Ian Slater - World in Flames

Must run now. I am sorry, Davey, but I wanted to tell you right away. Please write. I’d love to hear from you.

Love, Lissa.

There were hugs and kisses.

“Hey!” came a British voice from outside. “Don’t make a meal of it, Yank.”

“Hero’s probably wanking himself off,” said another voice. It sounded like the sergeant, so that when David came out, he was ready for him. But it wasn’t. Instinctively the British soldiers stepped back, one pinned up against the water fountain, his sleeve getting wet. Brentwood’s face was white with anger. As he passed them, the men waiting for the toilet fell silent, and for a moment it was as if the noise of the train drowned all else, even the sergeant’s snoring, while David, mumbling, “Excuse me,” made his way back to his seat by the window, the letter now a crumpled, tight ball in his fist.

One of the soldiers waiting outside the toilet, a corporal, lit a cigarette and noted quietly, “A Dear John letter. You think?”

“I’ll put a fiver on it,” said an Australian gunner, arm in a sling.

“Dear John in the John,” a cockney quipped.

“Not funny, mate,” said the corporal. “Knock the piss out of you, that will. Rotten bitch.”

“He should chuck it. Throw it away,” said the corporal’s mate.

“Nah,” said the cockney. “Our ‘ero’s a bloody brooder, I reckon. ‘E’ll covet that, ‘e will. Read it over an’ over. Torture ‘imself proper. Drop ‘is bundle, ‘e will. No more gongs for him, mate.”

“Ah, I dunno,” said the Australian reflectively, drawing thoughtfully on the cigarette. “Might take it out on the Russkis and win another friggin’ gong.”

“A Purple ‘Eart’s only medal ‘e’ll get,” rejoined the cockney. “A loser.”

“Dunno,” opined the Australian, lighting a cigarette from the corporal. “Hears his bird’s getting screwed by the milkman. First he’s mad, full ‘o piss and vinegar, know what I mean? Then he goes really crazy — runs at a fucking machine gun. He’ll get his gong.” The Australian blew out a cloud of smoke and looked down at the cockney. “But it’ll be posthumous.”

“Well,” answered the cockney, “ ‘e won’t get it in bloody Brussels. All ‘e’ll get there is the clap.”

“No way,” concluded the Australian definitively. “Right now he hates all women, I reckon.”

“Who are you?” asked the cockney derisively. “Dr. Freud?”

“Listen, mate, I know about those blokes. Overachievers. Type A. Go, go, go, and then suddenly they look around and mere’s no one there. Then they can go either way. He’s on a high wire, mate, make no mistake.”

When Lili came through the carriage again, clutching a sheaf of papers in her hands, checking each patient had the right chart to avoid the kinds of bureaucratic foul-ups that so often bedeviled administrators trying to keep track of wounded as they moved from train to buses to ships, she saw David and could tell instantly something dreadful had happened to him. He was staring out the carriage window like an old man, the coloration in his face splotchy, teeth clenched like those patients she’d seen who ground their teeth at night and wondered why they woke up with a pounding headache — a look of such unrelieved bitterness in his eyes that it seemed to distort the very contours of his face.

Lili could only wonder what might have caused it. Her heart wanted to go out to him not only because she had found him attractive when she’d first seen him but because he was an American. In her father’s house the word “American” had always been uttered in reverential tones. When she was a child, her father had taken her to the South, deep into French-speaking Wallonia, to Bastogne, where the Nazis had made their deep armored thrust through Belgium in December of 1944. Lili had stood in awe of the huge monument outside the town with the Latin inscription, which her father translated: “To the American liberators. The Belgian people remember.” He had told her of how his great-grandfather and his wife and two children, like so many other Belgians, owed their lives to the Americans who, though surrounded by a ring of German steel in that bitter Christmas, wouldn’t surrender. At school, Lili had heard the story of how the American general, given the surrender terms by the German commander, had replied, “Nuts,” though her father—”in the interest of truth,” as he gravely told her — felt compelled to explain to her in order to save her any “embarrassment” as she grew older that what the American general, McAuliffe, after whom the town square in Bastogne was named, had actually said was not “Nuts” but an English synonym to do with, as Lili’s father put it, a part of the male anatomy.

