David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  ‘I got one in the fanny a couple weeks ago. Same side.’

  ‘Who shoots a chaplain?’ the medic grumbled again.

  The boy pressed Ben’s hand over the bandage patch. He helped Ben sit up while he spun the gauze wrap around Ben’s midsection. When he was done, the boy smacked him on the shoulder. Ben flinched.

  ‘Good as new, Padre. We’ll get you back to the aid station and have a doc look at that. But you’re gonna be okay, maybe a couple stitches. Here.’ He poured some sulfa tablets on Ben’s palm.

  ‘Thanks ... what’s your name?’

  ‘Bubba.’

  Ben snorted. ‘I could have guessed. Stay low, Bubba.’

  ‘See you later, Padre. Do you need a stretcher or can you get back on your own steam?’

  ‘I got a little steam left.’

  The medic scampered away. The morning stayed splintered by potshots from I Company still trying to ferret out the Kraut machine gun hidden and flailing at the doughs from the trees. Ben hunched under the grass to tuck in his shirt over the wrapping and pull up his trousers. He finished with difficulty, then shoved Phineas’s .45 back into his waistband. That smarted.

  I Company kept the Kraut MG busy. Ben struggled to his feet and hobbled, bent over, as fast as he could to the rear. Once he covered fifty yards, he straightened. The pain in his side was bad but he gritted his teeth and found he could walk with a limp.

  Ben moved past more soldiers easing forward to join the hunt. The company needed to clear the woods so they could take Mont and stay on course for Fontoy. A few doughs who saw Ben called out sympathy and curses, ‘We’ll get the sumbitch did that, Chap, don’t you worry. Damn Krauts.’ Ben waved a bloody hand.

  An A/T gun crew hauled their 57 mm cannon into the clearing, then swung it to face the woods. Ben sat on a stump to watch them load and fire five rounds at flat trajectories into the trees. Trunks and branches blew sky high. The doughs of I Company ducked flying shavings. When the smoke cleared and the last bark and chips fluttered to earth, the woods were gouged and hazy. A squad stepped into the brush, guns ready. Ben turned away. More men moved up, running now.

  Ben limped to the rear, his first strides backward since stumbling down Mont Castre two months ago. Every trod yard, every trucked mile since then had been east, running down the Germans, chasing what he thought God wanted from him, holding himself out in the argument. Now he was in retreat. He considered whether he might keep retreating, catch a ride back to the rear, take his stitches and head west until he was home and done. Nothing was left for him in France. He’d come back to this war thinking he could make some difference, sway God in Thomas’s fate, win over soldiers to fight for his reasons. He’d thought he might wipe off the blood from his hands onto the new battlefield, wash his hands in old rivers. He’d found that the blood clung, and beyond that he’d mattered not at all, only enough for God to turn from him. Who shoots a chaplain? Ben knew the answer now. No one. This was God’s last statement to him, that Ben Kahn was no chaplain. No rabbi.

  An ambulance driver spotted him making his way to the rear. The private jogged to help him.

  ‘Who shoots a chaplain?’ the boy asked, taking Ben’s arm. Ben shook his head and said nothing.

  He asked to sit up front with the driver, not on a litter in the rear. The boy was glad to say yes. Escorting Ben over the last of the field, he carried on a one-sided chat, about his home and folks and why he was a driver and not a fighter. He was a Mormon from Provo. Ben let him prattle, then stood aside while the boy and a medic settled two stretchers into the rear of the ambulance. Each of these wounded doughs had been hit in the leg by the MG before the A/T gun smashed the woods around it. Ben spoke to the two boys briefly. Both reached from their litters to point at the red blemish at Ben’s waist where his bandage was soaking through. Ben grimaced when the boys asked, ‘Does that hurt?’ ‘Sure does,’ he told them.

  The driver took the wheel, gabbing again. The ambulance rolled in a convoy of a dozen vehicles, a mix of Red Cross trucks and emptied Jimmies with an infantry squad in the back. These doughs were headed to the ASP at Mairy to pick up supplies. The road was a one-lane, narrow, bouncy path, barely paved. Ben bit his lip and put a hand over the rip in his side to press it shut.

