“Seems like.”
Later in the night, Marshak was asleep and Kafak was keeping watch when he heard someone approaching.
“Who goes?” Kafak said, hissing it through the darkness.
Only an occasional shell fell and nothing too close by where Kafak’s hole sank in the ground.
A voice gave the night’s password. “Crank.” The Allies liked to choose words like that since Germans had difficulty pronouncing them without an accent. This voice gave out just fine with the password, and Kafak allowed its owner to approach. It was Sergeant Collins. He dropped into the hole.
“How’s it hanging, Kafak?” he said.
Kafak found it amusing, in a way. The farther away a guy was from the front, the more difficulty they had in remembering your name. Back in Naples, he was mostly “Private” to every noncom and officer. Here on Anzio he became Kafak. During the assaults, he often became Bob. Kafak wondered whether it was something the army taught NCOs and officers or whether it was some simple trick of human nature.
Kafak said, “Seems quiet enough, Sarge.”
“Good. Good. Get some rest. We’ve had a hell of a couple days.”
“How’d we do?”
“You were fine, son, just fine.”
Kafak felt grateful, but it wasn’t what he had meant.
“What I meant,” he said. “We close to Cisterna?”
“About two, three miles off,” the sergeant said.
“We making another go tomorrow, then?”
“Not likely. Too many losses. We need to regroup. They just want us to dig in and hold what we’ve gained for now. We’ll try again probably when we heal up some.”
Kafak nodded.
“Sounds good,” he said.
Collins slapped him softly on the shoulder and told him, “Keep your eyes peeled now, Kafak. Germans might be sending out patrols to probe our lines, find weaknesses, that kind of shit. A single German can kill you just as easy as the whole fucking Kraut army and sometimes easier. Don’t ever forget that. Right?”
“Sure,” Kafak said.
The sergeant slid out of the foxhole and moved on to the next one. Kafak waited, listening. It was tense at night because if the Germans were going to send out any probes, the darkness would be the time they’d do it. So you had to stay alert. He could hear things during the night. Other guys’ voices, quiet but drifting along in the cool night air. And, of course, there were explosions occasionally blistering the quiet. Every so often you heard the zzzinnng of a shot firing or ricocheting, some German thinking he’d spotted movement in the dark. Kafak kept his head down so he could just barely watch over the lip of the hole. He tried not to move his head any more than he had to, just flicked his eyes. Constantly moved them. Once in a while a flare went up, either German or Allied.
Kafak tried to use the moonlight and starlight to keep his watch. He tried to memorize the shapes in front of him, the outlines of rocks and bushes. That way, if any of the outlines changed, he’d know something was going on. It wasn’t easy, but he surprised himself. He’d never been especially observant back home, but when a guy’s life is on the line, it makes everything a little sharper.
When Marshak woke up, Kafak took a crap in his helmet, then tossed it over the side of the foxhole. The entire line stank of men’s shit. He thought it interesting that the army never taught a guy how to take a shit in a foxhole. After all, they spent so much time in their dugouts, you’d think the army would have thought of that, would have figured out a way to teach the troops to do it. Instead, they made do. Because you sure as hell weren’t going to get out of your protection just to take a dump and risk being nailed by some German sniper with a lousy sense of humor.
The next day, they stayed put, like Collins had said. The Germans didn’t, though. They counterattacked, trying to win back the ground the Allies had taken over the last couple of days. Now the Allies took the defensive and fought back. Kafak didn’t see any Germans in his area, though, so he didn’t have anything much to do except listen to the battle that was going on nearby, off to his front and left.
Midmorning, Collins came by and grabbed Kafak and Marshak and took them to another foxhole. This one was more in the center of the fighting, and there was a machine gun there that he gave to Kafak and Marshak to operate.
“Know how to work this thing?”
“Remember a little from basic.”
“Well, you’re all we got. The regular crew is all dead. It should come back to you quick enough once you start in working it.”
