Articles of War (13 page)

The next day the Pennsylvanian was gone. The lieutenant asked Heck if he knew what had happened to the man, and Heck shook his head.

When the lieutenant was killed that evening—he was sitting on a tree stump somewhat in front of their position, waiting for an overdue patrol to come back, when a sniper shot him through the heart—everyone said it was a damned shame but why was he sitting out there anyway? There was dark comfort in the remembered foreknowledge that it had been bound to happen, sooner or later.

Unfortunately, positioned as the lieutenant was, no one dared go retrieve his body. The snipers were brutal, the body bait in a trap. So the lieutenant sat there, his hand raised to the top of his head as if rubbing his scalp thoughtfully. In the cold his face hardened with an expression of disdainful surprise, the look of someone attacked with a childish insult. From where Heck peered out of his hole the lieutenant could be seen easily. It was a relief when, the following night, a strong wind came up and the body fell out of sight. A new lieutenant arrived, and word came around, in tones both ironic and incredulous, that the new man didn't appear nervous at all.

The new lieutenant ordered a nighttime “probe”—which meant, as Conlee explained it, wandering around until shot at, then running away. The noncoms argued against it, explaining that the snipers here had been particularly active. But the lieutenant would not back down. Such was the situation, anyway, that the sergeant described to Heck, Conlee, and Zeem as the four of them set out. They wandered around in the dark for several terrifying hours. Heck's hand strayed repeatedly to the silver music box in his pocket, always suspecting that this would be his last opportunity to touch it. Yet, incredibly, they encountered no one. As they were returning Conlee observed that their lack of casualties was beyond explanation. He seemed quite aggrieved at the lack of casualties.

They had spread out as they neared their holes in the first pallid light of day, and Heck had lost track of the others when he seemed to see a movement very near the company's position. He stood still a minute, but saw nothing more. He began to inch forward, thinking perhaps it had been nothing, or a movement of the wind, when he saw it again, low to the ground. With his battered heart whacking itself against his ribs, he checked the safety on his rifle and crept forward. It crossed his mind that if he could eliminate one of the snipers he would be something of a hero.

As he came closer he realized he was very close indeed to the position that they had been dug into for several days now—the movement he had seen was approximately where the dead lieutenant's body had been left.

Then he saw that it was the lieutenant himself moving, rolling slightly side to side and gently rattling the branches around him. Heck crept nearer. A figure was crouched awkwardly over the corpse. A German, Heck thought, looking for souvenirs or maps. After watching for a moment, with great slowness he crept ahead. He was surprised to note that he felt exhilaration. He wanted to kill this German.

But then he could see that it was nothing human at all, just some animal, seemingly headless. “Hey,” he whispered. “Hey.”

The thing backed up to extract itself—its head had been buried in the lieutenant's gut. It was Pooch. She saw Heck and wagged her tail. She nosed the corpse and looked up as if inviting him to join her. Her muzzle was matted and dark with blood. “Hey, Pooch,” Heck said. “Whatcha doing, Pooch?” And the dog beat her tail about happily until he raised his rifle and fired.

The dog cowered low, tail tucked under her belly, whimpering. He had missed. He walked over and kicked the dog in the ribs. She ran off yowling.

He encountered Conlee peering around a tree with his rifle aimed from the hip. “I nearly killed you,” Conlee said. “Was that you?”

“Pooch was eating the lieutenant.”

“Shit.”

“I just scared her.”

“Fuck.”

Heck went back to his foxhole. He had fired at the dog without thinking. It bothered him that he had missed.

6.

HECK COULD NOT HAVE SAID WITH CERTAINTY WHETHER IT WAS
the next day, or the day after that, or perhaps it was the same day that they pulled out and began trekking again. Somewhere, where they stopped to rest and eat, he sat moving his hand vaguely before him, fascinated by it and the movement: it was as if he were able to perceive along some new dimension and he were grasping for something there. Then there was an odd sound, like a passing diesel truck with a badly tuned engine, but overhead. The sky was an unsettling origin for such a sound, and instinctively he cowered a little. He peered into the sky and spotted an odd, fat airplane with stubby wings. Zeem was seated nearby, and Heck asked him, “What is it?”