  Mairy lay two miles away, and the ride was quick. The boy was a terrible driver, dodging potholes, making the stretchers in the rear bang the sides of the ambulance. He scraped the panels of the vehicle against branches grown wild along the road. In five minutes the village appeared at a crossroads. It had its own church and a welcoming wooden icon of Jesus posted outside the town limits. The column stopped beside a circle of crates, an ASP in a field where the carved Jesus gazed over the heads of the soldiers jumping out of trucks. Ben eased from the cab. The Mormon driver bustled to the back of the ambulance. The wounded were to be transferred to another set of vehicles shuttling two more miles to the rear, to the 90th’s CP at Landres. That will be four miles away from the fighting, Ben thought. That’s a start.

  Ben’s side pulsed. He looked into his palm; blood tacked his fingers.

  Another convoy arrived on the road at the edge of the road, this one coming from the west. Quartermasters waved clipboards to greet them, showing the newly arrived Jimmies where to park. The trucks all bore the Red Ball emblem on their bumpers. They halted in a tight echelon, with parade precision. Every driver who stepped from the dusty cabs was a colored boy.

  Ben forged ahead, figuring he’d catch a ride with one of these Red Ballers back to the CP. He looked at the thirty Negroes gathering on the grass. Some of their trucks steamed under the hoods. But even from a distance he could tell the dark boys had a swagger to them. They shared cigarettes and slapped hands. Not a one of them made a move to off-load their beds filled with ammo. Some stretched, others loitered in the shade of their Jimmies. None of the white soldiers spoke to them. Ben headed their way.

  Halfway to the line of trucks, he noticed several GIs and drivers standing in place or sitting up on the grass. Ben halted, lifting his senses to the morning. He followed the looks of the stilled soldiers. He turned to the village and the road behind him.

  Squeals were the first thing he heard. The stretcher crews took off running with the wounded between them. In seconds, every dough in the field with a crate in his hand dropped it and dashed. The Negro soldiers sprinted for their trucks. Like the wooden Jesus across the field, Ben stared.

  The thrum of motors clawed beneath the squeaks of rolling tracks. Three hundred yards away, where the lane emerged out of its summer cloak of brush and trees, a Mark IV panzer powered into the open. The tank did not stop, clearing the way for two more panzers to roll into the field. A hundred grenadiers jogged behind the tanks.

  The lead machine’s turret whined and rotated, a robotic, ugly gesture. The long cannon pointed at the mound of supplies. Ben clapped one hand over the hole in his side and the other on Phineas’s pistol, and ran.

  ~ * ~

  The great cannon cut loose from seventy yards, point-blank range, so that the blast from the Kraut tank and the eruption in the supply dump happened at the same instant. With a black-and-orange fireball and a piercing yowl, a corner of the dump was hurled into the air. Busted wood slats and C-ration tins snowed over the field and running doughs.

  Joe Amos was pissed off, scared, too. He stood rooted. What the hell was going on, where’d all these Germans come from out of nowhere? Damn, this was the front line alright! It’s what he said he always wanted, but suddenly he wasn’t so sure. The shit had hit the fan and he didn’t know what to do, where to run. It seemed like a hundred soldiers black and white were in the same quandary, either frozen and gaping at the charging enemy or just darting around. A second tank fired into another portion of the dump, blowing it to bits. Joe Amos jerked at this detonation. By instinct he growled; someone had to haul those crates all the way out here from the beaches and now these Krauts were shooting them up.

  The three tanks fanned into the field. In secon
ds the dump took two more shells. In moments more every truck and ambulance parked beside the dump was in ruins. German soldiers galloped through the smoke from the fires set in the vehicles and the crates of uniforms and food. They headed across the field, for the convoy.

