by Bill Mesce
“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” Harry said, “but I have to go up there.”
A disappointed shake of the head from Ricks.
“None of your men have to go further than this,” Harry continued. “I can find my way to the top and back on my own.”
VanDerMeer bowed his head, rubbed his eyes. Harry wondered whether those eyes would ever again be clear and rested. Finally, “Aw, hell.” To Woolchuck: “I’ll take them up.”
Woolchuck shook his head in protest. “Lootenant, you should – ”
“You should shut up, Sarge. Your job is the normal people,” and he nodded at the squad. Then, jerking a thumb at Harry and Ricks: “These squirrels belong to me. The rest of you stay and cover us. Just give me one man. Preferably somebody with a good time running the mile.”
“Hey, Trey!” Woolchuck waved a beckoning finger at the lad who’d been walking point. “Private Traeger,” Woolchuck introduced him.
The boy had a strong, square face, unsettling pale gray eyes, cool. Harry considered the remarkable poise the lad had displayed walking alone far out ahead of the column and taking them through the mined stretch of path. He was a good choice.
“Mind takin’ a walk up the hills with the gennulmen, Trey?” Woolchuck asked him.
That poise: barely a flicker of any feeling in his face, just a tickle at the corner of his mouth, an allowance of amusement from someone who realized he was not really being given a choice. Traeger shrugged. “Whaddaya need me to do, Loot?” he asked VanDerMeer.
“Help me keep look–out which you seem to do pretty ok,” VanDerMeer said. “And if you see krauts, I hope you’ll mention them to me as you pass running like hell down the hill. You can run like hell, can’t you, soldier?”
“Like a fuckin’ gazelle, Sir.”
They started across the firebreak in a picket line: VanDerMeer on the left, then Ricks, Harry, and Traeger, ten yards of open ground between them, the rest of the squad fanned out at the treeline behind them to provide cover fire if necessary. Their short line expanded and contracted like an accordion’s bellows as each found himself trying to thread his way about the torn ground of the break.
“Keep your eyes open,” VanDerMeer called out. “You see a movement, let out a yell. How’re you doing, Colonel?”
Harry managed to grunt out an “Ok,” but the muscles in his body were so taut they hurt. He clutched his carbine close to his body, his eyes swept this way and that across the hill, looking for…well, just looking. At one point, his path and Peter Ricks’ came close to each other. “If something happens, is it better to run forward or back?”
Ricks smiled philosophically. “If I were them, and I was up there, I’d wait until we were right in the middle so it’d be just as bad one way as the other.”
“Don’t think about jumpin’ in one a these holes, neither,” Traeger added. “From the top you can see right down in ‘em.”
“So what do we do if, um…”
Ricks’ shoulders rose and fell. “Well, me, I was just planning on running my arse off and praying.”
For all Harry’s concerns, they reached the brook on the far side of the break without incident. They found a narrow stretch of the brook where several rocks could be used as stepping stones.
“Careful, Colonel,” Traeger warned. “You slip ‘n’ get wet, we don’t have no warm–up shack for you to get dry. And it’s a long–arse walk home in this weather with cold feet. You could wind up minus a few toes.”
Despite a tense moment or two tip–toeing across, Harry managed the crossing aptly (if somewhat gracelessly). VanDerMeer then formed them back into a file and they started up the tortured slope, himself in the lead, Traeger taking up the rear.
Harry saw the first body almost immediately. He froze at first, transfixed by the almost cartoonish physiognomy of the face: oversized staring dark eyes, a manic grin. But as Harry stared closer, he saw the eyes seemed so large because they were missing; what he was staring into were two dark, empty sockets. The grin was the same toothy display of any corpus where the skin – now dark and looking like tattered old leather – had fallen away leaving exposed jaws.
The soldier must not have died immediately. He sat against the trunk of a tree, half–blanketed by snow, skeletal hands in their rotting wool gloves still grasped round the rifle in his lap. This was where he had drawn himself up to die.
