Уильям Макгиверн - Soldiers of ’44

The following letter is classified Item 61-A in the Solvis Collection of Diaries and Letters donated to the College of Pennsylvania at Ardmore, Pennsylvania, by Edward G. Solvis.

The letter is part of an open collection which includes material dating from 1942 until the present.

To: Lieutenant Buell Docker ASX 36663864

APO 784

European Theatre of Operations

February 2, 1945

Dear Buell:

News of your promotion duly noted and long overdue, your fans here contend. Your paterfamilias stopped by the college last week. Worn and tired as we all are by the war. But nothing physically serious. He asked me to mention that the cream-and-silver bitch — why did you name her Detroit? — is recovering from some kind of dysentery, and is again begging for snacks up and down your elm-lined paradiso street, and — what an irony — terrorizing the mailmen who must deliver those frightful telegrams. But not so frequently now, thank God.

And, irony — after all the pennants were flying for victory — stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold — after all the terror and death you had seen, there was still to be more of it, still that last test of blood and fire in the Ardennes offensive. Did you know the newspapers are calling it the Battle of the Bulge? Well, too much. No tears left here. In the end, pessimists are always proven right, I expect.

As ever,

From: David Hamlin

Associate Professor of English

College of Pennsylvania

Ardmore, Pennsylvania

This letter from David Hamlin is reprinted with the permission of Dr. Gerald Flood, Curator of Archives.

December 11, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Monday, 1530 hours.

In an open jeep and two heavy trucks, the soldiers of D (Dog) Battery’s Gun Section Eight followed a steep and twisting road to the crest of a hill layered with drifting fogs above a silent valley in the forests of the Ardennes.

Gusting winds shook the canvas sides of the laboring trucks and swept in erratic spirals around the sergeant driving the support jeep and the corporal scanning the white ravines below them through binoculars.

They had been out of contact with Battery headquarters for two days and nights, but knew that somewhere ahead of them in the mountains were divisions of German soldiers pulling back toward the Siegfried Line and the Rhine, the last barriers between the Allied forces and the heartland of Nazi Germany.

Sergeant Buell Docker raised a hand and Corporal Schmitzer in the lead truck acknowledged the gesture with his horn, the single beeping note lost almost instantly in the rasp of wind through the frozen trees. The small convoy slowed and stopped near a tangled mass of thorn bushes that gave them some relief from the winds.

Schmitzer swung his truck about in a circle and positioned its hood against the front of the second truck, providing the cannon and machine guns behind them full fields of fire.

When Docker and the corporals turned off their engines, the silence that settled seemed intensified by the thick snow and rolling fogs. The sergeant listened for sounds of transport or planes, but heard only the rising winds and the occasional fragile snap of icicles.

Corporal Matt Larkin, in the passenger seat beside Docker, turned and looked at him.

“Well?”

“Well what?” Docker said.

“I don’t know. What’re you worried about?”

“You tell me.”

Corporal Larkin smiled bleakly, his teeth white against black whiskers; dirt and grease smudged his forehead beneath the rim of his helmet.

“I mean our nonpareil leader,” Larkin said. “I mean that ninety-day fuck-up, Whitter.”

Docker picked up his binoculars and looked across the fogs toward hills almost lost in the shifting patterns of low clouds. “We’ll break here,” he said. “Take a few men and cover the east side of the hill. Keep your eyes open. I don’t want any smiling faces missing when you come back.”

Larkin had more to say but looked at the sergeant and decided against it. Climbing from the jeep, he yelled with ritual exasperation at three soldiers standing near the truck, and led them back down a narrow road to the floor of the valley.

The sergeant looped his binoculars around his neck, grabbed the windshield bar and swung himself from the jeep, his boots making splintering sounds as they broke through the crust of snow on the ground.

Docker was tall but not as slim as he appeared at a casual glance; there was a precision in his movements that masked the power and size of his body. He wore a field jacket with his stripes on it and a wool-lined canvas coat with a fur collar. A bolstered .45 automatic was clipped to his cartridge belt and a carbine was looped across his shoulders.

Docker was twenty-seven but looked ten years older; his eyes were hard and there were flecks of gray in the dark hair at his temples. The single and obligatory requisite of his rank was responsibility, which had left its mark in his eyes and in his lined and weathered features.

From the top of the hill. Docker followed Corporal Larkin’s detail down the slopes through his binoculars, checking to make sure the men were on opposite sides of the road, moving out with proper intervals between them.

Docker called to Schmitzer, who walked over frozen ground to the jeep, his thick and powerfully muscled shoulders leaning into the wind, his hands swinging almost down to his knees. In new units, Schmitzer was occasionally called Monk or Monkey, but seldom twice by the same person. With Section Eight only three weeks now, he had already booted Spinelli hard for rolling a rock at him and shouting, “Think fast! Live coconut!”

The sergeant told Schmitzer to take a second detail and cover the west side of the hill; the steep pitch of the ridge would protect the other two flanks of their position.

“I ask for volunteers?” Schmitzer said.

Docker glanced through the gathering dusk toward the guns. Joe Pitko and Ed Solvis were at the controls of the cannon, seated in the metal seats beside its wide breechblock. They were the oldest of Docker’s men, in their middle thirties, and liked working together. Sensibly enough (in Docker’s view) they preferred one another’s company to that of the noisy youngsters in the section.

Docker answered Corporal Schmitzer with, “Take Linari, Pierce and the other kid, what’s his name, Sonny Laurel. Linari is solid bone upstairs but he’ll do what you tell him. Pierce and Sonny Laurel, I don’t know.”

“They ever see any action?”

“They shipped here as replacements a month ago. Fired at sleeve targets in England, that’s about it. They know the manual of arms and how to unbutton their flys.”

“I’ll watch ’em,” Schmitzer said.

The corporal went back to the trucks and called out the names of his detail, and three young soldiers hurried to join him at the top of the rutted pathway into the valley.

The sergeant watched them through his binoculars until their figures merged into the mists, then turned and studied the mountains and valleys stretching toward the Rhine, rolling and open country, fields bright with snow and occasional stands of pines that looked dull green through the fogs. He was searching for roads or farmhouses or signs of a village but the driving sleet had blurred the valleys into an opaque expanse of swirling white mists.