“I sure hope you’re right about that, Sarge,” Marshak said.
Kafak didn’t think he sounded too confident. Collins ignored him, his tone.
He said, “Hold this position and fire at anything German you fucking see. Got that?”
“Sure, Sarge,” Kafak said.
“There’s another machine gun to either side of you so you can cross your fields of fire. Keep everything under cover that way.”
Collins moved off.
For the first hour or so they didn’t see any Germans. Then they saw far too many of them. Germans everywhere in front of them. They started firing, Kafak pulling the trigger and swaying the gun in slow arcs to cover his entire front. Marshak fed the belts. They were under return fire, but they managed to shoot low and keep the Germans’ heads down. Still, a couple times bullets singed by pretty close, once banging off the barrel of the machine gun. It didn’t seem to do any harm to it, though, and Kafak kept firing.
Midafternoon, the Germans rose up as one and screamed, charging.
Kafak shouted. Marshak shouted.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Kafak pulled the trigger until his fingers ached and cramped. The Germans moved maybe ten or fifteen yards forward, firing every weapon they held, a hail of small arms fire swarming Kafak and Marshak. Kafak kept low but kept firing. He could hear bullets everywhere around him, kicking up the dirt in front of him, slapping against men’s bodies nearby. Then the Krauts decided it wasn’t going to work and retreated back behind cover. They continued harassing fire for the rest of the afternoon, and Kafak and Marshak, now switched off in their positions, kept firing at them, keeping their heads down. As night fell, the Germans pulled back.
The next day was similar, only Kafak and Marshak’s position saw no action. They heard it off to their front and left and right but nothing ahead of them. They held fire and waited, tense and wondering. The entire day they never pulled the trigger on their machine gun. They never had to.
As night fell things once more grew quiet. Collins dropped into their hole.
“Good work, guys,” he told them. “We think the fuckers have had enough, but we can’t be sure, so stay alert. They might try a night attack. We got guys moved up ahead of you now in more forward positions. You guys hold here. If you see a red flare, that means the forward unit is going to retreat. Don’t fucking shoot them! Let ’em through and then shoot anything that comes after them because that’ll be fucking Krauts. Got it?”
“That sounds complicated, Sarge,” Marshak said.
“It ain’t complicated, asshole,” Collins said. “Just shoot the right fucking people, is all you gotta do.”
All night they waited for a red flare, but nothing ever came. Kafak guessed the Germans had had enough, just like the Americans had. They probably had to fall back and lick their wounds, try to reorganize for another time.
That suited Kafak just fine.
He’d only been on the line for a few days. Seemed like months, though. He stopped to think about it. It was January 29 when he came up to the front, and then they had attacked Cisterna, and then the Germans had counterattacked. Maybe four or five days total, for all of it. And yet he felt like he’d been fighting and shooting and getting shot at for his entire life.
That all seemed strange to him and somehow impossible. Yet there it was.
He felt he’d done all right. He hadn’t run. He hadn’t been a coward. When things had gotten hot,
the training had taken over and he’d done what he was supposed to do.
Still, he didn’t feel that sense of relief he thought he would once he’d undergone fire for the first time and held up against it. He figured after that he was a soldier. Done. And no one could ever take that away from him.
Only now that it had happened, he knew that wasn’t the case. Not at all. Because each time you went under fire was a new time. Each time was the first time, sort of. All over again. Any single time you went into combat could be the time you broke and ran, turned coward. Even after you’d faced a dozen, a hundred times of people shooting at you, you could still find it impossible to face it the next time. The next time. That was just it. That was always the time that counted. The only time that counted.
The next time.
Kafak lay in his foxhole, trying to sleep and hoping he’d stand and do his duty the next time.
3
After that first five days of shit, things fell into a routine for a couple of weeks. A sometimes hellish routine, but a routine nonetheless.
