Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

Schmitzer opened a button of Pitko’s field jacket, found his dog tag chain and broke it with a twist of his wrist. He put one dog tag in his wallet. Sonny Laurel watched with wide, shocked eyes as Schmitzer forced open Pitko’s mouth and dropped the other dog tag into it. With the heel of his hand, Schmitzer forced the dead man’s jaw shut, letting several inches of the chain hang from the stiffening lips.

“Something happens to us, there’s a chance some-body’ll find the other tag on him,” Schmitzer said.

“Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”

“I guess so.”

“What would be right?”

“I don’t know. He was the expert on that.”

Schmitzer looked at the snowflakes melting in Laurel’s blond hair and coating the shoulders of his overcoat. Standing above and behind him, he could see the curve of the boy’s cheek and the smooth, soft arch of his throat. He looked quickly away, before Laurel might turn and see what was revealed in his eyes and on his face.

Pitko had seen it, a mark, an abomination. And Pitko was dead. He had warned him, though. To save the boy. Maybe to save them both...

Schmitzer remembered the words in the Spanish poem his uncle had sent them from the jail in Barcelona. Maybe it wasn’t just right, he thought, but what the hell, and in a low and earnest voice he said, “Just remember, I’ll never forget. All those Christmas days gone by. Ineradicably” — he stumbled on the word — “stamped in my head. Lovely memories are held high.”

“Lovely memories are held high,” Laurel said. “That’s nice.”

His skin looked soft, pale against the rosy color in his cheeks, but as he secured the tarpaulin over Pitko’s face, Schmitzer made himself think of the other deaths hounding his life, a defiant uncle, his father at an empty coal bin with the gun, his brother on the Lex when the planes tore her hull apart — he forced himself to think of them and he vowed, he vowed bitterly in the cathedral silence that his abomination of feeling would never contaminate anyone but himself, that it would die here and forever under the trees with Joe Pitko.

“Now listen to me good. Sonny,” he said. “It’s part my fault Pitko got hit. He got talking about something that had nothing the fuck to do with staying alive. Like I told you, we gotta make sure nobody takes our place over here. Pitko forgot that, he forgot what he was here for, and it’s my fault because I let him.” Schmitzer drew a deep breath. “So get this. I ever say anything to you, anything, that isn’t about our job, you take that rifle and ram the butt into my face, understand? Goddamn it, you understand?”

Laurel was startled, almost frightened by his intensity. He nodded quickly. “Sure, I understand.” Except, of course, he didn’t.

They looked for a moment at Pitko in the canvas shroud already layered with snow and then turned and went down a trail to the trucks. “Lovely memories are held high...” Shit, Schmitzer thought. The wind was cold and strong in his face and he was glad because it froze the tears in his eyes. The other guy knew more about it... “The age demanded that we dance, and jammed us into iron pants...”

When they swung themselves up into the trucks. Docker shouted, “March order,” and within the hour they were cresting a hill that sloped down toward the Salm River and the village of Lepont.

December 19, 1944. The Ardennes. Tuesday, 1500 Hours.

On the fourth day of the German offensive, intelligence officers at First Army and VIII Corps prepared the following reconstructions and summaries for Supreme Allied Headquarters at Versailles.

Operation Christrose had been launched on a ninety-mile front from Monschau in the north to Echternach in the south, a striking force of more than twenty-seven full-strength Panzer and infantry divisions with a reserve estimated at seven divisions.

On the northern shoulder of the German line. General Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army had smashed through the Losheim Gap into the forward positions of the Americans’ 14th Armored Division. In the center. General Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army had broken the same division’s left flank and bypassed it to open approaches into the deep valley of the Our River.

On the southern flank. General Brandenberger’s Seventh Army was driving a wedge below at the rail center at Bastogne, its objective the Meuse River and its tributary, the Semois.

These spearheads were savaging the American 4th Infantry Division and positioning their armor to provide a shield against the expected counterattacks from the south by General Patton’s Third Army.

At dawn on December 19th, the io6th Infantry Division (the Golden Lions) had been surrounded on the Schnee Eiffel by a pincer movement of the Fifth and Sixth German Panzer armies; nine thousand troops of the division were captured with their supplies intact, gasoline, medical stores and ammunition.

Fragmentary reports reaching Intelligence from the broken American lines indicated that elements of the American V Corps were barely holding their position on the Elsenborn Ridge.

The 9th Armored and the 28th Infantry Division had been badly mauled in the first stages of Christrose. Kampfgruppe Peiper had broken cleanly through the American front, its columns driving toward the Salm River and Trois-Ponts.

Strategically important towns captured or invested by the enemy as of this date were Malmédy, Stavelot, Vielsalm, St. Vith, Houffalize, Longvilly and Wiltz.

Bastogne was known to be surrounded, the 101st Airborne Division trapped inside a ring of German armor.

Intelligence summaries created this picture: American forces were retreating by the thousands to an illusion of safety in rear-echelon areas, discarding weapons and even overcoats and food supplies in a flight through streets clogged with the wreckage of tanks and trucks and rotting with decomposed bodies.

To contain the great breach in the Allied eastern lines. General Eisenhower had placed certain units of General Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group under the command of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

Patton’s famous Third, the Lucky Forward, was marching north to relieve Bastogne. Various other divisions — the ist, the 30th, the 7th Armored and the 82nd Airborne — were given new orders and committed to the Battle of the Bulge.

First intelligence reports also included brief sketches and descriptions of two German officers and their operations, as well as information suggesting that these missions were crucial to the success of Christrose.

Colonel Friedrich August Heydte: the commander of a brigade of paratroopers who were being dropped into Belgium and France from heavy transports (JU-52S) as far as the outskirts of Paris. The numerical strength of the brigade was estimated at two thousand officers and men.

Colonel Heydte was in his middle forties, five feet nine, narrow features, high cheekbones, dark hair and eyes, scars on left side of forehead. Fluent in English, a member of the German nobility (a baron), Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves with Swords, one of his country’s most feared and audacious commanders. (To this someone added a notation: Heydte once received a Carnegie Fellowship in International Law to teach at an Ivy League university in the United States. Start of hostilities precluded this.)

Colonel Otto Skorzeny: born June 12, 1908, Vienna. A physical giant, six feet six, weighing 275 pounds. Dueling scars at left temple, left cheek, left side of jaw. His unit’s mission: to infiltrate American lines in the Ardennes in United States army uniforms. Mission is code-named: Greif (the Griffon).

Skorzeny’s troops were fluent in English, briefed on American politics, sports, movie stars, popular music, and so forth. “It is imperative,” the report continued, “that American troops regard with suspicion all soldiers in American uniform not known to them personally. ID and dog tags to be inspected. Suspects, regardless of rank, to be interrogated. Intelligence officers will provide suitable questions for such encounters and distribute to all units. Senior American commanders will travel with armed escorts. The number of German soldiers assigned to Colonel Skorzeny’s Operation Greif unit is unknown at this time.”