“No.”
“They got big boilers and tank trucks on the other side. The water’s real hot. Make sure you get the soap off pretty early, or you’ll have to live with it.”
Harry left his things on the duckboard outside the shower, pulled out his razor, put in his last blade, and entered. The walls were canvas and not particularly clean, and the floor was a freight pallet that was slippery with slime and moss. Though it was almost dark, he could see a gleam that marked the chrome shower head. Soap and razor in hand, he pulled the chain. A thick pressurized stream so hot it reddened his skin hit him with a shock. Sometimes even fancy hotels did not have enough hot water. Not here. For half a minute he just let the water play over him. Steam rose, and for the first time in weeks he was actually hot. He got to work frantically with the soap, lathering and cleaning as if he were something very rough and dirty, which he was.
Not devoting so much as a second to removing the soap, he let the water do it in the course of things as he ran the remnants of the bar over a week’s worth of beard, until his face was covered by an inch of white mousse. Held under the stream of hot water, the new blade was supple and sharp, and by the time he was clean-shaven he had about four minutes left. He turned his face to the stream and slowly revolved so as to be covered everywhere. Never had water been so wonderful.
When it stopped, he dried himself, surrendered the thin towel to a bin, picked up his clothes and rifle, and staggered forward to the next station, a tent in which half a dozen lines of men were “puffed” with DDT. At the next station they dressed, combed their hair, and saw their new selves in clouded metal mirrors fastened to the canvas walls of the tent.
Fully dressed and armed once again, they went outside and waited in the snow before being seated in one of the huge mess tents. Everyone was so hot that no one wore a helmet or a balaclava, and while they were waiting their hair froze and snow dusted the tops of their heads. In the mess tent they picked up trays and went from server to server taking on food. At the end of this, Harry found himself sitting on a bench at a long table with a good space on either side of him. He had a knife, fork, spoon, paper napkin, and an aluminum tray upon which were a pound of pot roast, a pile of fried potatoes, corn, and a large piece of COM Z chocolate cake without icing. Hot tea with many sugars filled his canteen cup. The light that came through the high ceiling of the tent was silvered by the snow that had collected on the canvas, which in places sagged and dripped. From outside, the sound of gas burners penetrated what might have been a steady silence had it not been for the occasional huge thud of incoming German artillery. As the men ate, a hundred in Harry’s tent alone, they hardly noticed the concussions. They were clean and warm, with clean linen, and they were eating real food. That was enough.
Though hardly a word was spoken, from somewhere behind Harry came the words, heard as if faintly echoed from the vaulted roof of a busy train station, “It’s near Atlanta.” And during the meal a name was called out—someone who had left his dog tags in the shower. It was almost like a monastery, until a captain walked in, banged an aluminum cup against a tent poll as if there had been noise to suppress, and went through a recitation he had made many times before and would make many times again.
“Listen up,” he said. “General orders. I’m supposed to remind you of a few things, because we’ve been taking unnecessary casualties as people have gotten careless. Remember, European roads, especially in Germany, are intersected about every thousand meters by lanes at right angles. These are often swept by machine-gun fire. Don’t walk down them. Cross fast. Got that? That’s one.
“Two: How many of you are gonna die because you forgot how to attack a pillbox? Let me remind you. Don’t do it unless you’ve got the right team. Wait for it. Put it together. Get it right. You need two BARs, a bazooka, a light machine gun, two to four riflemen, and two men with demolitions. That’s a lot, but it works, and it’ll get the job done and probably save your goddamned life. There’s a method here. Follow it. Night approach. Dawn attack. Fire at the openings with everything you’ve got. Demolitions can then move to the rear. Blow the door. Toss in the grenades. Enfilade fire as the enemy exits if any are left. Okay? Don’t forget.