Ricks pushed at Harry to move him past, but even as he walked Harry’s head cocked over his shoulder, fixed on that staring, grinning visage. When he finally pulled his eyes away, he saw another. And another. And another. The slope was littered with them in whatever direction he turned his eyes. As he looked up to take in the expanse of the hillside he was treated to a hellscape from some Bosch nightmare with its ravaged ground, its spectral, dissolute inhabitants, their destruction and rot captured in a cold–gripped frieze, looking all the more forlorn and abandoned in the snow. Some bodies had been carefully laid in the shelter of a fallen log or shell hole, while others had died on their feet, falling in crumpled heaps. And some were morbid versions of classic statuary: torsos without limbs, without heads, some…things only recognizable as having once been part of a human being by the olive drab uniform decomposing about it.
They cleared the tree line. VanDerMeer found a path blown through the minefield, the double apron wire peeled back and laying on either side in tangled curls. Harry’s eye caught a shape hanging from one coil of wire, bobbing in the winter wind. Grasped about the wire a gloved hand, then the arm in the sleeve of an Army windcheater then…then an exposed bit of bone, shreds of leathery skin and nothing else. Again, only the insistent push of Ricks got him moving again.
They reached the trench line and here it was worse, with stretches of the defensive line nothing more than an open grave, American corpses and German corpses piled atop each other so thickly that there were places the ditch was completely dammed by dead men. Arms, legs, an upper trunk jutted at odd angles from the snowy earth that had buried them when shellfire had collapsed sections of the trench walls.
“I hate to think what this place is gonna smell like come warm weather,” muttered Traeger in off–handed observation.
VanDerMeer headed them to an empty part of the trench close to the rocky spine that led to the saddle. In the shelter of the trench, Harry, Ricks and Traeger waited while VanDerMeer studied the saddle and the twin crests through his field glasses. “Looks empty.” After a minute he turned the glasses over to Ricks who slowly swept the top of the hill.
“Maybe they’re just patient,” Ricks considered.
“Your pal the captain isn’t much on optimism, Colonel,” VanDerMeer said.
“I guess I’m the one who finds out,” Traeger said casually. “That’s what you bring the privates along for, right?”
While the other three held their weapons at the ready, Traeger clambered out of the trench, darted across the open ground to the foot of the spine where he paused for one last look along either slope, then started up for the saddle. The sharp angle of the spine, slick with snow and ice, made for slow, dicey going and more than once Traeger lost his footing, but then he was at the top and over the lip of the saddle.
How long a time would be appropriate for Traeger to scout the top before waving them on Harry didn’t know, but it didn’t take him long to grow nervous. Then he saw anxious looks envelop the faces of Ricks and VanDerMeer, and it only made him feel worse. They all nearly sighed aloud when Traeger finally reappeared to wave them up.
As VanDerMeer led them up the spine, he called over their shoulder: “Let’s not dawdle out here, fellas.”
I’ve stood there. I can understand VanDerMeer’s anxiety. The spine was worse than the open ground of the firebreak, for its narrow confines did not allow any room for evasion, nor even the illusory harbor of shell craters. To stand on the spine was to be a target at a Brighton shooting gallery, open to fire from anywhere along either crest as well as mortar and artillery fire, all the time while struggli
ng against a sharp uphill slope and poor footing. Even to jump off the spine would still leave one subject to fire from the hilltop but then the bunker line as well. One had only two options; run back for the trench line, or, as Tyrone Compton had told us, fight for the top in the hopes of getting behind the German guns. In either case, one would be under fire each step of the way. You could not feel any more exposed than to stand naked in Picadilly on a summer’s noon.
They stumbled, they slid, then finally stepped onto the saddle. Almost immediately Harry faltered, leaning on his carbine as he tried to catch his breath, wincing against the pain of the cold air rasping his throat. At his feet, a shell hole, and at its bottom the desiccated bodies of two more American soldiers.
“This must be it,” Ricks said, standing by Harry’s side, breathing a bit heavily himself. “That’s what they said: as soon as they hit the top they jumped in a hole. Makris, Bonilla, some others.” Ricks slid down the snowy side of the crater. “Yeah! Remember? They said there was a line of shell holes, almost like a trench.” Ricks pointed to the faux trench leading off of the first hole. “This must be it.”
