David Healey - Ardennes Sniper

The soldier dropped his cigarette, grabbed his rifle and spun toward the noise — his back to Cole.

Cole crossed the distance between him and the soldier in three bounding steps. He grabbed the man’s chin with his left hand, pulling it up and away, and then sank the point of the knife in his right hand into a spot just below the German’s right ear.

Cole thrust upward and the man’s body went limp — dead weight. He let it slump to the snowy ground.

He stood there a moment, trying to hear something besides his own heart hammering in his chest. He had killed his share of soldiers with a rifle, but never before with a knife. The brutality of what he had just done sickened him. He tried not to think too much about it.

He crouched down beside the dead German and waited several minutes. No shouts of alarm filled the night. If he was lucky, the scout was alone. He spent several minutes dragging the body deeper into the woods. It never failed to surprise him just how heavy a body could be — something that moved so gracefully on its own was just so much dead weight of lifeless bone and muscle. He stuffed the body as best he could under a windfall to hide it from view.

Back at the clearing, he retrieved his bundle of pickets and moved out into the open. He had already lashed the pickets together in pairs, so he now twisted the boards with the names on them to create a series of grave markers, which he thrust into the snow. He wasn’t worried about footprints — in fact, he made an effort to make a confusion of them so that it would look as if a number of men had passed among the graves.

The last thing he did was to take off his helmet, tuck the folded note Vaccaro had written inside, and then put the helmet on top of the cross that read “Cole.”

Anyone emerging from the trees on the sunken road couldn’t miss it.

Then he returned to the forest and found a likely looking pine tree that overlooked the clearing. He climbed up, rested his rifle across a bough, and settled down to wait.

And just like that, the Germans abandoned La Gleize. They moved across the open field to the northwest of the town and entered the forest. The trees here were old and shadowed the forest floor so that little underbrush grew to impede their way. They moved more easily than they had across the field because the boughs of the fir trees caught much of the snow, leaving just a few inches of snow that filtered to the forest floor. A sunken road through the woods made the way easier for a few of the walking wounded who had managed to escape with them.

They were taking a huge risk because it would not take a genius to see that this corridor of trees was the only escape route from La Gleize. Escape was the last thing the Allies expected to be on Friel’s mind. Through his binoculars, he had seen that the main road leading out of La Gleize remained heavily fortified, as if the Amis expected a breakout attempt at any moment. Still, there was such danger — to be caught here in the forest could mean being cut to pieces.

His orders demanded strict silence. When a man stumbled over a tree root, he did not so much as swear. If a man had to cough, he put his arm across his mouth to muffle the sound. No lights were allowed.

Eight hundred men moved through the woods in almost total quiet. Shadows and silence — that was all that remained now of Kampfgruppe Friel.

Behind them, they could hear the sounds of their remaining panzers being destroyed by the team left behind. A few machine guns chattered to distract the Allied forces into thinking that La Gleize was still being defended.

If the thought of leaving the wounded had brought tears to Friel’s eyes, the destruction of the tanks was just as emotional for the tank commanders. There was nothing that made a man feel so much like a god on a battlefield as commanding a King Tiger tank. Now they were setting their machines on fire, and they were mortal again. In the cold, tears froze on the cheeks of a handful of even the toughest tank commanders. The distant explosions as the panzers were destroyed sounded like the death cries of old friends.

Soon, the licking flames danced with a devilish light across the ancient stone streets and buildings. Ammunition within the tanks began to explode, muffled within. A few machine guns peppered the dawn, continuing to keep the eyes of the Americans on the town itself, even as they wondered what was going on.

Then the rear guard and demolition team slipped away in what remained of the darkness and ran across the open field, headed for the woods that had swallowed the rest of Kampfgruppe Friel.

Scharführer Breger was not among them.

Several hundred feet ahead of the main column, Von Stenger moved like a shadow. Dressed in winter white camouflage, he was nearly invisible. The woods and the creatures within it couldn’t be fooled, even if the soldiers behind him moved quietly. They knew something else was in the woods, and hunkered down.

Von Stenger was cautious, but his confidence grew with the dawn. He did not see any signs that someone had gotten there ahead of them. No American force seemed to be waiting in ambush.

But he did not let his guard down, moving silently forward.

Dimly, his mind registered that it was Christmas Eve morning.

The forest stretched on for more than two miles, cloaking the Germans perfectly. The terrain grew more rugged and rocky, so they followed an old sunken road bed through the woods. It must have been used by the local people, going into the forest to cut wood, but it clearly had not been traveled in some time. Then Von Stenger saw a clearing ahead where the sunken road emerged from the trees. This was where the danger began. By the time they reached the clearing, what remained of Kampfgruppe Friel would be funneled into one area. Out in the open, they would be vulnerable to attack.

He moved carefully into the clearing. Once again, all was quiet. The sun promised to come out that day for the first time in weeks. Already, dawn light played over the snowy trees, tinging them in brilliant green and white. The snow on the ground looked like purity itself. Von Stenger knew a beautiful day when he saw one, but while he admired his surroundings, he was more interested in what they might be hiding.

Nothing.

Birds flitted here and there. A squirrel chattered high up in the trees.

There was supposed to be a scout, but there was no telling where the man had gotten to. Maybe he had fallen asleep. Maybe he had given up and gone on to Germany alone.

In addition to the fact that they were now in the open, this clearing was a danger zone because they would be passing very close to the American lines. The only sign that anyone had been there recently was a cluster of graves, marked with wooden crosses. He barely gave them more than a glance. Such graves were scattered everywhere throughout the Ardennes, signs of a deadly skirmish. No one wanted to carry a body through miles of rough terrain, so the bodies were buried in graves hacked from the frozen earth, then marked with crude crosses. In this case, the Americans must have been using this quiet spot as a burying ground for their dead from the battle for La Gleize. The footprints in the snow looked fresh.

Von Stenger felt terribly exposed in the clearing, so he moved into the makeshift graveyard. At least it offered some kind of cover. The remnants of Kampfgruppe Friel would not emerge from the woods for several minutes. No sign of the enemy appeared. In the winter quiet, he began to relax.

He glanced at the names of the dead around him. Someone had taken the trouble to paint or scratch names on the crude crosses. These were American graves with names like McNulty and Turner. Many of the names could easily be German, such as the one on the cross for a soldier named Rowe. The sight of the last cross made him pause.