“And three: Everybody keep this in mind. A vigorous attack pressed relentlessly and with surprise—don’t slack—is the best chance you have of living through the war. It may not seem so even now after all you’ve done, but it is. If you plod toward the enemy he’ll hold out five times as long and kill five times as many of us. If you run him down quick he can’t and he won’t. Officers, noncoms, squad leaders—everybody—keep these three things in mind. That’s all.”
At the very last station, Harry was given five chocolate bars and three packs of cigarettes. Just before he got on the truck he passed some sort of welfare officer, his insignia obscured by snow, who asked, “Do you need anything?”
Almost universally the reply was a stunned repetition of the question—“Do I need anything?”—followed by uncontrollable laughter that was a gift in itself, of relief. And on the truck back, for a short time, they were as happy as babies in their mothers’ arms, because from start to finish, over a little more than an hour and a half, they were reacquainted with life, which gave them a reason to live.
The next day, after everyone had experienced three or four hours of happiness before things reverted to normal, a regimental combat team, one-third the fighting strength of a division, came down the road in several miles of trucks, armor, and infantry ready to press east. They were to pass through the several companies of infantry that had advanced to and held the wood, and who would follow them to their farthest salient, to hold once again as the main force recharged and waited for gasoline.
Everyone knew that soldiers rest and fight, then rest and fight, so the combat teams that were poised to thread through the lines onto the plain below thought no less of the soldiers who had been holding the position until their arrival. Some of the newcomers asked questions of Harry and the others, but most were quiet, depressed, sullen, or in dignified despair. As soon as they began to fight, their fear and melancholy would vanish, but now they stared at the pine boughs laden with snow, or rested their foreheads on their hands, and remembered things from childhood and things from not so long ago. Poets could not have been more contemplative, though some of the men drowned their fear in bravado and talked about what they would do to the Germans. Some would do what they said, if they could, if they found themselves in a house where they might kill the men and rape the women. They were very few, but they did exist, and they made the American lines less solid than they might have been, because their existence was a threat to body and soul.
The armor was in the lead, tanks ten feet apart stretching back on the road as far as one could see. The tankers spent the night as miserably as anyone else, because they could neither sleep in their tanks nor make decent fires. And because they were not as warmly dressed as soldiers who were outside for twenty-four hours a day in the cold and wind, they were like horses who find themselves in the field without blankets or their natural heavy coats.
Thousands of men were scattered unit by unit among the trees, waiting for first light. They were spared the stench of their own waste only because of the subfreezing temperatures and the winds that lifted warmth away from things so efficiently that a dead man or animal would hard freeze in less than an hour. Something hot to drink—from a thermos, a small concealed fire, or a can of Sterno’s patient work beneath a cup—was as appreciated and desired as if Venus had presented herself in the nude. More so, because in the hours before the attack the great sexual charge that for an infantryman is either fully on or fully off, was fully off. They breathed carefully, and slept fitfully. Just before dawn, officers moved among the masses of men and ordered them into roughly assembled formations. Having arisen from sleep into shattering cold, they tried to stop trembling, and when, disciplining their arms and shoulders, they forced them to be still, their teeth would chatter.
The tankers climbed into their tanks. At the signal of a dropped flag, they started their engines all at once. Not even the heavy snow would conceal the sound from the enemy dug in around the town, so, having alerted him, they rushed. But within seconds the huge rumble of scores of tank engines brought forth a barrage of heavy artillery that the Germans had been holding in reserve. 280-millimeter shells came in a shrieking arc over their heads and burst behind them. And then the explosions started walking back in a tightening pattern as if to spur the concentrated attackers out into the open. This may have been the plan, but the open, choked with delicately falling snow, was no longer a field of fire. Knowing that they could not be seen on these fields, because nature had covered them with a perfect smokescreen, the tank commanders were impatient to escape the walking barrage. A 280-millimeter shell could collapse a large house, shatter a concrete pillbox, or sink a ship. With a direct hit, it would obliterate a tank.
