No one seemed to know where we were going, but the whisper, “Minerie?” rustled faintly through the waiting ranks of tired, dirty men. I abandoned hope when the top- kick handed me two flares for my grenade launcher, plus careful instructions on when they were to be used. At the company C.P. we stripped to a basic combat load, dropping our overcoats in a pile by the side of the road and making another pile of our extra blankets. We kept one blanket apiece. At last the trucks rolled up; we clambered aboard and were off.
A few minutes before we left I peered over someone’s shoulder to read a recent “poop sheet”—a mimeographed news sheet, issued daily, but rarely seen in our outfit. In it was the official news that Von Runstedt had launched a counteroffensive on a seventy-mile front, and that German paratroopers had been dropped over a wide area. It didn’t look good.
We rode about fifteen miles, passing road signs pointing to towns like Malmedy and Stavelot, which the poop sheet had informed us were threatened by the German thrust. Finally the trucks halted. We climbed off and continued on foot, a column on each side of the road and twenty yards of safety between men. Approaching a village, we saw American tanks, tank destroyers, machine guns, and antiaircraft batteries bristling at every conceivable point throughout and around the village.
December 21.
Tonight is the longest night of the year. But every night is that when you’re on guard duty.
I’ll go on from where I left off yesterday when my cold hands dropped the pen and refused to pick it up again.
We moved swiftly through the village, but just as G Company started down the main street, we heard planes. All hell broke loose on the instant, with ack-ack and machine guns chattering like my teeth on the dogwatch. We spread like frightened quail, diving into the muddy ditches that bordered the road. Shorty hit the ditch, which had a sizable stream in it, flat on his stomach. That seemed unnecessarily uncomfortable, so I hugged the bank and tried to look as humble and inoffensive as possible. (Not that humility has any noticeable effect on the dispassionate judgment of machine-gun bullets, but humility comes unbidden when the danger is close.) A moment later three Nazi planes, bombers, roared over our heads, seemingly so near that we swore later we could feel the heat of their engines. Why they failed to strafe us I cannot tell; we were visible enough, certainly, and they couldn’t have missed knocking some of us off. It was a blood-quickening and mercifully brief experience; not without comic relief, I thought, as I watched Shorty climb from the ditch, his face a muddy mask and his clothes oozing water with every step.
We waited briefly on the chance that the planes might return. They did not, and we continued through the village. On the far outskirts we were assigned positions and ordered to dig in. Our platoon was on the point; that is, we were the
most forward element of our group, and between us and the enemy there was nothing but scenery. I wished for something more solid. We huddled on the southern slope of the most beautiful little valley, but whether this was Belgium or Germany, I could not tell. I did know we were only a few miles from Malmedy, and near us was a village called Waimes.
Shorty and I dug a two-man hole where a hedgerow and a fence met. Seventy feet behind us, at the top of the hill, lay the road. Our nearest neighbors, a bazooka team, were on the other side of the road, and Shorty and I felt naked and forgotten in our lonely spot.
That first night, December 19, Shorty and I alternated on guard, two hours on, two off. It was bitter cold and we missed our overcoats. For outer garments we wore only thin sweaters and cotton field jackets. No gloves. Exercise had kept us warm during the march, but the long, motionless hours of guard in a damp hole were something else again. In my off-duty hours I tried to sleep and could not. Even though I rolled myself up in our two blankets, the chill of the ground crept through and held sleep away.
All that night the artillery roared, and continues still. If this was a battle, they were more disorderly affairs than I’d imagined, because the guns, our guns, seemed to be firing from all directions—as did the Germans—completely boxing the compass, with us in the middle. Even our squad leader didn’t know exactly where our lines were. Our mission was to hold against possible attack from two areas. But it was precisely from those areas that most of our artillery seemed to be firing, throwing their shells into the German lines—against which we had apparently set our backs! Hopelessly confused, we appealed to the squad leader for clarification, but he said helplessly that his orders were to put us where we were and he could explain no more. We were very unhappy about our position. Our skin prickled with the sure knowledge of Jerries moving upon us from our rear while we, all innocent, kept careful watch in the direction of our own forces.