  Joe Amos looked for Hull and Franklin, the two drivers he’d ridden out here with over the past day and a half. He didn’t see them, he didn’t even know where he was exactly, didn’t know the name of that village on the far side of the smoky field. White infantry and quartermaster crews flung themselves into foxholes, dug either by them or by Germans in their four years here. Colored drivers dove for their truck cabs to grab their M-1s, then scattered for cover. This struck Joe Amos as the best thing to do, but he was too far from Hull’s truck to fetch his rifle. Already shots rang from both edges of the field. The fight was on.

  He whirled for the column parked on the road and ran flat out thirty yards. In one bound he was on the tailgate of a truck, with another jump he stood on top of the ammo crates. He hurtled across them and dropped inside the ring of the .50 caliber machine gun. Flinging the ammo belt out flat on the boxes to help it flow smoothly, he charged the chamber and swung the barrel at the onrushing Krauts.

  ‘Alright, boy,’ he muttered, taking aim, ‘let’s do somethin’ right.’

  Joe Amos squeezed the trigger and spit a gale of bullets right through the swirling smoke, aiming blind at the advancing Krauts but sure in their direction. The ammo belt jiggled across the crates, empty brass casings tinkled around his boots. The fat gun shook but Joe Amos threw every muscle into keeping it steady on the Krauts. Through a gap in the smoke he saw them dive to their gray bellies in the field. He let off the trigger.

  ‘Whoo!’ he shouted into the battle. ‘Whoo-ee!’

  In the moments he’d bought, two teams of doughs had worked their way forward with bazookas. Where the hell had those boys get bazookas? he wondered, then figured they must have grabbed them out of the supply dump before the Krauts blew it up.

  All four men ran ahead and Joe Amos swung the gun again, shooting the daylights out of anything that moved in front of them while the GIs dropped to their knees. The teams took aim at the lead panzer, which growled past the burning supply dump in the center of the field. Joe Amos wasted ammo on the tank, hoping to draw its attention away from the bazooka teams. He succeeded, and whooped again.

  The Mark IV spotted him. Like a slow death’s finger the turret turned for him standing on top of his Jimmy. Joe Amos blasted the last of the ammo belt right into the face of the tank until he stared straight into the black eye of the cannon. Then he sprang over the side of the truck.

  The ground hit him hard. He didn’t try to stand and run but rolled like a barrel as fast as he could away from the Jimmy. The explosion blew over him, rolling him faster. He stopped and looked dizzily into the black heat of an inferno where the Jimmy had been. Nothing but the chassis and flaming wheels were left. He covered his head from the falling pieces of truck and cargo. The Jimmy’s hood landed with a clang five feet from him.

  Joe Amos scrambled to his feet and peered through the blaze at the panzer. Its cannon was pivoting to take out another truck just when the first bazooka round struck. A flash bloomed on the panzer’s temple and the turret stopped its whine. The second shell pounded on the same spot and that did it, the turret popped like a cork out of its ring and settled cockeyed. Hatches flung open and the tank crew bailed out. Oily billows coiled from the wounded panzer. Hollers went up everywhere in the field from the doughs and drivers.

  He ran along the line of Jimmies, but the other .50 cal already had a colored boy behind it, working it hard. Joe Amos needed a gun. He skipped between bumpers and scooted back into the field’s edge, scanning for a weapon and cover to shoot from. Behind him, from the charring truck, crates of ammo began to cook off. Zings and snaps of unaimed rounds made Joe Amos dive into the nearest hole dug beside the road.

  He gaped at the skirmish fought across the broad pasture. Smoke rising from the ruined tank and blazing depot obscured the fighting. Haze from the smoldering Jimmy hugged the ground. A carved Jesus high on a cross looked over the smoky combat, impassive, head down. Joe Amos figured Christ had seen plenty in His time.

  There was nothing for Joe Amos to do in the battle without a rifle. From the foxhole he watched the two remaining tanks career over the field, making themselves harder targets for the doughs with the bazookas. Both tanks kept shooting on the run at the Jimmies, hitting two more trucks and missing three. More ammo flared and fired crazy rounds in every direction. The bazooka teams kept trying to creep close but the tanks sped away or the doughs were chased back to cover by Kraut infantry.

