Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  We were told it might be several days before we would be called up and that we’d better find ourselves some shelter until that time: the Jerries had an unfortunate habit of lobbing shells into our area on occasion, just for luck. Dempsey had been assigned to another unit and I was alone again. I wandered about forlornly and finally found a one-man prone shelter, dug by an earlier doggie in these woods. It was well- covered with logs and dirt, but small and cramped. I enlarged it, moved my pack inside, and felt the honest pride of the pioneer who has just completed his first log cabin. I didn’t want to think about the man who had first sheltered himself here and where he was now.

  After chow, which was cold C-rations, we got our call. We picked up and packed up, waded through mud a little deeper than before, mounted our trucks, and “Hi-yo, Silver!”

  Already it’s hard to remember some of the things I wanted not to forget, the things I saw, because I was raw and new and would never see them again in just this way: the careful unconcern of the few German civilians we encountered... the pleasured surprise of discovering that the vaunted “dragon’s teeth” concrete tank barriers are tinted a soft green ... the signs of battle—blown bridges and shrapnel-scarred walls ... the German helmet lying mutely on the top of a thorny hedge, a jagged hole torn significantly through the front and rear... the empty C- and K-ration containers that marked the progress of American troops... the faint sickness in my stomach when I saw a house with a shell hole in the wall large enough to drive a tank through, and my sense of shock, as at something improper, that a house should be so used ... the five dead Americans in the woods near Walheim, lying in a neat row by the side of the road. They’d been brought back from the front in a truck, lifted out—not gently but not carelessly, perhaps unfeelingly is the word, as though it were habitual and there was more to do and so little time—and placed there. Several hours later someone covered them with a blanket, and later another truck came up from the rear and took them away. Many of the men went over to look at the bodies, drawn by a horrible fascination. We hadn’t seen any dead men yet. Most of them came back looking very ill. I didn’t go over.

  We arrived at the Hurtgen Forest on the afternoon of November 21. The company was at the front, on line, and no officers were there, only the supply room and cook-tent personnel. There was no one to tell us what to do or where to go. We stood about helplessly, feeling lost and unwanted again.

  One of the supply room NCOs told us we were six miles, by road, from our front line, and Cologne was twenty-eight miles away. There were two ridges between our front and the broad plain that lay before Cologne. Several days ago our outfit had taken the first of these ridges, and once the second was captured, the Armored was to take over and push across the plain to Cologne. Accompanied by the infantry, of course. One of the cooks told us (rumor! rumor!) that the division had been promised a rest when Cologne fell. I cheerfully admit I was a reluctant warrior, and thought a rest at that point would be dandy.

  All afternoon we huddled in uneasy groups, talking in undertones and asking timid questions of the veterans in the kitchen and supply tents. The seventeen weeks of basic training that had once been so interminable now seemed scant indeed, and knowing how soon we were to put that training to a test in which our uniquely precious lives were involved, we felt unprepared, awkward, and exposed. As dusk drew on, a noncom appeared and told us to make up combat packs in preparation for going up that night. Silently, nervously, we set to work—breaking our ponderous bedrolls in the mud and rain and assembling combat packs: small compact units holding one blanket, a raincoat, and whatever small items the individual man feels impelled to take for his private solace. The seasoned soldier, we soon learned, takes only the essentials. The rest of our personal belongings and equipment we rolled in a shelter half, marked the bundle with our name and serial number, and added it to the growing pile under a tree. In the gathering dusk the mound of bedrolls loomed grimly, and in our mind’s eye we saw each one stamped “Personal Effects.” We worked in silence. There was no joking now; the time for humor was past.

  After we’d completed our task, the supply sergeant issued extra ammunition: three bandoliers and two hand grenades to each of us. We handled the grenades awkwardly, having had only limited experience during basic training with these tools of war, and even that seemed far away and inadequate. Then we stood around and waited, huddling in small groups of five or six, impelled by the need to feel someone else near at hand.

