Blunt dragged Herr Schloss out to Lieutenant Oliver, who was still waiting with his riflemen on the cobblestones of Sainte-Mère. “Shoot the little son of a bitch. He’s a Nazi spy.”
“But I can’t just …”
Herr Schloss shivered and got down on his knees. “I am not a spy. I am a clerk, a paymaster, bitte.”
“Where are the other villagers? Your captain got rid of every one, including the village priest, and replaced them with Krauts. So you could have your boiled potatoes and schnitzel while they guarded the coast. And then they all disappeared…. You wanna stay alive?”
“Yes, yes, Mein Herr.”
“Then you’ll take us on a walking tour of this village and show us where every mine is placed, with every trip wire, or you’ll end up with your Heinie ass on one of your own trick toilet seats.”
And so they toured this fake Tyrolean village with Herr Schloss as a walking minesweeper, and with Lieutenant Oliver and the Twelfth’s demolition team. Herr Schloss was shrewd enough to sense that he’d found a real protector—this graduate of the Citadel.
“Herr Oberleutnant,” he muttered, “I am of some use, yes?”
“You’re doing fine, son,” Oliver said, though Schloss was more than twice his age.
The demolition team dismantled the triggers attached to every toilet seat. And while they were touring the village, one idle dogface reached through the broken glass of the bakery window and plucked out his prize—a gigantic pretzel. He gnawed at it, wouldn’t share his plunder. His face turned brackish green. He grew dizzy, stumbled across the cobblestones, his mouth full of bile.
“Medic,” another dogface shouted, “medic—it’s an emergency.”
The first dogface fell to the ground, while his whole body trembled, like someone having a seizure. And then the trembling stopped.
A medic arrived. He crouched over the dogface and couldn’t find his pulse.
“We’ll have to bag him,” the medic said, sniffing the half-gnawed pretzel.
“What happened?” the second dogface asked.
“Cyanide, I guess. Why’d he go near the window?”
Captain Blunt arrived with Her Schloss, the lieutenant, and his demolition team. Blunt didn’t waver for a second. He took out his Colt .45 and shot the little grocer in the head, the wind whipping blood into the lieutenant’s eyes. Oliver stood there with his mouth agape.
“Salinger,” Blunt called.
Sonny arrived with Corporal Benson.
“Saboteur, Salinger. Mark it down.”
And that’s when Sonny had a revelation, as that crooked church spire appeared with a sudden pull in front of his eyes. “Airborne,” he mumbled. “A paratrooper got battered by the wind and landed in this village. His silk hooked onto some lump of metal, and the Krauts shot him down like a dog. I’m sure of it. That damn grocer must have hid the body somewhere—I’ll bet Herr Schloss really was a captain in the SS.”
It was Corporal Benson who found a dead paratrooper in the nave of the church, embalmed in silk. The boy’s boots were gone, and the blood on his face had hardened into a red beard.
“Holy moly,” Lieutenant Oliver said. “Salinger, you’re all right. It was the SS.”
2.
THE BOYS FROM GRAVES REGISTRATION buried the fallen paratrooper in the churchyard of Sainte-Mère with a little marker, while the regimental chaplain delivered a sermon.
“Here he lies, one of our mighty sons who sacrificed himself …”
Sonny couldn’t bear to listen. The chaplain’s speech had nothing to do with that sky soldier and what he might have felt hanging from a spire that bent under his weight in a village of swastikas and red flags. The chaplain swept away all the dignity, all the fear, all the strangeness of the boy’s last moments.
Meanwhile, the Twelfth used the dead grocer’s castle as its headquarters and canteen, but its commanders remained in a quandary. They couldn’t unriddle the bocage—field after field of Norman hedgerows that would have to be taken from the Krauts one field at a time. Lieutenant Oliver had been promoted to company commander on his first day in Normandy, and now he wanted Sonny and the skeletal captain from Counter Intel on his own assault team of riflemen.
A ghostly quiet descended upon Sainte-Mère. Boys of the Eighty-second Airborne had landed in the bocage and couldn’t punch their way out of that earthen nightmare. And it was the Twelfth’s job to “rescue” the paratroopers from hostile territory and move deeper into the Norman countryside with the Eighty-second. But its strategists couldn’t come up with a master plan, not in that wild, unpredictable growth.