  The fighting was simple to follow, even with the smoke thickening from burning vehicles and black exhaust from the tanks. The Krauts moved in from the north, the GIs and drivers defended the south and the convoy, while tanks dodged in the middle, working to get clear shots at the Jimmies and to finish off the supply dump. No more than two hundred yards now separated the forces: in some places, only a hundred lay between them.

  Joe Amos’s legs stayed tensed, waiting for a reason to fly out of this hole. It was a clashing, flaming time, with the colored driver and the machine gun blaring from the Jimmy on the road, the carping of small arms on all sides, the screech of armored treads everywhere. The two remaining tanks roared at the trucks and hit another three, adding more blaze and smoke to the battlefield. The Krauts tried to move up, the doughs and drivers tried to nail them down under a flail of bullets. The haze leaked thin glimpses of the enemy, hardly enough to take aim. Joe Amos coughed and cursed without a gun.

  Glaring into the smoke, he caught sight of a soldier staggering forward, still amazingly on his feet in the heart of the fighting. The guy had been hit, he struggled with a limp. A pistol hung in his hand.

  A dough ran across the field, into the smoke to help this straggler. Joe Amos spotted the red cross on the hobbling soldier’s helmet, he was a medic. No. The running dough called to him, ‘Padre!’ He was a chaplain.

  The soldier made it most of the way before he got hit. The GI threw out his arms and landed like a duck on water, skidding and collapsing, facedown. The chaplain stumbled to the dough and kneeled. He rolled the soldier over, and didn’t seem to notice he was in a crossfire with tanks rumbling at his backside. For a moment the chaplain laid his face close to the downed soldier, then tried to stand. He reeled and sank back to his knees. Joe Amos could tell he was finished.

  ~ * ~

  Ben looked at the dead soldier.

  No name, no religion, he knew nothing about the boy except that he’d taken a bullet through the throat coming to a chaplain’s rescue.

  From his knees he looked from the soldier’s face into the twirls of smoke. Breathing was hard; the hole in his side knifed him and said he was going nowhere. Behind him came German boots and rattles, shouts closing in on the raging dump. Around his head, rounds sizzled.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he told the body. This boy surely hadn’t considered dying here, in a raid on a supply dump outside some out-of-the-way village. He’d just wanted to be brave, get the hurt padre off the field. Trusting he was doing a good thing had killed him. Ben had killed him. Ben asked himself for remorse and couldn’t find it. Instead, he’d given the boy the only thing he had, a quick and empty Lord’s Prayer, guessing he was likely a Christian. Ben couldn’t feel any pride for the courage of this soldier, or gratitude at the sacrifice. All he felt was the waste.

  This moment had been coming. He’d held it at bay as long as he could with denial, lies, and hope, patching the cracks with faith, but finally he felt death rising in him. Father, mother, brother, enemies, pals, son, Phineas, and now he was cracked open, at last his own spilled out. He coughed again and seized at the pain. He took in his surroundings. The circumstances of his death were going to be the same as this squandered soldier’s.

  No, they weren’t.

  Ben glared at the earth, at his folded knees on
it, and remembered that God had turned His back. God asked nothing from Ben any longer, and though Ben did not want this freedom, he had it. God was not deciding Ben’s life or death on this battlefield. Ben chose for himself.

  He pushed his foot into the ground. The pain in his side tried to trip him but he drove the boot harder into the grass. The pain reared but could not stop him. Ben rose above the dead boy.

  He took a step. He couldn’t make it to the doughs defending the field. They were too far, there was too much lead in the air, the Germans were close behind him. Ben chuckled in a dry mouth.

  He walked anyway.

  A voice screamed from the rear.

  ‘Halt! Halten Sie! Aus den Grund!’

  Ben pivoted. He found all the strength he needed.

  He hoisted the .45 and fired. The first round hit the grenadier high in the chest at twenty yards, knocking him backward like a pratfall. The second and third rounds winged two more soldiers who had their rifles poised. Ben put one down with a bullet to the leg, the other twisted with a round in his shoulder. Ben dropped him with two more shots. The German with the hole in his leg raised his hands. Ben aimed between the palms and put a bullet in the man’s torso.