Because of the fearlessness of her youth and because she had always assumed Americans were heroes, Lili felt that no matter how off-putting David’s mood or appearance was now, she must try to help him. He was, after all, far away from his home, and to have fought with such courage must have exacted a terrible cost. She was so used to seeing soldiers whose wounds were external, she had to remind herself that some of the most terrible wounds, as her father had so often told her, were unseen, inside the heart. Perhaps, she thought, he was worried about the coming ordeal of identifying the captive SPETS. It was not a thing, she imagined, that a soldier liked doing, even to his most bitter enemy, even though she knew such people must be punished. Perhaps after he had been to the NATO HQ, she could help him forget the ordeal by showing him around Brussels. She must be brave, she resolved, brace herself and risk his anger. The Belgians’ debt of honor to the Americans, her father had said, was eternal, and every generation must do its best to repay.

Five hundred miles to the east, on the snowy vastness of the alluvial Polish plain, the thunder of artillery was intense. Along the C-shaped front that took in Gdansk in the north to Poznan, 250 miles to the southwest, and Krakow, 250 miles to the southeast, the crashing of the artillery was so constant that it was said newborn babies were accepting the noise as normal. Since December 21, over a thousand Russian self-propelled 152-millimeter gun-howitzers, refueled by urgently rushed oil supplies from the Estonian shale fields, were mobile again and, together with the 2,037 lighter 122-millimeter guns still in action on the front, were laying down a wall of steel that had already destroyed advanced elements of the Dutch Forty-first and German Third Armored. And with blizzards moving in from the Baltic, advance Allied air cover was soon reduced to almost nil except for the all-weather ground-hugging Tornadoes whose British and German pilots were flying often no more than a hundred feet above ground level, denying Russian antiaircraft radar stations any telltale “bounce-back.”

The situation was made even worse for the Allies when the American helicopters, which had performed so magnificently at Fulda Gap when the Russian armored surges had first breached the NATO defenses, now found themselves hampered by lack of refueling depots. The helos, including the redoubtable Black Hawk UH-60—three-man-crewed air cavalry choppers, capable of carrying up to eleven fully equipped troops, antitank and antihelo missiles, plus M-52 mine disposal baskets — were fuel-limited to a hundred minutes in the air. Drop tanks could be fitted, but then the fuel weight/weapons equation shifted dramatically, making the missions doubly dangerous for the pilot. In short, as General Freeman was first to recognize in his forward HQ bunker less than forty miles from Poznan, his armies were the victims of their own success.

“Like small businesses,” he had told his aides. “All the business we want, fellas, and too little inventory.” After he’d broken out of the Dortmund-Bielefeld pocket, the speed of his advance from NATO’s central front had been such that urgently needed fuel, ammunition, and food supplies had either been slowed or stopped altogether in the truck convoys’ attempt to keep up with the troops in the blizzards sweeping down from the Baltic and the North Sea. In such weather, artillery notwithstanding, the opinion of most Allied commanders was that neither side could mount major offensives, particularly fighter sorties — NATO air forces, as much as the Soviets, thankful for the respite of the snowstorms so they could attend to the high levels of maintenance demanded by state-of-the-art aircraft. In any case, the pilots of the “super” birds like the F-15 Eagles and MiG Foxbats were presently as worn out as their fighters’ engines. Furthermore, apart from the Luftwaffe and RAF risking their Tornadoes in zero visibility, subjecting other billion-dollar airplanes and pilots to dogfights in blizzard conditions was a losing proposition. For the Allied chiefs, it was viewed as a good time to pause and consolidate. In this they were in concert with Washington.