It took Oliver’s squirrel shooters half a day to cover the first hundred yards. Krauts in green summer wool would rise right out of the bocage with their bayonets and machine pistols. Without any collaborators to collect, Sonny dove into the fray with his M1. He saw the mad, wolfish hunger in the eyes of Krauts he was meant to kill. It was savagery in slow motion—men snarling, biting, shooting, and ripping at one another in a strange rhythmic dance he could hardly believe was happening.
These must have been the former guardians of the bunkers and tunnels on Uncle Red, who’d taken over Sainte-Mère and might have murdered the village priest, and who poisoned the pretzels in the bakery window, booby-trapped every toilet seat, and took potshots at that lad from the Eighty-second, with his silk caught on the crooked spire. They were ferocious under their wide helmets, their faces contorted into hideous masks. They yelped and cursed the Amerikanische Schweinehunde, even as some of them lay near the hedgerows, licking their wounds. And still neither side appeared capable of seizing ground, of capturing that stone-filled farmer’s field. The struggle could have gone on forever, ending any notion of an Allied juggernaut across Normandy, and the great American gamble to reach the Rhine before winter.
The struggle concluded as capriciously as it began, with the Krauts vanishing into another field and leaving their wounded behind. But the Twelfth had witnessed the carnage of these soldiers from Sainte-Mère, who had butchered boys of the Eighty-second dangling in the treetops; several Krauts had “surrendered” on Uncle Red, while machine gunners standing behind them ripped into the regiment … and then ran into the dunes without a sign that they had ever existed.
Lieutenant Oliver sang a Christian song and shot the wounded Krauts as graciously as he could.
“Can’t be helped, Salinger. No Prisoners. That’s our battle cry—and the motto of the Fourth.”
“Since when?”
“Since we landed on Utah … and they tricked us with that false surrender on the beach.”
Sonny was also a trickster. That’s what the CIC was all about: enticing information from collaborators, spies, and potential saboteurs. And now Sonny, with his rabbinical beliefs concerning the human spirit and the holiness of mankind, nourished on Park Avenue, with Miriam Salinger at his side, had become a hunter and killer of men with his M1 and his Colt. And he still had to watch over Captain Blunt while he broke through the bocage with his fellow dogfaces, where he encountered the next German ambush and the next. Where did all these Krauts come from? Every last homicidal maniac in Normandy couldn’t have been billeted in an obscure French village with German delicacies in the window—a bit of homeland away from home, a stage set to draw the Americans in and have them sit on wired-up toilet seats.
Sonny couldn’t help but feel that this curious battleground on shifting parcels of land was much more fickle than Hitler’s Atlantic Wall or a transplanted Tyrolean village. An entire German regiment had arrived out of nowhere, or must have been waiting, waiting in the hedgerows.
General Roosevelt limped like a scarecrow from company to company with his Colt in one hand and his cane in the other. “Boys, we can’t leave the Eighty-second stranded. We have to marry up.”
But how could Sergeant Salinger and Company E marry up with sky soldiers who couldn’t be found? The dogfaces rushed deeper and deeper into this labyrinth of hedgerows, wondering if they had wandered precipitou
sly into their own burial ground. Sonny wrestled in some forgotten field with a German boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with blond eyebrows and a wisp of a beard.
I can’t kill this kid.
The young soldier lunged at him with his bayonet, and Sonny knocked the bayonet out of the kid’s hand, told him in German to please do them all a fucking favor and find another field and another war. The kid howled once and disappeared into the foliage. And that’s when Sonny saw this insidious commando—or forest creature—with a blackened face, who was wearing German pantaloons and a GI field jacket, and went about in bare feet.
“Hey, you,” the creature said, his scalp camouflaged with twigs, “stop right there, and be quick about it. Who the fuck are the Andrews Sisters and what are their first names?”
“They’re balladeers,” Sonny said. “Patty, LaVerne, and Maxene….”
The commando persisted. “Who’s the prettiest one?”