The buzz bombs kept coming. They threaded the sky in a bewildering haphazard of objectives, although most of them appeared to originate from the area where we believed the German lines to be. We observed one that behaved very oddly: after zigging where it should have zagged and vice versa, it seemed to catch fire. I could see the bomb clearly—it was about two a.m. and a clear night—and when the heavy sound of its muttering abruptly ceased, I held my breath and waited for the crash. It kept to its course, however, and the flame from its exhaust grew larger and brighter as it drew away, finally passing from sight beyond the horizon. There was much talk of it today, and many of us thought it might be a new secret weapon. It lighted enormous stretches of open sky and glowed in vast rosiness when it slipped behind the scattered clouds.
The artillery and machine-gun fire never stops, day or night. Lying down, you feel the concussion of the big shells in your stomach and, curiously, in your throat.
Shorty and I spent most of December 20 working on our dugout (The old soldiers were right you never get through working on a dugout First you work for safety, and you work fast Then, if a lull comes and you’re still around, you work for comfort. And you are still improving, adding last touches, when the order comes to move on and you start from scratch again at the next stop.)
We enlarged our original hole, laid planks in the bottom, and covered them with a foot of straw. Both planks and straw were filched from the nearby farmhouse. Then a roof of heavy boards—we raided the farm woodpile for those—gunnysacks over the boards—we raided the granary, too—more straw over the gunnysacks—another foray on the barn—and finally two feet of earth over the straw. This was a palatial dugout, warm and sweet-smelling. We were very proud.
Again on the night of the twentieth we stood all night, two hours on, two off. But I slept warmly in the off hours and rose the next day feeling nearly human. Only once during the night
did anything noteworthy occur. During one of my guard tricks a shell from our artillery struck a building in the nearby German-held town, setting a fire that burned fiercely for most of the night.
One of the more shocking incongruities in this latest phase of the war is the presence of civilians. The morning is thunderous with artillery, peppered with the crackling of small- arms fire, and then, in one of the small silences that fall occasionally like a lull in drawing-room conversation, we hear the mooing of cows, the sound of roosters crowing, and hens shrilly proclaiming motherhood. We watched a small boy and his dog romping together in the yard of a farmhouse in the valley below, the valley we have named “No-Man’s-Land” and regard with suspicion and fear.
Today a seven-man daylight patrol went out on reconnaissance. We watched from our holes, saw them slip over the shoulder of the hill and through the woods at the head of the valley, moving cautiously and with rifles ready, rushing across open spaces that could not be avoided or circled, employing all the subtle, life-cautious tricks we’d been taught in basic training, tension speaking in every line of their straining bodies. And lo! Even as they progressed at their stealthiest, around the corner of the path came three civilians, a man and two little girls. They bowed deeply to the staggered and obviously outraged men of the patrol, the man removed his hat, and the three of them politely stepped from the path to allow the patrol th
rough. A few yards farther along the path came another pair of civilians, a man and a woman, equally nonchalant, equally expressive of polite wonder at the curious antics of these men in uniform. A little disconcerting for the patrol, I thought. But even as I leaned against the dirt wall of my dugout, gasping with laughter, I was angry with a boiling rage. Because of the civilians, this serious death game in which we were engaged was made to seem like a neighborhood frolic of Cops and Robbers, and we were grown men discovered playing boys’ games when we should have been doing the work of men. We felt, obscurely, that the civilians weren’t playing fair; they were out of character. Or maybe we were. Anyway, Hollywood was never like this!
December 22.