No longer needed in the line, which was about to be pushed forward radically, and desperate to leave the area of bombardment, the soldiers who had held the woods rushed to take their places on the tanks that were about to leave. No one was going to defy the incoming artillery. Leaving behind crucial items and smoldering fires, they ran to the tanks and climbed up on them.
From their lead position, Harry’s stick climbed on the forward tank. This was not as foolish as it might have seemed. They knew from long experience that in open country tanks fan out and the one at the head of the line would take a position on the extreme left or right, away from the point of the spear.
As shells were bursting behind them they climbed onto the first tank and knocked at its turret with their rifle butts. But the tank wouldn’t move until the officer standing in front of it dropped his flag to signal the attack, and he waited until everyone was on. Rice was on, Bayer was on, Johnson was on, Hemphill was on, Reeves was on, and Sussingham was on. But not Harry.
Harry, who was as athletic as any of the others, was unable to mount the tank because the gunnery flannel that he had wrapped around him made it impossible to vault onto the deck. He tried, but it was as if he were an old man with a bad back. As the column began to move, forcing aside the officer with the flag, Harry ran alongside and held out his hand. Bayer, whose weight was a steady anchor, went to the edge of the deck to help pull him up, but the tank made a slight turn and the track shot out toward Harry, forcing him to throw himself backward. Having lost his opportunity, he was left behind.
With hand signals, pointing to themselves and then the ground, they asked if they should jump off. Harry signaled back that they should stay on. Hemphill, who was holding Debra the beagle, asked by pantomime if he should toss her off. She was Harry’s dog. Harry said yes, and she was pitched into the snow. She rolled, righted herself, and ran toward her master and benefactor as he whistled to her over the sound of the armor. Stumbling forward, his carbine banging against his back, Harry tried to keep up, but couldn’t. Breathing hard and not thinking, he was driven on by the shells that, sighted-in during the retreat of the German artillery, had found their marks back along the road and blown whole truckloads of men into the air. The explosions were so massive that when they hit a vehicle they blew it a hundred feet or more off to the side. But when all they did was crater the road, they just as often flattened the small pines along it, allowing other vehicles to pass.
With the paratroopers riding atop it, the lead tank was about to move out of the trees when it stopped short. Harry kept running toward it. He saw its gun move and thought that perhaps it was going to fire an exploratory round dead ahead. The tank commander dropped into the turret. Harry slowed, as if to give himself time to understand what was happening.
During the night, shielded by the snow, the Germans—it must have taken fifty men—had pulled up an anti-tank gun by hand two hundred feet from the edge of the forest and set it down on the road just below a dip in the hill. The tank driver had seen it first, then the commander, then Harry, who shouted to his men to leap off. But as if in a dream the engines drowned out his voice.
The dog kept on running. Harry called to her. “Debra!” he shouted. “Debra! Come! Come!” It seemed insane to be calling so desperately, his heart breaking, in the almost blinding snow, after a dog named Debra, someplace in Germany, while looking into the barrel of a German 88. What happened, happened in a fraction of a second. But even as the light and flame burst from the dark spot that was the bore of the gun, and before he heard the sound, Harry felt sorrow, hopeless sorrow, and right before the shell hit, he exhaled as if he would never breathe again.
The first shot blew the turret off the tank and onto the north side of the road, where it lay like an overturned horseshoe crab, the cannon its tail. Harry watched his men launched twenty feet into the air and propelled backward, some over the tank that was second in line, landing on the road behind it, some onto the side of the road, beyond the turret. All in an instant, they were shot upward as if hit by a speeding truck. As they flew they tumbled, their limbs spread from their bodies. They knocked into each other, and they snapped like towels, with motion whipping through them from head to toe.
When the second tank saw the turret coming off the first, it hesitated and then started to back up. Paralyzed, Harry stood by its side, staring at those of his men splayed out unconscious in the snow behind it. Although it could not have been for more than half a second, it seemed forever before his nerves could communicate with his muscles. This half second would haunt him for the rest of his life. When finally he could move, he reached the backing tank, and, having unslung his carbine, beat the armor with the butt as he screamed for them to halt. Even as he was doing this, he knew that to the driver the sound would be only faint knocks, and that his voice could not be heard.
