None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  Finally, the officer shouted a few more commands, and moved the armored personnel carrier further back down the road. The Germans tried again. But the cannon muzzle was still a little too high. Now the half-track was blocking the road. The tankers and drivers of the other half-tracks were yelling at him. So, the officer jumped up into the vehicle and drove off. He was laughing as he disappeared out of sight after the tanks.

  By that time, it was getting cold standing there, and Marsh’s shoulders were killing him. They all still had their hands up over their heads. Until then, Marsh was focused on the muzzles of all the weapons pointed his way. He could see a slow motion preview in his brain of slugs coming out of those black holes and slamming into his chest. Like watching the movies back home.

  He could barely keep his hands up for the pain. There was no reason to keep them standing that way, but the Germans were brutal whenever a hand came down even a little.

  One man in the row to Marsh’s left lowered his hands to right angles. A guard just shot him point blank in the face. Several men were beaten with rifle butts for talking or moving too much. The guards pantomimed that they were going to shoot if the prisoners lowered their hands, so pain or not, they all held them high.

  Marsh had no idea how long he stayed like that. Another Kraut half-track passed by. The officer shouted at them, laughing. His English was nearly perfect.

  “It’s a long way to Tipperary, boys!”

  A real joker.

  There was some movement from the café. An older man came out the front door of the battered stone building. Marsh recognized him from the couple of times he stopped in there going to and from the front. Funny, he thought, how sometimes he would take a break at that café and have some terrible coffee for a few minutes to pretend there was no war. The man was always friendly enough to him, but Marsh suspected he was friendly to whoever had the guns at the time.

  The man was dressed in a shabby blue coat, threads hanging from the sleeves, holes patched here and there. His head was bare.

  The man walked up to an SS officer and began chatting away. It was as if they were out for a winter stroll. Old buddies. If a time ever came to get back here, Marsh promised himself, he was going to remember that man.

  Then the door opened again, and the old lady, the one who owned the café, came out, too. She just stood there for a while looking around. Finally, she went up to a Kraut guard and led him away. Marsh could see them disappear behind the café and head toward a tumbledown shack that was barely standing up a few yards behind the café itself. He couldn’t see what happened next, but the old lady came back, followed by two GIs with their hands held high, and the guard prodding them along with the machine pistol.

  That bitch must have seen those GIs hide in the shed, and she told the fucking Krauts. I can’t fucking believe it. If I only had a gun, I kid you not, I’d blow her away, right here, right now. I mean, we’re here trying to free her fucking country. Jesus!

  About this time, a few of the GIs fell to the ground. There were no shots, so Marsh thought they had been wounded earlier, or maybe they were playing dead. A medic who was with B Battery knelt down, and rolled one GI over onto his back. Marsh had never seen him before, but he knew the man was a medic because he had a red cross painted on each side of his helmet, and a red-cross armband on each arm, and he had kept his medical pack during the whole ordeal. The medic opened the kit and started to take out dressings and sulfa packets. Marsh couldn’t figure out how the Germans had let him keep the kit this long, but apparently they had missed it. There were, after all, more than a hundred prisoners, and they had been drifting into the field in small groups for some time. The guy on the ground was bleeding from a gut wound, now staining the whole front of his coat. He must have been hit in the initial ambush and made it to the field.

  The medic was plugging the wound and doing what he did best when a Kraut came into the field and walked up behind him. He put the muzzle of the gun to the back of the medic’s helmet. Marsh could hear the little tick of metal on metal. The Kraut gave it a little shove, which pushed the helmet askew because the chinstrap wasn’t fastened.

  The medic slowly raised his hands and froze. The Kraut thumbed a switch on the machine pistol. Marsh thought he was putting on the safety. But he wasn’t. He flicked the machine pistol to single fire and shot the medic through the head. The man tumbled down on top of the wounded GI and never moved again. The Kraut shoved the body aside with his boot, and put two shots through the dying GI’s chest. Then he walked back out to the road.

  Marsh was trying hard not to vomit. He was afraid if he did, they would shoot him, too. It wasn’t the sight of the wounds or the deaths that got to him. It was the complete callousness of the act. The indifference. That Kraut might have been squashing a mosquito for all he seemed to feel. No, it was worse than that: he enjoyed it.

  He fucking enjoyed it!

  What happened next seemed to happen all at once, though Marsh knew even as it happened that there was a sequence to it. Still, it all crowded together in his mind as a single event.

  One of the APCs pulled up close to the field at the southern end, the end farthest from Marsh and the café, which was right at the crossroads. The SS officer who had been speaking to Peiper stood up in the back and chambered a round in his nine millimeter pistol. He took careful aim. Marsh could see a slight grin on the officer’s face. At first, Marsh thought he was trying to scare them again, but then he saw the flash of the twin lightning bolts on his collar: SS.

  The officer fired three times in rapid succession, and three men in the front rank fell down. Almost at the same instant several of the APCs opened up with machine guns. Men were falling everywhere, all around Marsh. There were screams of pain and different screams too: screams of fear. After so long in battle, Marsh could actually tell them apart.

