“Now I Company was back so far they couldn’t get up. You remember everything that was happening that day. (Plenty. Plenty was happening.) So the Colonel, he took a company away from the First Battalion and threw them in, so he’d have three companies to make the attack.
“That was around one o’clock. The Colonel and I went up this left fork that was sort of drawn off on the left, to watch the attack get started. It started fine. K Company sarted riding the tanks and the T.D.s, and then they moved up and got just below the crest and fanned out. Just as they should. Just as they hit that little crest, L Company on their right opened up with machine guns and 60-millimeter mortars and all that fire, to attract attention from K Company.
“The tanks and T.D.s got up the hill and the flak guns (German antiaircraft guns, which fire almost as rapidly as machine guns, being used for direct fire on the ground against the attacking troops) opened up first. The 88 which we knew was in there held its fire. When the ack-ack and the machine guns opened up, the men started to dismount from the tanks, just as they should, and they went on up and they went fine till they got out in the open on that big bare field and almost to the edge of the last field in front of the woods.
“About that time they really opened up with the 88s—the 88s and all that flak. One T.D. hit a mine over on the left by that little road, you remember, just before it goes into the woods, and the tanks began to run. Lost a T.D. and a tank and they all started backing up. You know how they are when they start backing up.
“They started coming back down across the field, dragging a few wounded and a few limping. You know how they look coming back. Then the tanks started coming back and the T.D.s coming back and the men coming back plenty. They couldn’t stay in that bare field, and the ones who weren’t hit started yelling for the medicos for those who were hit, and you know how that excites everybody.
“The Colonel and I were sitting by the house and we could see the fight and the way it started fine and good. We thought they’d got right through. But then this stuff starts. Then come four tankers tearing along on foot and yelling and hollering how everything was knocked out.
“Then I asked the Colonel—I’d been in the Third Battalion a long time—and I said, ‘Sir, I can go out there and kick those bastards in the tail and take that place.’ And he said, ‘You’re S-2 in a staff function and you stay where you are.’ That chewed my tail out. That made me unhappy.
“We sat there another ten or fifteen minutes, and the wounded kept drifting along back, and we were just there and I thought we’re going to lose this battle. Then the Colonel says, ‘Let’s get up there. This thing has got to move. Those chickenspits aren’t going to break down this attack.’
“So we started up the hill and we passed little groups here and there—you know how they drift together—and you know how the Colonel looks, and he is carrying his forty-five and walking up that hill. There is a sort of little terrace at the top where the hill starts to come down; under the cover of that little terrace were all the tanks and the T.D.s, and K Company was lined up along in a sort of skirmish line and they were all just sort of dead, and the attack was gone.
“The Colonel came up the hill and out over this terrace where they were all lying and he said, ‘Let’s go get these Krauts. Let’s kill these chickenspitters. Let’s get up over this hill now and get this place taken.’
“He had his goddam forty-five and he shot three-four times at where the Kraut fire was coming from, and he said, ‘Goddam, let’s go get these Krauts! Come on! Nobody’s going to stop here now!” They were plenty cold as hell but he kept talking to them and telling them, and pretty soon he got some of them, and in fifteen minutes he got most of them moving. Once he got them moving, the Colonel and I and Smith (Sergeant James C. Smith from Tullahoma, Tennessee), we went on ahead of them and the attack was going again and we headed into the woods. It was bad in the woods but they went in good now.
“When we got into the woods (The woods were close-planted fir trees, and the shell-bursts tore and smashed them, and the splinters from the tree bursts were like javelins in the half-light of the forest, and the men were shouting and calling now to take the curse off the darkness of the forest and shooting and killing Krauts and moving ahead now) it was pretty thick for the tanks, and so they went to the outside. They were shooting into the woods, but we had to stop them now because K Company had pushed through ahead of them way into the woods.