  It grew darker. It had been raining steadily all day and we were soaked to the hide. There were no shelters except the cook and supply tents, and we’d been forbidden them because there were too many of us. Chow time came, and still no further orders concerning us. Our spirits slipped another three notches. Going up was bad enough, but going up in the dark, unable to see where we were going or what it was like.... How could they do this to us, and how many of us would make it, and would I, would I?

  The artillery barrage continued, the guns never stopping altogether, and German shells screamed back in spiteful answer, some of them landing in the trees near us.

  In the late dusk we assembled for chow, and as night fell, some of us sought shelter from the rain in an empty GI truck parked near the cook tent. (As I record this, I am sitting in that truck, my raincoat stretched over my paper to protect it from the water that drips steadily through the leaky tarpaulin.) We talked in undertones. We were bewildered and unhappy. There was the usual pointless cursing of Eleanor Roosevelt.

  Then a jeep pulled up and an officer jumped out. He had just come from the front and he was weary and unshaven and caked with mud. He said there had been a change in orders and we weren’t wanted up there until the present push had been completed. We were so green and there were so many of us that we’d be more hindrance than help to the seasoned veterans on the line.

  We were pathetically, shamefully grateful for this reprieve. It seemed like the greatest good fortune in the world. (I still think so. I learned later what the battle of the Hurtgen Forest had been like.)

  Now we were confronted with the milder problem of where to spend the night. We had one blanket apiece, and having turned in our shelter halves, we had no tents. Some of the men elected to sit in the truck all night, but the rest of us set out to find dugouts in the woods. (The Germans had been here before us, and they had been well dug in.) With a man named Nelson, a former seaman who was now unaccountably in the infantry, I began the search for a two-man dugout we’d discovered earlier in the day, deep in the woods. We begged two extra blankets from the supply room and smugly contemplated a warm and comfortable night

  The dugout had appeared to be large and dry, but we learned it was neither. Scooped shallowly from the rain- soaked earth, it was less than two feet deep and roofed over with a framework of logs that rested on the surface of the ground and were covered with mud. The entrance was a mere slit an opening so small that we had to lie flat on the ground and wriggle through on our stomachs. Nelson went in first and I handed our “bed linen” in to him: first our raincoats, then our overcoats, and finally a blanket on top of the overcoats. That left three blankets for cover over us. At last the bed was made, and I slid in.

  It was pretty bad, too short and too narrow, and we were forced to lie facing the same way, our knees drawn up and our bodies curled one inside the other. Turning over in bed was a dual operation, requiring inch-by-inch maneuvering and much panting. A puddle quickly formed under us and grew wider and deeper, soaking through our raincoats, our overcoats, and the single blanket. Water dripped from the roof, tapped on our blankets, splashed icily on our faces. The roof was so low that straggling roots touched us like cold fingers.

  I had a moment of near panic after Nelson fell asleep and the comfort of his voice had ceased. The sense of being trapped grew more frightening every moment, the choking fear of being locked within a grave. In the dark, the severed roots of trees glimmered phosphorescently on the earth walls with a green and unholy light. And the never-ceasing drip of w
ater hammered maddeningly. I couldn’t sleep and the night was long: a nap of a few minutes and I would be waked by the agony of my cramped legs. I smoked a lot, struggling to pull a cigarette from my pocket, making it last as long as possible, putting it out by holding it under one of the streams that dripped from the ceiling. And the guns pounded on, sometimes a lonely single report, more frequently thunderous barrages that shook the earth and sprinkled our blankets with dirt I thought long, aching thoughts of home and wondered bitterly what I was doing there.

  But the night passed at last. The final misery was to miss breakfast because I was catnapping when the cook yelled, “Come and get it!” and Nelson, of course, had slept angelically all night long.

