Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

He looked at his watch and saw the Americans’ time was running out, and he knew that his corporals were watching him and the people of the village were watching him.

But those generations of unborn Germans that General Kroll fancied as the moral custodians of some distant future, they were not watching him, he was alone as he tried to decide who would live and who would die near a frozen village on the banks of the Salm River. Morality existed on the cracked edge of the present, not in the past or future. What he and the sergeant decided to do today was what was — or wasn’t — moral; what unborn generations might think about it would be history.

Jaeger’s anger had grown so that he felt helpless to deflect or control it, but it also seemed a cleansing emotion... Rudi had said that when reason slept, the beast in the blood awakened, and Rudi had believed, with deep sorrow, that reason had gone to sleep in Germany... Jaeger looked at his watch one last time, but there was no mistake, no optical illusion, he had not misread the hands or the numerals — the sergeant had declined his offer of a moral solution to their problem, a humane surrender.

Alerting his men, he told them to return immediately to the tank position, but as he swung himself behind the wheel of his command car he was seized by a sensation that intensified so powerfully he felt it might break his mind into pieces... his thoughts searing and painful... of Rudi and a child the priest had told him about... the accusing eye that glared at him from his father’s ravaged face... Almost with a will of its own his hand moved to the seat beside him and touched the cold metal clasps of his leather field case. They had expected him somehow to right the wrongs of the world, wrongs they couldn’t even give a clear name to. The American soldiers on the hill didn’t deserve to die, and neither had Rudi Geldman, but if he could never make amends for any of this, if in truth he had not been allowed to, then he didn’t deserve — as a soldier and father — the burden his own father had willed him, the letter and pictures the old man had placed in his field case on their last meeting in the tiny bedroom in Dresden, the last pictures taken of Rudi Geldman at Buchenwald... In his heart Jaeger couldn’t believe he deserved a guilt and remorse that was beyond human responsibility, that sublimated all action to an acceptance of forces outside a man’s control — the Will of God, or Fate, or whatever that possessive, malevolent thing was in the ancient stars.

Drawing a deep breath of the chill air to clear his head, Jaeger took the letter and pictures from his field case and studied them with deliberate attention under the faint yellow cone of his dashboard light.

December 23, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Lepont. Saturday, 0530 Hours.

Section Eight had worked steadily through the early morning darkness. Trankic and Schmitzer with acetylene torches and hacksaws had cut the four machine guns from their yokes in the mobile mount and with assistance from Farrel and Solvis had carried the heavy weapons across the windswept crown of Mont Reynard, boots slipping on the frozen rocks, the cold metal tearing at their fingertips.

Under Docker’s direction they set up the .50s at natural strongpoints on the precipice, wedging them into forked outcroppings of shale approximately fifty yards on either side of the dug-in and reveted cannon. The muzzles of the machine guns and the ammo drums were concealed with underbrush, and the firepower of both these strongpoints was supplemented by bazookas and grenades.

As the faint morning light came over the valley, Docker knew they were running short of time. They had eaten nothing, not even breaking for coffee, but they still had not planted the dynamite charges, and Docker checked the rising sun as he carried a blasting machine out to the right flank, where Sonny Laurel and Kohler were cutting fusing wire into hundred-foot lengths.

At the revetment, Trankic prepared the dynamite for the insertion of electric caps, his muscular hand and wrist twisting a wooden punch into the brittle end of the sticks, driving the pin deeply into the hard-packed explosive. When three were ready, he lashed them together with heavy black friction tape and handed them to Docker, who attached an end of fusing wire to electrical detonator caps, inserted one into each of the holes Trankic had drilled into the dynamite, clipped the unattached ends of wire to the blasting machine and checked the hand plunger, the test-pilot light and the charging switch. Then, carrying the taped bundle of explosives under his arm and the coils of wire over his shoulder, he waved to Trankic, who was now standing at the opposite flank, a small figure in the hazy mists.

When he saw Trankic settle to his knees and go over the side of the hill, Docker started down the slope himself, crouching to take advantage of natural cover, clusters of iron-hard bracken and frozen clumps of bushes still bright with pips and berries. He crawled and slid headfirst a dozen yards, then stopped to rest, his chest and stomach numb with snow that had soaked through his woolen shirt. When his breathing slowed, he studied the area where he intended to place the charges, a level bed of rock about thirty yards below him. Raising himself on his elbows, he studied the floor of the valley which was quilted with white clouds, the tips of fir trees studding this screen like big green spools.

The Tiger Mark II was almost completely submerged in these ground mists, only the massive turret and cannon visible through the white layers.

In Baird’s theory, the Tiger II would attack either of the machine gun positions, and it was Docker’s job on this flank — and Trankic’s on the other — to anticipate its route up the mountain. He looked at the machine guns above him and moved eight or ten yards to his left, traveling like a crab on his knees and elbows to place himself at last on a direct line between the tank and the guns.

He saw Laurel and Kohler watching him from the crest of the hill, their helmeted faces framed by the machine gun barrels, and for an instant he was shocked by their ravaged appearance, until he realized they all must look like that now, dirt and fear and exhaustion a common mask.

Docker started down to his target area, a rough ledge of rock that would give the tank treads a solid grip for the final thrust up and over the top of the hill. Stretched at full length, he worked carefully toward it, freezing motionless whenever his body created a betraying spill of snow and shale. When he reached the flat shelf, he planted the lashed bundle of dynamite behind a small outcrop of rock and covered it with snow and matted brown grass. He then rested for a moment, feeling his sodden shirt begin to stiffen against his body.

After making a last check of the detonator caps, he started back up the mountain, rapidly playing out the fusing wire and aware now of the growing daylight and the black muzzle of the big cannon covering the steep slopes of Mont Reynard.

December 23, 1944. Lepont-sur-Salm. Saturday, 0600 Hours.

She heard the car stop, the sound of the motor mingling briefly with the sleet and wind against her windowpanes. She knew it was not from Lepont. The only vehicle left in the village was an ancient Citroen used by the pharmacist to visit the sick on snowbound farms, but even those trips had halted in the last few months when petrol supplies had run out.

A knock sounded. Denise Francoeur opened the door, wind sweeping around her in chilling blasts. She stepped back instinctively and put a hand to her throat.

“You do that nicely,” Karl Jaeger said. He came into the room and swung the door shut behind him. “It’s an attractive gesture, suggesting graceful repugnance for the Hun, a defense of virginal treasures. You’re alone here, mademoiselle?”