Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Over the years it seemed to Docker he had matured and hardened as a soldier in several distinct stages. At first he had tried to mask his anxiety and fears by pretending they didn’t exist, because this seemed the only acceptable attitude to assume, the one he had absorbed from books and school and other recruits. Then he had learned something different from the panic they had all been seared with at Kasserine in North Africa, and in Sicily he had begun to trust his unrooted anxieties, to depend on unspecific suspicions about terrain and incongruous silences, examining these intuitive alarms as carefully as he would the condition of his weapons.

Eventually the instincts that caused him to be aware of danger escalated through repetition to a higher perception, a complex set of reflexes that were like physical sensors, monitoring devices as dependable as his eyes and ears. And now, standing alone on a sleeting hill in Belgium, Docker was paying close attention to the warning of his combat instincts.

Everybody was so goddamn sure the war was about over. That was part of what disturbed and alerted him. (“Ah tell yuh, Dockah, this lil ole pig-stickin’ is over, ” Whitter had told him just a week ago.) And it wasn’t only green troops regretting they’d missed all the action, it was the noncoms talking about the jobs and women they were going back home to, and sewing new hash marks and stripes on their tunics, officers ordering Ike jackets and “pinks” run up by tailors in Paris and Brussels. Talk of eating and drinking, wistful discussions of glorious foods and beers and whiskeys; these had always been a traditional, time-honored preoccupation and fantasy of soldiers in all armies, but now there was a sense of the immediate in the leisurely discussions of crab and turkey gumbos. New England chowders, baked beans and hams and steaks and fried potatoes and pies and cakes and doughnuts, not as if these delights were waiting in the fantasy kitchens of towns like Duluth and Mobile and Boston and New York, but were in fact steaming and frying and bubbling for grateful soldiers just beyond the next range of hills.

Air Force Intelligence (according to Lieutenant Whitter again) insisted there were no German troops in the Ardennes. But Allied planes hadn’t been flying for a week. And no one knew for sure what might be moving under that heavy cover of fog and clouds.

Nevertheless, everyone was certain it was winding down, even Dave Hamlin was convinced of it, Hamlin, three thousand miles away on a college campus in Pennsylvania, was just as complacent as everybody else. Only last month he had written: “It’s not that I’m tired of being a surrogate cock for you heroes because I’m not. But fair is fair; wrap things up, come on home and get yours. ”...

Corporal John Trankic checked the breechblock of the cannon, climbed down from the firing platform and walked through the snow to Docker. Trankic’s bulk was emphasized by the wool sweater and scarf he wore beneath a field jacket and overcoat as he studied Docker now with an appraising frown.

“What the fuck’s bothering you?”

“We’re taking a break here,” Docker said. “Long enough for a piss call and chow.”

“You worried about the new guy? What’s his name — Schmitzer?”

“No, I think he’s all right.”

“I’d say it was pretty chicken shit of him kicking Spinelli in the ass that way. Live coconut. Hell, it was just a joke.”

“Schmitzer didn’t see it that way,” Docker said. “Look, try to get a signal through to Battery or Battalion.”

“I been trying all day. Bull.”

“Unless you want to switch to smoke signals, stay on the radio. If you get through to Battery, I want to talk to Captain Grant.”

Section Eight’s X-42 radio receiver-transmitter was packed in its leather carrying case and strapped to the side of the jeep where its antenna had free play above the windshield and rear seats. It was essentially the same communications system used in command cars and spotter jeeps; it could monitor signals from the divisions on their flanks and occasionally — depending on the weather and configuration of the valleys and mountains in their immediate vicinity — could pick up German units ahead of them and transmitters operating to the north with Montgomery’s British armies.

“Okay, let’s get with it.” Docker walked to the big trucks, ghostly shapes in the fogs now, and cupped a hand around his mouth and yelled for Dormund.

Private Chet Dormund climbed awkwardly over the tailgate of the truck and stood panting in front of Docker, his head hanging and his fingers moving nervously along the seams of his fatigue trousers. His mouth was open and his breath caused the heavy snow to melt and form drops of moisture on his chin and lips. When Docker told him this was a chow break, the section’s cook shifted his weight uneasily, his boots making a liquid sound in the sleet and snow crusting the ground.

“The guys’ll get on me, sarge,” he said. “It’ll be all cold. I can’t light a fire, so the guys’ll get on me.”

“Start your fire between a couple of trees and put a tarp over it.”

“You mean like tie it between the trees?”

“Right. Let’s have some good hot food. Open a dozen cans of K-rations, beans and franks, roast beef hash, whatever you got. This may be the last meal today. Any biscuits left from breakfast?”

“They’re cold and hard as wretched rocks, sarge. They’ll get on me for it.”

“The engine blocks are still warm. Start one of the trucks and put a pan of biscuits on the block and close the hood.”

“You damn right, sarge.” Dormund nodded vigorously and went to collect his supplies.

“Any luck?” Docker asked Corporal Trankic.

Trankic closed the top of the leather case to protect the radio from the snow and made a thumbs-down gesture with his hand.

“Not a fucking thing, Bull,” he said. “Some yackety-yak from a civilian station in Brussels, could have been a resistance transmitter, and some shortwave static from God knows where.”

Docker removed a map from a clip under the dashboard of the jeep and spread it across the frosted hood, securing two of its sides with his carbine and binoculars against the gusting winds. When one corner of the map continued to snap and flutter, Docker pinned it down with his helmet. The canvas straps in the helmet liner had made deep creases in his thick dark hair, and the settling snow formed patterns in them that matched the touches of gray at his temples.

“With a shave and a good night’s sleep, you could pass for fifty,” Trankic told him.

Docker studied the map, his eyes narrowing against the stinging winds. He rubbed a hand over his head, enjoying the pleasant discomfort of massaging hair and scalp against the constriction caused by the canvas straps of his helmet. With a gloved fingertip he drew a line south from Liège to the Allied railhead at Bastogne. Fifty miles, perhaps sixty. He couldn’t judge the distance in terms of time; bridges might be down, narrow mountain roads packed and impassable with snowdrifts. His section was somewhere between those big towns, traveling on a line roughly east of Trois-Ponts and Malmédy.

“So what the hell’s bugging you?” Trankic said.

“Take a look at the map.”

The battalion had crossed the Meuse River at Namur the first week of December, the mission of its thirty-two gun sections to provide antiaircraft and antitank protection for various elements of the 28th and 106th Infantry Divisions.

Docker and Trankic studied their line of march, which curved in an easterly direction from Namur toward Germany. The towns of Werbomont, Manhay, Vielsalm were behind them now. They had passed through them at night, the houses and shops blacked out, trucks and guns noisy in the narrow streets and windswept squares, with Larkin at the wheel of the jeep and Docker beside him plotting the course on a grid map braced against his knees.