Kafak sat in his foxhole with Marshak. Sometimes they would move up and dig a foxhole farther forward. Oftentimes they’d end up back in the same one they started from after the Germans began firing heavily toward the more forward position. Usually that fire came from artillery. Mortars and 88s. Other big guns firing down upon them from the Alban Hills. Sometimes it was snipers or other small arms fire, machine guns, burp guns, things like that. It wasn’t worth keeping a foxhole twenty or thirty yards forward if it meant a guy was under constant fire. So they moved back.
Most of the time in the foxhole, Kafak was bored. It was boredom and waiting for the Germans to attack. They didn’t attack. Not in those weeks, anyway. He and Marshak watched the German planes assaulting the harbor at night, attempting to disrupt the Anzio buildup of men and supplies that went on almost constantly. The Messerschmitts would come in right near dusk, with the dropping sun right behind them so that they could hide themselves as long as possible from the gunners’ eyes. Then it would be dark. Kafak and the others would watch the tracers from the antiaircraft guns seeking out the German planes. Occasionally they saw a German plane get hit and go down. They didn’t even consider chasing after the pilots any longer. They didn’t think about leaving their foxholes at all now that the Germans would fire at any movement they saw. Or even thought they saw. No. Now, Kafak and the rest of them sat and waited, somehow bored and tense all at the same time. During the day, they watched the Allied planes, usually the Tuskegee Airmen, strafe the German positions in Cisterna.
It was trench warfare, the closest thing to World War I in the entire operations of the Second World War. That’s what Kafak thought, anyway.
He sometimes felt afraid. No, not sometimes. A lot of the time. But he didn’t say this to anyone. He only sat and kept it to himself and wondered if anybody else felt like he did. Wondered if the other guys were afraid. No one spoke about it. It wasn’t a thing you wanted to talk about, admit.
It made him feel bad about himself, that he felt afraid. Afraid of getting shot, killed, wounded, sliced up by shrapnel. Maimed or disfigured. All of that terrified him. He kept it all locked up inside, though, and felt miserable for feeling that way, thinking about those things.
Then he figured that the important thing was to do what was expected of him. To fight when he was supposed to fight. If he just did that, he told himself, then the other stuff didn’t matter. The being scared stuff. That would be OK just so long as he didn’t let it stop him doing what he was there to do, what he had been trained to do.
And so far, he’d managed that. Once the fighting had started, the training had taken over. He didn’t think so much about the fear then. He just fought.
That was good, he told himself.
That was all he needed to do.
The weather was miserable. Sunny Italy. They all had a laugh about that. Well, it was winter, after all. And at some point it had started to rain. And once it started raining, it didn’t seem to ever stop raining. Everything turned into mud. Thick, viscous, boot-sucking mud. It was difficult to prop up the sides of the foxholes because the dirt turned to mud and rolled down into the bottom of the hole. Groundwater seeped through the sides of the holes. Rain puddled the bottoms of the holes as well. A lot of foxholes just caved in. Living conditions became more and more miserable every day.
Kafak thought he would never forget lying out in a foxhole all day in the rain. Not if he lived to be a hundred.
Of course, he didn’t expect to live that long, truth be told.
Still, it was wet and cold and ugly and that made everything terrible and didn’t even take into account the Germans shelling them and taking potshots at them every time they moved.
One day, Kafak came down with the shits. The diarrhea was horrible, and his guts cramped and he thought he would explode, and then the shit did explode out of him. He crapped into his helmet almost nonstop the entire day, tossing it out the side of the foxhole, whatever foxhole he happened to be in that day, he couldn’t keep track any longer. He couldn’t keep track of anything any longer. He didn’t know what day it was or how long he had been here on Anzio now. He just knew he had the shits and felt miserable.
He knew, too, though, that it was no reason to be sent back to the rest area. Not that there was any rest area on Anzio. The Germans were shelling even the hospitals back at the beach. Doctors and nurses were being killed. Even if he could have been sent back, Kafak never would have asked for that. He wouldn’t leave his position on the line for something as minor as diarrhea when other guys had much worse. That wouldn’t be right. He wouldn’t let down his buddies like that.