VanDerMeer pointed Traeger up to the high ground on the east side of the saddle. “Go up there, watch that side of the hill, give a yell if you see anything. I’ll take the high ground on this side and watch the other side of the hill.” To Harry and Ricks: “I’m sure I speak for Private Traeger as well as myself when I say that whatever you two came up here for, don’t make it an all–day thing.”
“They still have their dog tags?” Harry called down to Ricks.
Ricks brushed aside the snow, fumbled inside a collar with his one good hand. “Beaudrie,” he read.
“And Wardell,” Harry recalled. “This is it.” He slid down the side of the crater and followed Ricks through the overlaid shell holes leading further into the saddle. The snow at the bottom was deeper than elsewhere, and it was an effort to wade through the shin–deep powder. They came to the end of the line of holes almost at the mid–point of the saddle.
Ricks shook his head, puzzled. “If this is it, he should be here.”
“Maybe the Germans took the body – ”
“And left all these others?”
“ – or he was just wounded and taken prisoner.”
“The Red Cross doesn’t have his name.” Ricks climbed to the edge of the hole. “This has to be it.” Harry joined him as Ricks pointed through the falling snow at Schmidt over a quarter–mile away, the town appearing through the snow as a huddled group of low blue shadows; unreal. “Dammit…” Ricks muttered, frustrated, pulled himself out of the hole and began to scout the other craters that had churned up the saddle.
From the crater, Harry could easily see the well–positioned dug–outs all along the high ground on either side of the saddle. Dominick Sisto and the other men huddled at the bottom of low ground between the two crests bowl had been right to view holding the position as tantamount to climbing onto a sacrificial altar.
“There’s more bodies here,” Ricks called. He was standing near a crater part–way up the sloping side of the saddle. He walked to where the saddle dropped off to western slope, pointed at something unseen below him. “The Item Company men came up this way – ” he walked back to the crater “ – jumped in here. Compton said they were below him.” Ricks frowned. “This has got to be right. So where the hell’s Porter?”
Harry was slowly moving about at the bottom of the crater, sweeping a foot through the powder in front of him. “How far down into this hole can you see?”
Ricks crouched to approximate the view Compton might have had. “Better than half–way down the far side. Nearer to me, hm, you’d have to be down a good two feet before I couldn’t see the top of your head.”
Thunk. Harry’s boot collided with some mettalic. He gave a push with his toe and a helmet popped free of the snow in a burst of powder, then settled back in the snow. Harry found himself looking at the officer’s bar painted down the back of the helmet. “I think I’ve got something.”
He picked the helmet up, dusted off the clinging snow. At the front of the helmet was a lieutenant colonel’s silver oak leaf. Just below and a bit to one side was a hole – an eruption – nearly an inch across. He turned the helmet over to look inside. The front of the liner round the hole was discolored with a dark, mottled stain. Along the side, just above the rim, in small, neat white letters was painted: PORTER, CJ. Tucked inside the webbing at the crown of the liner was a photograph, the small, square type one would expect from a Brownie box. The photo showed a willowy, dark–haired woman sitting up in what appeared to be a hospital bed. Her eyes were shadowed, her face fatigued, but she remained a handsome sort, all the more so for the beaming smile she held for the small, sleeping infant she cradled in her arms. Leaning over her shoulder was another puffy–cheeked tot, a girl two or three years of age, looking down at her new sibling with buoyant curiosity.
Once more Harry found himself propped against his carbine, his legs weak. But this time not from the cold or fatigue.
“What’ve you got?” said Ricks, skidding down the side of the crater. He took the helmet from Harry’s gloved hand, quickly glanced inside, then turned to study the hole at the front. “See the way the metal puckers out? This is an exit hole. It looks angled up. No entrance hole. You’d have to be pretty far down behind him…” Ricks tossed the helmet away and looked about the shell crater. “Where the fuck could this joker be?”
