The German bucks, flails, punches madly, catching Rio with a stunning hit on the side of her head. She lets go of the koummya, and the German now scrambles frantically to escape the hole. He’s halfway up and out, but the koummya sticks out from the bottom of his uniform trousers like a horrifying Popsicle stick.
Rio makes a mad grab for the koummya, pulls it out, making a slurping sound, then grabs his uniform and pulls him back down. And now, the koummya goes around his throat and she pulls back hard.
She sits panting in the foxhole, recovering as the two Germans bleed and die at her feet. Then she crawls back to the hole and gathers her freezing, weary flock.
29
MARTHA SWANN, RIO RICHLIN, AND JENOU CASTAIN—ELSENBORN RIDGE, BELGIUM
Private Martha Swann is a draftee. She is eighteen, five foot six inches tall, a redhead, pale, with distinctly green eyes.
Exactly twenty-one weeks earlier Martha received her notice from the draft board in Chicago, Illinois. She reported, was sent to basic training, tossed on a boat, landed in Britain, spent days in the Repple Depple, and was shipped forward.
And then, before she’d even seen her own assigned unit, it had started: the brutal fight that would come to be known as the Battle of the Bulge.
Martha is from an academic family. Her father is a professor of Oriental Languages at the University of Chicago, and her mother is a secretary in the dean’s office. She herself has never had much interest in either of her parents’ work, though she is bookish in her own way, reading voraciously, everything by the greats like Dickens and Tolstoy, but especially more modern, more exciting works by Agatha Christie and Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who she loves to distraction. She loves mysteries, the more hard-boiled the better. She enjoys nothing more than a scene involving some cheap hood with a gat in his hand being slapped down by Chandler’s great detective, Philip Marlowe.
But prior to basic training she had never even seen an actual gun, let alone fired one. When she reads tales of action and derring-do, Martha never sees herself as the hero. She is not even in her imagination the hero’s girlfriend or moll. She sees herself as one of the anonymous passersby, one of the minor characters perhaps glimpsed on a street corner or sitting at the counter of a diner. She is by nature an observer, not a participant. She attends university football games dutifully, attends drama club productions a bit more enthusiastically, cheers on the lacrosse team, but always from the sidelines.
Martha is happy in the role of observer. Happiest when she is almost invisible, like one of those secondary characters Marlowe might describe as a “sweet little package, but not one I had time for.”
Her father did all he could—going hat-in-hand to an alderman to see whether he could get his daughter a draft deferment. The war would soon be over, after all. People said by Christmas. But the alderman had either been powerless or unwilling. And the truth is that Martha did not hate the idea of being drafted because—so she thought—it would be fascinating to observe the process, to be able to see it up close. To watch the war and take mental notes.
The first time her training sergeant had punched her in the belly with the butt of an M1 she had experienced the shattering and disorienting realization that she was not to be an observer. She was to be a participant.
After that she had done her best—she is not rebellious by nature, and is smart and willing—and by the time the army deemed her ready for war she had qualified with all infantry weapons, could perform basic first aid, and knew how to march in formation.
That last, she suspected, would not be of much use here in the eternal, dense, dark, frightening forests of northern Europe.
She’d been taken in the night to a freezing, mud-and-snow-slush tent camp where she had spent the next day writing letters home and reading before being called out by a young PFC with the unlikely name of Benjamin Barry Bassingthwaite.
“But everyone calls me Beebee. Hell, even I call myself Beebee.”
He’s in a jeep. The back is loaded with musette bags stuffed with who-knows-what, some crates of C rations, and what looks like a half-dozen bazooka rounds.
“I’m Martha Swann.”
“Let’s go, Swann. Have any idea how to fire a fifty?”
She almost says, “A what?” before realizing he means the .50 caliber machine gun mounted on the jeep. It rests atop a short pole mount, with the long barrel pointed forward over her head. “I’ve never . . .”
“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come up.”
