by Bill Mesce
“You OK?” Ricks asked, noticing the shudder pass through Harry.
“Just a chill.”
The ramp of the LCT went down. The three officers held tight as Angstrom’s driver fired up the Chrysler engine and took the Sherman down into the mild surf, then up onto the oil-streaked sand.
A slicker-clad figure on the beach waved them to a stop, climbed up the bow of the tank, and introduced himself to Angstrom in a tired and cracked voice. “Corporal Schuyler. You Angstrom? I’m supposed to guide you and your tanks on up to the line.”
In the gloomy afternoon light, with the rain dripping in a curtain off his helmet, there wasn’t much to see of the corporal. Harry could pick out only red-rimmed eyes, a thick stubble, a sodden cigarette drooping unlit from his lips.
Angstrom introduced the three officers. “These gents are supposed to hook up with an infantry battalion up in the same sector.”
“South of Route 6,” Ricks explained. “Near Mignano.”
“What unit?”
Ricks told him.
The corporal nodded. “I gotta stay with these tanks all the way to their dispersal point,” Schuyler said, “but well run close by there. I’ll point you in the right direction when we get close. We’re gonna be headin’ out right now, though, straight from here to the line, so I hope you guys got all your gear with you.”
Military traffic monopolized the city’s vias. MP’s were placed at nearly every intersection to channel it smoothly to the roads winding northward out of the city At each intersection clusters of signs erected by the American engineers pointed the way to every major military unit in operation between Naples and the Main Line of Resistance. Among the signs were placards warning GI’s about the hazards of venereal disease, and asking them, Is Your Tent Clean?
When the column was stopped by MP’s to let cross-traffic through, Italian civilians materialized out of the gray veil of rain and clustered about the vehicles. Women wore sodden tatty aprons over sodden tatty dresses, rain draining from sagging, wide-brimmed straw hats. Some were old, others merely looked old. They offered up baskets of apples and hazelnuts for sale.
At one stop Harry saw a woman looking even more worn out than the roadside marketeers offer a handful of change to one of the applemongers. The woman with the apple basket shouldered her away, and when the other woman persisted, kicked at her, the other vendors joining in with curses until the woman withdrew.
“They won’t sell to their own,” Ricks explained. “She can’t pay what we can. And if those women don’t want their families to starve, they need what we can pay.”
They joined the endless train of vehicles on one of the roads running among the low hills of the coast. In the fading gray light Harry saw a strangely undisturbed countryside of farms and groves crowded round the endless hills. Ten steps away from either side of the road the war disappeared.
Ricks leaned close to him, speaking confidentially. “If anything pops, get clear of the tanks.”
“If something happens, I was figuring on hiding behind one of these monsters,” Harry said.
“Major, if anything pops, it’s the tanks they’ll be going for. There’s a reason they call them Purple Heart boxes.”
With a top speed of little more than twenty miles per hour, the four Shermans periodically had to pull aside to allow knots of vehicles behind them to pass. When the last of the daylight had gone, the vehicles in the column fearlessly turned on their headlamps.
“No choice,” Schuyler told them. “These goddamn guinea roads twist around like spaghetti, you got all these trucks runnin’ like there’s no tomorrow…” He didn’t need to complete the equation. “They kill the lights when they get up to the combat zone.” He grinned. “Hell, sirs, it ain’t like the krauts don’t know we’re here.”
They passed through villages, clusters of stone and stucco-covered buildings. Hollow-eyed civilians watched from their lightless windows. Skinny children stood by the roadside, dressed in rags and cast-off — or pilfered — articles of German, Italian, British, and American uniforms. All were spattered with mud, their hair matted from the rain. Sunken-cheeked and red-eyed, the children carried themselves with the jauntiness of any combat veteran, brazenly running alongside the column with begging hands out.
“Hey, GI, GI, mange, GI, chocolate, GI, hey, GI, Hershey, GI, hey ’mericana…”
Harry began to reach into his musette for his K rations.
Ricks laid a restraining hand on his arm. “Unless you’re going to feed them all…” he cautioned.
