by Leo Kessler
The King laughed uproariously. ‘I s-say,’ he stuttered, ‘that’s weally wich, P-P-Patton!’
It was just at that moment that an anxious aide appeared at the door of the candle-lit dining room and crooked a hesitant finger at General Collins. ‘Sir,’ he whispered, cupping his hands around his mouth carefully. ‘Urgent.’
Collins inclined his blond head towards the head of the table. No one seemed to notice. The top brass was engrossed in another of Patton’s scurrilous stories. Hastily he slipped through the door.
Down the corridor, some cook or other was singing: ‘The officers they give us can stand up to the worst. You find ’em every weekend, shacked up with a nurse!’ in a low monotone.
‘What is it, Jones?’ he asked swiftly.
The aide’s eyes gleamed. ‘Good news, sir! The Big Red One’s just reported they’ve taken Crucifixion Hill. Thirty minutes ago. Colonel Cox’s Second Battalion report they’re only one thousand yards from the nearest foxholes of Hobbs’s 18th Infantry.’ He stopped expectantly.
‘Goddam!’ Collins yelled and punched his fist into he palm of his other hand, his eyes gleaming wildly, ‘that’s the best goddam news I’ve had in the whole goddam campaign! Now we can really root hog!’
In the kitchen, the cook sang: ‘The coffee that they give us, they say is mighty fine. It’s good for cuts and bruises, in place of iodine.’
But Lightning Joe did not hear the dirge, not the muted laughter of the top brass, nor the persistent rumble of the heavies, the background music of war. All he heard were the magic words – one thousand yards. One thousand yards more and the Aachen gap was closed for good!
The bunker was heavy with the stink of sweaty feet. But nobody seemed to notice. The men of Cox’s Second Battalion no longer had the sensitive noses of civilians. In these last two years they had smelled too much explosive, too much blood, too much death. Packed close together on the straw they slept or talked in low whispers, while the guns pounded away outside. A few just lay there, wide awake, not talking, but smoking cigarette after cigarette as they stared into the darkness.
In a couple of hours, they would be the point of the final attack to close the gap; and those who were awake knew what that would entail in the way of casualties. Every one of them had written his last letter home, which had been collected personally by the company commanders lest they revealed anything about the forthcoming attack. The only magazine they possessed, a tattered copy of Yank, had done the rounds earlier, read from cover to cover by every GI until it had been finally consigned to the big can which held the scanty supply of latrine paper.
Someone laughed suddenly. It was an uncanny sound in the middle of the night in that tense stinking bunker.
‘What the hell you laughing for?’ a sergeant cried angrily and the sleeping men stirred uneasily.
‘Because if I didn’t laugh, Sarge,’ one of the smoking men said softly, not turning his head in the direction of the angry NCO, ‘I’d go nuts!’
The hours passed leadenly. Outside the roar of the artillery grew steadily louder. Now Cox’s men could no longer sleep. Grumbling sleepily at the ‘God awful racket’, they sat up and yawned, shivering the next instant with cold – and fear.
The sergeant who had complained started a game of poker. But it petered out quickly. The sergeant tucked away the money in his olive drab shirt pocket.
‘Listen, fellers,’ he announced, ‘I’ve got forty dollars in this roll. If I buy it in this push, split the dough between you and play one goddam hot game of poker in my memory, willya?’
The men laughed too loudly, even the man who had protested he would go nuts. They were all wide awake. The artillery barrage was reaching a crescendo. It wouldn’t be long now. A thin sliver of grey light, heralding the dawn, slipped in under the bunker’s great steel door.
‘Looks like a great day for the Purple Heart,’ someone said gloomily.
‘I wouldn’t mind a Purple Heart,’ another soldier commented.2
‘Depends where you get it,’ a third said. ‘In the leg okay. In the guts, no thank you, brother!’
‘Trench foot is the best,’ a bespectacled corporal said scornfully. ‘I thought even you dumb oxes knew that. It’s pretty lousy at first when the medics take your shoes off. It’s like as if you was walking on needles or some wise guy was giving you a hot foot. But brother it got me ninety days in hospital back in North Africa with real white women nurses. Brother!’ He rolled his eyes expressively.
‘What about false teeth?’ a pale-faced rifleman with freckles said. ‘I heard if you lost your choppers they took you out of the goddam line and sent you back to the rear to get new ones made.’