  A minor mystery: one of the replacements in our bunch, known as “Chesty” because of his magnificent but exaggerated torso, disappeared during the night. His rifle and pack and all his equipment were still by the tree where he was seen to have placed them, but Chesty was gone. The men who knew him best insisted it wasn’t desertion. They believed that his somewhat simpleminded curiosity to find out what it was like on the front led him to make a personal reconnaissance in that direction. At any rate, he was gone.

  (Note: The disappearance of Chesty is still one of the mysteries of Company G. When I sailed for home in December 1945, Chesty was still missing, and he was still carried on the company books as a case of “desertion.” I wonder what did become of him. It’s possible that he wandered up to the front that night and was killed, perhaps so mangled that he was unrecognizable and his dog tags lost. Or a German sniper or straggler may have killed him and concealed his body in Hurtgen Forest ... or he may have stumbled on a mine or booby trap ... or perhaps he’d spent the night in a dugout that collapsed on him, burying him alive. It remains a mystery, and not a pleasant one.)

  November 22, 1944. The day before Thanksgiving.

  We’ve been sitting around all day trying to get warm, trying to get dry. It’s a raw, rainy day.

  Ree, I wish I could make you feel what it is like to be here, only a few miles from a battle that is likely to be regarded as one of the worst of the war. A jeep driver who just came back has been telling us about it. He says the Germans are drunk and singing, and he tells of attacks and counterattacks in which they rush from their positions, singing as they come, firing until their ammunition is gone, then throwing down their useless weapons and still coming on, still singing. German or not, enemy or not, there is a magnificent and barbaric carelessness in the gesture that is spine-tingling. There is tragic waste, too. Perhaps it’s my own Germanic origins that make me thrill to such grandiose extravagance... the Wittelsbach madness that tainted all Bavaria.

  And the guns, our guns, continue to thunder, and we wonder how long the Germans can hold out ... and when will we go up? We wait here, our imagination running loose and wild ... frightened and willing to admit it, sick with longing for home and wishing desperately that the whole bloody mess were over.

  Last night and the night before, the usual spells failed. I couldn’t bring you and the children close to me, couldn’t hold you. For the first time since I’ve been in the army, you are not here; you are someone in a book I read somewhere and a long time ago. You are more than miles from me.

  I am aware of fear, compounded with a curiosity to see what “it” is like and how I will react. I am conscious only of my cold, wet, dirty, aching body, and yet I am impersonally curious to discover how much punishment it can take.

  November 23, 1944. Nearly eleven a.m., Thanksgiving Day.

  Two thousand miles from me you’re sleeping still, while I, miserably awake in this rain-drenched German forest, sit with a leaky raincoat pulled over my head and try to write myself out of my misery.

  Yesterday afternoon we looked for new quarters, as it seemed likely that we would be here for another night. Found a sturdy but unfinished log cabin, lacking a roof and open at one end. It’s not as safe as a dugout in the event of a shelling, but we’re going to take the chance. Nelson and I constructed a log roof, covering it with strips of linoleum I found in the woods and piling pine branches on top for camouflage. Wandering in the woods, I came upon a straw mattress, very damp, and threw that in for a bed. We finished our dream castle with burlap bags to stop up the chinks in the walls, thus ensuring blackout when we wanted to smoke. We hung a German shelter half over the open end, and the finished product impelled us to link arms and bleat one quavering chorus of “My Blue Heaven.” At chow I invited another homeless waif to bunk with us, and that night the three of us slept warm and almost dry, in spite of leaks that appeared in the roof during the night.

  I’m sitting in our mansion now and the leaks have increased a thousandfold because it’s raining hard at the moment. If it stops raining this afternoon, Nelson and I are going to tear the roof off and start from scratch one more time.

  And still we have had no word on when we’ll be sent up. Last night our barrage was heavy and the Jerries retaliated in some strength with their own guns, trying to feel out and blast the artillery positions in our rear. We huddled in our blankets, listening to the shells moaning through the air over our heads, wondering if the Jerries would shorten the range and drop a few in our neighborhood or if there would be any accidental short rounds from our own guns. Not a pleasant way to spend an evening.