He grinds the gears, drops the clutch, and the jeep goes bouncing and careening away, out of the camp and down a wooded lane. The sun is down and the wind is up and Martha is freezing within seconds.
“Cold?” Beebee yells.
“Yes!”
“Nah.” Beebee laughs. “You’re not cold. But you will be.”
How Beebee is steering is a mystery to Martha. He has not turned on his lights. It is pitch-black but for some faint starlight. And now snow begins to fall in fat flakes. From time to time a tendril of a bush will slap her shoulder as they race along. Her face is numb. Her ears ache. Her nose is streaming and burning.
In the not-very-distant distance Martha hears artillery, an ominous rumble. Beebee pulls the jeep off whatever faint trail they’ve been bouncing along and plunges into the untracked woods. But not for long. He careens to a stop and kills the engine.
A shape appears, illuminated only by the glow of a cigarette.
“That you, Beebee?” a woman’s voice asks.
“Yep. And I brought a replacement for you, Castain.”
“Fug the replacement, did you bring coffee?”
“I got what I could. It’s in the back.”
The woman says, “Hey, Chester! Help us move this gear.”
Martha is given a box of C rations to carry, and four of them, Corporal Castain, PFC Beebee, Private Chester, and Martha, tramp into the woods bearing gifts.
They come to a fallen tree, and Martha is told to drop her box.
“All right, come with me, whoever you are,” Castain says.
“Martha Swann.”
“No one cares,” Castain says. She leads the way, and Martha hurries to keep up. “You’ll spend the night in Mazur’s hole. He dug it well.”
“Mazur?”
“Pity about him, he was hell with a bazooka.”
“Is he . . .”
“Nah. But he won’t be running any footraces any time soon.” Castain chuckles.
She follows Castain through near-pitch darkness made even more opaque by snow falling thick and hard. Her boots crunch on frost, feet plunging three inches, six inches, sudden drops into holes that trip her up. She spits snow out of her mouth and wipes it from her eyes. Tears stream from her eyes, not tears of sadness but cold, tears sliding down to freeze on her cheeks.
Martha is from Chicago. She has spent hours out in Chicago winters riding her sled down the hill or entering into snowball fights with other kids in the neighborhood. This is as cold as a Chicago January, certainly no more than a dozen degrees Fahrenheit, but the difference here is that there is no fireplace-warmed parlor, and no hot cocoa by that fire while the family’s maid, Wilma, lays a plaid blanket on her lap and clucks, “You’ll catch your death!”
There is no escape from this cold. No respite. She is in the forest, a place infinitely stranger to her than the streets of the city.
She looks up and suddenly realizes, to her utter horror, that she has lost Castain.
She spins, breath coming in throat-rasping, freezing gasps of steam. Trees. Nothing but the shadows of trees against snow. She knows she must not call out—Castain has urged silence. But she is lost! Lost in the middle of a forest with nothing at all to guide her. The panic grows swiftly and—
BOOM!
Bright yellow flames sear her eyeballs and stun her ears.
BOOM!
This explosion is above her, over her head! She drops to the ground, babbling incoherently, random disconnected words a
s . . .
BOOM! BOOM!
Something falls on her, and in unreasoning terror she rolls over to beat at it before realizing it is just a thumb-thick branch.
BOOM!
A hand grabs the collar of her coat and yanks her to her feet. “Move!” Castain shoves her in the back, propelling her forward as—
BOOM!
Castain yanks her back, twists her to the right, and says, “Get in!”
There is a hole at Martha’s feet, and she slides down into it with Castain bundled in that same slide and—
BOOM!
In the hole now and Martha realizes she has wet her underwear. Her teeth chatter. She thrusts her hands under her armpits and bows her head trying to get her freezing, running nose into the scarf at her neck.
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The flash of explosions shows her Castain’s face for the first time, and Martha the careful observer sees a certain prettiness barely evident beneath dirt and a scarf wrapped around much of her head.
They huddle in the hole as Martha realizes that water is seeping into her boots. How can water even be liquid at this temperature?