‘You heard wrong, soldier,’ the sergeant said. ‘What the hell do you think you’re here for – to shoot the Krauts with your Garand or bite the bastards to death?’
‘Oh, what the hell you guys running off at the mouth for?’ grunted a burly older staff sergeant, cigar at the corner of his tough mouth. ‘Purple Heart, trench foot, goddam false teeth!’ He spat on the straw. ‘Hell, the Krauts ain’t got nothing in front except a lot of old guys with glass eyes and wooden legs! Don’t you guys know that they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel on the Aachen front?’
‘I don’t care if the guy behind that gun is a syphilitic prick who’s a goddam hundred years old, Sarge,’ the pale-faced rifleman said. ‘He’s still sitting behind eight feet of concrete and he’s still got enough goddam fingers to press triggers and shoot bullets.’
‘Now, see here, soldier,’ the staff sergeant began, but he never finished.
Outside, the whistles started to blow and the same old coarse voices commenced calling the same old orders: ‘All right, youse guys – get ya arses out here. Don’t ya know there’s a goddam war on?’
At the Quellenhof, Donner raged. ‘In the name of God,’ he yelled at a mud-covered Schwarz who had just managed to pull the couple of hundred panzer grenadiers still alive off Crucifixion Hill, ‘Where is Colonel von Dodenburg?’
Schwarz, swaying with fatigue and hunger, licked his blood-scummed lips. ‘He carried out your orders, sir,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Went off to stop the Ami drive on the Rimburg front. There was the CO and Officer-Cadet Krause.’
In his agitation, Donner thrust out his glass eye and ran it through his blood-tipped fingers. ‘So this is what the premier regiment of the Armed SS has come to, Schwarz – the CO and a seventeen-year-old boy trying to stop a whole enemy division?’ Suddenly he buried his ruined face in his hands. ‘My God,’ he sobbed, ‘where is von Dodenburg?’
The Ami fighters had gone. The whole countryside, still covered in the grey-white of the false dawn, was alive with enemy troops. Throughout the night they had heard the persistent rumble of their tanks and trucks and once they had seen a long line of lights heading towards Aachen as a confident Ami, convoy drove by. Soon von Dodenburg knew they would have to make a bolt for it before they were trapped completely. But how?
Schulze, slumped in the seat next to him, groaned. Von Dodenburg opened his eyes. Schulze was badly hit, he realised that. The big NCO had tossed and turned the whole night long, while he and Matz had taken turns as sentry.
‘Let me have a look at that shoulder, Schulze. Matz, flash your torch over here, but keep it shaded.’
Von Dodenburg ripped away the burnt, bloody shirt from the wounded NCO’s heavily muscled shoulder. The wound was thick with black caked blood, congealed around the jagged silver fragment of a twenty-millimetre shell. In the thin blue light, he could just make out the faint red line of blood poisoning running into the matted hair of the ex-docker’s powerful chest.
‘The body beautiful,’ Schulze said weakly, his half-closed eyelids flickering. ‘Takes anybody’s breath away … so exciting.’
Von Dodenburg looked at Matz. Outside another Ami convoy rumbled across the fields. The one-legged NCO licked his cracked lips.
‘Don’t look so pretty, sir,’ he voiced von Dodenburg’s unspoken fear. �
��And that pong too.’ He hesitated. ‘I hope it’s just the old, sergeant-major’s natural stink – and not gas gangrene.’ He tapped his wooden leg. ‘That’s the bastard that did for me,’
Von Dodenburg knew what Matz meant. If some of the dirty cloth from Schulze’s shirt had been forced into the wound, he was in for bad trouble. Even Diedenhofen, as much as he loved his SS men, would have no compunction about whipping off Schulze’s arm, rather than leave it and risk the big NCO’s life.
‘What do you think, Matz?’
Matz flicked off the torch. Schulze’s eyes closed and he relapsed into unconsciousness again, his breath sharp and shallow. Matz did not speak for a moment. ‘The best thing, sir, is to get him back to the bone-menders as quick as possible. But—’ he hesitated.
‘Go on.’
‘Well, sir, I think we ought to get that lump of lead out of him. God knows how long it’s going to take us to get back to our own lines and by then the damage might be done, if we leave that in his shoulder.’
