Ian Slater - Rage of Battle

Freeman stopped, but it wasn’t for breath. He wanted to make sure every man in the hut had his eyes fixed on him. They did. “Now I’m gonna tell you something else. It’s the last thing Yesov will expect. Every goddamned tinhorn reporter is telling everyone that the DB pocket is on its last legs.” He turned to the brigadier and the other British officers who had gathered to watch the mad American. “Why, last night even your BBC were telling your own people we’re about to fold. Well, we’re not going to fold.” He snatched up his helmet and gloves, pushing them sharply in front of him to underscore his point. “We are going on the offensive!”

There was silence; even the crackle of the radios seemed to have died. There were no cheers, no “ja!”s from the German officers present, one obersleutnant, lieutenant colonel, commenting to his colleage, “Kindlicher Qtatsch! “—” Nonsense.” Did Freeman, they wondered, really think that this “silly American football pep talk” would have any effect? Would he expect the headquarters company, most of them career officers, to be suddenly filled with elation?

Freeman certainly didn’t expect it. He knew that an order to the top-echelon commanding officers, no matter how forcefully delivered, was not enough to galvanize a dispirited army, and so within minutes he was in his command Hum-vee, its driver peering through the smudge of windshield as the wipers howled, heading through the blanket of softly falling snow to visit individual battalion commanders, Freeman noting the increase in Russian artillery, their distinctive thuds louder than the quieter thump of American artillery. “Cheap gunpowder,” he told his aide, Col. Al Banks. It was almost certainly the softening up before what Freeman believed would be a massive Russian frontal and flank assault. The NATO artillery battalions were firing intermittently, then-supply of ammunition dictating restraint, one that could not help but be noticed by the Russian divisions, boosting their morale even further.

“We have to keep telling our boys,” Freeman shouted over the high-gear whine of the Humvee, “that concentrated fire is far more effective than blanket random fire.” His aide found it difficult to concentrate with the rolling, crunching noise of the creeping barrage coming toward them from the Russian artillery around Bielefeld. The racket made it even more difficult to hear Freeman, who, as usual, insisted on standing up in his Humvee, gripping the top of the windshield, his leather gloves now covered in snow, the general seemingly oblivious to the increasing menace of the enemy’s artillery, the whistle of shot above them and the clouds of cordite, burning rubber, and fuel that, wafting westward, smudged the white curtain of falling snow. Freeman’s expression, beneath the goggles, was one of eager expectation.

“Looks like a kid at a fairground,” grumbled a GI, one of the bedraggled remnants of a reconnaissance patrol making its way back wearily to their battalion headquarters.

“He’s mad,” said one of the loaders in a cluster of 120-millimeter howitzers, the harsh, metallic aspect of the discarded shells now softening, melding into a mound of virginal white as the black spaces between the brass casings filled with snow.

With the Humvee nearing the perimeter, Al Banks heard the splintering of timber and an eruption of black earth only a few hundred yards ahead of them, his eyes, like those of the driver, frantically searching either side of the road for some kind of shelter, the pines of the forest too close together for the Humvee to hide in them. The road turned sharply to the left. Ahead they saw a small bridge had been taken out, one of the bridge’s elegantly carved wooden posts miraculously intact, its dwarf’s face smiling sweetly beneath a hiker’s hat capped with snow.

As the shelling increased, Banks thought that for a moment enemy intelligence must have somehow found out where Freeman was and “bracketed” his position, ordering its artillery to saturate the area. The driver, seeing a small forester’s hut in a clearing a hundred yards to the right of the bridge’s ruins, wasted no time in pulling the Humvee off toward it, the other two Humvees, one front and back of the general’s, braking and following.

Approaching the hut, Freeman saw it was unlocked and what he thought was movement inside. He spotted discarded ammo belts and empty cans. He saw the movement again — something orange. Drawing his pistol from the shoulder holster beneath his camouflage jacket, he flicked the safety off and opened the door. Inside the gloom he heard a huffing sound, like someone out of breath, as if they’d been running. Then he saw a blackened face gazing up, terrified, from a pile of Hessian sacks. The soldier, an American, didn’t move; the woman — her green-and-brown-splotched Bundeswehr jacket open, breasts rising and falling rapidly beneath her khaki T-shirt — reached quickly for her trousers, crumpled by her side. Looking first at the soldier as be grunted and rolled off her, she gazed up in terror at the general. Freeman saw the flash of Day-Glo orange, the woman clutching her trousers.

“Sorry… sir…” began the GI, his camouflage greasepaint catching the light from the snow as he scrambled awkwardly to his feet, two feet in one trouser leg, falling and knocking over a pickax and shovel in the corner of the hut.

“Where the hell’s your squad?” asked Freeman.

“Don’t know, sir. We got separated…”

The general holstered his.45. “Well, son, finish up here and get aboard one of our jeeps. We’re going up to the front. You—” He looked across at the German woman”—and your young lady friend can come with us. If that isn’t too inconvenient?”

The soldier was too frightened to answer. Freeman left the hut. “Goddamn it, Banks!” he said. “I’ve been in this man’s army for over forty years, and the incompetence we harbor never ceases to amaze me.”

The shelling seemed to have subsided, or at least passed beyond the immediate area, the Humvee drivers taking the opportunity to brush off as much snow from windshields and windows as possible.

“Take a message,” Freeman told Al Banks. “Immediate and confidential. SACEUR.”

Is it necessary to compound the danger to our fighting men by the issuance of Technicolor rubbers, which can be seen by the enemy at a thousand yards in snow conditions? The resulting injury to our men from enemy fire would be far more hazardous than that which you seek to avoid.

The message puzzled both Supreme Allied Command Europe and Commander in Chief, Channel Forces, in Northwood, England, until it was explained by an American liaison officer that “rubbers” were not “erasers” but American slang for condoms.

“Oh—” replied a brigadier. “Oh!”

Mirth in the British officers’ mess aside, SACEUR realized that the American general had a point quite apart from the fact that over 12 percent of all casualties in all armies were due to venereal disease — often higher than the casualty rate suffered in combat.

In any event, the story of the general’s encounter with the battlefield lovers swept like wildfire through the decimated ranks of American X Corps and other contingents around the perimeter, including those among the American airborne who had not been blown off course into enemy territory beyond the drop zone. By the time the story had reached Dortmund, only fifty miles in the rear, it was attaining mythical proportions and was completely changed, the story now being that Freeman “comes across one of our guys humping a Fräulein and says, ‘What the fuck are you doing, soldier?’ Well, this dogface looks up at Freeman and says, “This little honey bee if she’ll let me, General.” So Freeman says to his aide, ‘Al, you’d better promote the son of a bitch. Any man that quick on all fours deserves a battlefield citation.’ So his aide says, ‘You want him made a sergeant, General?’ and old Freeman says, ‘You make him a lieutenant. And that’s an order!’ “