Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“I slipped on the road,” Kohler said. “I stepped in something.”

“You stepped in something with your hands, you silly bastard?”

“Go fuck yourself,” Kohler said, but he was laughing, his breath fusing in white bursts with the cold air. “I had to do something, know what I mean? Some of the guys told me Korbick was getting all fixed up, you know, soaking in that big tub of his, a clean uniform all laid out, just so he could go over to the motor pool and have a ringside seat to watch the other shithead, Haskell, working over Larkin. So I got to thinking, what the fuck? Who we supposed to be fighting? So I went to the supply tent and got me a helmet and filled it with crap from a slit trench behind the barn. That’s how I got it on my hands, it was sloppin’ over. I took it back to Korbick’s tent, he was sitting there in a big tub of water, scrubbing his back. I dumped the helmet over his head, right down to his ears, and was gone before he even started yelling. I tell you guys, he screamed like he had his balls caught in an eggbeater.”

Docker braked the jeep and pulled over to the side of the road. “Get out and scrub your hands, Shorty,” he said.

“Jesus.” Larkin slapped the dashboard. “Perfect.”

“Let’s forget it,” Docker said.

“But you got to admit—”

“I told you, forget it.”

“All right.” Larkin’s voice was quiet, empty. He took a handkerchief from his overcoat and began moistening the blood hardening on his lips. “I know what you’re thinking about.”

Kohler climbed back into the jeep and Docker gunned the motor. After another hour’s drive he made the last winding turn high in the hills, where they saw the smudge of smoke from Dormund’s fire and the section’s guns against the curtains of snow.

In the rear of a truck Private Solvis sat cross-legged with a blanket pulled around his shoulders. Using a flashlight and a stubby pencil, Solvis brought his diary up-to-date:

“Early chow tonight. Present position north and west of Werpen. We pulled back yesterday to a hill that was covered by fog in this endless damn snowstorm. I’ve mentioned Spinelli, Pierce and Gruber. Docker and Larkin and Kohler took their personal things down to Battery HQ tonight. Now the big dog (Laurel named him Radar) is barking and I just heard the jeep. So they’re back.

“I’m seldom really exasperated with Pitko but I dislike his ideas about religion. He sees the Hand of God in the deaths of these young men. Thinks it’s retribution against the section. Because we’re ungodly or something. I’m not sure what this means either but he seems to have (not in so many words) a bad feeling about the new corporal.

“Awfully noisy this last twenty-four hours. V-1 rockets sounding above us like a thunderstorm. Must get to sleep. Tomorrow is December 16th. Only nine more shopping days till Christmas. Ha-ha!”

Corporal Schmitzer stood on the loading platform of the cannon and studied the valley mists through his binoculars. Linari and Tex Farrel were huddled in the iron seats on either side of the breechblock, gloved hands resting on cranks that moved the gun barrel through its tracking patterns.

Schmitzer thought about the wet snow creeping under the cuffs of his gloves and the coffee Dormund was making and of Spinelli’s face (“Live coconut, corporal!”); sure, it was funny if you thought about it, but some part of his mind strayed helplessly in the direction of Sonny Laurel, who was curled up in a sleeping bag near the trucks...

“You got it all wrong,” Guido Linari was telling Farrel. “Italians don’t like being called wops.”

The lanky Texan had merely asked Linari if he’d been born in an Italian neighborhood in New York, but Linari’s mental processes frequently produced responses of confused and worrisome irrelevance. “See, Tex, at a ball game when I was a kid a guy called Frankie Crosetti a wop. Crosetti went into the stands and beat hell out of him. So you can’t say he liked being called a wop.”

“Which don’t really answer my question,” Farrel said, without interrupting his careful scrutiny of the valley below him...

Schmitzer knew that if he focused his binoculars on Laurel he would see the delicate blond eyelashes feathering his cheeks, the lips slightly parted and traced with melting snowflakes... Like a skilled campaigner these past days, Schmitzer had plotted his hours to be near the boy, working beside him on the guns, sitting as inconspicuously close to him as possible at chow breaks, but always furiously aware, and hating the reality of it, that this tantalizing proximity would never be enough to satisfy the need he could feel building inside him.

Schmitzer forced himself to look away from the boy and think about his father and brother and uncle, deliberately raising those dark shapes to obscure visions of a sleeping young man and blond hair turned frosted by the cold wind...

The mark on the wall in the basement in Detroit, that was all that was left of the old man, the footprint he’d made near the ceiling, Christ, what a young bull he’d been, laughing and running up the wall like it was a flight of stairs with him and his brother tight in his arms. That faded footprint was just above the empty coal bin where they’d found him one morning with the gun in his hand. And crazy Uncle Ernie dead in a jail where they didn’t even talk his language...

Schmitzer knew that private Joe Pitko was staring at him from where he sat near Dormund’s covered fire, his eyes bright and watchful under the rim of his helmet, his stubby forefinger, as if with a will of its own, moving slowly across the open Bible on his knee. The bald old bastard had his eye on him all right; every time he was near Sonny Laurel he was damn sure to find Pitko staring solemnly, accusingly at him. Somehow it was all part of the shit of this war... Pitko’s staring, vindictive eyes, and the awful explosions that tore open the hull of the Lexington... all the same damn thing... all of it could kill you...

In Barcelona, one of Uncle Ernie’s cell mates had given him a copy of a poem written by a writer named Ernest Hemingway. Uncle Ernie claimed it was written by Hemingway, but the poem had been typed on a piece of ruled paper and wasn’t signed so it could have been written by anybody. That’s what Schmitzer thought, and the only thing he knew about that Hemingway writer was a fishing piece in a sports magazine. But whoever wrote the poem, it was so goddamn true about war it made him almost weak with anger. It had been shipped back to Detroit with some of his uncle’s stuff, old uniforms, a few books and a picture of a girl the family didn’t know anything about, a smiling, dark-haired girl who held a leather bottle of wine up to whoever was taking the picture.

Schmitzer had memorized the last lines of the poem:

That Hemingway, or whoever it was, knew what it was all about, he sure as hell knew the score, Corporal Schmitzer thought as he studied the white expanse of the valley and the hazy outline of the trails leading down and through the rocky gorges and fir trees.

December 16, 1944. The Ardennes. Saturday, 0530 Hours.

In the first half of December, 1944, a number of intelligence summaries and statements were distributed to appropriate units in the American and British and German sectors of the Ardennes.

United States Army Intelligence, on December 10th, 1944, submitted its daily report to Eisenhower headquarters at SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces), Versailles, France. The report conceded that “beyond vague rumors, there is no further news of General Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army.”