“Buzz bomb. V-1. Going to London.” They watched it trundle across the sky. “Some fall short. Hear that noise cut out, get under cover. Things make a hell of a bang. Course sometimes they cut out then start up again. You never know.” Zeem shrugged. Slouching in a posture of exhaustion, he rubbed his face and took off his helmet.

“Hey,” said Heck. “What happened to your hair?”

Zeem felt at his head, then peered incredulously into the hollow of his helmet. He took out a fistful of loose hair. “Christ,” he said. “Is this mine?” He pulled more hair from his helmet, gathering it into his hands as though he were cupping water. “Shit,” he said. “Bald. I must look like you.”

Actually it looked worse, because the hair had come free in random clumps from here and there on the head, creating a crude patchwork of exposed pink flesh.

“Think I can get sent home? Pick up a Purple Heart?”

At the next stop, or perhaps it was during the next march on the next day, Heck moved a little away from the others to relieve himself. He stood at the base of a thick pine, devoid of branches to twenty-five or thirty feet up, and his urine steamed against the wood. He swayed side to side a little, watching the sheets of vapor ripple upward, and as he buttoned up he continued swaying, like a tree in a light wind. He closed his eyes and lifted his arms slowly up and down, a sensation familiar from years before, when he was a child and would convince himself of the feeling of flying. He was flying. He remembered his father taking him up by the feet and whirling him around so that the blood went into his head until it seemed his face would burst. He raised and lowered his arms. The cold air moved through his coat and against his skin.

Abruptly he stopped and sat. He drew his legs up and pressed his face into his knees. He was going insane. The possibility was suddenly very clear to him. As was the temptation.

He recalled the German sniper's blue-green, empty eyes, the bold, dead stare, the incomprehension.

He felt possessed by a terrible fearfulness. He did not want to be dead or crazy or maimed. Yet these seemed his only options.

He must retain a hold on his mind. With that, perhaps, he could find a way to find Claire. When he thought of living, he thought of her. But first he must keep his sanity.

His habit of quiet had hardened. He knew now the sounds of a variety of shells, knew which were rising from behind him and which were falling toward him, knew how near they would strike and how big a bang they would make, knew that the one that would kill him would be the one he never heard. He knew that at any given moment there was a fair chance he could be dead in the next moment, and somehow he was not paralyzed by this knowledge.

He thought about Claire, fretted over her. He loved her for offering to him the feel of her skin, the smell of her, the sound of her incomprehensible words.

They bivouacked in the woods near a farm, and the cook made steaming potatoes and pork. It was the first hot food they had been offered since Heck had arrived. Conlee examined the meat on his plate and said this was ominous. Then he began to eat rapidly.

They were roused before dawn the next morning, told to prepare for an assault, and led along a downward, narrow road. They came to a place where the road turned and a short rocky cliff rose sharply along one side of the road and the earth dropped away rapidly on the other side. Shoved off the road and tumbled down into the woods below in terrible profusion were the dead, broken into pieces and rotting, emitting a smell thick and awful like a greasy haze. Nearly all of them were American infantry with the keystone badge of their own division, the 28th. Here lay a lower mandible, there a kneecap. The skin was going black. Heck and the others moved through quickly, because the scene was unendurable and because if the Graves Registration men had not come it must be dangerous.

Two Sherman tanks clanked behind them on the road. A lieutenant came out to meet the tanks and shouted, “We were supposed to get five!”

A noncom in the turret yelled back, “Well, you got two! One's back there stuck in the mud, one blew a track on a mine, and another slid sideways into a ditch trying to get around the one that hit the mine! So you got two!”

