Articles of War (11 page)

For a time there was the light of day.

Heck began to understand that this was hell: a rainy woods, a place of mud and standing water and deep cold, made complete by the explosions that forced you to burrow into the muck and lie in it and be glad for it. Peering out the entrance to their hole he could see nothing that did not appear wretched and inauspicious. The damaged trees were stricken, ossified. When it rained the trees dripped, providing no protection. A fog was trapped or confused in the forest and dwelled there all day, at its thickest creating a white darkness. The mists seemed to absorb the night, and eventually night reconquered the mists, and in this fashion the idea of sunlight itself was erased.

Why this place was deemed of sufficient import to be held at the cost of men's lives, Heck did not understand. The Germans did not seem particularly interested in it, except insofar as there were Americans here who might be killed. In the night the lieutenant came around and stuck his head in the foxhole and said, “Morale is low. I know it is. Just try to keep your chin up.” To which no reply was adequate, but habit gave forth a “Yes sir.” “Stop that!” the lieutenant hissed. “And remember to dry your feet and socks every day.”

Conlee said that some men deliberately allowed trench foot to set in, to escape this place.

Conlee brooded in a general silence that he broke with occasional curses and outbursts. He said, “This is shit. I'd rather charge into an army of ten thousand krauts, by myself, than suffer though this useless waiting with the krauts poaching on us. At least I could take out a couple with me. Here we're getting knocked off and we can't even shoot back.”

Heck agreed, shivering.

He slept when he passed out from exhaustion. He awoke with no sense of how long he had been unconscious. He could not remember his dreams.

There were just the two meals a day, one after sundown, the other shortly before dawn. There was no hot food. A runner moving in the night brought the K- and C-rations that they ate cold with filthy fingers while squatting in the mud.

Thinking of what Conlee had said about how some men allowed trench foot to set in, Heck was tempted, and he waged a silent bitter battle inside himself, but he did his best to raise his feet out of the mud and switch his two pairs of socks, putting the off pair into his pants, where they might conceivably dry somewhat. He bitterly congratulated himself on a kind of bravery.

He and Conlee talked even less as time went on. Conlee seemed to dislike any conversation that might force him to regard Heck as more than a piece of mobile meat. Heck might have wanted to talk except that he was not in the habit of it and did not know how to begin. So they sat and lay side by side in the foxhole in silence.

When Heck managed to elide his situation for a moment, he thought of Claire and ran his fingers over her music box. He pondered in a kind of pained abstraction Albert's assertion that she was pregnant. Could it be true? He could not decide. If it was true, how had it happened? It was a mystery, but he felt a great pity for her and somehow it made his love for her even greater. He knew he would never see her again.

He hated the mud, which it seemed all the world was made of. He hated the cold, which never lifted but only modulated its degree of bitterness. It thrived in the damp and the dark and the mud and soaked into Heck so that he was uncertain if he could ever feel warm again; perhaps his skin might be warmed a little, but everything inside would remain soggy and chilled, like a swamp-soaked log. He hated also the fear that had soaked into him with the chill and which, like the chill, was never gone but only varied in degree of intensity.

Even in the hole, facedown in the mud under the logs, there was no real security. He learned that the incoming shells were preceded by a soft fluttering, gaining volume as they came down, and that the German artillery barrages moved in methodical patterns—he began to anticipate when the shells would land near him and when they would shift toward other positions. But though he might be able to anticipate the shells he could not stop them, and as the shells found their way down through the trees—which happened more often as the trees were gradually destroyed—eventually a direct hit would tear through the log roof and turn his foxhole into a small space where an explosion would have nothing to exert itself against but flesh. In addition to this was the menace of a German tank or infantry attack, and the snipers, and the terrifying likelihood of death every time one had to emerge from below ground.

After a bad shelling a roll call would go around, each foxhole calling out that they were okay. Sometimes at the end Zeem called, “Now I want to take a poll. How many of you are still atheists?” An incorporeal laughter followed, hysterical and overlong.

Obie was occasionally heard to sing in a jaunty tone from wherever he lay in the mud:

“We're the Twenty-eighth men, and we're out to fight again

For the good old U.S.A. We're the guys who know

Where to strike the blow, and you'll know just why

After we say:

Roll on, Twenty-eighth, roll on, set the pace,

Hold the banners high, and raise the cry,

‘We're off to Victory!' ”

The silence that followed this seemed to Heck wholly impenetrable.

