When at last they were led away, I watched from my window. They were forced to run down the street, even the lame and the wounded, with their hands clasped awkwardly on top of their heads. Beside them ran one of our officers—gentleman by act of Congress!—screaming obscenities at them in an incoherence of rage. As he ran he jabbed their rumps with his bared trench knife, and the gray-clad buttocks grew dark with blood. His reason? Justification? Excuse? His brother was wounded the night before by a German shell fragment. The fact that these were German infantrymen did not prevent him from paying off his grief and resentment on their helpless bodies.
Maybe I’m soft; maybe I shouldn’t be wearing a uniform. But brutality, however sweetened by the hot justice of the moment, is brutality still, and it doesn’t matter whether its agent is a German, a Jap, an American, or the deacon of a church.
There are many who will shrug helplessly and say: “But it’s war! What can you expect of men in war?”
My answer to that is unprintably vulgar, so I’ll say, simply: War is not always insanity, constant and unrelieved. There are moments, yes—there are moments when the precarious framework of our morality goes under, drowned in a black, atavistic surge. But they are moments only: the flood retreats and the old structure still stands, even though damaged a little. The danger is this: there is a heady intoxication in the giving over of one’s self to that black torrent, a blind and animal exultation that sings dangerously in the blood. It is the death wish made manifest, and I have seen men bow to it, seen them voluntarily and eagerly forswear the responsibility of their morality to wallow, dazed and raptured, in that bloody bath. The Germans in the Battle of Hurtgen Forest who advanced singing, their arms outstretched, were drunk with more than wine; the Americans who baited the hapless German prisoners in Waimes were intoxicated with more than victory.
If there is a theme to this sermon I sing, it is an old and worn one, simply this: we are kin to both the apes and the angels. We have a propensity for labeling our more admirable qualities and calling them “American virtues.” Our consciences thus drugged, we’re free to relish the cruelties and barbarisms of the enemy; we bounce in orgasms of horrid pleasure and chant at the top of our lungs, “Americans were never thus, never thus, never thus!” Crap! When you read your newspaper’s account of the Malmédy massacre, the 140 Americans who were shot down in cold blood by their German captors, don’t get your b---s in an uproar. I can match that story with accounts of German prisoners who were shot down in blood equally cold by some of our own “gallant boys.” And it doesn’t matter that in my stories only two, or five, or eight German prisoners were shot, whereas 140 Americans were murdered at Malmédy. Because the number doesn’t qualify the crime, does it? Murder is not a matter of quantity—one victim or one hundred, it is still murder, bestial and foul, an act in denial of all law and all humanity. I hope the Malmédy murderers are caught and executed, but believing in that justice, I must also believe in the justice of executing those Americans guilty of the deliberate murder of unarmed and unresisting prisoners of war. I believe that.
We left Waimes about January 12 and moved up, passing through ruined Faymonville. In that village we lingered until dark, seeking refuge from a sudden German barrage in the wrecked houses.
I had forgotten Christmas was so freshly past. Now I remembered, was obliged to remember. The half-ruined house in which we huddled had been hastily abandoned by its inhabitants while they were in the midst of their Christmas preparations. Hung on the bed in one room was a partially trimmed Christmas tree, some of its ornaments still unbroken ... shining gold, silver, and crimson. A Star of Bethlehem glittered on the tip, and fastened to several of the branches were glass birds with flowing silken tails. My German grandmother had had such ornaments for her Christmas tree.
It would have been lighted with candles, the softly shimmering light I remembered in magic years past. The clamp candle holders were already fastened to the dry and withering branches, and boxes of ornaments stood nearby. The men amused themselves with tossing the unbroken ornaments against the wall, and the unheated air chimed with the muted, silvery tinkle of that small destruction.
There were dirty dishes in the kitchen, and the remains of an interrupted meal. And there was a Christmas decoration on the table, a centerpiece someone had been arranging. That, too, was unfinished, incomplete. Red candles and sprays of evergreen, and one space empty. The missing branch lay beside the white bowl, dropped in haste and not picked up again.
