Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

“Say what’s on your mind.”

“Maybe I should ask the Boy Scout here.” Schmitzer stared at Baird. “Tell us, kid — what happened the last time you saw German soldiers.”

“Shit! We don’t need this,” Farrel said.

“Listen, goddamn it! I ain’t trying to make anybody look bad. I know how few heroes there are, how many guys shit their pants when a shell goes over.”

“Then get to the point,” Docker said.

“I’m saying we’re up here with a popgun for a cannon, and some rifles and grenades that couldn’t stop a snowball fight. And we’re going up against a Kraut officer and the biggest goddamn tank the Nazis got, and we’re using battle plans figured out by” — Schmitzer swung a long arm around at Baird — “by an eighteen-year-old kid whose only experience comes from playing with lead soldiers and reading a lot of shit about war in his playpen.”

“If I’m right, does it matter where I learned it? I’ll bet you that—”

“You’ll bet what? ” Schmitzer said. “Next month’s pay? A three-day pass to Paris? You’re betting our lives.” Schmitzer turned to Docker. “Here’s another goddamn thing you haven’t mentioned. We don’t have to surrender to them Krauts. And we don’t have to stand here and let ’em blow hell out of us either. We can walk. Docker, we can get the fuck off this hill. Take our rifles and fade into the woods till they get what they want and get the hell out of here. That way nobody’s a hero, nobody’s a coward, but everybody’s alive.”

“I don’t care how close it is to Christmas,” Docker said, “we’re not giving them that kind of present.”

“Why the fuck not? It’s just another goddamn hill and you know it. Who cares now about those hills in Africa and Sicily you and me got our ass shot up taking? There’s nothing there now but rag-head Arabs and old ginneys walking up the trails through donkey shit. There’s comes a time when there’s enough of them hills. And that’s where I’ve got to.”

Docker thought fleetingly of jokes he’d heard before they went to war, when most Americans wanted no part of it, and comics in nightclubs made elaborate routines out of nothing but place names, demanding to know who in hell wanted to die for places called Minsk and Linsk and Pinsk and Cracow and Gdynia. Names you not only couldn’t spell but couldn’t pronounce, couldn’t even find on maps, full of people with beards who drank sour milk out of leather gourds and slept with goats and wouldn’t know what to do with an American toilet except maybe wash potatoes in it...

“It’s our hill now,” Docker said. “That’s what makes it different, Schmitzer.”

“Yeah, and for my old lady a couple of thousand square miles of the Pacific Ocean are different,” Schmitzer said. “That’s where my brother bought it on the Lexington . She’s got a telegram on the wall, and under it she wrote the latitude and longitude where the Lex went down, the Coral Sea, twenty-five thousand feet. Latitude fifteen degrees and twelve minutes south; longitude one hundred fifty-five degrees and twenty-seven minutes east. They welded steel plates over portholes to protect blackout. My brother got it when an explosion ripped one of those plates out and took the top off his head. There’s no grave markers there. Nobody’s ever going out there in a fucking rowboat and blow taps over him.” He looked hard at Baird. “Fm not trading my life for your cowboys and Indians.”

“We can handle this job with just five men, Schmitzer.” Docker looked at the group near him and beyond to Linari and Dormund. “I want four volunteers. Sound off.”

Dormund shouted, “I’m with Docker, and don’t you wretched bastards ever forget it.” Solvis and Tex Farrel moved away from the revetment to stand with the sergeant.

“Come on. Bull,” Trankic said. “What’s this volunteer shit? Like you always said, we ain’t a goddamned debating club.”

“Okay, pick yourself a detail and get to work.”

“Count me in,” Laurel said, and hurried to join Trankic.

Baird looked expectantly at Docker, who said, “Sure. What did you think?” Schmitzer stood alone, not moving.

“Schmitzer, you can take off if you want to,” Docker said. Then without any particular emphasis, he added, “But I think you’ve got a stake here, too, and it’s more than a few yards of rocky real estate.”

Schmitzer felt the words like blows. He forced himself not to look at Sonny Laurel, who was saying something to Farrel and Baird, his voice threaded with laughter and excitement. And Schmitzer wondered with a sharp fear how much Docker had guessed, because he did have a stake here, just as much as the other guys. If all the shit you read in the papers was true, they were fighting for what they loved and believed in. And they were proud of it. Well, so was he... Schmitzer allowed himself to look steadily at the boy for a last time, studying the lively eyes and full lips brushed with fleeting snowflakes, knowing that what he wanted so badly he could never have beyond his own fantasies. And yet — the thought was painful and bitter — if what he felt never contaminated anyone else, there might be for him the thing the priests were always talking about, even the rummy priest who told them about his brother — the condition of forgiveness and the state of Grace... He held on to the instant until he saw that Docker was frowning at him. He silently whispered good-bye to the boy and said, “I might as well volunteer, too, sarge. Make it fucking unanimous. I’ll get the ammo belts off them machine guns, Trank.”

Swinging his rifle across his shoulders, he walked from the revetment toward the crest of the hill, and within seconds his hulking shape was lost in the darkness and mists.

December 23, 1944. Lepont, Belgium. Saturday, 0600 Hours.

Colonel Jaeger stood in the square of Lepont and watched the first early light breaking above the stone bridges, coating the frozen surface of the river the color of steel. He looked at his wristwatch and then at the passageway beside the café, La Chance, where he could see two of his corporals, the faint light breaking on their MP-40 machine guns.

The Americans and their sergeant had fifteen minutes left...

Jaeger began pacing, his strides smooth and rhythmic. Nothing in his bearing revealed his awareness of the eyes watching him from the houses facing on the square. The silent vacuum he moved in was disturbed only by the winds against the church and the crunch of his boots on the snow-encrusted cobblestones.

A knot of anxiety was winding tight in his chest. Anger suddenly made him light-headed.

He had arranged with the priest to use the church cellar as a guardhouse for the Americans until they could be trucked to a camp behind the German lines. His corporals were present only to carry out these details. After that, his crew would conclude their primary mission, finding and eliminating any trace of the ME-262 before the weather broke and Allied planes on reconnaissance flights might spot it.

Except Sergeant Ebert had reported by radio that the American soldiers gave no evidence of surrendering; instead they were strengthening their line along the sheer edge of the cliff, emplacing machine guns on both flanks of their cannon revetment. They had test-fired these guns within the last hour, and Jaeger had listened to the flat, whistling echoes and had seen the faraway streams of tracer ammunition arching through the darkness high above the valley. Showing off like stupid children...

His orders had been to destroy the Americans, not to take them prisoner, and he couldn’t conceive, wouldn’t conceive, that the sergeant was refusing to accept the almost comradely terms he’d proposed on his own authority and for which he undoubtedly would have to accept serious consequences... To distract himself Jaeger thought of his family in Dresden: Hedy and his daughters, forcing himself to recall the exact texture of spring days when he walked with them through parks and along the banks of the river. He remembered shops where they bought chocolate and hot spice cakes and the way the birds hopped about, and blue and white horses that Hannah and Rosa loved to ride on the merry-go-round, their fair hair blown about their faces, rosy in the fresh winds which — when he was a child — his father had told him were broken and gentled by the Aeolian spires of Dresden’s old cathedrals... He thought of those carefree days when the war was only a promise of future vindication, when he and Rudi Geldman explored the silent woods and swam in clear lakes and read together at the fireplace in his father’s apartment...