Casualties of War: The Advocate Trilgy

by Bill Mesce

  Harry drew the boy to him, grabbed fistfuls of the lad’s windcheater as he pressed him to his chest. He was not Dominick’s father, nor was Dominick his son. But Harry was someone’s father, and Dominick was son enough, and, at that moment, that was bond enough.

  Dominick pushed at Harry, but Harry held tight as if holding tight could stop the fight, the war, as if he could pull Dominick Sisto along with him all the way home.

  The lad pushed harder, finally separating them. “It’s time for you to go, Signor. When you get home, you give my regards to the missus and to those boys of yours. You take care of those boys, Signor. And when you see my mom…” He smiled in a helpless, hapless way that was so painfully the picture of a young lad at a loss. “Tell her…tell her something.” Then he took Harry by the arm and helped him into the back of the lorry. He hooked the tailgate shut, signaled to Ryan in the cab with a bang of his fist on the side panel. “Take ‘em home!”

  “Good luck, Dominick!” Ryan called back, slipped the lorry into gear and the weapons carrier lumbered across the firebreak, climbed up onto the pavement and headed west.

  Sisto remained on the veranda. He raised his hand in a wave.

  Harry raised his.

  Then the lorry passed into the trees on the west side of the firebreak, turned a bend in the road, and Dominick Sisto disappeared from view.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: Absalom

  I SAT WITH HARRY HALF THAT NIGHT in our billet in the old chateau in Wiltz. He remembered what he did not want to remember but could not clear from his mind; it spilled out of him in an unstoppable purge, like something toxic being vomited out. There was more to it than the trauma of combat; something that had cut even deeper. The salt in the wound.

  He did not make the self–accusations specifically. But they were there in his face, in his voice. It was this:

  In his eyes, he had killed Spider Valence.

  He had killed Juan Bonilla.

  He had killed Peter Ricks the day he had persuaded him to leave the pub back in Salisbury.

  And Dominick Sisto.

  “What was your choice, Harry?” I tried to assuage him. “If you hadn’t defended him, he’d’ve been sent down for God–knows–how–long in a military prison. Honestly, what do you think the lad would’ve preferred?”

  He looked at me with glistening, soulful eyes. “Come home with me and ask his mother what she would’ve preferred.”

  I cadged some medicinal brandy from the hospital staff in the chateau. Completely done in as he was, it only took a glass to lay Harry out on his cot.

  The day had done for me as well, and soon I was slumbering along with him.

  *

  It felt as if I had only just closed my eyes when I was being shaken awake.

  “Where the hell is he?”

  “Hm?” I squinted into the dark, recognized Joe Ryan’s voice.

  “Where is he, Owen?”

  “Where is – ”

  “Get your pants on and meet me downstairs!” and he was gone.

  I sat up on my cot, blinked the sleep out of my eyes. I looked at my watch: I’d actually been asleep for several hours. I turned to Harry to ask if he knew what Ryan was on about and saw only his empty cot.

  When I caught up with Ryan at the main entrance, he’d already learned that an hour earlier Harry had been asking the medical staff for directions to the divisional motor pool.

  At the motor pool we were told Harry had talked his way into possession of a jeep.

  Ryan didn’t need to ask where the trail led from there. He commandeered his own jeep and with me sitting alongside we were soon on our way out of town on the northeast road that crossed the Wiltz River, angling toward Skyline Drive. But barely a half–kilometer beyond the river we were stopped at a roadblock: a rifle platoon dug in along the road.

  They remembered Harry’s passing through. According to them, he had, by that time, somehow acquired a bazooka. Having reported Harry’s transit back to Wiltz, the platoon lieutenant had since received orders to insure that no other unauthorized personnel passed eastward down the road. From the roadblock, we could see a furious display of artillery flashes beyond the horizon.

  “I awready lost one guy tonight wants to get himself killed,” the platoon lieutenant told us, “I’m not gonna lose any more. This is as far as you guys go.”

  For a moment, Ryan and I stood side by side in the road, watching the pyrotechnics in the distance, listening to the rumble of the guns.

