Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  Painfully, we resumed work on the night hole, and another rifle team appeared and began to dig a hundred yards from us. We worked without pause until midnight, stopping when a runner hurried up to tell us that a German patrol had been reported moving through the woods, heading our way. We passed the word to our neighbors and they left their digging to join forces with us. (Their hole was but a scratch in the frozen ground, offering no protection in the event of a scrap, while ours—after two nights of digging—had progressed to a depth of two feet!)

  The four of us huddled in the hole, peering over our low barricade of sandbags, straining to see movement in the misty gray of the open field, suspicious of every quiver of sound in the whispering hedgerows. Shoulder-to-shoulder, we sat on sandbags in the bottom of the hole, our knees touching our chins. Our legs cramped and we felt the bitter cold crawling up our bodies, inch by tortured inch. One of the visiting team had brought two blankets, and we draped one over our eight legs. The other we tried to stretch to cover four backs.

  It was a long wait and nothing happened. At three-thirty the squad leader of the other two men came along and told them to take off, back to their daytime hole for some sleep. (They took the blankets with them, the dogs!) Our squad leader didn’t show, and Shorty and I hung on until dawn before returning to our own daytime hole. Got a little sleep, but spent most of the day working on the hole, trying to make it livable.

  From now on we’ll get only twenty-four hours’ rest after each forty-eight-hour trick on the line. The system is: two squads on line, one resting in the rear. Tonight we go back up again, this time relieving a squad in still another section of the line.

  I learned that Shorty and I were moved because the Jerries took three of our men in a raid on one of our outposts and their capture left a gap in our line.

  It snowed all night, and is still snowing, and I’m a little sick inside at the prospect of going back out tonight. My muscles and bones ache with fatigue, all my joints (particularly my fingers) are badly swollen, and my nose drips like a... well, like an old drip. How am I going to get through the next forty-eight hours out there?

  In spite of the cold and the misery and the long dreariness of the hours on guard, there was often a piercing sweetness to the winter nights. At times it was possible to forget the circumstance of war; sometimes the guns would be silent or become a far-off murmur, like summer thunder. Then the earth had the black-and-white vigor of a woodcut, and the blaze of the stars was intimate and searching. I invented new mental games and tormented myself with visions of home. One night I heard music. In my head was the golden bell voice of Flagstad, singing the “Liebestod.” I could hear the dark shifting patterns of the horns, the long sweetness of strings, and over all rose that magic voice, spiraling slowly upward in the last affirmation of grief and triumph ... so real that the old poignancy caught me unprepared—“Tristan is dead!”—and I was undone by it. I stood in the brittle starlight, to all appearances a sentry on duty, but with eyes so blurred I could not have seen an enemy patrol fifteen paces from me. The tears froze on my cheeks and I didn’t know and it didn’t matter ... ‘Tristan is dead!”... Loki had slain the sun god and all the world was winter.

  January 31, 1945.

  There’s a long gap between this and my last entry because things happened fast after January 8 and I was too busy to write. Now I’m having a helluva sweet time trying to sort out the sequence of events.

  We returned to the lines on the night of January 8—that much I remember clearly. And I had a tour of duty at the “listening post,” an assignment I didn’t like. The listening post was, simply, a standing place in a little grove of trees, 150 yards forward of the nearest dugout and on the uncomfortable side of our barbed wire. You took a field telephone with you when you went on duty and reported frequently to the C.P. If too long an interval elapsed between calls from the post, the C.P. assumed that the man out there had been killed or captured. The assumption was usually correct.

  After the listening post, there was a day’s rest in the chicken house, and then back on the line again, an emergency call to fill in a squad that was shorthanded. It was necessary to supply four men from our squad, and we drew cards for the assignment. My gambling luck was at its usual low level, and I groaned as I reached for the rifle I’d just placed in the corner. The lucky ones—and a more unfeeling bunch of stinkers I never saw—curled themselves comfortably around the glowing stove and made sleepy and unkind remarks.