“That depends,” Sonny said. “Patty is much prettier, but I prefer Maxene…. Who the hell are you?”
“I ain’t finished yet. Who played shortstop with Joltin’ Joe in ’41 and ’42?”
Sonny was reluctant to answer. “The Scooter, Phil Rizzuto.”
“You’re all right, kid,” the commando said, introducing himself as Capt. Phil Clare of the Eighty-second, while he proceeded to explain the odyssey of his jump into Normandy. Landed miles from his drop zone, he said. Clare was captured by a Kraut patrol but managed to elude those boys.
“Is that why you’re wearing Kraut pants?”
That was another skirmish. The captain had to survive on wits alone. He lost his boots in an ambush. He was second in command of his battalion, he said. And while he sat on his haunches, other paratroopers with blackened faces showed up with a pair of Kraut boots for their captain. They had metal crickets that served as a signaling device for the Eighty-second.
Sonny hadn’t met soldiers like these before. Never mind the charcoal and the crickets. They were scalp hunters, and hadn’t come to the Far Shore to seize territory, but to kill Krauts. They kept their own box score and counted every kill. They weren’t uncertain in the bocage. And Sonny realized that the Twelfth hadn’t arrived at this spot to rescue airborne infantry. It was the scalp hunters who’d come to lead the dogfaces out of the morass.
They had a string of ears attached to their cartridge belts, Kraut ears caked with blood. It seemed ghoulish. Captain Clare could recall the circumstances of every ear he’d collected.
“The first one,” he said. “That was a beaut.”
“I’d rather not hear about it,” Sonny said.
“You CIC boys,” Clare said. “You’re devils. You dismantle a guy, mutilate his mind and soul, and you consider that okay.”
“But we’re not torturers,” Sonny said.
Clare scratched his chin. “What do ya mean? We kill a guy before we cut.”
And the colloquium ended right there. Sonny couldn’t match Clare’s logic, nor his stealth. The sky soldiers sang out their credo as they marched across the roughened terrain.
Who are you? The Eighty-two Airborne, Airborne
That screed served notice that the Krauts weren’t simply battling riflemen from across the Channel, but scalp hunters who kept trophies of their kills. The Krauts had their own scalp hunters, Sonny supposed, men drawn to that screed, fighter to fighter. But it didn’t last very long. The Kraut machine gunners dwindled. There were fewer and fewer surprise attacks. If they found some loner in German wool, Clare dismissed him with a wave of his hand, like some medieval king. Sonny didn’t realize it at first, but the battle of the hedgerows had ended. No one, it seemed, wanted to engage these scalp hunters. Hitler’s elite had withdrawn to Cherbourg.
General Roosevelt sat in a portable chair that his aides had settled on a hill near the very last field at the mouth of that maze. He was lauding the Twelfth to Captain Clare.
“We married up and got you out of this mess, didn’t we, Captain?”
“You sure did.”
Clare admired this gimp of a general who’d gone into the hedgerows with his boys, clutching a cane. He might have fallen without that stick in his hand. And yet he seemed to have little fear. His raincoat was riven with bullet holes. He’d shot at Krauts between the hedgerows.
His eyes were bloodshot, and his left hand started to shake. He should have been invalided out of the war. Yet here he was, on this clandestine battlefield, where whole companies of Krauts lurked behind hedgerow after hedgerow … until the sky soldiers swarmed down upon them with their own brand of thunder.
Roosevelt saw the string of ears on the captain’s ammo belt. “What’s that, Captain Cowboy?”
“An amulet, sir.”
The general smiled. “Sergeant Salinger, you ought to arrest this man. He’s been practicing a kind of cannibalism.”
“Amulets are beyond the pale of my jurisdiction, sir,” Sonny said, jousting with the general.
“Well, make a note of it,” Roosevelt said, rising from his chair with one great shiver and limping off a battlefield with the bodies of German soldiers strewn about like ragged harlequins with missing ears. He had a constant crook in one shoulder, like a hunchback, and he was burdened with a dreadful pallor. He had no business being here.
“Should I help you, sir?” Sonny asked.
“I’m fine, soldier,” Roosevelt said with a wince. “Thank you.”