Heck's platoon worked slowly up a wooded hillside, through desultory artillery and sniper fire. They halted just short of open ground. Heck quickly carved a shallow hole in the earth and settled in. Before him, just beyond the trees, lay grass, a hill, houses upon it, a thin church spire. As Heck watched, artillery began pounding the houses. Plumes of smoke rose up. Holes appeared in roofs. A chimney collapsed. A brick house went down with a deep rumbling noise. The peaked wooden roof of the church steeple exploded. Smoke and dust merged into a seething black mass. From the village there came no response.

The pounding went on for perhaps an hour; then the artillery lifted, and sergeants began bellowing and hollering, and the assault began, everyone running, and after that it was all random chaos and shooting and explosions and people running, and shouting and screaming, dirt flying, Heck running, stumbling, running. He was scared and exhilarated and he felt like he must have misunderstood something or they had neglected to tell him something because he hardly understood where he was running to or what he would do there, but for now he was running and screaming and that was everything. Not until he needed to stop screaming and slow slightly to breathe did he realize he had run ahead of everyone—there was no one before him. He glanced back and saw a man vanish within an explosion. Heck stumbled, pelted by a scattering of fragments that might have been earthen or human. He regained balance and ran harder. Where was he going? Where? He ran. Ahead on the hill were damaged trees, pale rocks, the craters of shells, and all the buildings of the town. He could see the Germans—a fraction of a helmet here, a gun barrel there. Loud, just beside his ear, snapped the noise of a bullwhip cracking. A bullet, he thought. Then he glanced back, apprehending that the bullet might very well have come from behind him. He was shocked by his own speed; the others appeared hopelessly far behind. He saw a shallow crater ahead and leaped into it.

Orders had simply been to advance into the town—as if it were as simple as walking into a five-and-dime. Where should he go in the town? What should he do there? What about all those people who would be shooting at him? He had no answers. He had never received any training in how to assault a house, how to fight in a city.

To his left the twin Shermans were advancing, drawing torrential blazes of gunfire from half a dozen different buildings, the bullets rebounding off the steel armor with shrieks and zings and fluttering noises, and Heck was glad he was not nearby. In a laborious rhythm the tanks turned their long guns to destroy the occupants of one window frame after another. Heck saw, briefly, a German rise up on a roof and launch—with a roar of flame—a
Panzerfaust
rocket. An explosion engulfed a side of the nearest tank. Thick coils of black smoke streamed upward from around the turret. A hatch was thrown open. The men who scrambled out were shot down one by one.

It now seemed impossible that he would ever raise himself up and move forward again. Death would be certain. Yet Heck felt relatively calm. He had reached this place safely, and he might not be able to escape it without dying, but at the moment, in this hole, he felt secure. He was able to look around himself with a kind of rational curiosity. The others behind him were cowering like himself. Only occasionally somewhere on the hillside did a GI appear out of his hiding place and dart into a new hole. Mortar and artillery shells shrieked and exploded. One by one these nudged Heck back toward fear.

Perhaps this same thought was occurring to others as well because suddenly several emerged and there was a flurry of motion and activity. A lieutenant stood full upright with his back to the Germans and howled insults at the men below him. The German machine guns renewed their furious chains of noise. Men began moving uphill.

Heck turned forward. He hesitated and shut his eyes. He heard the noises of hell erupting, screams like laughter, screams like a language. The smells of earth and burning and blood and cordite, of dust, smoke, and fear. The crack of a bullet passing. The thud of another burying itself in the dirt. He opened his eyes and saw the enemy guns ahead spitting small flames. His legs and hands trembled remarkably. He noticed a harsh rasp in his throat and wondered if he had been screaming. He felt the fear again, the surfeit of dreadful emotion that had paralyzed him in Elbeuf, the horrible sensation of losing control of himself, or of there being no control to have. Then a nearby blast lifted him slightly and dropped him—filling his mouth with dirt, which he nearly inhaled, causing him to gag and spit and spit, breaking the paralysis. He looked up and there were GIs around him, a few ahead of him. A blast pushed his helmet down against his head. He felt the shells were narrowing on him, and he scrambled out of his hollow and into the open. He got to his feet and lurched ahead. He ran.

