwire behind, Ben hurried from the tent. He found the CO of 2nd Battalion. With three other officers, the Major stalked the front lines of his five hundred riflemen, barking at them in their foxholes to keep their heads up, stay ready.

  ‘We gotta pick up the slack!’ the CO hollered, striding tall. ‘You see what happens? Goddammit, you men keep focused!’

  Ben followed the Major, waiting to catch him between bellowed breaths. Ben stayed out of the way while this officer did what every leader must, lead from the front, be visible, show resolve.

  When the Major had gone to the farthest reach of his line, he turned to the rear, to head back to his CP. Ben held up a hand.

  ‘Chaplain. I’m really busy right now. Can it wait?’

  ‘No, sir. It can’t.’

  ‘Alright. Walk with me. What?’

  Ben fell alongside the Major’s long strides. Before he could make his request, he saw McGwire and another chaplain coming at full tilt. The Major halted until all three chaplains were around him. He waved his staff to go on yelling at more soldiers without him.

  ‘What do you want, gentlemen?’

  Ben spoke first.

  ‘Sir, there’s dead and there may still be wounded out in the field. I’d -’

  McGwire interjected, ‘We’d like to see if we can go get them.’ The chaplain beside him nodded. Ben shot McGwire a grateful tip of his head.

  The Major took in the three faces, all men older than him by at least a decade. He pulled a rag from his pocket to wipe the nape of his neck.

  ‘Gentlemen, by my count, we got two hundred and fifty riflemen and eleven officers captured this morning. We got over a hundred wounded, and no idea how many dead. For all intents and purposes, 1st Battalion has ceased to exist. If you can go out there in that goddam meadow and get us back even a few of those boys, I and God Almighty with me will be beholden to you. What do you need?’

  While McGwire explained, Ben peeled the tape from his helmet, to expose the bright red cross.

  ~ * ~

  With Sam, two medics, and six litter bearers at his side, Ben lifted a Red Cross flag and stepped into the open field. A hundred yards to his left under another flag, the priest, McGwire, and his crew headed along the rim of the swamp. To Ben’s right, the other chaplain, Jay Bolick from the Salvation Army, waded into the tall grass. Their three red-and-white banners fluttered in the clear noon.

  Before they walked fifty yards, a triangle of P-47S flew in low and fast, strafing the German positions. The planes were looking for the twin MGs that had gunned down so many doughs two hours ago. The racket from the fighters’ rockets and machine guns made every man under the white flags cringe. Then the planes banked in formation and circled hard to come in again. Overhead, more artillery whined, to thunder on the hedges far ahead. The battle for Sèves Island carried on.

  Once they were deeper in the field, Sam moved to walk in front of Ben.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah, Rabbi?’

  ‘Get behind me. I don’t want a rifleman in front. This is a peace mission. Let me lead. Put your weapon up.’

  ‘Rabbi -’

  ‘Do it.’

  Sam shouldered his M-1 and faded behind the litter bearers. Ben stepped to the lead and held the little flag high. He looked across the trampled grasses, feeling the disgrace of fleeing freshen in his heart.

  ‘1st Battalion!’ he shouted over the reeds, ‘1st Battalion! We’re Americans!’

  To his right, the three P-47S dropped low and flattened their wings. The fighters rushed the ground and fired long, ripping bursts into the marsh grass. Ben and his unit stopped until they were gone with a terrible roar of speed and smoke. Ben held the red cross as high as he could, to make sure the planes and any Germans hiding in the grasses or any wounded GIs saw it.

  ‘Spread out,’ Ben ordered his men. He told Sam, the only one carrying a rifle, to stay close.

  Off to the right, close to where the fighters had plowed the field, Chaplain Bolick’s team stopped. They’d found a GI down. Ben’s steps quickened.

  In seconds, one of his litter bearers shouted, ‘Over here!’ Before Ben could turn, he saw more dreadfulness of the morning strewn at his feet, a tangle of bodies, littered boots, limbs, and helmets. He waded in, bending quickly to each, tugging and rolling boy from boy. These soldiers had been hit bad and, left to die, had crawled close to each other: some lapped arms over others to give succor before their own deaths. Ben wept and did not make himself stop, looking for breath among these lost boys.

  One soldier shocked Ben when he moaned. His wounds were the grimmest in the jumble, his left arm was shot away at the shoulder and his torso shredded. Ben readied himself to bring his face close and ask the boy how he could pray for him, but first took his wrist and felt a strong pulse.

  ‘Medic! Medic!’

  Looking up for the running medic, Ben noted the Thunderbolts were not banking for another pass. The planes circled over the river, holding off. There had been no small-arms fire in the meadow since the chaplains entered.

  Beside Ben, the medic skidded on his heels. The wounded soldier coughed. The medic glanced at Ben in wonderment at this clinging life, then shouted for a stretcher.

  The boy was not conscious enough for Ben to speak to him, shock and blood loss kept him limp. Ben stood, lifting the Red Cross flag. Across the meadow, all three teams tended to wounded, or located and lifted bodies. More soldiers from 2nd Battalion headed up from the river to help carry stretchers out of the meadow.

  Ben tromped through the field, hoping and afraid to find Phineas. He walked to the other two chaplains to ask if they had recovered him. A half kilometer away, artillery pummeled the hedges, and beyond them, St. Germain. But in the meadow, a truce seemed to have taken hold.

  The three chaplains ranged across the grasses and far into the swamp. Every step, Ben knew, was taken under the gun sights of crouching Germans. In the first hour, ten seriously wounded GIs were taken from the field. A dozen bodies were carted off, three times that many were found. Ben’s chest tightened with each dough found in the grass, dead or still alive. He saw the medics run, and ran behind them, ready with a prayer or a soothing word, he gripped GIs’ hands hard to instill life or gently to whisper goodbye. He stood over one boy, riddled and gone. He turned to look south, toward the hedges and village, and thought this island should have been taken by now, by these dead and maime
d boys on the ground.

  Then he blinked, to be sure his vision was correct, to make sure he really saw the Kraut soldier walking across the field.

  Ben raised the Red Cross flag and walked toward the German. Seeing him, Sam jogged to catch up. Ben lifted a hand to stop the boy.

  He approached the German. When they were twenty yards apart, both of them stopped.

  The German called, ‘Wir lassen Amerikaner verwunden. Lassen Sie irgendwie Deutsches verwunden?’

  Ben answered in German. ‘Yes, we do have some of your wounded.’

  The man was tall and wore round glasses. He seemed by his insignia to be an officer. He carried only a holstered pistol.

  With gray camouflaged pantaloons tucked into his boots, Ben took him to be a paratrooper.