“The Colonel and I and Smith, we went on ahead and found a hole in the timber where we could get a T.D. in. Now the attack was going good on ahead and all of a sudden we saw a bunker right beside us, and they started shooting at us. We decided there were Krauts in it. (The bunker was completely hidden by fir trees planted over it and grass growing over it and was a subterranean fort on the Maginot Line style with automatic ventilation, concussion-proof doors, bunks fifteen feet underground for the men, special exit provisions so that it could be run over and then its occupants attack the enemy from the rear, and it held fifty SS troops whose mission was to let the attack pass and then come out and fire on it.)
“All there was left with us now was the Colonel, I and Smith and Roger, this French boy who had been with us ever since St. Poix. I never knew his last name but he was a wonderful Frenchman. Best boy in a fight you ever saw. These Krauts in the bunker started shooting at us. So we started walking over toward it and we decided we’d got to get them out.
“There was an embrasure over on our side, but we couldn’t see that, the way it was all planted over. I had only one grenade because I wasn’t expecting what we were going to do. We got over within about ten yards of the pillbox, coming in this side of it. We couldn’t see the aperture at the bottom of it. It all looked like a wooded hillock.
“They’re shooting sort of scattered all the while. The Colonel and Smith were at the right of it. Roger was going in right toward the aperture. You couldn’t see the fire.
“I yelled at Roger to get down, and right then they shot him. I saw the goddam hole then and I threw the grenade to go in, but you know how those apertures are beveled, and it hit and bounced out. Smith grabbed the Frenchman by the heels and started to drag him clear because he was still alive. In that slit trench on the left, there was a Kraut and he stood up, and Smith shot him with his carbine. You can tell how fast this happened because just then the grenade went off, and we all ducked.
“Then we started to get a lot of fire from the field out in front of the woods—the field we’d crossed to get into the woods—and Smith said, ‘Colonel, you better get down in that hole because here come those Krauts.’
“They were firing from the wheat shocks in the field right there in front of the woods and in that little tongue of brush. The Krauts started shooting at us from out there, which should have been our rear.
“The Colonel dropped one Kraut with his forty-five. Smith shot two with his carbine; I was in back of the pillbox and I shot the one who was in back of us across the road about fifteen yards away. I had to shoot at him three times before he stopped and then I didn’t kill him good because when the T.D. came up finally he was lying right across the middle of the road and, seeing the T.D. coming up, he sort of scrounged up and tried to get out of the way, and the T.D. went over him and flattened him out.
“The rest of the Krauts sort of took off across the field and we didn’t have any real trouble with that lot. Just sort of longrange fire. We know we killed three and we wounded some more that took off.
“We didn’t have any more hand grenades and the bastards in the bunker wouldn’t come out when we yelled at them. So the Colonel and I were waiting for them to come out, and Smith went off to the left and found a T.D. and brought it up. That was the T.D. that ran over the Kraut I had to shoot three times with that little old German pistol.
“The Krauts still wouldn’t come out when talked to, so we pulled that T.D. right up to the back of that steel door we had located by now, and that old Wump gun fired about six rounds and blast
ed that door in, and then you ought to have heard them want to come out. You ought to have heard them yell and moan and moan and scream and yell ‘Kamerad!’
“The T.D. had that old Wump gun pointed right in the door, and they started to come out, and you never saw such a mess. Every one of them was wounded in five or six different places, from pieces of concrete and steel. About eighteen good ones came out, and all the time inside there was the most piteous moaning and screaming, and there was one fellow with both his legs cut off by the steel door. I went down to see how everything was and got a suitcase with a couple of quarts of whisky in it and a couple of boxes of cigars and a pistol for the Colonel.
“One of the prisoners was in pretty good shape, not really good shape but he could travel. He was a noncom. The rest of them were lying down outside, all moaning, wounded and shot up.