It’s a fatal mistake to make a dugout too comfortable; you always move out the next day. So we moved yesterday. Not the entire platoon—only our squad and a machine-gun section. We moved into the hills to the junction of a cart road and a footpath. The machine gun was mounted at this intersection, and Shorty and I, as rifle protection for the gun, were sent down the road to guard the left flank. Our bazooka team was assigned to the right flank, and in addition a hasty minefield was laid across the road on the right flank. The reason for the minefield, and its haste, was all too apparent: the flesh tread marks of a Mark IV tank were very evident on the road.
Shorty and I dug separate holes in a row of pine trees, parted from each other’s comfort by fifty feet. Ahead of us was an empty, snow-covered field, and beyond it the German fines. However, with the exception of roving patrols, we felt relatively safe from German infantry. The tanks were the threat.
Six of us were to take turns standing guard through the night, from seven to seven. The two machine gunners comprised one shift, Shorty and I another, the bazooka man—Leo Allen, from Watertown, New York—and his partner made the third team.
I ended that long winter’s night with a deep and lingering suspicion of all weapons platoon men. The machine gunners, a selfish and cowardly pair, screwed us royally on the guard business. Neither Shorty nor I had a watch, and the machine gunners knew it. With devious trickery and much manipulating of the hands on their watch, they succeeded in so befuddling us that when dawn came and we compared notes with the bazooka team, we discovered that Shorty and I had stood guard for over six hours, Leo and his pal for more than four hours—and those canny bastards, the machine gunners, had spent the night snug in their beds except for one small, undernourished guard trick! Roll me over!
I could not sleep because of the cold. Our overcoats were returned to us yesterday, but an overcoat and a blanket don’t provide enough warmth when my bed is the winter ground. Snow began to fall at ten p.m., a damp and clinging snow, and it fell throughout the night. My dugout was too short—I stuck out at one end—too narrow (I was forced to he on my side), and only partially roofed. So today my fingers are cracked and swollen, a most subtle agony because fine woolen filaments from my clothing catch in the cracks and are drawn searingly across the raw flesh beneath.
Do I dwell on these physical miseries too much, these body aches from cold and wet and chap, and not enough sleep and not enough to eat? It would be more manly, more in the Spartan tradition, to gloss over such complaints, I know. But these are the things that gnawed at men fully as much as the threat of bullets and the fear of death; these are the things that whittled men to puny, whimpering smallness. These are war, too.
Shorty and I finished our last guard trick at four a.m., then sat together and talked until dawn, listening to the artillery and wincing at the howling of concussion-maddened dogs in the village.
We’d been ordered to be packed and ready to move at five a.m., because we were chowing at five-thirty and pulling out immediately thereafter. Five a.m. came, and five-thirty, and six, and we were wet and cold and the snow continued to fall and it was still dark. At six-thirty a messenger found us and told one of us to come for breakfast. (The chow system in the front lines is for one man of a team to go to the chow truck, eat, and take his buddy’s food back in his mess gear. The waiting man gets cold food, of course, so they alternate in the business—one man getting breakfast, the other getting the next meal, and so on. Sometimes the system is altered slightly. The man who goes back gets two portions of everything in his mess gear, takes the food back to the hole, and both men eat together from the same gear. Then they both get cold food. The latter system was the one employed this morning, December 22.) I brought back a slopping mess gear of cold, unsugared oatmeal, cold flapjacks, and a dripping canteen cup of cold coffee. We ate with gusto. Then we stood around and waited until ten a.m. Finally the order came to pack up.
Wearily we returned to the C.P. and to the place where I write this—a stable, the foulest, most stinking stable I’ve ever seen. Our gear is in another of the farm buildings, but we’re huddled in the stable with the cows because the heat of their bodies makes for a little warmth. Or so we tell ourselves. Poor beasts, they are very restless and complain ceaselessly in low moos. Small wonder—every damn one of them has a cold, wet, GI overcoat spread over her back! The theory is, the heat of the cow’s body will eventually dry the coat, and truly, there is a little steam arising from the sodden coats. I don’t think the cows are enjoying it much.
