Articles of War (15 page)

Then, simultaneous with the sound of a single shot, his arm was hit with a hammer, knocking it backward with great violence, straining his shoulder and creating an explosion of pain that subsided so quickly he wondered if he had imagined it. No, he could still feel a pulsing of heat. His hand seemed to return to him slowly and mechanically, like flag being run down a pole. He could contract and move his fingers still; he could feel them. An intense movement of sparks passed through his hand and all along his arm, and when he thought at last to look at his hand, to
look
at it, it was with the eerie feeling of recalling a form of perception he had momentarily forgotten.

He sat looking at his hand and doubting himself, because there appeared to be nothing wrong with it. The fingers were all there, the thumb, the skin lay intact and taut across the palm. Turning the hand over, however, he noticed a small hole in the sleeve of his coat, then another on the opposite side, and the blood seeping into the cloth. He pushed up the sleeve of his coat and his shirt and here was the wound, neatly through the wrist, bleeding freely on either side. The fingers of his hand trembled violently, but it hardly hurt. He could still move his fingers, although when he did blood spurted weakly. There was a heat in his hand. He needed to find a medic.

When he looked up he saw Conlee watching from the other end of the wall. It was the first familiar face Heck had seen since they'd begun the charge up the hill, and for a second he and Conlee stared at each other; then Conlee smiled and moved toward him in a rapid squat-crawl. “Looks like you got yourself a boo-boo there. Better go back and get patched up.” The machine-gun fire stopped, and Conlee raised up to fire a few shots over the wall, then flung himself down as the German gun resumed its efforts. Conlee grinned. “Terrible, something like that happens, bullet catches you like that. Really unfortunate.” He locked eyes with Heck and grinned. Then he turned and crawled away.

It entered Heck's mind—without any particular hope for or against the possibility—that Conlee might be killed. He noted that he himself might be the one to do the killing, but he had no desire for it; he would rather accept the consequences of what he had done. He felt too tired to do anything but accept. His arm began to throb with pain. He peered over his shoulder, looking for a secure route rearward.

7.

THE SNOW-FILLED FIELDS SHONE WHITE AND SMOOTH IN THE
sun. Smoke from a farmhouse chimney carried a warm, familiar scent of burning pine. Behind the farmhouse stood a square wooden barn with ranks of glittering icicles long as rifles hanging from the roof's edge, the teeth of a beautiful monster.

At the door to the house a GI shuffled his feet and smoked a cigarette. His rifle was propped casually against the wall. Heck explained who he was, offered his papers. The sentry nodded and opened the door.

Inside Heck could see nothing; the windows were blacked out and the house seemed dark as night after the glare of the sun on snow. He stood blinking. Gradually he began to be able to see figures seated around a large, cast-iron stove in the corner. All the chairs in the room—plush armchairs, wooden dining chairs, a bench—had been pulled over to that source of warmth. Socks, pants, underwear, and coats hung on ropes above the stove. Heck peered at the soldiers seated below.

After he had taken the wound to the wrist, Heck had made his way to the nearest medical station. They were unimpressed with his injury, and he was billeted in a nearby barn to rest until the hole in his wrist sealed up. The division couldn't afford to lose men to superficial wounds, and Heck had no will to argue about it.

A couple of days later, however, his division, the 28th, had been taken out of the Hürtgen and sent to a quiet part of the line to rest and cycle in replacements. The medical station followed the division, and Heck was put into another cot in another barn.

Early one morning noises of heavy artillery and fighting erupted in the distance and over the next hour began to move nearer. Soldiers in a jeep came through shouting crazy things. Soon there were scores of people in full retreat—not an organized, military retreat but a panicked, everyone-for-himself retreat that became a flood, moblike; men who had abandoned their equipment, vehicles, artillery, rifles, and ammunition fled past the medical station without looking anyone in the eye. It was the beginning of the fighting that became known as the Battle of the Bugle. Heck and the other ambulatory wounded were sent out to fend for themselves, and Heck wandered westward alone for a couple of days. He ended up at a depot where he spent several weeks, loading and unloading trucks. By the time order was restored and Heck was sent to rejoin his proper unit, it was near the end of January 1945.

In the farmhouse, one of the figures detached from the group at the stove and came toward Heck. Although Heck could see only dimly, he knew by the silhouette's shape and movement that it was Conlee. “Hello, Heck,” Conlee said.

