Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  Before dawn on April 14 we were in trucks and on the road to a place called Sieber. By noon Sieber was far behind us and we were high in the Harz Mountains, en route to St. Andreasberg. Our course was cross-country and through the mountains, up slopes so sheer that we had to pull ourselves up, bleeding fingers clawing desperately for the frail security of tree roots and outcroppings of rock. The thick cushion of pine needles underfoot made a treachery of the most tentative movement, and once a man started to slide, he was fortunate indeed if he could bring himself to a halt before skidding to the bottom, let alone knocking a dozen others into the gully below.

  The roughest lot fell to the men of the weapons platoon, toting their heavy burdens of machine guns and mortars. The bazooka men in the rifle platoons were hard-pressed, too. I watched one of them, a thirty-eight-year-old Texan in my platoon, as he fought upward to reach a brief shelf of rock. When he gained it, he fell on his face and could not get up again, his body shuddering with convulsive sobs. After a moment he turned over and lay on his back for several minutes, his face the color of old cheese and the sweat standing on it in thick, greasy drops. When the sobs that racked his body had subsided, he grinned painfully at me and said, “Guess I’m not as young as I thought I was.” But he would not permit me to take the bazooka from him or assign it to a younger man. He just kept going. And he got there. When I watched him take off again, moving only because he would not permit himself to quit, and when I looked at little Albert, 114 pounds of skinny persistence, staggering under the load of a full BAR belt and a sack of grenades, I wondered bitterly how many people at home were still bitching about cigarette shortages, gas rationing, cuffless trousers, and the high cost of living.

  At the top of each mountain, we were rewarded with a brief moment of rest, a pause that lasted just long enough for our hot, sweat-drenched clothing to cool, turning to icy shrouds. When the last murmur of conversation and commiseration had died in humorless misery, and chattering teeth made the only sound, we’d shove off again. A slipping, sliding, daredevil descent, a stream of ice water to ford when we reached the bottom, and lo! Before us another mountain to climb!

  We ran a gauntlet of sniper fire in one mountain pass. And in the heart of the mountains we stumbled smack into a horse-drawn convoy and an entire company of Germans, eager to surrender, almost as though they’d been waiting for us. They were smiling and cheerful, happy to throw down their arms and march off to prison camp. Having no stockade for captive horses, we turned the animals loose to forage for themselves in the forest. There were scores of them, from fine saddle horses to heavily muscled Percherons. The convoy yielded an impressive quantity of loot, but I ended up disconsolately juggling two cans of meat, a loaf of bread, and a leather map case, while all around me happy doggies exclaimed over their new German pistols. (It isn’t that I don’t try—it’s just that I get there too late, or I look in the wrong places.)

  It was nearly midnight when we reached St. Andreasberg. We were hungry, having had no food all day except what we’d taken from the convoy. And the night was cold. For several hours we lay in the ditches and on damp ground on the outskirts of town, hungry, cold, and aching with fatigue, but hypnotized by the spectacle of the burning buildings. St. Andreasberg was burning to the ground, and the night was so bright that I could record my impressions on the spot. When at last we moved upon the town, it was in a grimly bizarre processional. Hooded, armed figures, we walked a blazing gauntlet along the cobbled streets, the houses on either hand so wildly burning that our hair singed and men instinctively shielded their ammunition from the intense heat. At an intersection where the buildings on all four corners were ablaze, we crouched low under an arch of flames and ran, to plunge knee-deep through the torrent of icy water gushing from a broken main. A town burning to the ground, and water wasting between our feet! We watched the old houses dissolve, watched roofs crumble in showers of sparks, and exclaimed over the lacy skeletons of blazing rafters. Standing as near a burning building as safety permitted, we watched St. Andreasberg disappear and felt the warmth on our backs and faces and liked it. And the civilians ... the children, the stubborn women, the home-loyal old men who would have fled to the cellars when the shells started dropping on St. Andreasberg—how many were now imprisoned in these cellars, watching with unbelieving eyes the slow puffing and crisping of their own flesh, strangling in this evil smoke ... perhaps (the last bitter irony!) drowning in the water that filled these streets and lapped at the low sills of steel-barred cellar windows.... Who is that, beating with bloody fists against a door that will not open?