  Shorty, having drawn a high card, was not going out. My partner for the night was to be the man I described a few pages back as the “Worst Citizen-Soldier of the Year,” whom I’ve called B. A night in his company was not a happy prospect

  The squad leader to whom we were being loaned indicated that our post was to be the night hole where Shorty and I had labored so many hours. Already the night was off to a lousy start, but the real wallop came later, when we arrived at the hole. Only a few days before, Shorty and I had been jerked from our snug dugout and sent to this desolate spot to plug a “vital gap” in our line. So the shallow night trench we’d scratched in the frozen ground was still unfinished, and now filled with new snow. It was evident that no one had occupied the position since we’d been there. Now it was a gap, now it wasn’t, now it was—were the Germans also dancing about in their positions as erratically, or was someone in the C.P. playing games?

  Well, we were there, and unless B. and I were to spend the night digging, we would have to stand guard in the open, an easy target for a passing patrol. I decided to stand: I’d spent enough hours working on that damned hole. B., already whimpering, flatly refused to have anything at all to do with a place so inhospitable. Rolling himself tightly in his blanket, he lay in the snow and felt sorry for himself. During the next eight hours he groaned without cease, wept bitterly, and offered me five thousand dollars—a new high for him—if I could help him get out of the army. I’d have done it for free. He could not sleep because of the cold, but he refused to get up and share the guard duty. Two hours before dawn my patience wore out, so I kicked his ass until he arose, then I told him to get the hell out. Weeping, he trailed off to the barn, and I settled my chin in my blanket, feeling almost at peace with the world.

  That night was a long ten hours. I spent most of the time perched painfully on the low branch of a tree, grimly regarding the desolate expanse of frozen field and wondering if any Germans were stupid enough to leave a warm fire and come out in this weather. No one came to relieve me, and at dawn I gave up and started for the barn.

  Again the days blur. I recall Shorty and I being separated and sent to different positions on the line for a brief period. It was while we were out there that Miller, a grinning, frecklefaced guy, was killed out on patrol. It happened at four-fifteen one morning, fifty feet from the “point” dugout where I was on guard duty.

  Miller, an old man in the outfit, had been second in command of an eight-man patrol that had gone out at midnight, led by Lieutenant C., our new platoon leader. The lieutenant was a recent transfer from a stateside ack-ack outfit, and he didn’t know from first base about infantry. Perhaps he was a nice guy, personally, but he was no infantryman. The platoon always felt that he was directly responsible for Miller’s death, and I guess he was. He lasted only a couple of weeks. Shortly after Miller’s death, he was hospitalized with the flu and never returned.

  By three-thirty a.m. the eight-man patrol had completed its mission and was on its way back. I counted heads as it neared my position. One… two... three... four... five... six... seven... eight! No casualties, no prisoners. They broke even.

  Suddenly the eight figures collapsed noiselessly in the snow, flat on their stomachs. I couldn’t figure it out. I learned later that the lieutenant believed a German patrol was trailing them, and, being strictly the eager-beaver type, he wanted to get it. (No one ever tried to explain why he chose to set an ambush fifty feet in front of his own lines, directly in the path of the supporting fire he might require from us!
But that’s what he did, and he was in command: his decisions were the law.) For forty minutes they lay there while Miller, an old hand at this game, repeatedly urged him to bring the patrol inside our wire and there await the enemy patrol. The lieutenant refused. I could hear the faint murmur of their voices and see the dim blur of movement every time Miller left his own place in the snow and crossed to the lieutenant, trying once more to persuade him.

  At four-fifteen our artillery opened up. That was someone’s mistake, because the artillery had been ordered to remain silent until six a.m., the deadline hour for the return of the patrol. Only three rounds were fired, two of them screaming harmlessly overhead as they sped toward the German positions. The third round, an airburst, was short, and it caught Miller. He alone of the eight men lying in a close semicircle was hit. He said simply, “I’m hit... help me... help me...!” and died.