He sounded friendly enough, although he didn't offer to shake hands. Heck's hands were occupied with his rifle and his pack anyway. Heck hesitated, then said, “Hello, Conlee.” It was unsettling how old Conlee looked. Heck knew the man was only eighteen, but anyone would have guessed at least thirty. After a moment of nervous silence, Heck offered, hesitantly, “I'm glad you're all right.”

“I'm doing okay. I don't know if you'll recognize much of anyone else. You might as well go take a place over by the stove and warm up. I'll introduce you to all the new ones.”

Heck was not sure how to take this friendliness. He looked at the stove. “Is Zeem here?”

Conlee frowned and straightened slightly. “Zeem stepped on a mine. Looked like he might be able to keep one leg, one testicle.”

“Oh, God.” Heck set his bag down and rubbed his face.

Conlee said, “Go on, warm up.”

Heck picked up his bag again. Moving past Conlee, he noticed stripes and stopped. “Sergeant?”

“Yeah. Don't congratulate me, please. It's just a matter of somehow still being alive and in one piece. Go on. I'll be there in a moment.”

Heck failed to absorb the names offered to him around the stove. A couple of the faces he recognized as boys who had been fresh replacements at the time he was shot. The others had come in sometime afterward, although to look at the lines around their eyes one would have thought they had been in combat for years.

He gathered from the conversation that they would remain here several days longer, perhaps as much as a week, while more replacements were integrated and the generals decided where they wanted to move this particular chess piece. Their current location was considered very lucky, and something of a coup. A house! With a stove! The boys hadn't yet gotten over it. Before, to stay in a barn was a luxury. But here the barn was used only for a kitchen, and the men trooped out three times a day for hot meals. Three hot meals!

Just past the iron stove was a room that the platoon's lieutenant had made into an office, with a couple of chairs and a large oak table that had been taken from the kitchen and was now strewn with papers. Conlee wandered in and out freely, and at times when the lieutenant was off somewhere, it unofficially became Conlee's office. He said nothing about the matter of Heck's wound. In fact, after the first conversation at the door he seemed to pay no particular attention to Heck, and Heck was uncertain what this meant. Perhaps Conlee had decided to forget it, to offer Heck another chance. Perhaps he was waiting to bring it up at the most embarrassing possible moment. Perhaps he was biding time until a convenient opportunity to put a bullet in Heck's back.

The others understood Heck to be a veteran, nearly as veteran as Conlee himself, and they deferred to his silence. He had been wounded by an enemy bullet and it hadn't gotten him out of the war—this could only be very bad luck indeed, so they perhaps thought it understandable that he would hold himself apart a little and brood on his lot. Heck felt as if he ought to disabuse them—make a suggestion to the effect that he was nothing but a coward. But anything short of an outright confession would be interpreted as modesty, and he could not imagine trying to explain what he had done in believable detail.

During the next three days the sky had an extraordinary clarity, a blue that receded behind itself indefinitely. A wind gusted erratically off the fields, lifting and dissipating high shimmering plumes of snow. There was one salient event during this time. Heck and the others were lined up at the door of the barn for lunch, standing with arms crossed, stamping their feet, breathing small whorls of condensation into the wind and muttering in anticipation of hot stew, bread, and coffee. One by one they were served by the cook, and Heck was nearly to the doorway when there was a sudden, loud crack.

Inside Heck's mind, the report was immediately followed by an anticipation of his own death. But it was the man before him who collapsed, screaming as he fell, his shriek broken by a gurgle, which had also ceased by the time Heck had dropped flat beside him. Others did likewise, or scattered into the barn or toward the house, where nearly everyone had left their weapons. “Where's the sniper?” screamed one GI, his voice high-pitched with panic. “Where's the fucking sniper?” Heck lifted his face off the ground and saw directly before him the oozing wound in the man's shoulder. A thing jutted from the wound, oddly shaped, shining—metallic he thought, adrenal fear still frantic inside him. But it was transparent. It was ice.

Conlee crouched beside him. “Icicle,” he said. “A fucking icicle.” He checked for a pulse. Heck sat up. There was a gap in the rank of icicles suspended from the barn's roof. A medic came. Conlee stood and bellowed, “Calm down! There's no kraut sniper.” He glanced at the roof. “Better move away from there,” he said to Heck and the medic.

The medic drew out the icicle, a lance of ice nearly four feet long. The tapering end had noticeably thinned in the body's heat and glowed pink.