  “Dammit, Harry,” he muttered, shaking his head. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “What any father would,” I said, and turned back to the jeep.

  *

  There is no witness as to what transpired at the gasthaus on the La Pont du Ste. Marc–Heinerscheid road after Harry and Joe Ryan had left earlier that day. Ernest Schup’s headquarters received one, last communication from Sisto’s position a little before 1400 hours that afternoon, this by telephone line from Spiro Makris, using the protocol he had only so recently acquired from an Army manual: “This switchboard is now closed.”

  Still, for over an hour thereafter, the defenders at Heinerscheid heard intermittent gunfire on the road below them. By the time the guns fell silent, the Germans didn’t dare an assault on Heinerscheid with the few hours daylight left to them and buttoned up for the night.

  Schup alerted his men to be on guard for Love Company survivors coming into the line during the night. There were none.

  *

  The 110th Regiment, along with a number of attached units, took the brunt of von Manteuffel’s assault across the middle of the Ardennes line. The Germans had expected to clear Skyline Drive and cross the Clerf River beyond that first day. But though they faced a numerical superiority of 10–to–1, the 110th managed to hold positions east of the river until 19 December. Had they not done so, the Germans would have been in Bastogne before the “Screaming Eagles” of the American 101st Airborne Division who only reached the town around midnight on the 18th. There would have been no legendary stand by the “Battered Bastards of the Bastion of Bastogne,” and von Manteuffel’s panzers would have had an open road to the Meuse.

  Those three days came at tremendous cost. The 110th Regiment and attached units (including Ernest Schup’s battalion) had numbered some 5,000 men at the outset of the fight. When the so–called Battle of the Bulge was officially announced concluded on 28 January, less than 600 of them were still fit for duty.

  As for Dominick Sisto’s Love Company…

  The daily morning report sent by Sergeant Creedmore to Ernest Schup’s headquarters in Heinerscheid on 15 December gave the following accounting of the company roster: thirteen were at the field hospital in Wiltz suffering from a variety of petty ailments; they were still awaiting a replacement for the man lost on Andy Thom’s reconnaissance foray across the Our; 179 were fit for duty.

  By nightfall of 16 December, of those 179, only six – the wounded taken out by Harry and myself – could be accounted for, the rest listed as killed or missing and presumed captured or killed.

  On the morning of the 17th, as Ryan and I prepared to return to Liege, I was informed that PFC Robert “Chicken” Hollis had died some time during the night as a result of his wounds. I was glad Harry wasn’t there to hear the news.

  *

  Each day, Ryan would plumb his military headquarters sources for word of casualties, and I exploited my journalistic connections for news from Geneva on prisoners. None of the names we were concerned with appeared on either list: not Sisto’s, not Ricks’, not Harry’s. They remained categorized as “Missing in Action.”

  “What the hell does ‘missing’ mean?” Ryan had badgered one of his sources.

  The officer, a sage Army veteran, explained: “It doesn’t mean he’s dead. It doesn’t mean he’s alive. It might mean his body’s out in the woods or the bottom of a river where we’ll never find it, or he got blown to bits and there’s no body to find. It might mean he got himself wounded and he
’s laid up in some Belgian broad’s basement and we haven’t found him yet. It might mean he’s in some Stalag hospital and he’s in such bad shape he doesn’t remember his own name. What it means is we don’t know.”

  *

  It was a gem–like February day, bitingly cold, but with a brilliant yellow sun lighting the clear sky a deep sapphire blue, setting the snow and ice aglitter. Ryan and I threw some boxes of rations in the back of a jeep along with a thermos of hot soup and another of coffee and drove south from Liege.

  We took the main road to Bastogne, and from there turned east. We passed Graves Registration units scouring the fields and forests for the dead; Field Maintenance companies hauling away damaged and gutted vehicles. Alongside roads, the carcasses of entire German convoys lay burned out and collapsed like the rotting skeletons of prehistoric leviathans, victims of the Jabos that had gone to work when the weather had finally cleared. We headed into the high ground and onto Skyline Drive, turned northwards to Heinerscheid, and then east.