Anticipating the second shot, the commander had dropped down and closed the hatch. Nothing would stop the tank from its movement. Behind it, the motionless paratroopers lay, perhaps dead. Harry beat frantically with his carbine. His throat was raw with screaming. Then he dropped his weapon and ran toward the three men in the path of the backing tank. He had time to seize only the one nearest, whose helmet he grasped and pulled, dragging him out of the way. Though Harry didn’t know until later, it was Johnson, and although Harry exerted himself to the point where he thought his heart would burst, the right tread of the tank rolled over Johnson’s right leg from just below the knee down.
Harry was caught between freezing with horror at the sound of the treads crushing the two men he was unable to help, and the blood from Johnson’s leg reddening the snow. The sound was the same as that of a pile of twigs and small branches when a man puts his weight on them to compress them into a cart or a wheelbarrow. Skulls, bones, and ligaments were cracking and snapping. Harry was shouting, not words but something from deep in his chest as, at the same time, he mechanically found a tourniquet in one of his pouches and tied off Johnson’s leg. Then he started screaming for a corpsman, until a second shell hit and the crippled tank blew up.
The force of the explosion was like an incoming wave across a broad front. Harry thought he could see it, that it looked like the blurry, heated air above a highway in July or August. It propelled him back, parallel to the ground, sweeping over Johnson without effect. He was flying, and in the fractional moment before he blacked out, he felt and knew a thousand things. Among them, incorrectly, was that this was his death. Not only was it not terrifying or unpleasant, it was euphoric. It was the end of gravity and pressure and the triumph of light. As time began to stop, he sensed perfection. And although he saw no scenes of his life, and nothing was played for him like a newsreel, it was as if he could feel everything—not every emotion he had ever experienced, but only those that were deep and good—in a concentration so intense he would later recall it as resembling a slab of black stone. And as he flew without volition or control he felt as if the world were moving, not he. That he was the only thing that was still was a great comfort. And then, before he hit the ground, he found hi
mself in a painless darkness that he did not even know was dark.
How much later he couldn’t tell, but he awoke staring at a white sky from which snow was falling straight at him. Nor could he calculate how long he lay without feeling his body or being able to move. He wasn’t sure at first that he was alive. Like something that wasn’t a part of him, his right hand appeared before his face to clear away the snow that had accumulated on his eyelids. There wasn’t much, not enough to completely obscure his vision. He felt his limbs and moved them. Then he rolled onto his side. He was looking back on the road, along which armor was traveling in a line, its engines deafening. Riding atop most of the tanks, as always, were infantry. He turned over to look in the other direction. The hulk of the first tank was burning gently. The second tank was gone. The armor had cut a detour around the scene, smashing down trees to do it. Now it moved fluidly in a crescent, and returned to the road, passing the upended German anti-tank gun, on the way east, from which the thuds of battle came rolling up the hill.
A corpsman who was bent over Johnson held a bottle of plasma high in his left hand. Harry rose to his knees. Unable to stand, he walked on all fours halfway, and then, somehow, rose and staggered. His carbine lay behind the corpsman, half visible in the snow. “Are these your men?” the corpsman asked.
“Get an ambulance,” Harry said, as if he were on Central Park West.
“The road’s not wide enough for traffic in the other direction,” the corpsman replied. Harry knew this, but he had had to say what he said. “They’re going to bring a field hospital and set up right down there,” the corpsman told him, meaning just beyond the trees.
“When?”
“Should be very soon. We were behind the first five platoons. It should be now.” He was working on Johnson, who had awakened. The corpsman was preparing morphine, and had laid out pressure bandages. As Harry moved toward the others, the corpsman said, “I can’t help them. I checked.”