He stank and he knew it but he didn’t care. Everybody stank. The entire front stank.
After two days, his bowels returned to normal. He felt better then. The Germans didn’t seem to care, though, he thought. They increased their shelling that day for some reason. Every day on the beachhead the Germans delivered rolling barrages from one end of the Allied lines to the other. Those bombardments the guys all knew would be coming. They could surmise how long they would last and so could get through it. This was different, though. Kafak only remembered it happened that particular day because he knew it was the day after his shits ended.
At one point, the shells came so fast and furious that everyone along Kafak’s line of foxholes had shoved themselves deep into the puddles of water and mud at the bottom of their dugouts, waiting out the damned explosions, cursing and screaming at the Germans, and praying to God to make it all stop.
It didn’t stop, though. It went on for what seemed hours. Mud flew everywhere. It rained mud as the shells blew and erupted the mud out of the ground and then it fell back down again in sickening, wet plops that covered all the men with filth. Kafak figured some of his own shit was probably being thumped high up into the air and flying back down on him. And Marshak. And everyone else nearby as well.
Even though they knew that regular artillery was generally ineffective against well-dug-in troops, the bombardment was horrible. The noise of it, the shrieking and whistling of metal dropping through the air. The horrendous booming of the shells exploding. The screaming meemies that sounded like they were piercing your very eardrums with their shrieks. The Germans were expert at psychological weapons. Their guns, Kafak thought, often sounded worse than they were effective. But God! That sound. It drove you mad with terror because it sounded right on top of you.
Kafak wondered if he would get through it or if he would crack, and then he started thinking about baseball, playing baseball when he was growing up, he’d been a hell of a baseball player and he loved playing and had things been different, he might have gone on to play at a higher level, maybe college, he could have gone to college, he thought, no, he knew he could have, because when the army had drafted him and tested him they had told him he had scored high enough to become an officer, to go to Officer Candidate School, to lead men, but he hadn’t wanted to lead men, K
afak hadn’t, he only wanted to keep his fucking head down and survive this fucking thing, and so he told them thanks but no thanks and he was assigned to the infantry and now here he was sunk deep in the bowels of the wet muddy earth, shit dropping down out of the sky on top of him and nowhere to go to escape it, not even for a second, and the explosions battering his eardrums and smashing his head into splinters, or it felt that way anyhow, and he thought about a girl he had known in Naples, not for long because he hadn’t been there long before they had shipped him here to Anzio, but he had met this Italian girl there and he had taken a picture with her and he still had the picture in which he looked like a tall, gawky, green American teenaged boy (all of which he was) and she looked like a pretty Italian girl (which she was; she wasn’t a whore, in other words, just a regular girl, although the guys, a lot of the guys, said all the Italian women were whores nowadays, now that the Germans had ruined Italy and impoverished them all, but he didn’t believe that, Kafak didn’t think that was true, not at all) and he stood there in the picture, grinning like an idiot with his hands in his pockets, not even touching the girl, not an arm around her or anything because she wasn’t a whore, she was a regular girl, a nice girl, and he had just wanted a picture to remember her by and he wished he could look at that picture now but he wouldn’t try because all the mud and the rain and the shit falling down upon him would have ruined it, anyway, so he left it in his pocket where it was and while he was thinking about that girl the shelling stopped.
It was quiet then.
Deathly quiet.
All of the men scrambled into position, slipping and sliding against the muddy sides of their holes, readying their weapons over the lips of their foxholes, awaiting an attack. Because usually that kind of bombardment was the precursor to an attack.
When nothing happened after an hour or so, they started to relax.
And that was when someone down the row of foxholes shouted.
“Man on the end, let it go!”
Everyone laughed, the tension releasing.
One Man's War Page 3