Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

I cabled Camello, stating that Martin had escaped and that we wanted authority to pursue and arrest him. We received a one-word response from Teedle: "Proceed." I was still not sure which of the two I was actually searching for.

Although it was a little like playing pin-the-tail-onthe-donkey, Biddy and I chose to follow the 87th Infantry as it moved out of Saint-Vith toward Priim. We had encountered battalion commanders of the 347th Infantry Regiment in town and they had agreed to let us accompany them.

Virtually all the territory lost in the Ardennes offensive had been regained and some of Patton's elements were now mounting assaults against the massive concrete fortifications of the Siegfried line at the German border. The battle was progressing inch by inch, an advantage to Biddy and me, since it would make it hard for Martin to get far. Bidwell and I drove along just behind the fighting, going from one medical collecting company to another. By the third day, we had twice received reports of a little Red Cross nurse who'd presented herself at battalion aid stations. She'd helped minister to the wounded briefly and then disappeared with an armload of supplies.

On the front, the battle lines were constantly shifting, with each side making swift incursions and then drawing back. Several times Biddy and I found ourselves driving into firefights. However slowly, though, the Americans were gaining position and our troops were in a far different mood here than they'd been in during the Bulge. They were not simply more confident, but also hardened by being on enemy soil. Late on our third day, Biddy and I encountered an infantry platoon that had just taken a high point dominated by the house of a prosperous burgher.

A sergeant came out to greet us. "You figure this here is Germany?" he asked. I didn't know from hour to hour if we were in Belgium, Germany, or Luxembourg, but we compared maps and I agreed with his estimate. He then issued a hand signal to his troops and they rushed into the house, emerging with everything of value they could find. China. Candlesticks. Paintings. Linens. Two soldiers struggled through the door with an old tapestry. I had no clue how they even imagined they could get it back to the U. S. The homeowners had made themselves scarce but an old maid had remained and she followed the troops out, shrieking about every item, trying once or twice to grab them from the men's arms. When she would not desist, a thin private pushed her to the ground, where she lay weeping. A corporal delivered a set of silver wine goblets to the sergeant, who offered a couple to Biddy and me.

"I don't drink wine," Biddy said, which was untrue.

"Learn," the sergeant told him, and insisted on heaving them into our jeep.

We stayed the night in the house, where every man in the platoon seemed determined to consume the entire store of liquor they had discovered in the cellar. One literally drank himself into a coma. When a buddy tried to revive him by throwing schnapps in his face, the liquid splattered into the wood-burning stove in the center of the room and the flame leaped up into the bottle, which exploded. Several men were pierced by flying glass, and the couch and the carpet caught fire. The troops were so drunk they howled in merriment while they stomped out the flames, but the lieutenant in charge was irate, inasmuch as four soldiers had to be removed to the aid station.

In the morning, Biddy and I headed south. We were in American-held territory, no more than half a mile from the house, when half a dozen Germans, dressed in black leather coats and armed with Schmeisser machine pistols, leaped up from the ditches on either side of the road and surrounded the jeep. I could see they were SS, rather than Wehrmacht, because of the silver death's-heads over the bills of their caps and the Nazi runes on their coats.

My instinct was to shout out a stupidly casual remark like "Our mistake," and head the other way, but as the six came forward to disarm us, the full gravity of the situation settled on me. I had been off the battlefield ten days now, but I found it had never left me, as I suppose it never will. Within, my spirit shrunk to something as small and hard as a walnut and piped out its familiar resigned message: So if you die, you die.

They ordered us out of the jeep and drove it into a wayside of heavy bushes, marching Biddy and me behind it. As we walked through the snow, Hercules sat in the back of the vehicle, Cleopatra on her barge, surveying the scene with a struggling curiosity like the RCA hound staring into the trumpet of the Victrola. "Look at that dog," Biddy muttered, and we managed a laugh.

Once the jeep was out of sight, the Germans searched us, taking anything useful we had. Compass. Trench knives. Grenades. Watches. And, of course, Bidwell's camera. One of the soldiers looked at the lens and recognized it as German.

"Woher bast du die?" he asked Biddy.

Biddy acted as if he did not understand and the SS man raised his Schmeisser and asked the question again. Fortunately, he was distracted when the others found our store of K rations. They each tore through several boxes, tossing aside the cardboard covers with their wavy designs as they ate with feral abandon.

"Cut off from their unit?" I asked Biddy.

He nodded. They clearly hadn't seen food for days.

"Run for it?" he asked. I was still debating, when the German lieutenant came back our way and began to question me in terrible English. "Vhere Americans? Vhere Deutsch?" They obviously wanted to get back to their side.

I answered with my name, rank, and serial number. The Germans were far too desperate to be bothered with the Geneva Convention. The lieutenant motioned to two of his men, who took me by the shoulders while the lieutenant kicked me three times in the stomach. I was brought back instantly to the schoolyard, the last time I'd survived this panicked breathless moment when the diaphragm stops functioning after a blow to the gut. To make matters worse, when the air finally heaved back into my lungs, I vomited my breakfast on the lieutenant's boot. In reprisal, he struck me in the face with his gloved fist.

My vomiting seemed to catch Hercules' attention. Up until now, the deaf dog had been more interested in the discarded ration tins, but when I was hit this time, he bounded forward and started an enormous racket. He did not attack the German lieutenant, but came within a few feet, rocking back on his paws with his hot breath rising up in puffs, almost like punctuation, as he barked. The Germans immediately began glancing down the road while they futilely attempted to quiet the animal, raising their fingers to their lips, shouting at him, and finally reaching out to subdue him. When the men came after him, Hercules snapped at one and caught his hand, biting right through the leather glove as the German yelped somewhat pathetically.

There was then a single gunshot. The same SS man who'd been questioning Biddy had his pistol out. A little whiff of smoke curled up over the barrel and the dog lay in the snowy road motionless, with a bloody oval like a peach pit where his eye had been. Several of his comrades began shouting at the soldier who'd fired, afraid of the attention the shot would attract. In the confusion, Bidwell joined in.

"What the hell you'd go and do that for?" he demanded. The German soldier with the drawn Schmeisser appeared to have no idea how to respond to the berating he was receiving from all sides. When Biddy strode forward, intent on looking after the dog, the German recoiled slightly and his pistol ignited again in a short automatic burst. Gideon toppled, rolling to his back with three clean bullet holes in his stomach. It had happened so simply, with no preparation at all, and was so pointless, that my first reaction was that it could not be true. How could the world, which has always been here, undergo such a fundamental transformation in two or three seconds?