The people will come back, some of them will come back. And I think there will be a special agony when they come home, when they return to this dead house and find, ironically preserved, the symbols and promises of everlasting life, peace on earth, goodwill to men.
The front room lacked most of one wall. In the corner, exposed now to the incurious daylight, was a broken rocking chair. It stood by a wall cabinet filled with sewing gear— buttons, darning cotton, pins, thread. On the floor by the rocker was a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, old and very worn. They had been broken, smashed neatly at the bridge.
The barn smelled of dead cow, and calves wandered forlornly in the silent, empty yard. The countryside is filled with bawling, homeless calves, untended and unfed.
In the stable I saw eyes shining from a dark hole in the floor, and bending down, discovered a cat. Hidden and safe, it cowered and would not come out, but its eyes followed me, unblinking, until I grew uncomfortable and went away.
We moved out as it grew dark. The bodies of German and American soldiers lay in the roads and ditches and in front of the houses. One doggie, shot in the head, had fallen upon a fence. His body hung on the pickets, limp and shapeless as a scarecrow thrown carelessly from an upper window, a thing of rags and straw. Under his dangling head three daffodils, miraculous in the snow, were speckled with blood.
We had nearly reached the battered farmhouse that was to be our company C.P. when the German artillery zeroed in. One shell landed very near, and I hit the ground as it exploded, pelted with lumps of frozen earth and pain stabbing my back. For a single terrible moment I had a bright vision of my tom flesh, but a little self-exploration revealed that I was still unpunctured. My “wound” was a sharp-edged buckle on my pack, gouging me in a tender spot.
We started to dig in. Shorty and I had nearly finished our hole in the hedgerow when we were assigned to outpost duty. Floundering waist-deep through a field of untrodden snow, we reached the point designated as the outpost and again started digging. Three attempts convinced us we’d hit water no matter where we dug, so we gave up in disgust. Scraping a shallow trench, we sat on our packs in the soggy pit and felt sorry for ourselves. We wrapped blankets around our shoulders, but our feet dangled in eight inches of ice water. At dawn we returned to our dugout.
After a cold breakfast we looked for straw for the dugout. Under a manger in the barn, carefully concealed, I found a locked suitcase. Immediately I had visions of fabulous loot— Leica cameras, pistols, the German crown jewels. Furtively, we carried the case back to our hole and broke it open. For a moment of shamed silence we were unable to meet each other’s eyes. No pistols, no jewels ... nothing but three well-mended white tablecloths, a woman’s slip, and seven pairs of boys’ socks. The socks had been darned many times at toe and heel.
I wasn’t very proud of myself. Then, resolutely tough about it, I appropriated one of the tablecloths for a snow-camouflage garment, forced one on Shorty for the same purpose, and the third we draped over our leaky roof to prevent the snow from drifting through the chinks. The slip and the socks we replaced in the suitcase, which we set carefully against the rear wall of our hole. Some spring, maybe... when the fields are sprouting green and the farmer and his sons are filling in the holes the verdammte Amerikanische dug ...
We stayed two days. At three-thirty on the third morning we were awakened. “Get it on! We’re moving up!”
We struck our shelters in a howling blizzard and packed. Tiny pellets of snow lashed our faces wi
th the stinging force of buckshot. Cold, cold, cold, and a fierce wind.
This was attack, and we knew it. We stripped down to basic combat equipment, surrendering our packs to the supply sergeant We made separate bundles of our personals and turned them over to Supply, also. We carried only weapons and ammo when we started. No extraneous gear, no luxuries. No overcoats. I was happy to pare down because my load was a heavy one: as grenadier, I carried a Ml sack of heavy rifle grenades, but being assistant to the BAR man, I carried a full complement of that weighty ammunition as well. In addition, I was burdened with the normal load of a rifleman—a full rifle belt two bandoliers, five hand grenades.