There were moments of pure hallucination. Heck was home again in bed with crickets and frogs crying in the night outside his window; he sat alone at a large table crowded with chicken and ham, cornbread and potatoes, thick vegetable stew and fresh salad, apple and cherry and pecan pies, cold ice cream, chilled milk—all of which he could smell but somehow could not touch; he was sledding down a long white hill with the hissing cold biting at his face; he was talking with a strange girl, explaining how sorry he was, how he loved her, and she understood every word; he was in a darkness with an anonymous woman touching every part of him, groaning.

Some nights he was posted to a watch position out in front of their location. He could see nothing, which at least assured him that the snipers also could not see him. But he would not have been able to see the entire German army if it was two arm lengths away. Nor was it clear to him what he should do if the entire German army did appear. Start shooting? Throw grenades? Run? Hide? Surrender? No one told him, and Heck assumed he was not supposed to ask. In the darkness certain noises cast Heck into a timeless gap where he waited for the sound of German steel sliding into his skin. He pointed his rifle at the noises he heard in the trees and brush but he never really considered pulling the trigger. He was too afraid of giving away his location. When he could hear distant shooting and artillery, he actually found the noise mildly comforting, evidence of a universe beyond the darkness before him and the imminence of his own death.

At the end of his shift he awoke the next man, then slid into the filth of his foxhole and, upon his bed of mud, without a thought of doing so, fell asleep.

Each day more wounded, ill, or dead were sent back. Meanwhile, somehow, Heck had become a veteran. He still had not fired his weapon.

Then they were suddenly ordered from their holes and began to march in the night. No one spoke. They seemed to be moving back toward the place where Heck had been dropped off, and he was relieved—they would get a respite, somewhere quiet. But soon they turned and marched farther into the woods. The trees blocked even the faint light of the moon in the clouded sky, and they had to move each with one hand on the pack of the man in front, and there were frequent stoppages, turnings, collisions, hisses issued to bring back men who had strayed off, painful encounters with branches. Heck lost all sense of bearing and location. He felt like one of a party of blind men.

When they came into a cleared firebreak, Obie turned and pointed out a thin white line running through the brush. “Follow the tape,” he said softly. “That's the route. The engineers mark it through the mines.” After a moment he chuckled and added, “Though, of course, sometimes the krauts sneak in and move the tape around.”

They crossed the opening without incident and pressed again into the woods, forced to walk stooped, and often nearly doubled over, to pass under the low, tangled branches of the pines. Suddenly, at a point no different from any other that Heck could see, they were stopped and ordered to dig in. The GIs unfolded their little shovels and set to work. They had scant darkness left before dawn. Without a word, Conlee pulled him to one side and together they dug. Heck understood this as a kind of acceptance, and he felt moved with a deep gratitude and camaraderie.

The next night they had just started off again when a sudden explosion overhead was immediately followed by the whir and smack of high-speed metal and wood embedding into whatever they encountered. Someone began to scream. “Hug a tree!” Zeem yelled at him. “Stay under your helmet!” Heck ran for a tree. Another explosion; something tore at his arm. He reached a tree much too large to encircle with his arms and pressed himself against it. There were several more explosions in rapid succession. A second voice joined the first in screaming. Chunks of wood and shell fell in a hurtling, malefic rain. Heck gripped the rim of his helmet with his hands and pulled down hard but it was an impossible task to cover himself with it. Further explosions—a treetop crashed and Heck felt a rush of air as it landed heavily in the mud behind him. He tried without success to push himself forward into the rough wood. He desperately yearned for a muddy foxhole to crawl into. The overhead explosions were a continuous noise, too loud to be heard. Falling debris knocked occasionally against his helmet.

It all stopped suddenly. Only one voice was screaming now; the second had stopped. A few last dislodged branches rattled down. The screaming continued, but around that lone, terrible sound a perfect silence prevailed. A medic started toward the injured man. Heck, recalling his experience in Elbeuf, judged that an artillery pause could not be discerned from a stop and stayed in his place.