“This noncom showed us where the next bunker was. By then, we knew what they looked like, and you could spot them by any sort of rise of ground. So we took the T.D. and went down the road about seventy-five yards to this second bunker—you know which one—and had this bird ask them to surrender. You ought to have seen this Kraut. He was a Wehrmacht, regular army, and he kept saying, ‘Bitty. S.S.S.’ He meant they were those real bad ones and they would kill him if he asked them to surrender. He yelled at them to come out, and they wouldn’t come. They wouldn’t answer. So we pulled the Wump gun up to the back door just like the other time and yelled to them to come out, and they wouldn’t come. So we put in about ten shots from the Wump gun and then they came out—what was left of them. They were a sad and bedraggled lot. Every one of them was in awful shape.
“They were SS boys, all of them, and they got down in the road, one by one, on their knees. They expected to get shot. But we were obliged to disappoint them. There were about twelve that got out. The rest were all blown to pieces and wounded all to hell. There were legs and arms and heads scattered all over that goddamn place.
“We had so many prisoners and nobody to guard them but the Colonel and I and Smith and the Wump gun, so we sort of sat around there until things sort of clarified. After a while a medical aide came up and looked at the French boy, Roger. He was lying there all the time and when they came to dress him, he said, ‘Mon colonel, je suis content. I am happy to die on German soil.’
“They put a tag on him reading ‘Free French’ and I said, ‘The hell with that,’ and changed the tag to read ‘Company L.’
“Every time I think about that Frenchman, it makes me want to get to killing Krauts again . . . .”
There is a lot more to the story. Maybe that is as much as you can take today. I could write you just what I Company did, what the other two battalions did. I could write for you, if you could take it, what happened at the third bunker and the fourth bunker and at fourteen other bunkers. They were all taken.
If you want to know something, get someone who was there to tell you. If you wish, and I can still remember, I will be glad to tell you sometime what it was like in those woods for the next ten days; about all the counterattacks and about the German artillery. It is a very, very interesting story if you can remember it. Probably it has even epic elements. Doubtless sometime you will even see it on the screen.
It probably is suitable for screen treatment, because I remember the Colonel saying, “Ernie, a lot of the time I felt as though I were at a Grade B picture and kept saying to myself, ‘This is where I came in.’ ”
The only thing that will probably be hard to get properly in the picture is the German SS troops, their faces black from the concussion, bleeding at the nose and mouth, kneeling in the road, grabbing their stomachs, hardly able to get out of the way of the tanks, though probably the cinema will be able to make this even more realistic. But a situation like that is the fault of the engineers who, when they designed those concussion-proof doors, did not expect to have 105-mm. Wump guns come up and fire point-blank at them from behind.
That was not provided for when the specifications were laid down. And sometimes, observing such sad sights and such elaborate preparations gone wrong, I have a feeling that it really would have been better for Germany not to have started this war in the first place.
F I V E
After the Wars, 1949-1956
The Great Blue River
Holiday • JULY, 1949
PEOPLE ask you why you live in Cuba and you say it is because you like it. It is too complicated to explain about the early morning in the hills above Havana where every morning is cool and fresh on the hottest day in summer. There is no need to tell them that one reason you live there is because you can raise your own fighting cocks, train them on the place, and fight them anywhere that you can match them and that this is all legal.
Maybe they do not like cockfighting anyway.
You do not tell them about the strange and lovely birds that are on the farm the year around, nor about all the migratory birds that come through, nor that quail come in the early mornings to drink at the swimming pool, nor about the different types of lizards that live and hunt in the thatched arbor at the end of the pool, nor the eighteen different kinds of mangoes that grow on the long slope up to the house. You do not try to explain about our ball team—hardball, not softball—where, if you are over forty, you can have a boy run for you and still stay in the game, nor which are the boys in our town that are really the fastest on the base paths.
You do not tell them about the shooting club just down the road, where we used to shoot the big live-pigeon matches for the large money, with Winston Guest, Tommy Shevlin, Thorwald Sanchez and Pichon Aguilera, and where we used to shoot matches against the Brooklyn Dodgers when they had fine shots like Curt Davis, Billy Herman, Augie Galan and Hugh Casey. Maybe they think live-pigeon shooting is wrong. Queen Victoria did and barred it in England. Maybe they are right. Maybe it is wrong. It certainly is a miserable spectator sport. But with strong, really fast birds it is still the best participant sport for betting I know; and where we live it is legal.