Matz flicked on his torch again. With his free hand, he reached down into his dice-beaker and whipped out a long sheath-knife, decorated with the diamond-shaped swastika of the Hitler Youth. ‘Got it when I was a youth leader before the war. Kept it ever since.’ He ran a horny thumb over its blade. ‘Sharp as a razor. The tip’s like a needle.’
Von Dodenburg looked at the knife. ‘We’ve nothing to deaden the pain,’ he said. ‘And hygiene.’
‘Leave it to me, sir. It won’t be the first time. In Russia in ‘43, I whipped two toes off a corporal with frostbite in two seconds flat. As for hygiene.’ He ripped open his flies and standing upright on the turret aimed a hot stream of yellow urine at the knife’s blade. ‘They say my urine’ll kill anything, ever since I had the Spaghetti clap this spring.’ As the liquid dribbled down the side of the Tiger, he turned and bent over the unconscious Schulze.
‘Sir, you’d better get a good grip on the big bastard. He’s strong as a bull. And as soon as he feels this inside him, he’s going to kick up something horrible.’
Von Dodenburg nodded his agreement. He sat with his whole weight on the wounded man’s good shoulder, twisting him sideways so that he could grab his elbows, pull his arm back and expose the wound to its full extent. Matz clamped the torch between his teeth, took a firm hold of the dripping knife and plunged the razor-sharp blade into the side of the wound.
Schulze screamed. His great body heaved like a tied-down stallion. Von Dodenburg exerted all his strength. He heard the knife scrape sickeningly against the shoulder bone. Schulze screamed again, his. spine arching sharply with agony. Von Dodenburg freed one hand hurriedly and stuffed his dirty handkerchief into Schulze’s wide-open gasping mouth.
Matz worked rapidly, the sweat standing out in dull pearls on his forehead, the knife digging deep into the flesh around the wound as he eased the shell fragment out. What Schulze felt neither man knew; the dirty handkerchief gagged whatever cries he made. But a sweat-lathered von Dodenburg, fighting desperately to keep him still, could well imagine that Matz’s knife must feel like a red-hot poker, stabbing and gouging in the wound.
And then Matz spat the torch out of his mouth. He took a deep breath. ‘Sorry, you big bastard!’ he gasped and heaved. He turned the knife with a swift flick of his wrist. There was a soft sucking noise. Next instant the 20-mm shell fragment clattered on to the Tiger’s deck, and Matz was squatting on his haunches, fingers red with fresh blood, panting with exertion. As a suddenly exhausted von Dodenburg removed the gag, Schulze relapsed into a merciful unconsciousness. Outside the guns had stopped. Von Dodenburg knew what that meant: the Amis were going to attack.
‘Come on, you lucky bastards,’ the older staff sergeant cried, ‘earn a day’s pay, will you!’ He waved his carbine and slogged on down the hill into the grey cloud of artillery smoke.
Cox’s entire Second Battalion was sweeping down the far side of Crucifixion Hill in an unbroken line. An abrupt blast of 88 fire directly overhead illuminated the card-playing sergeant on his right knee pumping shot after shot from his Garand into the Kraut positions. Another horrifying blast swooshed through the air. Darkness. Then the brilliant bluish flash of the shell exploding revealed the sergeant, still on his right knee, but without his head.
As he fell, the freckled-faced young PFC ran forward and began searching the headless body’s pockets for the forty dollars poker money. The First’s artillery crashed into action and silenced the 88. Cox’s Second Battalion pushed on again, squelching over squashed bodies, slithering on squirming entrails. A sudden potato masher grenade threw the man who couldn’t sleep into a deep foxhole. He found himself wedged face to face with a Kraut. The German was as surprised as the American. For a long moment the two of them stood there transfixed. The American had a rifle; the German none, but the trench was too narrow to use it. The American grabbed his commando knife. He thrust the brass-knuckled grip into the German’s mouth, who reeled back spitting teeth and blood. With all his remaining strength, the man who couldn’t sleep stabbed the knife into the German’s stomach. The Kraut gasped, ‘Oh, holy Mother … holy Mother!’ The American felt the hot blood spurt up his right arm. He pulled the knife out and rammed it home again. Again and again. The Kraut’s body sagged. His knees gave way beneath him. The man who couldn’t sleep reeled and vomited.
