James Benn - The Rest Is Silence

It was the jeep. It had fallen on us, and judging by the working end of the gearshift a few inches from my eyeballs, it was upside down. That was the good news. The bad news was that it was on fire.

Burning rubber and blistering paint gave off an acrid spume of smoke that forced its way into my lungs and eyes. Kaz began to cough and hack, each spasm reverberating beneath me. I tried to call for help, but as I opened my mouth I drew in more of the smoke and felt the heat of the fire on the undercarriage, fanned by the wind and fed by the burst fuel line. It wouldn’t be long before the tank went and we roasted in a fireball of Uncle Sam’s Grade A gasoline.

“Heave!” A voice sounded from within a jumble of shouts and boots shuffling around the jeep. The side panel came off my back, and hands dragged me out as I kept a grip on Kaz and pulled him with me. “Clear!” Quick shouted as soon as Kaz was safe, and a dozen or so GIs let the jeep drop from their grip, scampering back from the flames licking out at them.

“Are you all right?” Quick asked, kneeling and looking into our eyes. For signs of shock, my mind dully registered.

“I think so,” Kaz answered, dusting himself off. “Now that I don’t have a jeep and Billy on top of me.”

“I’m fine,” I said, then noticed my torn pants and the red, oozing gashes on my legs. Plus my left arm was warm and sticky with blood. Maybe not quite so fine, I realized.

The next thing I knew, I was coming to in a field ambulance, my arm swathed in a bandage as a medic wrapped gauze around multiple wounds on my legs. Harding stood outside the open rear door, the medic telling him I’d be fine, nothing but superficial lacerations. I was about to say they didn’t feel superficial, but then I remembered the dead on the beach, and the others who must have been grievously wounded, so I kept my trap shut.

“What happened?” I asked, struggling to sit up on the stretcher.

“Constable Quick tells me a shell narrowly missing taking your heads off,” Harding said. “It flipped the jeep and tossed it on top of you. You were damned lucky it dropped the way it did. The seat well gave you space and protection.”

“Colonel,” I said, swinging my legs off the stretcher, “if I was really lucky I wouldn’t have been stuck under a burning jeep while our own side bombarded the beach.” Some people had the oddest way of looking at luck. “What I meant was, what went wrong with the shelling?”

“Misjudgment, error, incompetence,” Harding said, glancing around to be sure no one heard. “Some of the transports were slow in forming up, so the naval commander delayed H-Hour by sixty minutes. The Hawkins got word, but some of the transports didn’t. They launched on the original schedule.”

“Which put men on the beach right under the Hawkins ’s shells,” I said.

“Yeah,” Harding said, nearly spitting out the word. “You can’t change plans once troops are underway. Someone always misses the message. Normally it’d just be confusion. But today it cost lives.”

“I’m beginning to think this beach is jinxed,” I said. “First the corpse, then this. Not to mention a flaming jeep.”

“Keep it under your hat, Boyle,” Harding said. “I’ve already talked to Lieutenant Kazimierz and the constable. They understand what happened here has to be kept on the QT.”

“Why?” I asked. “I mean, it was an accident. Happens all the time in training.”

“Not in these numbers,” Harding said. “And there are other considerations you don’t need to know about. So get back to your swank billet and rest up. Right now I have to get these bodies moved out of here. Your resourceful constable has come up with transportation for you, so get back and take it easy.”

I didn’t argue. It wasn’t often that Harding told anyone to take a rest, and I began to worry that I was hurt worse than I thought. It sure felt that way as I eased myself out of the ambulance and looked around for Kaz and Tom Quick. They were in a jeep parked alongside of the ambulance, partially hidden. Tom helped me into the back seat as Kaz looked around like a furtive thief, which technically he was. He eased out onto the roadway, cutting in between two trucks. We followed as the deuce-and-a-half in front of us ground gears going uphill, the unsecured rear canvas cover flapping in the breeze. I caught a glimpse of limbs jutting out at odd angles from the darkness of the truck bed. A truck full of dead soldiers. As soon as we came to a side road, Kaz took it.

“You trade in ours for a newer model?” I said as Kaz floored it and headed inland, away from the concentration of men and vehicles, the quick and the dead.

“It was Tom who pinched it,” Kaz said. “How are you feeling?”

“Still a little stunned,” I said. “Since when do constables steal automobiles?”

“As it’s an American military vehicle,” Quick said, “I am participating in Lend-Lease, not stealing. Your Colonel Harding thought it was an ingenious rationale.”

“It helped that the major we borrowed it from was a fool,” Kaz said.

“How so?” I asked from my perch in the rear.

“He cursed the Royal Navy for the shelling. Called the captain of the Hawkins a British son of a bitch.”

“General Eisenhower doesn’t mind officers calling each other sons of bitches,” I explained to Tom. “But he hates it when they say someone is an American or a British son of a bitch. Ike is all about Allied unity.”

“Colonel Harding was too busy to discipline the major, but I knew he was furious with him. So he turned a blind eye to our enterprise,” Kaz said.

“Well, it worked out well for us,” Quick said. “Otherwise we’d still be waiting for a lift. It seems every other vehicle was pressed into service to deliver the wounded to hospital and the dead to wherever they’ll be buried.”

“How many?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” Kaz said. “Harding did the count of dead and wounded himself and wouldn’t say. He threatened everyone within earshot with a court-martial if they spoke of the incident.”

“It’s not like Harding to worry about public relations,” I said.

“I think it is more than that,” Kaz said. “There’s a secret he’s not sharing with us.”

“Need to know,” I said, a shopworn phrase by now.

“And we do not need to know,” Kaz said. There was nothing much left to say. We left the deserted South Hams and drove through villages and past fields alive with people, animals, and crops; everyday scenes that seemed to mock the devastation we’d left behind. Bodies and burnt houses, only a few miles from these peaceful hamlets where life continued much as before on this fine spring day. I wanted all these people to understand the sacrifice their neighbors had made, to know about the American GIs suffering in hospitals, and the dead tossed in trucks for a secret burial. Maybe they bore their own burdens of loss, or maybe they were oblivious to the world carrying on around them. It didn’t matter. Deep down, I knew I simply didn’t want to carry this secret locked up inside me. But orders were orders, as went the insistent logic of the army.

“Tom, how’d you miss getting hit by those shells?” I asked. “I seem to recall you were pretty exposed.”

“I saw they were headed in our direction and ran,” he said. “The force of the blast bowled me over, but the shrapnel missed me, thank God. After all the German ack-ack we flew through, I’d hate to go for a Burton courtesy of His Majesty’s navy.”

“A Burton?” Kaz asked.

“Buy the farm, go for a Burton, it’s all the same. Die,” Tom explained. “Burton is an ale. So gone for a Burton and never come back, see?”