A man in front of him spun violently and dropped—he lay with his arm taken off and several ribs exposed. Heck stepped over the detached arm and kept going. He was feeling, however, an accumulation—as if he were becoming heavier with each step, the fear returning into him like a tide. Yet he was nearly to the top of the hill, where there was a low stone wall he could hide behind. An explosion to his right lurched him sideways and down to his hands and knees. It seemed like an insult and he felt bitterly abused. He regained his feet and in a great struggle wrestled one foot uphill, then the other, watching the wall, nearing, until with enormous relief he pressed himself against its rough, cold stones.

He looked back at the other men coming up the face of the hill, to his left, to his right, and was shocked to see how effortlessly and rapidly they moved. They stared grimly ahead and ran headlong. The explosions that had seemed to be everywhere around Heck a moment before were actually quite scattered and appeared almost harmless from this perspective. The men moved with great agility and although he had reached this point ahead of them, Heck could not reconcile himself to the idea that he had himself come up the hill with equal or greater speed.

The wall he hid behind extended only, at most, thirty feet in either direction, and most of the men continued past it, directly into the streets and buildings, out of sight. The surviving Sherman tank propelled itself up the main road and disappeared in the village, hurling loud destruction ahead of itself.

Four other men had joined Heck behind his wall. One of them, a tall man with a fleshy, pink face, was lugging the weight of a Browning automatic rifle while another, smaller man was preoccupied with carrying ammunition for the BAR. With calm, quick efficiency, as if engaged in a fairly uninteresting field exercise, the BAR man and his ammo carrier set up and checked the weapon, then pushed it over the wall and began issuing short bursts of fire, moving from left to right, then back again. The BAR man took his hand off the gun and waved forward. “Go! Go! It's clear! Fucking go!” Heck exchanged glances with the other men. One stood and put a foot on the wall and leaped over. The man to Heck's left followed and quickly Heck—anticipating the exploding pain of a bullet in his chest but at the same time experiencing something like joy—went after him.

His foot caught somehow in the stones of the wall and he fell face-first on the other side. He put a hand out to somewhat arrest his fall, but the butt of his M-1 was driven into his chest, forcing the air from his lungs. He lay gasping while sudden white shapes faded slowly from his vision. Mentally he cursed himself. It seemed he was doomed to spend the entire war falling on his face. The BAR man and his ammo carrier clambered over the wall and the BAR man looked down at him. “You all right?” Heck nodded and waved them on. He made a show of pushing himself up, and the other two ran off.

He was alone in a space of high grasses and weeds. In front of him was a row of fruit trees and a two-story house. The BAR man and the ammo carrier kicked in the front door and rushed inside. There were shots. In the background hovered a tumult of explosions, machine guns, screams.

Heck circled around, along the wall. Where the wall ran beside the street it became higher—seven or eight feet tall. Patches of dead ivy fluttered dryly upon it. He reached an arched gateway, peered out, then stepped through.

In the street lay a dead cow. Directly across from him stood an intact, two-story half-timbered house, painted pale blue between the dark timbers. Farther down, several houses were burning, throwing billows of smoke upward as if intent on filling the sky. There were a couple of bodies, and a GI was sprinkling sulfa power into the empty socket of his own eye. The fighting seemed to have already swept onward, but Heck remained cautiously crouched beside the gate a minute. Then he began to creep along the street. Without ever entirely losing his fear, his awareness of death's proximity, he felt also a giddiness of triumph. He felt part of a tremendous victory. He ran farther down the street. Splashes of blood lay upon the cobblestones. A cat hissed at him. In a side yard was a corporal who was single-mindedly shooting open cans. He saw Heck and waved one of the cans, shouting, “Caviar!”