Our objective was a forest five miles away, and we had to break trail the entire distance through knee-high, waist-high snow. It was a dull, teeth-gritting monotony of hard work. It’s difficult now to describe it—the intense cold, the feather-bed thickness of snow that made every step a reluctant persuasion, the darkness that was hard and real, pressing against your eyeballs ... and always the fear of getting lost, of drifting away from the line of moving men that you could neither see nor hear in the blackness of the noisy night
When we reached our assembly point the edge of a little wood, we started to dig in. Two digging hours later, three medium tanks rumbled up and we prepared for the push, heading for the dark forest ahead, which was believed to be empty of German troops. There were several open fields intervening, marked off by wire fences that would have to be climbed, cut or crawled under. The entire operation was company in scope—no other units involved—and the third platoon was assigned to ride the tanks, coming in our left flank, while the first and second platoons made a frontal assault
So we started. As we moved from the shelter of the trees, the wind hit us from the right with the wallop of a fist (Official reports put the wind velocity that day at very near fifty miles per hour.) It scooped up the snow on the open fields, puffing it into a cloud so thick that we couldn’t see the forest ahead of us.
We moved out in a huge wave, each man breaking his own trail and no man directly behind another. It was no gallant dash, this—not like the movies. This was slow, laborious...
floundering. Men fell and could not struggle to their feet again for minutes. One heavily laden bazooka man went down and could not rise because of the hammering of the wind, until someone freed him of his burden of ammunition. A few yards of progress and we paused for a moment, crouching on our knees and sucking great mouthfuls of snow-whirling air into our tortured lungs. The forest was a blurred mass, appearing dreamlike through the storm of white for a brief moment and then dissolving once more.
As we struggled forward, the tanks moved out from our left flank, a thin arm that curved ahead to clutch at the nearest line of trees. Suddenly, a rattle of machine-gun fire burst from the woods and we saw the men of the third platoon tumbling from the tanks, falling into the deep snow. We raced for the shelter of a nearby copse, and safely there, peered from behind slim trees to spot the German positions. We could see nothing, but fired in the general direction of the sound anyway, hoping to draw enemy fire away from the men of the third platoon, who were pinned down in the open field.
For two hours the tanks fought it out with an unseen enemy while we waited, unable to help, but safe. That’s a misstatement: only some of us waited and only some of us remained safe. The grove that sheltered us was a small island in a sea of white: the clouds of whirling snow had settled as the wind died, and to strike out from the shelter of the trees in any direction was to step directly in view of the Germans. Frequent bursts through the branches over our heads informed us that our presence was known and they were waiting. Behind us, only a field away, was a low hill, crested with trees. If we could reach that ridge, we could move unseen and safe and flank the enemy. The consideration that gave us pause was how suicidal it would be to attempt to cross the field. Only our valor-hungry lieutenant was not convinced: he gave an order and four men took off, running for the trees on the hill. They were chopped down by a German burp gun before they’d gone thirty yards. Three of them were seriously wounded, and the fourth—Rose, the platoon runner—was killed. Undaunted still, the lieutenant proposed to lead the rest of the platoon over the same route. Our noncoms saved a lot of lives that day: they flatly refused to obey his orders, and he gave way before their fierce insubordination. We stayed in the grove until dark, and at last it seemed that our tanks had cleaned out the machine-gun nests.
The wind, the snow, and our rebellious noncoms kept us alive that day. But not all of us: the company suffered forty casualties.
I cannot forget one of them, an Italian boy I hadn’t remembered seeing before. He was still sitting upright in the foxhole he’d been digging when a slug caught him squarely between the eyes. His helmet was lying carelessly beside him, as though he’d taken it off to cool his head, sweaty from digging. Leaning against the dirt wall of his foxhole, he was smiling gently, his eyes half closed, his head tilted back, and the bullet hole very small, very neat... not messy. The snow was very white, his hair very black, and only a delicate thread of scarlet to mar the ivory of his face.