You could tell them that you live in Cuba because you only have to put shoes on when you come into town, and that you can plug the bell in the party-line telephone with paper so that you won’t have to answer, and that you work as well there in those cool early mornings as you ever have worked anywhere in the world. But those are professional secrets.
There are many other things you do not tell them. But when they talk to you about salmon fishing and what it costs them to fish the Restigouche, then, if they have not talked too much about how much it costs, and have talked well, or lovingly, about the salmon fishing, you tell them the biggest reason you live in Cuba is the great, deep blue river, three quarters of a mile to a mile deep and sixty to eighty miles across, that you can reach in thirty minutes from the door of your farmhouse, riding through beautiful country to get to it, that has, when the river is right, the finest fishing I have ever known.
When the Gulf Stream is running well, it is a dark blue and there are whirlpools along the edges. We fish in a forty-foot cabin cruiser with a flying bridge equipped with topside controls, oversize outriggers big enough to skip a ten-pound bait in summer, and we fish four rods.
Sometimes we keep Pilar, the fishing boat, in Havana harbor, sometimes in Cojimar, a fishing village seven miles east of Havana, with a harbor that is safe in summer and imminently unsafe in winter when there are northers or nor’westers. Pilar was built to be a fishing machine that would be a good sea boat in the heaviest kind of weather, have a minimum cruising range of five hundred miles, and sleep seven people. She carries three hundred gallons of gasoline in her tanks and one hundred and fifty gallons of water. On a long trip she can carry another hundred gallons of gas in small drums in her forward cockpit and the same extra amount of water in demijohns. She carries, when loaded full, 2400 pounds of ice.
Wheeler Shipyard, of New York, built her hull and modified it to our specifications, and we have made various changes in her since. She is a really sturdy boat, sweet in any kind of se
a, and she has a very low-cut stern with a large wooden roller to bring big fish over. The flying bridge is so sturdy and so reinforced below you can fight fish from the top of the house.
Ordinarily, fishing out of Havana, we get a line out with a Japanese feather squid and a strip of pork rind on the hook, while we are still running out of the harbor. This is for tarpon, which feed around the fishing smacks anchored along the Morro Castle-Cabañas side of the channel, and for kingfish, which are often in the mouth of the main ship channel and over the bar, where the bottom fishermen catch snappers just outside the Morro.
This bait is fished on a twelve-foot No. 10 piano-wire leader from a 6/0 reel, full of fifteen-thread line and from a nine-ounce Tycoon tip. The biggest tarpon I ever caught with this rig weighed 135 pounds. We have hooked some that were much bigger but lost them to outgoing or incoming ships, to port launches, to bumboats and to the anchor chains of the fishing smacks. You can plead with or threaten launches and bumboats when you have a big fish on and they are headed so that they will cut him off. But there is nothing you can do when a big tanker, or a cargo ship, or a liner is coming down the channel. So we usually put out this line when we can see the channel is clear and nothing is coming out; or after seven o’clock in the evening when ships will usually not be entering the harbor due to the extra port charges made after that hour.
Coming out of the harbor I will be on the flying bridge steering and watching the traffic and the line that is fishing the feather astern. As you go out, seeing friends along the water front—lottery-ticket sellers you have known for years, policemen you have given fish to and who have done favors in their turn, bumboatmen who lose their earnings standing shoulder to shoulder with you in the betting pit at the jai-alai fronton, and friends passing in motorcars along the harbor and ocean boulevard who wave and you wave to but cannot recognize at that distance, although they can see the Pilar and you on her flying bridge quite clearly—your feather jig is fishing all the time.
By-Line Ernest Hemingway Page 39