  As the first shell whined over, I dove for the bottom of my hole. When the short round exploded, I cowered under a rain of frozen earth from the roof of my dugout. A few seconds later there was a hubbub of hysterical sobbing as the remaining men of the patrol fought and tore their way through the wire. Two of them plunged headlong into my hole and the rest took trembling shelter beside it, huddling against the side and talking in frenzied gasps. They said Miller had been hit and they thought he was dead. The lieutenant raced for the squad leader’s dugout, slid in on his stomach in one movement, and frantically called the C.P. He excused himself from going back to help with Miller: he “had to report.”

  I stretched myself on the sagging wire, holding it down with the weight of my body while two of the men in the patrol went after Miller and carried him in. After a while the medics arrived, but there was nothing they could do, we knew that before they got there. Gently, we laid his body beside my hole and straightened his arms and legs before they stiffened. We sat close together in the hole and tried to talk, but were conscious of the body outside... how cold the air was... the brightness of blood against the snow... how gaily he had played with the children in the farmhouse the night before. It was several hours before bearers came and carried his body away.

  Blunders are not as infrequent as they ought to be. Men are killed or wounded daily by the miscalculations of our own artillery, our own planes, our own faulty weapons and imperfect ammunition. Some of it’s inevitable, I know, but it’s the last tragic irony so to die. I hope there’s no last-second realization for those who die that way, no final, biting awareness of blunder and waste.

  Most of our casualties-by-accident are the fault of fumble-fingered gun crews and defective shells. Short rounds are the major cause, and the principal sufferers are the men in the most forward and exposed positions. Last week one of our men had his jaw blown off.

  A few nights ago the Germans captured one of our outposts. Three men. When the telephone reports from the outpost abruptly ceased, a search party was sent out. The men had vanished, and so had the telephone, and there was only the mute evidence of a GI helmet in the snow.

  Afterward, there was much discussion on the fate of the captured men. One of the men was a Jew, and although he undoubtedly threw away his dog tags in order to conceal his name and his religion, it was believed likely he was shot anyway, on the double assumption of his markedly Hebraic features and his circumcised state. (It’s commonly believed, whether true or not, that Jewish soldiers captured by the Germans are summarily executed, and that a man who is circumcised, whether Jewish or not, is regarded as such by the Germans.) Today our gloomy suspicions were confirmed: several recent Jerry prisoners, quizzed individually about the raid on the outpost, admitted that the three men had been “executed.”

  [Note: This story has a strange and happy ending. One afternoon, several months after the end of the war, I was reminiscing with Leon Loeb, the company mail clerk, and we recalled the capture of the outpost. The day’s incoming mail was delivered as we talked, and Loeb began to sort it. Suddenly he exclaimed in blasphemous wonder and held out two cards for my inspection. I looked at them, at him, and we exchanged foolish, happy grins. The cards were Change of Address forms, requesting that mail be forwarded to a certain military hospital in the States. And the names on the cards were those of two of the men who’d been captured on that long-ago night. They had sweated out the war in a German P.W. camp, were released at the end of the war, and were shipped home. We marveled at the happy circumstance and spoke sadly of the fate of the third man, the Jew. Two weeks later his Change of Address card appeared in the mail!]

  We were relieved about January 10 for a brief rest. That night we walked to the nearby village of Waimes. Our lieutenant blundered and led us in bleating circles for two hours

  while he tried to locate the houses in which we were to bed down for the night.

  In the morning all was indecision. No one knew whether we were staying in Waimes, going back, or going forward. Shorty and I amused ourselves exploring.

  Our house had been the property of a lady pharmacist named Otti Riegel. Her shop on the ground floor was a shambles of broken glass, oozing syrups, pills, and ointments, but the living quarters on the second floor were still livable. We prowled in the attic and deduced, from the litter of correspondence and photographs, that she was a Belgian Nazi, or a German Nazi residing in Belgium. We also found some pencil drawings of remarkably faithful, or hopeful, details of male anatomy, which indicated that Otti was a right lusty wench.