As if to illustrate the point, the tank commander behind them tossed a C ration to the gaggle of little ones. Instantly, the smiling children turned vicious, clawing and pulling at one another as they scrambled on the dirt for the tin. One of them, a wiry little thing lost in a Wehrmacht officer’s tunic, came up with it and scampered into the darkness with his prize.
“What re all these rocks?” Kneece pointed to a section of wall standing erect in a field of rubble.
“Now?” Schuyler said. “It’s shit is what it is.”
Ricks explained: “We shell the hell out of these places to chase the krauts out. Then the krauts shell the hell out of them when we move in. At the end of the day, there isn’t much left.”
The rain managed to find its way inside their slickers, snaking down the collar, in through an upturned sleeve. As the night deepened, the rain grew chiller, and they began to chafe at their increasing discomfort and the tedium of the journey In Harry’s case it didn’t help that he hadn’t had a full night’s rest in three nights. The heat from the Sherman’s Chrysler engine helped sap him, created a lulling damp warmth inside his slicker. More than once he was shaken alert by Schuyler, Woody Kneece, or Peter Ricks, lest he topple unconscious from the rear of the tank.
“You take a tumble, Major,” warned Corporal Schuyler, “and you’re gonna be road goo ’fore them jokers behind us can hit the brakes.”
A complete cessation of motion finally stirred him from sleep. This was not one of those times when the Shermans had pulled aside for the sake of the vehicles behind them. The line of cat’s-eye headlamps extended for miles. The entire column was stopped. From ahead he heard cursing voices, the impatient honking of lorry horns, an MP’s angry whistle.
Schuyler was gone; Ricks and Kneece stood with Angstrom atop the turret, trying to peer through the rain and darkness ahead.
“How long have I been out?” Harry called up to them.
“Maybe twenty minutes,” Woody Kneece said.
“How long have we been here?”
“A little while. Schuyler went up ahead to see if he could find out what’s going on.”
Peter Ricks climbed down and sat on the edge of the turret, rubbing his chin in worried thought.
“What’s the matter?” Harry asked him.
“I don’t like this,” the lieutenant said. “We’re close to the line.”
The rain and narrow slits of light from the cat’s-eye covered headlamps revealed little. On Harry’s right, the road bank rose steeply. To the other side was a roadside shrine, a life-size wooden carving of Jesus on His cross, sheltered under a small awning. The crosspiece was draped with dozens of hastily run strands of telephone wire, so many it looked as if someone had rested a cape across Christ’s shoulders.
In the spill of light from the road he could make out wet, shadowy shapes headed south toward Naples. He leaned forward, squinting, and saw what he first took to be horses, then belatedly realized were mules, a long string of them, each carrying a dark oblong pack across its back.
“The trucks can’t get up into these hills,” Ricks told him. “They use the mules to bring supplies up… and bring the bodies down.”
Harry counted twenty animals, and the string had yet to end. He was grateful when Schuyler returned.
“The road’s a mess up there,” the corporal reported. “You got a deuce-and-a-half up to its axles in mud. Even if they pull ’im clear, nobody’s gettin’ through ’ti
l they get some engineers up here to do somethin’ ’bout this road.”
“You have a map, Corporal?” Ricks asked. “Let’s borrow the back of this guy’s truck and have a look at it.”
They climbed into the dry rear of a lorry stopped just ahead of them. Harry saw the flash of a torch in Schuyler’s hand, the map spread out on the floor of the lorry bed. Ricks and the corporal talked for some minutes. There was a lot of pointing at the map, and then into the space around them. Then Ricks returned.
“You two feel like a walk?” the lieutenant asked Harry and Kneece.
Kneece looked out into the wet night. “Walk where?”
“A couple of miles that way, we pick up an access road that takes us straight to the battalion headquarters we’re looking for. It’s either hoof it or sit out here in the rain all night.”
“It’s black as the inside of a duck’s ass out there.”
“I’ve never had my head up a ducks ass, so I’ll take your word on that,” Ricks retorted. “I’ve got a compass. We just head due north and we can’t miss it.”