  A lieutenant from B Battery, still with his hands up, yelled, “Stand fast! Don’t run!” He must have thought that the Germans were only shooting prisoners who were running. But, they weren’t. They were shooting everyone. It was a massacre.

  The running and the panic continued. The screaming went on. Men were calling for their mothers, for God.

  The Germans continued to shoot and shoot and shoot. How long? Marsh hadn’t any idea. As soon as the first wave of men crumpled, he ran toward the trees between the field and the café. He wasn’t going to head for that shed, but there was the most cover in that direction, and he knew there were culverts and shacks and places to hide. It was also the shortest route out of the field, away from the firing. If he made it that far, and they didn’t find him by dark, he might have a chance of getting to Malmédy.

  So Marsh ran. All the time he could hear the shouting and the screaming and the cries of pain and terror; he could hear the pistols and the automatic weapons. But, over all of that, what he remembered most clearly, what he would remember forever, were the voices of the Germans. They were laughing.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  18 December 1944, 0200 Hours

  Baugnez Crossroads, near Malmédy, Belgium

  Marsh was shivering badly, soaked completely through his clothing with snowmelt and mud. He could feel the cold grit of the mud rubbing the already sore spots where his clothing had let in the water and dirt. He hadn’t moved in hours. When he crawled down into the culvert, he pulled a pile of debris over himself. He tried to cover everything, even his head. He lay in the culvert, less than a hundred yards from that terrible field. The café was just out of sight beyond the trees. He definitely wasn’t going in that direction.

  After the shooting started, Marsh had scrambled out of the field as fast as he could. The man in front of him, the one who was nearly shielding Marsh from the sight of the German guards, had turned to run at the same time Marsh did. The man was big, but fast and strong. He actually gained on Marsh and, in less than ten yards, was coming up on Marsh’s back. Then Marsh heard a cry from right behind his ear, and at the same moment, there was terrible pain in
his back. It ripped right up alongside his spine, just to the left. He felt the whole weight of the man’s body slam into his back, nearly toppling him. Marsh turned in time to see the man slip to the ground and roll onto his back, his chest a mass of exit wounds no one could survive. He had almost climbed up Marsh’s back to get away from the Germans, and Marsh realized all at once that the man had shielded him from the volley of bullets; the ones that had struck Marsh in the back had passed through the man first and then into him. The only reason he wasn’t lying beside the now dead man in that field was that the bullets had spent all their energy going through the GI’s body, tearing the life out of the man and having little energy left for Marsh. He had no idea how many bullets had struck him or how seriously he was wounded.

  Thinking back from the relative safety of his culvert, it seemed as if he had stood there, over the man, figuring it all out, but he hadn’t. Marsh never even broke stride, only glanced at the body, but kept stumbling and running. The farther he got from the field, the stronger he felt. Each step that took him further out of range and out of sight of those Kraut bastards gave him more determination to get away. But, the pain was worsening, and he knew how close he had just come to being spine shot. God knows he had dragged a lot of those poor bastards out of the foxholes and back to the hospitals only to later learn they would be paralyzed for life.

  He clambered past the tree line to the northwest of the village and dodged across the little farm trail that led to the Malmédy Road. But he didn’t dare go any farther. The Krauts were sure to send a patrol to search that road, which was the fastest route to the American lines. If there were any lines by then.

  Marsh managed to get down into the culvert just as darkness was settling in. As the water wicked its way into his clothing, the heat seemed to evaporate from his body. At first he was lying in slush, but in a few minutes his body heat had melted the snow and slush all around him. It would have been better if it were ten degrees colder. At least then the water would have stayed frozen, and Marsh wouldn’t have gotten wet inside his clothes.

  From his little bunker, he could still hear firing. A few times he tried to peek out. His view was framed by the curved top of the culvert and his own chest at the bottom. It was like looking through a Kaleidoscope. Each time he moved his head to get a better picture, there was distortion in another edge of his view. He could never quite get everything at once. There didn’t seem to be anyone coming to scour the trees in front of where he had hidden, but he could just make out figures, dark shadowy shapes, moving into the field. Only moaning and pitiful sounds came from the massacre site.

  Massacre site. He finally had to say it to himself. For that’s what it was.

  Those fucking Krauts just murdered a hundred or more unarmed prisoners. My guys.

  He didn’t know how many made it out of the field, but it couldn’t have been more than a dozen. Maybe twenty, tops.

  As he peeked to see if he were still in danger of being discovered, Marsh saw the shadows again, moving among the bodies. He could only see part of a person at a time, and he was afraid to move too much because he knew from his own hunting days that movement will give your position away faster than anything else. That’s why, he knew, rabbits and deer freeze when they feel threatened.

  He couldn’t see color or detail, but there was enough light to see the long gray coats and military caps of the SS. They walked casually among the bodies, kicking and prodding with their boots. Every few minutes there was an answering cry or sob, and then the unmistakable metallic click of a round being chambered. Then a single shot. They were shooting the wounded. They were killing every living being who had survived the initial machine gunning.

  Marsh pulled himself down deeper into the water and made himself as small as he could. Then he just lay there, shivering. Finally, for the first time since the D-Day landing, he began to cry.