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The sides of the hole bounce against her, bruising her, as the 88s thunder and pound. Dirt and wood shards clatter down on Martha’s helmet, and she realizes she is crying, not just runny eyes, crying, wracking sobs that join the shaking of chills.
“I want to go home!” Martha cries out, a child’s cry.
And suddenly, as if on cue, the artillery stops.
Martha’s first instinct as the lull extends is to climb out, to escape this vile pit of fear and wet. But Castain holds her down.
“Uh-uh. Give it a minute.”
Sure enough, after a several-minute pause, a half-dozen more 88s come screaming in. One blows a tree clear out of the ground and it falls tearing through the branches of other trees, scattering snow everywhere.
Castain lifts her head and peeks out. “Goddammit, I guess the fugging tree couldn’t fall the other way. Could’ve been good cover. All right, kid. I gotta go. Oh, yeah: the call sign is ‘Hair.’ The response is ‘Brush.’”
Castain levers herself up and out of the hole.
“I don’t . . . You can’t . . . I don’t even know where the Germans are!”
“Oh, they’re over that way,” Castain says, waving negligently. “Most likely they’ll be along shortly.”
“But what am I supposed to do?”
“Shoot the fuggers, what do you think?”
Alone.
Martha Swann is completely alone.
She has no watch, no way to keep track of time. Minutes might be hours, but more likely, she realizes, time is passing with extreme subjective slowness. Snow falls into the foxhole, and with freezing feet she tamps it down into the slush, hoping it will freeze solid and she can stand on it. She can no longer feel her toes, her nose, her ears or fingers.
The forest at night makes strange sounds, dripping, rubbing, soft clattering. Each sound might be a German.
How many times has she read some novel where the author talks about a character’s heart being in their throat? It no longer seems like such a cliché. She can barely swallow.
A sound. A furtive, cautious, creeping sound.
“Hair!” she calls out in a tremulous tone.
“Shut the fug up,” comes a terse whisper. Then, a bolt of fire, a loud crack, and the sound of running, falling . . .
“Hah! Got him!” a male voice says, coming from the blackness to her left.
Had someone just shot a German?
She hears crawling and scuffling and low, distinctly Anglo-Saxon curses. Then, “Hah! It’s a baby deer! Meat!”
BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
The artillery comes again, and again Martha rocks back and forth in the bottom of her hole until it ends. She no longer cares that she is weeping. She no longer cares that she has peed herself.
And then, a female voice, strong and confident, yells, “Here they come!”
And instantly from ahead comes the rattle of small arms fire. Someone to Martha’s right fires, and the female voice yells, “Wait till you have a target!”
Then all at once it seems everyone has a target, the night lights up with muzzle flash to her left, to her right, and dead ahead. She forces herself to stand on legs that want so badly to collapse. She looks out and sees right there, right there, a gray uniform.
The German fires his rifle.
Martha sees the flash. Hears the bullet strike packed snow behind her head.
And something . . . snaps.
Freezing, weeping, snot running down her lip, Martha Swann grabs her rifle and does not return fire; instead she climbs out of the hole as the German fires again and misses again.
Then he turns and begins to run away as a now-screaming Martha chases him.
A shot rings out. The German falls, and through the veil of bloody rage that has seized Martha’s mind she sees Rudy J. Chester. He says, “Get back in your hole, you idiot!”
But there’s a certain laughing admiration in that “idiot.”
It’s a small probing attack, nothing more, and the Germans are driven off.
Martha crawls back to her hole, slides in, and falls instantly asleep.
Rio had made a hole in the ground the only way now possible: by clearing away the snow to reach the soil beneath and then setting off a grenade.
The ground is frozen. The grenade shatters the top layer and allows her to insert the blade of her entrenching tool. But the ground is frozen at least a foot down, and once she manages to dig and hack her way past the frost she all too soon found water.
One of the first things Rio had done after leaping at the opportunity to add Frangie to her rump platoon had been to ask Frangie to do a twinkle-toes inspection.