Kneece shrugged. “I can take a couple of miles stretching my legs.”
Both younger men turned worriedly in Harry’s direction.
“Sure,” Harry told them.
“Don’t say ‘sure’ unless you’re sure, Major,” Ricks said.
Harry’s answer was to climb down from the Sherman.
They were all less sure about Harry’s certainty — including Harry — minutes later. Unable to find the footing on the slick grass of the bank that his two younger mates had found, Peter Ricks and Woody Kneece had to haul Harry up to the crest. At the top he dropped to his knees wheezing more than the two men who’d dragged him up.
“I’ll be fine once we’re moving,” Harry gasped, urging the now hesitant Ricks on with a nod.
Ricks reached under his slicker for a dressing from the first-aid pouch on his belt. He stuck the square of white gauze under the camouflage netting at the back of his helmet. “I’ll take the point. Let me get far enough ahead where you can just about still see this. The lines up here are pretty stable but that doesn’t mean there isn’t infiltration, so keep your eyes and ears open, your mouths shut… sirs.” To Kneece: “Easy on the trigger. You’re behind our lines; the chances are anything we bump into is going to be ours.” Ricks glanced at the luminous dial of his compass, snapped the cover shut, then led them away from the road.
With only the dullest moonlight seeping past the never-empty rain clouds, the surrounding terrain was no more than a pencil sketch of open fields. The horizon ahead of them and the road behind them were obscured in a velvety curtain of blackness and rain.
As the din of the traffic-laden road subsided, they heard rumblings near and far, all along what Harry imagined was the front line. His first thought was thunder, but the detonations were too sudden, too percussive, strings of them too close together: artillery. At times he would see distant bursts of light — a muzzle flash, or the explosion of an incoming round — and there would be a brief presentation of a silhouette: shoulder of a hill, copse of trees, some lone outbuilding.
The field gave way to the ordered ranks of an olive grove.
“Careful,” Kneece whispered over his shoulder, and Harry followed the captain in skirting a large, muddy shell crater littered with the splintered limbs of olive trees. A blast had punched a twenty-foot hole in the latticed canopy
Harry walked with increasing weariness as the wet grass dragged at his legs. He fell into a dazed trudge, his head beginning to loll forward. Benumbed, he didn’t realize their little column had halted until he stumbled into Woody Kneece.
Ahead, Ricks was signaling them to stay put, then he vanished into the darkness. In a moment, he was back, waving them forward. “There’s some kind of shed just up ahead. It’s empty, looks like a good place to be dry for a few minutes.”
“Shed” had been a generous description. The structure was a windowless four walls of scrap wood hammered together into an eight-by-eight-foot square with a roof of rusting corrugated tin. But it was dry.
Ricks flashed his torch about the musty interior, the beam playing across rusting pruning shears and cobweb-adorned farm implements. He closed the creaking door, lit a candle from his musette, and set it in the middle of the floor. Harry found a bare comer and dropped to the dirt floor. Off his feet for the first time since they’d left the road, he worried he might not be able to regain them. He took off his helmet, relieved to be rid of the constant rattle of rain on his “pot,” although the drumming on the shed’s roof may have been even worse.
“You should eat something, Major,” Ricks said.
“I’m too tired to eat.”
“All the more reason you should.”
Harry pulled a K ration from his musette, but only picked at the crackers and tin of cheese, washing them down with a swig of metallic-tasting water from his canteen.
“Crap,” Kneece said, rooting about in his own musette. “All I have is breakfasts.”
“I didn’t have time to shop,” Ricks said without apology. “Here, I’ve got a supper. I’ll trade. Major, take this. Make sure you eat it all.”
He tossed Harry a D ration, the so-called “energy bar” troops were issued for emergencies: six hundred highly concentrated calories of chocolate, oat flour, and skim milk powder in a four-ounce bar.
“Hey, Kneece,” Ricks called, “I’ll bet right about now you’re thinking you should’ve listened to Daddy and stayed in that nice, warm office back in Washington.”
“Why, Lootenant Ricks!” Kneece said pleasantly. “You’ve been snooping!”