  These were questions to push away, to refuse. So we forced our minds blank and stood near the flames, thinking only of how good it was to feel the warmth.

  The first platoon took over four houses, and by one a.m„ April 15, the last squad was settled and I was back in my C.P. I’d barely made myself comfortable near the stove when a runner appeared. “Report to the captain at the C.P.” I groaned and put my shoes back on.

  The captain grinned apologetically at me and said, “Sergeant, if you had one guess as to why I sent for you, what would it be?”

  Twisting my tired face into a phony smile, I replied, “Well, sir, the possibilities are limitless, but I’ll damn well bet it’s something unpleasant!” I thought my answer was pretty cute. I remember it because I was tired enough at the time to feel a little smug over what seemed to me some pretty sharp repartee.

  The captain must have been tired, too, because he yocked appreciatively. Then, sobering, he said, “I’m afraid you’re right,” and he went on to say he’d just received new orders from Battalion to extend the company lines beyond the original plan, and the first platoon had been selected for the job.

  So we packed up and wearily moved another three thousand yards to a tiny village. I stationed one squad in a small hospital, which was staffed by kindly nuns and filled with sick and homeless civilians. I sent another squad on a reconnaissance patrol, and the third I assigned to an outpost in a nearby farmhouse. Then I selected a C.P., a good one, and by then it was four-thirty a.m. I stretched gratefully on the floor and slept for two hours. The kitchen was nearly warm.

  The women in the house I chose for a C.P. were a good cross section of the civilians we encountered as we moved deeper into Germany. They were, respectively: an elderly widow who owned the house, and two refugees from Cologne—another widow and her fourteen-year-old son— who rented a portion of the second floor. They shrank from us in shivering terror when we entered the house. (They had timorously unlocked the door, but not until we’d become disgusted by the lack of response to our polite knocking for admittance and begun to smash the door open.) When I said simply that all we wanted was a couple of rooms where the men could sleep and get warm, the women looked at me in a fearful wonder and said uncertainly, “Nicht... ?” and drew their forefingers suggestively across their throats. Incredulous at first, I stammered, “You thought...?” and drew my forefinger across my own throat, slowly. They nodded dumbly, their eyes pleading, still not trusting, not quite daring to believe. And when I said in violent, sick rage that we had no war with frauen und kinder and that our concern was with soldaten only, they burst into the most torrential weeping I’d ever seen. It was an intolerably painful moment. One of the women, crying so hard she could not see, kept stroking my dirty, stubble-covered cheek timidly and sobbing, "Du bist ein gut mann ... gut mann!" When they learned that we were American—at first they supposed us to be British—there was a brief resurgence of their fear. They asked, tremulously, if many “schwarz soldaten" had come with us. And again the forefinger drawn suggestively across the naked throat.

  What had they been told about us? What did they expect? We were angry and disturbed to discover that the Germans, these “beasts, sadists, and monsters,” believed with equal assurance that we were “beasts, sadists, and monsters.” What was going on here?

  I was awakened at dawn by one of the women stumbling over my feet as she entered the kitchen
to start breakfast. She brewed a pot of tasteless ersatz coffee and invited me to join her. Over our coffee cups I mentioned that my father was German-born, and I added casually that I’d been a tourist in Germany in 1932 and visited relatives in Baden-Baden. I watched her face stretch with amazement, her glance drop to my uniform and the wonder in her eyes change to horror, and at last only sadness remained, a comprehension old as time... the eyes of Eve when she looked at Cain. She shook her head slowly from side to side and said no more. We finished our coffee in silence.

  An observation plane is called an “Oscar.” No one seems to know why. And the German observation plane that buzzes our lines regularly each night is hailed, for obvious reasons, as “Bed-Check Charlie.”

  One of the new men in the platoon is an Italian-born American named Adorno. He’s lived in America only six years. Somewhere in Italy there is a Mrs. Adorno, but he seems not greatly interested in her whereabouts or welfare. He’s a pleasant guy, but it’s not the beauty of his soul that has won him the affection of the platoon—it’s the mayhem he commits daily on the English language. He assaults the problem of communication with the fierce intensity and bumbling ineffectiveness of a puppy attacking a rubber bone.