Now Frangie slides down into Rio’s foxhole. Both are wrapped in every stitch of clothing they own. GIs have taken to stripping dead Americans and sometimes dead Germans of boots, coats, hats, sweaters, gloves, and, above all, socks. There are any number of frozen dead Germans in the woods, but very few wearing overcoats at this point. Rio has a gray wool scarf wrapped around her head and tied at the back like some bargain-basement pirate, with her helmet shoved down over it. Frangie had a wool watch cap pulled low and her clean socks stuffed up under the watch cap to cover her ears. Her helmet unfortunately pushes the socks down, exposing the tops of her ears to cold.
Or more cold. Because no part of either woman was anything but cold. Cold was everywhere. Cold was in everything. Cold was inside them, no longer kept at bay; it had infiltrated them, lurked inside them now, weakening muscles, bringing on debilitating shivers, spreading a leaden lethargy.
Hungry. Lonely. Scared. But above all, cold.
Rio sometimes wonders how anyone holds out. Every now and then the Germans—who during daylight are within sight across a snow-covered field—would warm up their loudspeakers and shout, “Surrender, Americans! Warm beds and hot meals await you!” And sometimes when Rio looked into the whiskered or just filthy faces of her soldiers she wondered if they might not have been tempted . . . but for one word.
Malmédy.
The word, which had been unknown a day before, is now on every American GI’s lips.
Malmédy.
GIs had fought before this. GIs had hated before this. But the American army after Malmédy, after the deliberate murder of American prisoners, was an army stripped of doubt, stripped of ambivalence. The American army after Malmédy had a single unifying goal almost as powerful as the goal of getting home alive: killing SS. An army that had thought the war almost over, an army ready to go home as soon as possible, had become an army of hunters.
Rudy J. Chester comes stumbling in at the head of a three-person patrol composed of himself, Beebee, and the new replacement who had run screaming at the Germans the night before.
“Hey, Sarge! We got a prisoner!”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Frangie says. “But you ne
ed to put the fear of God into Molina or she’s gonna lose some toes.”
Rio gives the medic a boost up and out, and Chester drops and sits at the edge of the hole, legs dangling. He has a piece of rope tied around the neck of a German soldier.
“Good work, Chester,” Rio says.
“What are you going to do with him?” Chester seems possessive of his prize.
“G2 says we send all prisoners to them for questioning,” Rio says. “Castain?”
“F-u-u-u-g!” comes the groan from the next hole, some seventy-five feet away. Their line is thin—very thin, with far too much space between foxholes.
Jenou crawl-walks over. “What?”
“Prisoner.”
Jenou’s eyes travel from Rio to the German to Chester. “Ah,” she says.
“Take him down the hill to company,” Rio says. “Take um . . . take Beebee, maybe he’ll see something to scrounge. I’ll expect you back before nightfall.”
It is all coded speech and coded looks. A little show for the benefit of some of the newer, greener troops, those whose notions of right and wrong had been formed in churches and synagogues and conversations around the dinner table and have not yet been mangled and twisted and rearranged by too much experience of war.
The prisoner is SS, and while the American GIs have forgotten the names of a hundred Italian villages, and a hundred more French and Belgian towns, one place-name is burned deep into the minds of every American soldier, never to be forgotten, never to be forgiven.
Malmédy.
Jenou locates Beebee who, after walking the early morning patrol with Chester, is attempting to hide in his foxhole and sleep. But Jenou pokes him with the butt of her carbine.
“Come on, Beeb. Let’s go for a nice walk in the woods.”
They slog along, taking turns holding the German’s rope.
“Kamerad? Amis?” the German says from time to time in a pleading voice.
“We taking him to company?” Beebee asks.
Jenou gives him a look, and Beebee falls silent. The German senses something very wrong and starts again, “Kamerad? Kamerad. Amis! No Hitler! America Deutschland, yes? Kamerad?”
Purple Hearts Page 30