Behind him a coarse official voice shouted. ‘Jesus H. Christ, man, don’t kill ’em all – we need some cruddy prisoners!’
Cox’s artillery officer looked at the smoking hole filled with dead and dying men, which a moment before had been one of his 75s. Little bits of human anatomy were strewn from one end of the pit to the other. The maimed bodies of his artillerymen had poured blood and guts over the earth so that the ground had first turned purple and was now beginning to go black. Their extremities seemed to be wriggling still, as if they were trying to rejoin the bodies from which they had come.
The artillery officer had seen it all many times before. He tried to reassure his shocked men. ‘The Kraut 88,’ he lectured them as if he were back at the Point and not in the middle of a battlefield, ‘is no wonder weapon. It is merely a dual-purpose gun with a jacketed barrel, an easily detachable set of breech rings, a supported interchangeable A-tube, a carriage consisting of an upper carriage with a protective armour shield, a buffer fitted into the barrel cradle, a hydro-pneumatic recuperator fitted above the barrel and a special trailer which is fitted with pneumatic tyres and is drawn by a half-track.’ He smiled at them, confident that he had his men under control again, while they, faces white with shock, stared back at him as if he had suddenly gone crazy. ‘In other words, the 88 is a gun like any other gun. There is no need to suffer from 88 fever, men. No need at all.’ He peered at them through his gold-rimmed pince-nez. ‘A gun like any other gun,’ he repeated.
The rest of his words were drowned by the great hurrying rush of another 88 shell. A booming explosion sent shrapnel flying everywhere in the thick acrid yellow cloud of smoke of impact. When it cleared, the survivors saw that the artillery officer had succumbed to the ‘88 fever’ himself. His headless body was crumpled in an untidy mess at the edge of the fresh brown shell-hole. And still the advance went on.
Behind the crumbling German line, forced steadily backwards by the pressure of the two US divisions – Roosevelt’s Butchers and the Big Red One – the rear echelon stallions started to retreat. ‘Destroy, burn, leave nothing,’ Donner’s order had stated. And they carried it out to the letter. Every thirty seconds a vehicle laden with anything worth transporting rumbled off in the direction of Aachen, accompanied by the crump of another dump exploding. Speed, frenzy, horror were the order of the day behind the German front, as the Amis pressed home their attack. The gap between the two divisions was only a matter of yards now.
Another Sherman was hit. The gunner’s hair and uniform caught fire at once. He had been wounded in the leg by the panzerfaust rocket. All the same he dived through the open turret hatch. Pulling himself ou
t, he grabbed the metal with both hands. The hot steel ate into the flesh as if it were butter, tearing it away in livid strips. He struck the ground, screaming, face first. He sat up in the swirling smoke and tore off his combat jacket. It came away in flaming shreds. All the strength had gone from his lower limbs, but he found that by digging his elbows into the ground and pulling, he could move about ten feet every five minutes. He started to crawl. As he gasped to the medics just before he died in agony: ‘Brother, I’m not about to kick off just yet …’
And the veterans of the Big Red One who had been in North Africa went into the attack humming the words of their own divisional song:
‘Dirty Gertie from Bizerte
Had a mousetrap ‘neath her skirtie,
Strapped it on her kneecap purty,
Baited it with Fleur de Flirte,
Made her boy friends most alerty,
She was voted in Bizerte,
Miss Latrine for nineteen thirty.’
That was until the last German machine-guns opened and the song died on their lips as the lead struck their leading rank.
The men of the Big Red One could see their comrades of the 30th quite clearly now, and Colonel Cox began to grow anxious lest his boys start hitting Hobbs’s fellows by mistake. Staff officers made their cautious way into the firing line to ensure that no unfortunate accidents took place. The two divisions were only five hundred yards apart.
‘Lots of guys pass out,’ the burly truck driver was saying to the two stragglers from one of the 30th Division’s infantry outfits, as the three dug their spoons into cans of cold hash, ‘The gas fumes get you after a while,’ he indicated the back of his truck with his spoon, and the heaped rows of petrol jerricans, ‘Sometimes you just keel over and sometimes you get real sick. You get lead poisoning. Looks like poison ivy. On a real hot day, you can see the fumes. Looks like heat coming off a railroad yard.’