  A few days ago our chow wagons arrived to set up their stand in a town that had become ours only after a reasonably stiff fight. The muddy water in the cobbled gutters was still tinged with red, and the bodies of dead Germans lay in the street. A few yards from the chow truck a dead German sprawled in a small pool of thickening blood, his face hidden under the overcoat thrown carelessly over him. Limp and curiously flattened, the legs protruded from the shapeless huddle, the heavy shoes turned out and lying flat against the stones. The narrow street was choked with debris, and men returning with their chow had to step over the dead man. I saw Adorno turn away from the head of the line, his mess tin piled high with food. As he approached the dead body, he looked down and accepted the corpse without surprise. Then, pausing for a moment, he considered gravely, and at last, beaming with pride, uttered one word in tones of satisfaction and finality: “Snafu!” And walked on, ignoring the laughter of the men who had observed the scene.

  April 15.

  We resumed our trek through the Harz Mountains. More gut-straining labor, more sweating, more wet feet. And where the hell were the canaries?

  We spent the night on the summit of a singularly inhospitable mountain, but not by choice. We’d just reached the top, a bleak, windswept space of rough boulders and scrubby ground pine, when a shower of mortar shells rained down upon us. From the neighboring mountains the Jerries zeroed us in, and they were engaged in a vigorous game of pitch-toss. We scrambled for shelter, and when things had quieted down a bit, we discovered: (a) German tanks were standing grim guard over two of the three roads that girdled the base of the mountain; (b) German troops were throwing heavy roadblocks across the one road that offered a possibility of escape from our predicament; (c) on the hills around us the Germans were clearly visible, thick as fleas in summer. We seemed to be surrounded, and the question was: Would they rush us? Would they assault, try to clean us out? We tarried not for a possible answer but made feverish haste to dig in.

  On the very rim of the table-flat mountaintop we set up a defense line. Far below us the German tanks waited, motionless as toys that had run down, and we could see the enemy troops at work on the roadblocks, hear their voices and the sound of their axes.

  Digging in was no fun. Underneath the thin skin of leaf mold and pine needles, the damn mountain was solid rock. Evans, Joe, and I scratched away for several hours, giving up when we struck what seemed to be bedrock. At its deepest point our hole was less than three feet deep, no security at all against mortar bursts. We puttered endlessly, building a towering and shaky wall of rock and sod on the side of the hole facing the enemy, padding the lumpy interior of the hole with pine branches and long grass. What the hell, we didn’t have anything else to do ... just keep an eye on the Jerries and make ourselves as comfortable as the situation allowed. It didn’t allow much comfort—we’d been traveling light because we were traveling fast, and none of us had blankets, overcoats, or warm clothing. Or rations. Further, the mountain winds were knife-edged and we dared not build a fire. We wrapped our featherweight ponchos tightly around us and grimly sat through the night.

  Unaccountably, the Germans pulled out during the night, and we started off again shortly after dawn. Our objective was a road junction in the heart of the forest, called simply Point 69. Before we reached it, we ran into a vicious but short-lived firefight. At Point 69 we dug in, taking positions that would secure the road junction against attack from any quarter.

  Late in the afternoon of April 16 our bedrolls were delivered to us and the chow truck arrived. The night was quiet— only a sullen sputtering of fire on the flanks, a few prisoners taken, and the familiar tension of guard duty in a forest. Trees at night are fearful things. We slept warm and with our bellies full at last.

  April 17.

  Our prize capture today was a German field hospital. Escorted by American guards, the Germans came through our positions in a horse-drawn convoy. Every conceivable type of unmotored rolling stock was represented in the grotesque caravan: crude farm wagons, buggies, landaus, Victorias, covered wagons that evoked nostalgic memories of the early De Mille movies, horse-drawn trucks and buses—even pony carts and wicker pony baskets! The commanding general, elegant in fitted overcoat and monocle, sat erect in a gleaming landau, his aide-de-camp at his side. Behind the carriage trotted the general’s saddle horse, the reins held loosely by the aide-de-camp. A captured general was always good camera bait, but it was the sight of the horse that made me race for my camera. She was a thing of such quick and vibrant beauty that my throat ached with helpless love at first glance. A bay mare with the small head, the dainty feet, of Arabian blood, she moved like a princess, like a flame quivering in that dark wood. And a kind of sigh went through the silent, watching men when she disappeared down the muddy road.