I don’t know what comes next. When we reached the stable we were told we’d remain overnight. An hour later we were told we’d move out in half an hour and dig in in another field. We’re sick with thinking about it because the snow is falling in fat, wet flakes, and the air is raw, and altogether it’s as cold as the hinges of hell. But we’re still here. Either we’ll spend the night here or we’ll move out after dark.
I don’t have a helluva lot of spirit or pride at the moment. There is only a kind of determined tenacity, a stubborn “damn it all, I will hang on, and without whimpering...except to myself.”
Saturday, December 23.
Christmas Eve tomorrow night. Is there a fat red candle in the window at home, as usual? And will it be a big tree?
We stayed in the stable the night of December 22. At six p.m. we were told that we’d each pull an hour’s guard duty during the night, and shortly after that we were called out to unload several truckloads of barbed wire. At seven-fifteen the order came to get dressed and fall out, carrying all our ammo and arms. We were to act as guards while engineers laid several hundred mines and strung barbed wire in a sector half a mile away, where attack was expected.
It was one of those rare and perfect winter nights. It had turned much colder. The snow was crunchy underfoot—a helluva thing from the strategic point of view, but a familiar and lovely sound for all that—and the ground was hard and frozen, a delight to walk on after months of mud. There was a blinding half-moon, the stars were bright, and the evening star hung low in the sky and blazed like a snared buzz bomb. But it was cold. We stood guard in pairs, an hour on, an hour off. In our relief periods we retreated to a nearby farmhouse and sat in a cold, dark room, trying to warm frigid hands and feet over the flickering heat of a pocket-size heating unit. (These come in chocolate-bar size, and a fifth of a bar is supposed to heat a canteen cup of soup if you have soup, or coffee if you have coffee, or anything else if you have anything else. There are no directions on the box for warming feet.) We expected the job to last all night, but we’d finished by one-thirty.
In spite of the terrible cold, it was a memorable night. A few buzz bombs came over, the artillery was heavy—we watched the angry splashes of scarlet and gold all around the horizon—several German planes swept overhead, pursued by our ack-ack, and we saw one burst into bright flame and spin, Icarus-like, to the indifferent earth. I looked at the evening star, the Christmas star, and the old Christmas songs sang in my heart: “The Holly and the Ivy”...“In Dulci Jubilo”...“We Three Kings”... “O Little Town of Bethlehem”... and I remembered our Christmases and our shared joys and all the small things of Christmas—the wrapping paper and the seals, red ribbons and bayberry candles, greens in the window, trimming the tree and the mounting glory of it
, the smell of Christmas spices and baking Christmas cookies. There’s a lot I’ll have to catch up on when I come home.
Back to our stable at two a.m. and to bed. Up at five-thirty for breakfast. I think I was still asleep while I ate.
A good mail haul today. Old letters—the most recent dated November 18—but it’s mail. So far I’ve received no Christmas boxes, although some of the men have been getting them. [Note: My first Christmas box arrived several weeks after Christmas; my last on Easter Sunday. I mean this as no criticism of the mail service, which performed miracles. It was just one of those things.]
My most nagging worry these days is that I cannot write you. I know that soon you will receive the letter that told you I was back in Belgium, and the date of writing on that letter will just barely predate this big German counteroffensive which we know is being played up mightily by the papers at home. After that, there will be a long blank period, a time of silence. And I know all that you will be imagining, dreaming, and I can do nothing to spare you that needless torment, nothing I can do to prevent it. The officers will not censor letters for us when we are on line, a condition that may continue for weeks. Or months.
Don’t know what’s to happen tonight. We may stay here; we may move up; we may go out to string wire again. Last night one of our officers told us that two Jerries captured yesterday morning had admitted that a big attack was scheduled for today. We expected it at dawn (which explains the wire-and-mine detail of last night), but it is now late afternoon and nothing has happened. We’re ready to move at a moment’s notice—just in case we get it after all.
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