  They say we’re to have turkey for chow today. It will take more than turkey and fixings to make this seem a day of Thanksgiving. And yet it is, in one very real sense, a day on which to give thanks: I’m still alive. But oh, darling—being a soldier is being a wet, dirty, miserable creature, one dubious step removed from the animal. And I’m not sure whether the step is up or down!

  There is no news from the front on the progress of the push. Stories have come back, however, of the capture of eleven- and twelve-year-old German guerrillas. One twelve-year-old boy had seven notches on his rifle, which he boasted were his American “kills.” I cannot entirely credit such stories, but there is overwhelming evidence that there are harassing guerrilla forces of teenage and under-teenage boys. And girls. It would seem that Hitler’s plea for a “people’s war” is being answered exclusively by the German bobby-sox set. Last night I talked to some machine-gunners from another company, lately returned from the front. In shamed and bitter revulsion they spoke of cutting down scores of tender-faced young German soldiers, boys of sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen who would advance in fanatical fervor, deaf to all orders, to all entreaties to throw down their arms and surrender.

  Cologne is reputed to be only a mass of rubble. Yet we have heard only an occasional plane for the past several days. The weather is bad for flying.

  I miss you with a curious detached misery. You are still dreamlike, Ree—and my physical discomfort continues to be prime in my thoughts. Last night I lay awake in my almost comfortable bed and thought in terror and panic of days and weeks to be spent on the front lines, lying in muddy foxholes, standing in icy water. Curious, isn’t it, that I should be more concerned over these pedestrian miseries than I am about the threat of wound or death? Perhaps it’s because I willfully repudiate the possibility of death. My reason, insisting on cold logic, tells me “maybe,” but emotionally I reject it entirely. My equanimity has not yet been shaken, and I ponder much and naively on how I shall react under fire, in the immediacy of danger. I am sourly amused at my sneaking suspicion that if I crack, it will be from sheer physical discomfort, from too much mud and snow and water. I’m a tender blossom, all right!

  November 24. Still in Hurtgen Forest.

  It’s a clear day at last, after a night of rain, and it is expected that the Air Corps will give the Jerries hell today.

  A month from tonight will be Christmas Eve. That’s a thought that doesn’t bear much dwelling on. It’s just occurred to me, as an ironic underscoring of my premature Christmas homesickness, that my childish delight in Christmas has its origin in the holiday customs observed in my family when I was a youngster. And those customs were German. This re
flection puts me and my current task strangely at odds. I don’t mean that I’m slipping into any apologia for the German state, or even for the German people. I’m convinced that the very qualities in the German national character from which burgeoned the lovely Christmas customs also nurtured and richly fed the vigorous and rank growth that became Nazism. The ecstatic emotionalism that saw symbols in trees, fairy tales in rivers and rocks, holy legends in falling snow—the same emotionalism that transmuted these gentle miracles into song and story, also gave birth to the myth of the Aryan super race, spawned the bizarre Gothic tale of a German superculture, and in monstrous abortion spewed the nightmare of concentration camps and genocide. I’m no scientist, surely, and perhaps there is no scientific validity in the attributing of “national characteristics” to a group of people, but if there is, I would list an open mouthed childishness among the outstanding German characteristics, a naive and credulous belief in the painted and hollow shams that wiser people readily identify as canvas, cardboard, and gilt paint.

  I got through Thanksgiving somehow. We did indeed have turkey and dressing and giblet gravy and mashed potatoes. And a dab of cranberry sauce on a slab of bread. The food was cold when we got it, and we stood in a pouring rain to eat, but it was Thanksgiving. The calendar said so. And by the time you were eating Thanksgiving dinner, I was already in bed, listening to the artillery, which was worse than usual, and wondering how long it would be until my socks dried and my feet got warm.