  I was ordered to move my platoon—the rest of the company sat tight—to new positions four miles away, a railroad station in the forest at a place where three dirt roads converged upon the railroad. A sizable enemy unit had recently been encamped in that corner of the woods, perhaps the very hospital outfit we’d so recently observed. The bivouac area was a litter of miscellaneous equipment: discarded clothing, ammunition, personal belongings, and an impressive scattering of German contraceptives. We examined the latter with great scientific interest, and I pocketed several for the curious examination of my friends at home. Since the U.S. government with an almost morbid persistence continued to press familiar-name American contraceptives upon us in embarrassing profusion—we accepted this tribute to our prowess with pleased smirks, but made frequent, bitter comment on the plenitude of means and the dearth of opportunity!—we were curious to discover how Germany cared for her warriors. The German products were of reprocessed or “ersatz” rubber, a discreet pinkish-brown in color. While ready to concede the aesthetic advantages of the color, we were frankly dubious about the functional efficiency of the German product. Just another thing to make us glad we’d been born Americans. (Incidentally, so far as I know, German troops were not issued anything comparable to our “Pro-Kit,” a handy little gadget that was a minor miracle of planning and packaging. Evidently, the German High Command took the position that “protection before” was the end of official responsibility: “protection after” was the man’s private headache.)

  If I seem to refer to the subject of sex too frequently, remember that it gave army life, war life, a peculiar quality. There was either too much of it or too little—rarely was it held in simple balance, accepted and unquestioned, as in normal civilian life.

  I have sometimes thought that the one real flaw in the reporting of the many fine war correspondents was a sin of omission and that was prescribed and obligatory, a stricture imposed on them by the nature of their media, press and radio. Felicitous and sensitive
as their reporting was, it was meant for the family trade, and thus incomplete because it was so chastely reticent. It was good because you can write of war in terms of guns and tanks and planes and battles; it was bad because you cannot write of war in terms of men without also discussing sex and what its absence or abuse did.

  Having satisfied our junkman’s interest in the rubble at the crossroads, we examined our position. Dense forest surrounded us on all sides, but behind the station house a narrow road disappeared in the green depths of a gorge. Assigning two squads to positions near the station house, I sent the third into the gorge. When we discovered several bicycles hidden in the ferny undergrowth, life became at once very gay. It seemed suddenly necessary to make frequent inspection trips to the squad in the gorge—it was a helluva long walk back up the hill, but the ride down was filled with a thrilling uncertainty. Hairpin curves, sudden dips and twists, and a final exciting hazard at the bottom—a wickedly sharp curve and the challenge to essay it at full speed. If you missed, you were rewarded with a cold bath in the black pond that lipped the outer perimeter of the road. Twice I got my feet wet but was spared the full bath. However, two of the men, unblessed by a childhood lived on the saddle of a bicycle, spilled ass over teakettle into the pond and had to be spooned out.

  Late in the afternoon we were relieved and taken to the town of Hohegeiss for the night. We were billeted in houses, we were fed, we slept in warmth. The infantry asks no more of heaven.

  April 18.

  Up early and setting out on another leg of our forced march through the Harz Mountains. The mountains were easier here, but not for me. I was sick, and I felt like hell.

  We moved along at a good clip, but soon came upon evidence of recent enemy troops and slowed down, became more wary. As the scouts rounded a curve in the road, I saw them pause, their bodies rigid with surprise, then they turned and raced back to us. Going forward to verify their excited report, I was dumbfounded by the most massive, most skillfully devised roadblock we had yet encountered. On the left was a precipitous hillside, on the right a deep mountain stream, and on the road curving between these two natural obstacles the Germans had topped thirty-two trees, each one a giant, and so cunningly felled that they interlaced in a network that seemed impenetrable. Since they were too heavy to be pushed from the road, the trees would have to be cut into manageable lengths, one at a time—a slow, time-consuming business. If we climbed over the trees and moved ahead, leaving our armor behind, there was the double hazard of an ambush prepared for us beyond the roadblock, or a sudden attack on our undefended tanks and tank destroyers, immobile and helpless because they’d jammed the road and could neither go forward nor turn back.