  The schoolhouse next door was our second field of exploration. Before the Von Runstedt breakthrough, it had been used as an American field hospital. Hastily abandoned by our troops in the December retreat, it was a veritable treasure house of medical supplies and equipment. In the attic, however, was only schoolhouse junk: desks, blackboards, books, primers, chalk, exercise books. Other junk, too: furniture and dishes from private homes. (The Belgians were no dopes: they knew that American planes and artillery spared schools and churches as much as possible, and all through Europe such buildings were jammed with the larger valuables of civilians.)

  Rummaging through the dishes, chairs, sewing machines, and tables, I picked up a small wooden cylinder—a miniature rolling pin carved with curious figures—and a pang of homesickness swept me. It was a cookie press, employed in the making of spicy Christmas cookies called springerle, and exactly like one my grandmother had used when I was a small boy.

  We skonavished two cans of ether and returned with them to Otti’s house. Shorty said ether would burn, and we needed a light. It did burn, fine, with a delicate blue flame, but we couldn’t figure out a way to stop it from exploding. In the end our neighbors complained so bitterly about the smell that we had to throw the cans away.

  Figuring we’d be leaving soon, we hesitated to install a stove in our room. But night came and we were still there, and all night we shivered on the cold floor while our wiser neighbors in the adjacent rooms lolled comfortably near warm stoves. In the morning we said, “The hell with exploring, let’s get warm!” and rigged up a stove. We should have known better. Getting comfortable in the army is like waiting for a telephone call that doesn’t come and doesn’t come and doesn’t come and finally you decide to take a bath and just as you get wet all over, the phone rings. Our stove was just beginning to burn well when the order came to pack up.

  We saw twenty-four German prisoners brought in just before we left. They were searched and questioned in the alley between our house and the school. Everyone went over to take a look at the supermen, and I went, too. But I couldn’t take it: I felt sick within five minutes and returned to the house.

  I’m a sucker for words, I’m the dewy-eyed answer to a demagogue’s prayer, and I guess I’d been snowed under. I’d thought we stood for something a little better, a little higher, than the Nazi brutality we professed to abhor. Hell, I even thought we were fighting to put a stop to that brutality! I had believed we were sincere when we called the Fascist and Gestapo practices a denial of our civilization and our humanity. I really believed we did believe in the d
ignity of man. And the scene in the alley sickened me because it was wrong and I knew it was wrong and there was nothing I could do about it.

  Killing is clean. An enemy is an enemy is an enemy, and as long as you can believe that, you can kill... you shoot to kill. But torture is dirty, torture is ugly, foul, twisted, debasing both the victim and the wielder of the whip.

  The twenty-four Germans in the schoolhouse alley had been killing Americans, or attempting to. They were doing what they’d been disciplined to do and ordered to do, just as we did what we had been trained to do and ordered to do. There was no immediate evidence to connect these twenty-four Germans with specific acts of brutality against Americans or against American allies. And even with such evidence, I would still protest the deliberate viciousness of their treatment that afternoon. I’d protest for reasons of pride if every other argument were shot to pieces under me: pride in our own highly touted American principle of justice, pride in the much more fundamental principle of humanity.

  Some of the prisoners were found to have American cigarettes in their pockets; some of them wore small articles of American equipment. These were singled out for special treatment beyond the slapping and mauling that all were getting. They were regarded as cold-blooded murderers of innocent American soldiers, and they were beaten, slugged by hard American fists, kicked in the testicles by vicious GI boots, knocked to the ground and trampled upon. Most of them were young—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen years old—and some were crying, helplessly, like children. And their “crime”? The American cigarettes in their pockets, the small items of Gl equipment they wore? The odds were, they had picked up these things, as we’d picked up the German loot we were carrying about And I mean we really carried it! Nine out of ten of us wore or carried some article of German issue—as I was then wearing a German Luftwaffe belt—which we’d picked up somewhere. These prisoners were part of a victorious German army that had swept through an area lately held by Americans. It was natural that they would have in their possession bits of the vast litter that a retreating army leaves on the field.