He got through the hedgerows with his cane as a kind of baton. But he tripped and fell, this broken little man who was the Fourth’s first and last general in the field. Sonny picked up the brigadier and carried him in his arms, like a child. Roosevelt couldn’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. Sonny fed him water from his canteen. “Slow gulps, sir, or you’ll cough up whatever you swallow.”
“Salinger,” the brigadier said, “are you my nurse now?”
“No, sir.”
Roosevelt struggled out of Sonny’s arms and continued to hop along. “But I thank you kindly, soldier.”
Sonny knew he wouldn’t last. His heart gave soon after he entered a little Norman village in a captured Kraut truck that he used as his personal caravan—none of the medics could revive him. He’d just been promoted to a two-star general and never lived to learn about the promotion. Roosevelt had paraded through Normandy sick as a dog and still he persevered, a two-star general limping after his boys from the grave.
Sometimes, once or twice, Sonny could feel the wetness of a whisper behind him, a telltale touch of air that belonged to General Roosevelt in his ill-fitting helmet, strapped on at a crooked angle. He wasn’t the Fourth’s mascot or regimental ghost. He marched; he sat down on a wall to catch his breath. And then he vanished, just like that, and the boys had to fight without their fallen deputy commander, the only general who had been with them on Uncle Red.
PART THREE
Cherbourg
June 1944
1.
THE LITTLE HOUSE WOULDN’T STOP ROCKING. Rails fell off the garden wall. Shingles splintered. The crumbling chimney sounded like rats dancing on the tilted tiles of a rotten roof as the bombardment of Cherbourg continued with its own fierce noise, which was like a dissonant, half-crazed rhumba that Sonny might have danced to at the Stork with Oona O’Neill. He had a sudden whiff of her perfume, and nearly stumbled.
They were ten miles or so from Cherbourg, interrogating the local chieftain of the French fascist militia, whom several washerwomen had cornered and captured in this very house, which belonged to the chieftain’s petite amie, a fascist postal worker. The chieftain, Jean-Marie Merlot, was twenty-two, and wore a borrowed Gestapo uniform and a beret. The washerwomen had scratched his cheeks and broken the fingers of his left hand. Sonny appraised him as a supercilious young devil who had profited from the war. His nose was stuffed with mucus. He cupped his broken fingers in the palm of his left hand and blew on them from time to time.
Sonny and Corporal Benson had their own jeep again, parked behind the l
ittle house. The bombardment of Cherbourg had been going on for days. The Krauts had erected their makeshift castle, Fortress Cherbourg, a ring of battlements around the harbor, like a winding staircase with metal teeth. They also had minefields, racks of barbed wire, ditches, and subterranean tunnels on the landward side, surrounded by hills with another ring of battlements, and Sonny was forlorn that he wasn’t with his regiment and the men of the 82nd and the 101st, insane cavaliers, like Captain Clare.
The Allies couldn’t keep their tanks and trucks and jeeps supplied with petrol without capturing the port of Cherbourg. And yet Sonny was stuck here in Rauville-la-Bigot with a member of the milice, a beret over one eye. Jean-Marie had been the lord and master of this village until a day ago—mayor, sheriff, shylock, and executioner. He and his thugs had occupied the Hôtel de Ville and had their own private café and bordello, Le Chien Méchant. But he was a wiser thug than most. He hadn’t interfered in the daily commerce of Rauville-la-Bigot, hadn’t demanded tribute. He strutted around in his Gestapo uniform and grabbed a few dim-witted farmer boys as slave laborers and had them shipped to Germany. He hadn’t been paid a sou by his masters in Berlin. He inspired fear and deep distrust, but most of his tasks were ceremonial. He fêted Gestapo captains from Cherbourg. He had fascist parades.
Sonny was convinced that this smug militiaman had been inside the makeshift fortress, and would be vain enough to offer him some vital clues that might help the Allies seize Cherbourg and its prize harbor.
Captain Blunt wasn’t with him and the corporal in Rauville-la-Bigot. Blunt was closer to the German lines, interrogating Krauts who had surrendered during the constant pounding by the Allies. The lamps in Jean-Marie’s little office blinked on and off. The floorboards rumbled beneath them.
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