Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“She was at the window when it fell,” Bonnard said. “But it wasn’t the glass that cut her. It was the clock. The blast knocked it off the shelf into her face.”

The Bonnards were close to shock, Denise saw, Trude’s gestures clumsy and reflexive and Bonnard gripping his ax and watching the flames as if they were animals that might suddenly turn and attack his home.

Denise and Jocko helped Madame Bonnard into the gatehouse and to a chair at the fireplace. They told Felice Bonnard, who was sixteen, to bring warm water and some clean cloths.

Later, when Felice took her mother upstairs, Paul Bonnard motioned to Jocko and Denise to follow him outside, where he proceeded up a cart trail that curved into the woods above the crater made by the V-1. He stopped in a glade, pointing into the crown of a tree where a body was suspended by the straps of a tangled parachute, the head twisted at a sharp angle, the legs turning slowly with the winds.

They thought at first the dead man was an American soldier — the helmet was a gray-green, the overcoat brown — but when the wind moved the body, they could see under the open overcoat the field-gray color of a German uniform and the shine of SS insignia.

“Have you seen others?” Jocko asked.

“No, only this man. We heard planes sometime in the night—”

“We’d better bury him,” Jocko said.

Bonnard brought the ax and a shovel from the gatehouse and he and Jocko hacked out a grave. Denise put the soldier’s automatic handgun and wallet in the pocket of her cloak and, after Jocko marked the grave with stones, they started back to the village, the shadows of the castle and Mont Reynard mingling with their own on the road down to the silver edge of the river.

“Can you send a signal?” she said.

Jocko shook his head. “I worked on the transmitter yesterday but Father Juneau came up to the choir loft. I wasn’t expecting him.”

“What do you think he knows?”

“Everything he can get his hands on, you can be sure of that.”

Denise Francoeur made the sign of the cross on her forehead and slipped her cold hands into the folds of her cloak.

December 15, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Friday, 1900 Hours.

On the night of December 15th, Sergeant Docker stood in a tent at Dog Battery headquarters checking the personal effects of Privates Gruber, Pierce and Spinelli with a soldier from a Graves Registration Unit, Private First Class Edgar Nessel.

The gear of the dead soldiers was spread out on army cots, revealed in bright detail by an overhead light bulb and the glow from a potbellied stove.

“We’ll make up a nice package of their personal things.” Nessel was a thin and nervous young man with slightly bulging eyes. “Clean uniforms and all their mail and postcards, of course. We don’t want any loose ends. Tidy is a comfort, I always say.”

The bodies of Spinelli, Gruber and Pierce, or what was left of them, had been wrapped in mattress covers and tarpaulins and trucked the previous day to a holding cemetery behind the lines.

Nessel checked a quartermaster form and Docker stared at what the soldiers had left behind them.

In Spinelli’s effects were pinups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth, a pair of dice, unopened chewing gum from his K-rations, a shaving kit, black oxford shoes, V-mail letters.

Pierce had a similar collection. And a slingshot. Docker noted with some interest, because he’d never seen him use it. There was also an ivory-handled knife tucked into a pair of Pierce’s neatly rolled GI socks. The knife belonged to Shorty Kohler and had disappeared a few weeks earlier. No point in making anything out of it now... ship it home, let it end up on somebody’s mantelpiece as a souvenir of the fallen warrior.

Gruber had apparently kept every letter from home since he’d been in the Army.

“Something’s missing, sergeant,” Nessel said. “Private Spinelli was issued a rubber poncho with a detachable hood. You happen to know where they are?”

“No.”

“I don’t like these loose ends.” Nessel made a pencil check on his list. “Means a statement of charges. But we won’t bother the families. Battalion will send the charges to Battery and they’ll deduct it from whatever wages are due the soldier.”

The tent flap was pushed open by Lieutenant Whitter, who came in and crowded close to the stove, pounding his hands against his upper arms and shoulders.

“Sergeant, you got us up to our ass in paperwork tonight,” he said, but it seemed his irritation was mixed with a measure of satisfaction. “Didn’t you tell those guys of yours not to fuck around collecting souvenirs?”

“Yes, I told them.”

“They’re like babies crawling around sticking their fingers in light sockets. You got to watch ’em all the time. Who in hell was in charge?”

“I was,” Docker said.

“Well, we’ll go into that later.” Whitter took a sheaf of typewritten pages from his overcoat and handed them to Docker. “Right now, I want you to check the statement you gave Captain Grant’s clerk and see if you got anything to add to it.”

Docker read the four typewritten pages. “No, sir, that’s it.”

“You don’t say for sure whether it’s a fighter plane, a rocket, or anything.”

Private Nessel gave Whitter a quick salute and slipped out of the tent. Whitter took the pages from Docker. “Your report and some others are going to First Army at Spa and up to Corps at Bastogne. I’ll tell you something else, Docker. It’s going from there to SHAEF and London. So I hope for your ass that you and your section weren’t drunk on some of the black whiskey you stole from Utah.” He pushed his way out into the night.

Docker stood alone in the tent that smelled of coal and wool and looked at the personal gear of the dead soldiers. The slingshot bothered him, the childish look of it. And Gruber’s letters and Spinelli’s pinups of Rita Hayworth and Betty Grable. Clean socks, clean uniforms, theater ribbons and Purple Hearts, a last tidy package courtesy of Graves Registration.

Dog Battery’s headquarters was in the fields of an abandoned farm about a dozen miles behind its line of guns, south and west of Salmchateau, a rural complex with stone barns and outbuildings chipped and broken by rifle and artillery fire. Pyramidal tents had been erected among the trees to provide quarters for Captain Grant and the officers and noncoms who maintained the battery’s support systems — Supply, Mess, Communications, Medical and Administration. Guards were posted at both ends of the battery “street,” a muddy passage running between the tents. Other guards stood duty at the gasoline and ammo dumps and the lean-tos that sheltered food and medical supplies.

The motor pool was quartered in the rear courtyard of the old stone farmhouse, separated from other battery installations by a broad meadow and a stand of fruit trees.

Nessel was waiting for Docker in the battery street. “Sorry to bother you again sergeant, but there’s one more little thing.”

“What?”

“These men, did they owe anybody any money?”

“I’m not sure, probably not. They didn’t gamble much — what else would they need it for?” He glanced along the dark battery street. Several soldiers were in line at the mess tent. Another group stood around the rough bulletin board nailed to a post near First Sergeant Korbick’s tent. But he saw neither Larkin nor Shorty Kohler, who had driven here with him.

“We like the families of the deceased to know they didn’t owe any money,” Nessel said. “Con men in the States check the local papers for obituaries, then write the family and claim the dead GI was in debt to them.”

Docker saw Kohler coming up the battery street from the direction of the motor pool.