  It was a little past noon when the jeep rolled to a stop in front of the remains of the firebreak gasthaus. The stone first floor stood fire–blackened and stark against the snowy field, its square, abrupt shape reminding me – too aptly, I thought – of an ancient tomb. The upper portions of the inn had collapsed inward, the floors buckling with it, the whole, tangle of charred lumber filling the now open pit of the cellar. The coat of snow did nothing to dilute the odor of burnt wood.

  I stood in the doorless main entrance, looking into that snow–covered jumble. I heard something thunk onto one of the pieces of wood, go skittering down into the shadowy parts of cellar. Then again. I turned and saw Ryan leaning in one of the windows. In the palm of his leather glove were several small stones he was pitching one at a time into the shadows below.

  “What’re you on about?” I asked him.

  “Did Harry ever tell you about Philip Meyer? He was this Jewish guy back in the old neighborhood, had a grocery store next door to Harry’s building.” Thunk. “Something I remember him telling us one time. He told us that, instead of flowers, the Jews leave stones at a grave.” Thunk.

  “Stones? Why is that?”

  “He said it’s because flowers die. Stones last forever.”

  *

  On the way back to Liege, Ryan allowed me a detour.

  We reached the Chateau D’Audran late in the afternoon. The sun was a lowering ember, and the fading, amber light gave the castle a melancholic, forgotten look. The castle stood empty, the only sign of battle being the crumpled heap of the Signal Corp’s wireless antenna, destroyed either by the retreating Signal Corpsmen or the advancing Germans.

  Inside, even the few paltry creature comforts and adornments I remembered from our stay in November were gone. Ryan remained in the jeep while I walked the familiar chambers: the great dining hall, the chapel, the tower room that had been Dominick Sisto’s billet. I made my way up to where la comtesse had kept her apartments in the servant’s corridor, but even those rooms had been left barren. I made my way up one of the tower staircases and again walked the wall where Dominick Sisto had introduced himself to me one night a lifetime ago.

  A belated thought spurred me downstairs into the courtyard and to the stable. The dogcart was gone as was the mottled gray. But that might just have meant the cart had gone into the fireplaces for fuel, the horse into Wermacht bellies.

  As we headed back down the drive to the main road, I called to Ryan to stop at the sight of the path that led off into the woods. I followed it to the carriage house.

  “What’d you think you were going to find?” Ryan asked, politely waiting outside the front door of the cottage.

  I could only shrug.

  “She’s still alive, you know,” he said.

  Such optimism from a man I considered the epitome of cynical pragmatism quite took me aback. He saw my doubt.

  “She was a tough cookie, that lady. She’s alive. It’s just a matter of finding her.”

  We started back for the jeep.

  “Do you still have that note Harry gave you? The one for his wife?”

  I reached inside my windcheater and handed it over.

  He read the few lines and that handsomely aging face on which I could only ever recall seeing flippancy, arrogance, annoyance, showed an unaccustomed softness.

  “Harry was afraid it wasn’t good enough,” I said.

  “Harry was always worried about things he didn’t need to worry about.” He carefully folded it and put it in his own breast pocket. “I’m going to try to wangle a trip home. If you don’t mind, I’d like to bring this to her.”

  “Please.”

  “It’s going to be hard enough telling her. I don’t know how I’m going to tell his boys.”

  “I’d like to write her if you don’t think it a bad idea.”

  “I think she’d like that.”

  The sun was dropping quickly now, behind the trees.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.

  *

  A few days later, I drove him to the aerodrome outside Liege and walked him to his plane.

  He took my hand. “You know, Owen, if there’s a bigger pain in the arse in this world than you, I haven’t met him.”

  “It’s Eddie, Colonel.”

  “It’s Joe, Eddie.”

  “Safe home, Joe.”

  He turned for the plane, then immediately stopped and turned back to me. “We weren’t very good to him.”

  “Eh?”

  “We always figured he’d do the right thing so we didn’t have to.”

  “Aye. We’re on our own now, I suppose.”

  “Look for that lady, Eddie.”