Forty casualties. Ginto, the medic of the third platoon, was killed. He was a company favorite and one of the few “old” guys remaining. When the burial party went out several days later, the wolves had been at him. Others, too. There were no reports available on the number of men who perished of quite small wounds, died because they fell in deep snow and were not found in time, died of shock, of cold, of bleeding to death and no one to see.
After two days of pushing, the company now consisted of forty-seven men. Three rifle platoons and a weapons platoon—total, forty-seven men. There were twenty-nine men in the three rifle platoons. Not all of our losses were from enemy action, however there were many casualties from illness, particularly trench foot and frostbite.
We dug holes and stayed in the forest that night. And somewhere in this chaos of events is the confused memory of a foxhole where six of us slept one night, piled and tumbled together.
The days are a rapid blur: pushing, digging in, outpost duty, patrols, pushing, digging in.... Then Shorty went to the hospital with frozen feet, and now Greg Luecke and I alone remained of the group of replacements assigned to the first platoon back in the Hurtgen Forest. The rest of our “classmates” were gone.
Greg and I shared a foxhole after Shorty left. Greg was BAR man and I was his assistant. For greater firepower, we carried the BAR when we stood guard, but there were many dawns that found us wearily prepared to defend our little section of line with a weapon that was frozen thick with hoarfrost, useless and impotent. (I’m not complaining about the BAR: it’s a magnificent weapon. But it’s also a delicate and complex mechanism, and in below-zero weather the moving parts frequently became sealed tight with ice. After some experimenting, we stopped oiling the weapon because we discovered that the oil itself froze. Dry, it was more nearly workable.)
Our squad now consisted of four men. We stood guard in three-hour shifts, all day long, all night long, and the cold was a never-ending agony. There was no way to get warm.
Chow was scanty and uncertain. We were far out on the point, so far from the chow line that the kettles were nearly empty by the time Greg or I got there. Frequently the food was entirely gone, and then we ate cold C rations ... if we could get the C rations. Sometimes there was nothing at all, and we just pulled our belts tighter and hoped.
Replacements began to arrive, and rumors sprang up that we were going to be pulled back for reorganization and a brief rest.
Our line stretched along the crest of a ridge, with the enemy on the hill opposite and a deep valley as the No-Man’s-Land between us. Greg and I guarded a position in the middle of the line, but we had neighbors. Four hundred yards to our left the woods curved out before us like the horn of a crescent moon, and we knew that another platoon had several guard posts in the curve of the horn.
One day a couple of new replacements joined us, and I helped them di
g their foxhole, instructing them with self-conscious and weary patience. Glancing up for a moment, I saw four figures in snow-camouflage garments emerge from the valley and start to climb the hill. Instinctively, I stepped behind the nearest tree and hissed a warning to the green replacements to get the hell out of sight. Then tardy logic shamed me: this had to be one of our own patrols returning from a mission—nothing else would explain the bold, open manner of their approach. Besides, there had been no challenge from the guard posts in the woods. Still...
When the four were still several hundred yards away, their actions became puzzling. Leaving the edge of the woods, they moved horizontally across the breast of the hill until they seemed to be directly in front of me. There they paused, knelt in the snow, and began setting up what could only be a light machine gun. It was pointing toward us.
I had already sent a messenger after Meese, and at that moment he raced up and I pointed out the strange sight. Instantly he declared, “They’re doggies ... looks like one of our patrols!” but he lifted his binoculars and studied them. Abruptly he was hopping up and down and swearing with rage: “The sunsabitches are Jerries! Gimme a carbine, someone!” We opened fire but the range was too great: the four Germans hightailed it for the valley and we failed to wing even one.
As for the men in the platoon on our left and why hadn’t they seen the four Germans: they were probably sleeping in their holes. It was difficult to remain tensed for danger all the time.
Remembering now, I am aware that it must seem a very dull kind of war to anyone who wasn’t there. Where is the violent action, the bloody combat, the whistling shells and the hand-to-hand derring-do? Where are the pitched battles, the Hollywood extravaganzas of mud and blood, the Gettysburg and Argonne spectacles?
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