“Lieutenant!” It was Traeger, flagging VanDerMeer. Harry looked up and saw the lieutenant turn about, raise his field glasses to look at something somewhere on the back slope of the western wing of the hill.
Ricks was down on his hands and knees, his good hand sweeping over the hard ground beneath the snow cover along the lower part of the crater. “He didn’t have time to bury him. He couldn’t’ve done more than shove him somewhere and pull some mud down on him.”
Harry began following Ricks’ example, searching the opposite side of the crater. “There’s no chance Porter was hit by the Germans?” Harry asked, not believing it himself.
“We’ve got company.” It was VanDerMeer, standing at the lip of the crater. “Traeger! Let’s go!”
“What is it?” Ricks asked without pausing in his trolling.
“Patrol.”
“How heavy?”
“Standard. Ten men. They’ve got a light machine gun with them. I would prefer not to mix it up with them if you don’t mind.” He turned to Traeger who had just scrambled down the side of the crest. “It’s quitting time. Down the hill.”
Without a lost step, Traeger scooted by, over the lip of the saddle, and down the spine.
“You didn’t have to tell him twice,” Ricks observed.
“Well, he’s that rare guy who still has some common sense.”
“How long do we have?”
“They’re coming up the far end. Then I guess they’ll patrol the length of the top of the hill and go down the other end. It’ll take them a few minutes to get to the top, a few minutes here, but you don’t have all that time. The minute they hit the top they’ll be able to see anybody trying to get down.”
“You should go, then,” Harry said.
“Yeah, I should.” VanDerMeer shook his head and started for the crest to take Traeger’s look–out post.
“The bullet went in low and came out high,” Ricks explained to Harry. “If it was the krauts, you’d expect it to be the other way around. The only way they could’ve put a pill through Porter’s head at that angle was if he had his back to them, his head between his knees and was practically kissing his own arse. Ah! I believe the word is, ‘Eureka!’”
Harry helped him clear the snow away from an area near the floor of the crater. The body lay on its right side, legs tucked up underneath. Ricks’ presumption had been correct: most of the body was covered with only a thin layer of frozen mud. Exposed was the right heel of the right boot, the leg from knee to haunch, the arm from the elbow up to the
shoulder, a lieutenant colonel’s oak leaf visible on the windcheater shoulder.
VanDerMeer had returned. “We’re outta time! Let’s go!”
Ricks drew his K–bar from its scabbard and began chiseling away at the frozen ground about the corpse’s head. “I just need a quick look – ”
“What are you? Some kind of fucking ghoul? You don’t have time for a quick anything!”
Ricks had the head free, brushed away the clinging bits of soil. “Exit wound here in the front. Lines up with the helmet.” The fingers of his good hand felt around near the base of the skull.
“I don’t know what you guys are up here for,” VanDerMeer seethed, “but it’s not going to do any good if you’re up here dead!”
“Right there!” Ricks finger probed. “He must’ve just missed the rim of the helmet. Ok, Lieutenant! We’re right behind you!”
VanDerMeer led them off down the line of shell holes, but Harry skidded to a stop in just a few steps. “What the fuck are you after now?”
Harry scooped up Porter’s helmet and then the three of them were making their best speed through the powder of the craters, over the lip of the saddle and down the spine. Harry’ attention was on trying to keep his feet on the slick stone, but he had a quick impression of Traeger waiting for them at the trench line, frantically waving at them to hurry hurry hurry. Another quick look: over his shoulder. A line of silhouettes atop the crest of the hill. Surprised shouts.
Not the most physically adept of people, Harry was surprised he managed to keep his feet beneath him as he scrambled down the spine. Then they were on the open ground of the hillside running for the trench and it was there, of all places, just ten yards short of the shelter of the ditch, he misstepped. His left boot skidded on a patch of crumbly shale beneath the snow, he felt a pang in his ankle, then, for a moment, he was airborne until he crashed on his rump. The wind knocked out of him, he fell backward into the snow.
Despite the pain and what he considered to be his imminent demise, he almost laughed. It was an absurd way to die. An overweight, middle–aged man, out of breath, flat on his arse in a place he had no right to be.