  I sat in the jeep and watched the plane until it disappeared into the western sky, then drove back to my hotel.

  EPILOGUE: Shmira

  I PUSHED MY PLATE ASIDE, beckoned the waiter for another drink. My third? “So.”

  He took the prod clumsily, cleared his throat, fiddled with his silver.

  “C’mon, man, have at it!” It must’ve been my third; I was sounding a bit loud.

  He was a twee sort, bundled compactly in neat corduroys, a tie knotted so tightly against his throat one would think the ruddy cheeks peeping above his grey–streaked rust beard were the result of strangulation. He turned sidelong in his chair, the better to cross his legs, both actions looking more to protect his valuables than for comfort. “Aye, well, Edward, I’ve been going over your material. That is to say, the other editors and I, we’ve all discussed it – ”

  “I had no idea I was so popular round the office.”

  “Och, well, we’re all quite appreciative of your talent, Edward, I believe we’ve said as much on numerous previous occasions.” He seemed relieved to be able to say something with which I was unlikely to take issue. “I dare say we – yourself and the house – we’ve all done quite well by the relationship. We’ve certainly been satisfied.”

  “How nice of you to say!” He squinted at me through the lenses of his wire–rimmed spectacles. He was such an unimaginative sod about things not on the printed page that he could not sense the sarcasm. I think it was only that it came from me that roused his suspicions at all. “No, truly, old man, I’m flattered. Quite. Absolutely. Just a lovely, lovely thing to say. Loverly, as the plebians might say.”

  “Aye, well…”

  I leaned forward, perhaps overdoing the expectancy a bit. I did enjoy the way it unnerved him so. “Shall we get down to cases, then?” I pushed.

  “Cases.” He cleared his throat, I heard the rustle of his corduroy trouser legs as he re–crossed his legs. “As I say, your material, this latest submission, that is, it’s been reviewed – ”

  Neat touch, that, I thought. “It’s been reviewed…” Not, “I’ve reviewed it,” or “We’ve reviewed it…” Just some mechanical process in which no identifiable human hands were ever laid upon the material. No one to blame, you see.

  “ – it’s been reviewed�
��”

  “Not satisfactory, eh?”

  “Well, I don’t know that anyone would put it quite like that.”

  “Unacceptable? Deficient? Lacking? Not up to snuff?”

  He feigned a chuckle, slapped his thigh. “Oh, hardly, old fellow! ‘Not up to snuff?’ No, no, not the thing at all, actually.”

  If he could feign humor, I could feign wide–eyed innocence. “What then, eh?”

  “How to put it?”

  “Aye. How would you put it?”

  “Well, Edward, let me start with the obvious. It’s not your usual line of country, is it? I mean, in the sense it’s not quite reportage. It’s a bit…hmmm…can we agree on, ‘dramatic?’”

  “Might I contribute something, here?”

  He seemed relieved to see the onus move to my side of the table. “Please.”

  “If you don’t mind my saying, at the rate you’re going, old boy, we’ll be well into next month before you get to the point.” His ruddy cheeks grew a little ruddier. “I appreciate your diplomatic sense, and perhaps that’s the publishing game. Quite different from when I was with the papers, an entirely different milieu, as it were. All new set of why’s and wherefore’s.”

  His head cocked, puzzled. “I’m afraid I don’t – ”

  “Very deadline–oriented, old man. No time for a waltz, eh?” A brief memory, quite piquant, of the Old Boss. There’d’ve been none of this jigging about. A couple of splashes of the good scotch he kept tucked in his desk drawer, camouflaged in a set of chipped tea cups; to help the medicine go down. And then a simple, “There’s a way it’s to be, my son, and this is it,” and then it’d be done and over and on to the next thing. I never missed The Job: but I missed him, and never so much as at such a moment. “See, mate, with the clock always ticking, what we needed to say we said.”

  “I see.”

  “So: how dishonest does the book need to be?”

  He seemed less offended than embarrassed. “No one’s suggestng – ”

  “It’s just you want less, aye?”

  “I’m trying to clarify,” he asserted in his meek way.