  Sometime after midnight, Marsh heard what he hoped was the last of the trucks and APCs rev their engines and take off down the road south toward Ligneauville. Away from him. Away from Malmédy. In the stillness of that long winter night, he could hear the voices of the SS as they rode away. He couldn’t understand the words, but the voices were of men who might have just left a party. It was again the unmistakable sound of laughter and camaraderie.

  Marsh remained in the culvert for a while longer. For some reason he had stopped shivering, and had cried himself out as well. Now, he had to find a way back to his lines. He knew the road to Malmédy was probably his best bet. But, the Allies were retreating, and he didn’t even know who held that road anymore. He didn’t trust the Belgians now any more than the Germans. He knew that, at least around the crossroads, the Belgians would sell him out in a minute to keep the Krauts out of their hair. He saw that when that bitch snitched on the GIs hiding in her shed.

  So, Marsh took one more careful look around him and decided that this was the best time to haul ass again. It was just after two in the morning. He climbed up out of the culvert and made his way along the shoulder of the farm trail toward the road. He walked in a crouch, in part for concealment and in part to keep warm. His muscles were cramped and sore, and he found himself staggering. No way could he outrun anyone. The pain in his back was starting to return as he warmed up. First, it was throbbing up and down the whole course of the left side next to his spine. In minutes, it was just a steady horrible stabbing. He felt wetness back there, but in the dark he couldn’t tell if he was still bleeding or just wet from the culvert slush. He didn’t know how much blood he had lost, but he was very weak. His vision was blurring, and he could feel his heart racing. When he began to shiver and sweat, he realized he was going into shock, just like the hundreds of men he tended to in the field. But, there would be no medic coming to his aid. He could not call out, “Corpsman!” and wait for help. He was on his own.

  He prayed that he wouldn’t collapse at the side of the road to become just another body like the thousands he had seen over the last six months. If he did, he hoped somebody would take his dog tags so his parents would know what happened to him.

  He made his way across the first side road and then alternately crept and staggered toward the road to Malmédy. Before he came to the road, he turned left, keeping about a hundred yards between himself and the road; just enough to keep the road in sight and allow him to parallel its course without actually walking on the road itself. He didn’t want to run into any Germans. Also, he knew from his trips back and forth that there were plenty of shacks and barns for him to hide in between there and Malmédy.

  By about three in the morning, he was getting dangerously weaker. His vision was blurring, and he was shaking badly. He still couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or the blood loss or both. But, he knew he might be dying. He talked to himself to keep awake and to pass the time. Then he became frightened, thinking he was going mad. Then he told himself that if he were going nuts, he wouldn’t know it, so that being scared about going nuts was good. This all was very confusing.

  Just about then, Marsh saw a barn, and he headed for it. He didn’t want to collapse out there in the open, and he knew for sure that collapse was not very far off.

  And he was right.

  He made it into the barn, but he didn’t make it into the hayloft.

  The farmer and his wife found him lying in the mud and manure of the barn floor at the foot of the ladder to the loft. There was blood on the ladder half way up, so they surmised that he had tried to climb and fallen. They carefully carried him back to the house, hiding him there for three days. He woke up off and on for the first two days, enough for them to get some hot soup into him, and then on the third day he came around.

  Their daughter, Nicole, was twenty-three. She was the only child of the farmer and his wife. She had married when she was very young, only seventeen, much against her parents’ wishes. Her husband had run away to avoid the war, and they had not heard from him for more than a year.

  Nicole had been strong-willed and defia
nt since a little girl. When Marsh was found in the barn, it was she who persuaded her parents—her mother most of all—who feared for their safety, to hide the young American from the Bosch.

  “They will kill him,” she pleaded.

  “And they will kill us for hiding him,” her mother said.

  “But we aren’t hiding him,” her father said, now convinced by her pleas. “We found him in the barn, n’est-ce pas?”

  “And if they don’t believe us? What then?” the mother argued.

  The father sighed, exasperated. “I’m not going to send that boy back to the Germans. That’s final!”

  They carried Marsh into the house, where Nicole insisted that he be placed in her bed. It was the warmest room in the house, backing onto the rear stones of the fireplace in the main room.

  Several times a day, Nicole washed Marsh’s wounds with strong soap and hot water. She bandaged him with shreds of her own clothing torn into strips and boiled to sterilize them. Then she piled as many quilts as she could find on top of him. He woke in a stupor at each dressing change, the pain just enough to penetrate his clouded brain. Then he fell back to sleep until the next time.

  On the third night, a storm front passed through. In the aftermath of the wind and a short snow squall, the temperature dropped far below freezing. Even the fire in the main room could not stave off the chill that permeated the house.

  Marsh rolled onto his back and cried out. He tried to change his position, but he was held fast by something. He could not struggle free. He could not, for some reason, move his arms at all. From down in the depths of sleep he forced his consciousness to focus. Had he been captured again? Was he tied up by the fucking Krauts?

  He struggled some more. Slowly, as his eyes opened and focused, he was aware of the loosening of his restraint. Before he could see in the darkness of the room, he could hear a soft sound in his ear.