After a couple more minutes a sergeant came around reorganizing the unit. One man was dead, split open at the collarbone. Heck had to summon an effort of will to wrench himself away from the sight of split skin, glistening blood, exposed muscle, white bone. The other wounded man was sliced open on the leg, the back, and down the length of his arm. He was quiet now, glassy-eyed with morphine. The medic sprinkled packets of sulfa powder into the wounds. Two men were detailed to carry him back. Silently, at a signal from the sergeant, the remainder of the squad moved forward again, leaving behind the wounded and the dead.

The next night they moved again, sometimes in circling or contradictory directions, and initially Heck believed that they had become completely lost in the forest, that they might even have strayed behind the German lines. When the lieutenant had a map out he stood looking at it with his mouth ajar, an expression that did not convey confidence. Sometimes the noncoms could be heard arguing with him. But then they seemed to enter a relatively quiet area, and indeed they began to make movements by daylight, which made marching so much easier it was a tremendous relief, but at the same time all the light caused Heck to feel suicidally exposed. They marched along narrow trails and two-rut logging roads, through weed-filled firebreaks and across streams, uphill and down, past huts of unknown purpose, past isolated houses built of stone and built of wood, past piles of fallen trees and sections of burned forest, around shell craters and magnificently corroded, torn, broken, and scavenged jeeps, trucks, and antitank guns. The destroyed vehicles smelled of burned fuel and oil, scorched paint and steel and leather. The smell of the burned dead was like nothing else, and hours later when Heck's mouth grew dry he could taste it.

Deep into the pine forests there were peaceful places that possessed a cathedral's space and height and solemn stillness. Dropped limbs lay about like fallen statuary. Bird noises were rare and seemed to carry from far away. Moving through such a place they found an unexploded, finned bomb half-buried in the earth. An emaciated dog with long, matted fur, black around the face and white on the belly, sat atop the tube of the bomb and quietly regarded the soldiers as they passed. One of the men left behind an open C-ration can. They passed the isolated, upside-down turret of a tank whose lower parts were nowhere to be seen. Underfoot, roots showed out of the soft earth, twisted and vaguely obscene. Heck's feet swelled and blistered and he feared to take his boots off to look because he knew the boots would not go on again. Occasionally now the dog could be seen trailing along behind them. More food was left, and the men began to call her Pooch.

I've not been eating well, Heck thought. His perception of the world's nearer aspects was hazy. Often the rations he ate stayed down for only a few minutes before he vomited them out again. His stomach was painful with hunger and all he could do to try to pacify it was pour in a little water, and even the water, given a vile flavor by the army's purification tablets, made him queasy. Near the end of a day's march he could only think about the nearly impossible task of setting one foot before the other.

Then in the evening, near dark, they came into yet another position hidden among the trees, not far from a rutted two-track road. They had been moving for nearly twenty-four hours. Heck scratched a shallow hole for himself and lay in it. He was awoken abruptly by shouting and gunfire to his right. A couple of GIs ran frantically past him. A machine gun gnashed with terrible noise. The sergeant came to Heck's hole and shouted, “They're trying to flank us! Swing out that way!” Then he seized Heck under the shoulders and physically dragged him out.

Heck sat dumbly looking up at the sergeant. The sergeant ran off shouting, bullets churned the twilight gloom overhead, and finally fear sliced through befuddlement and Heck got up and ran in the direction that the sergeant had pointed. The machine gun stopped, but several rifles continued to peck away. A couple of men had run out in front of Heck, and Heck came up behind them and did as they did—ducked behind a tree and pointed his rifle in the direction of the excitement. The noise, however, had now dropped to the rhythm of a single rifle, steady as the blows of a lumberjack with an axe. One of the two men Heck had followed crept around his tree and moved forward. The other GI, a small, thick man, looked at Heck and Heck looked at him and they stayed where they were. Heck's breathing was ragged and loud and he could not control it. Despite the cold he sweated. He desperately feared something would emerge that he would have to shoot at. Then he desperately wished something would emerge that he could shoot at. The man creeping ahead had disappeared among the trees. The last rifle ceased firing, finally, and a brittle silence began. Heck sensed that whatever had happened was over, but his desire to shoot something remained. If he could just shoot something, then he could begin to feel like a soldier. He thought to himself—with such fierceness that he nearly said it aloud—
I am not a coward.
He aimed about twelve feet up into a nearby tree and crushed the trigger—but the trigger failed to move.