“Let’s just call it turn-about-fair-play, Kneece.”
“It’s Captain Kneece, Lootenant, and it’s not quite the same thing. I was pursuing an official investigation.”
“Pete, I’m not sure this is the time or place to get into this,” Harry cautioned.
“You’re wrong, Major,” Ricks said evenly. “This is the perfect time and place. Where we’re going, we may have to share a foxhole with this guy I’m wondering how safe my ass is going to be, covered by somebody who keeps secrets from the people he’s supposed to be working with.”
Kneece bowed his head and put a hand over his heart. “I am sincerely sorry for the agitated state of your ass, Lootenant.”
“That’s enough,” Harry snapped, dragging himself to his feet. “From both of you. I’m making it an order, Lieutenant: Move out.”
But it was Kneece who held up a hand. “No, Major. He’s making a fair call. Lootenant Ricks, if you figure my daddy pulled some strings to get me these captain’s bars and a cushy job in D.C. where the only bleeding I do is from paper cuts… you figure right. See, I’m the only male heir; I’m the last one carrying the family name. In my part of the country, that’s real important. At least to my daddy. If my daddy could’ve done anything about it, I wouldn’t be in the service at all. Hell, he didn’t even want me to be a state constable! But don’t call me to account for his doings.”
“That all being the case,” Ricks said, “we come to the sixty-four-dollar question: Just what in the hell are you doing here, Kneece?”
“Back in London, you and the major smartly made a case that I’ve been used. I resent being used.”
“You know you’re going to catch all kinds of hell for this junket when you get back. Or are you just that cocksure Daddy’s still going to be able to protect you?”
“I doubt he would if he could. I expect nobody’s going to be more irate over me being here than him.” Kneece pulled open the door and pointed to the rain-filled night. “Do you see my daddy protecting me now? My whole life — no matter what I do, no matter what I got for myself — everybody looks at me and I hear ’em thinking the only reason I got what I got is because Daddy bought it for me. Well, factually, nobody’s daddy can buy diddly up here, no matter how much money he’s got. Here, I either cut it on my own hook or I don’t. If you still have a problem with me at your back, Looten
ant, I’d be obliged if you’d let me walk point.”
Ricks extinguished the candle and stuffed it back in his musette bag. He stood at the open door, looked at his watch, checked his compass. He looked at Harry. “Ready, Major?” And with Peter Ricks in the lead, they started off into the rain.
*
They slogged on for another hour before they stepped out onto the access road.
Harry thought the going might be easier than stumbling over the roots of the olive grove, but the road was no more than a river of deep mud churned to a sucking mire by the heavy vehicles that had left their tread marks.
It was nearly another hour before a voice barked at them from the darkness up ahead: “Halt and identify yourself!” Ricks waved at Kneece and Harry to stay behind. He stepped forward, his rifle held up over his head.
“Do you think this is it?” Harry asked Kneece hopefully Kneece sniffed at the air. “Smell that?”
It was something more edible than boxed rations simmering on a stove.
“Uncle Ray used to say any hot food on a cold day smelled like home to him.”
*
The podere — as those squat Italian farmhouses are called by the natives — sat at the end of the road in a clearing, near the base of a low hill. Outside the farmhouse, a petrol-fed generator put-putted away. The farmhouse served as the battalion command post, and the clearing as home for the battalion’s headquarters company.
Hidden under the branches of olive trees, and further concealed by twig-filled camouflage netting, were a parking area for trucks and jeeps, the battalion supply point and its piled crates of munitions and fuel drums, an aid station marked by red crosses in circles of white, and the battalion’s Heavy Weapons company of 81-mm mortars. Near the edge of the clearing, providing the welcoming scents that had wafted toward them, was a field kitchen. A dozen soldiers stood in line in the rain, mess kits in hand, filing by two petrol-fueled stoves to have their tin plates filled from tasty-smelling pots.
“They’re serving a late supper,” Kneece commented.
“They rotate the men back in squads,” Ricks explained. “Gives them a chance for hot food and a break from the line. It can take all night to get through the roster.”