The remaining icicles over the barn door were knocked down with noisy shots from a Browning. They lay in small heaps of dazzling shards. Lunch was eaten quietly. Someone mentioned that the dead man had survived a month of combat, including the attack that became the Battle of the Bulge.

It could have happened outside a barn in Iowa, but it had happened here, and Heck turned the event around and around in his mind until he could see nothing in it but the tapering pink end of the icicle.

On the afternoon of his third day at the farmhouse a GI tapped him on the shoulder and pointed at the office. “Conlee wants to see you.”

From behind the desk Conlee asked Heck to shut the door, then offered a cigarette. They sat smoking. Conlee gazed at the window. Blackout curtains had been pushed aside, and the window framed a tree: snow sat in crooked white lines atop the crooked black lines of its branches.

Conlee said, his tone conversational, “We held that town, you know. A lot of men died holding on to that town.” Then, stubbing out his cigarette, Conlee added, “You were cited as an expert marksman during your training.”

“What?”

“Expert marksman. Is that right?”

Heck looked out the window, past the tree toward the barn denuded of icicles, then glanced at Conlee again. Basic training had been something that had happened a thousand years ago. Conlee bore an expression of mild expectation. Heck said, tentatively, “Yes.”

Conlee gestured at some of the papers. “The lieutenant has been asked to provide an expert marksman for a special assignment. I suggested your name. Is that all right?”

With the door closed, the heat from the stove in the other room was not getting in, and Heck could feel the cold gathering. He waited, but Conlee offered no more. “Yes,” Heck said. “Okay.”

“There's no danger involved. Don't worry. A truck will be here at 0600 tomorrow. Take your M-1. You'll be in a little town in the Vosges Mountains.” Conlee shifted some papers and pointed to a dot on a map. “Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines—” Conlee pronounced the name slowly, Americanizing the French:
Saint Mary ah Mines.
“You'll be there for a couple of days, then you'll rejoin us.” Conlee gazed at him for a moment, then turned away and picked up some papers and began to shuffle them.

Heck went to the door, but hesitated. “Can't you tell me what this is?”

“You'll be given further orders there.”

“All right.”

At the fire, someone else had taken his seat. Heck settled into another, farther from the warmth. He wondered if it was possible that Conlee was actually trying to give him some kind of lucky break. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair and tried not to wonder, tried not to dread. But still the image in his mind was of a pink, narrowed icicle.

When Heck boarded the deuce-and-a-half—it arrived half an hour late—he counted nine other GIs already on board. All wore the red keystone patch of the 28th Division, but they were from other units within the division and Heck did not know any of them. By the stiffness and distance of how they sat relative to one another he sensed that no one knew any of the others. The truck made two more stops. Then, with a dozen men on board, it headed south as fast as the roads would allow. The men smoked, and occasionally someone would say a few words to the person next to him, about the roads, which were surprisingly smooth, or the weather, which was gray and misty. They spoke in near whispers, however, and the talk never sustained itself past a few terse exchanges. Heck pondered the mystery of their task with alternating alarm and weariness. He suspected that the others knew more than he did and what they knew was bad, or there would be chatter, questions, speculation.

Beside him sat a freckled young man who kept a wad of tobacco in his mouth and spit from time to time onto the floor of the truck. Occasionally, as if insulted by some inner voice, the freckled man scowled. After the truck had stopped for fuel and a short rest, Heck said to him in a low voice, “What is it we're supposed to do? Do you know?”

The freckled man's face swiveled to stare at him. The tobacco was a lump in his cheek, and his tense expression shifted slightly toward incredulity. “What do you mean?”

“What is it we've been volunteered for? Do you know?”

“You don't know?”

“They didn't tell me anything.”

The freckled man shook his head, then leaned forward, put his elbows on his knees and spit on the floor. A minute passed, and Heck realized there would be no answer. He pulled his head down into the collar of his coat.

Nearing the last hour of daylight, they began to pass on their right humpbacked hills veiled in gray mists. Slowly these resolved into forested slopes, hundreds of feet high, a square castle tower at the top of one, the snow-white slopes marked with the black strokes of innumerable trees. The truck turned into a valley, and the trees spread down off the hills to meet the sides of the road. It was a tremendously beautiful landscape. They passed through a small town, then another, nestled into the crook of the valley. There were gabled buildings painted pink, brown, rust, or lavender, with dark wooden window shutters.

Then a sign said
Sainte-Marie-aux-Mines.
At the heart of town were two- and three-story buildings set jowl to jowl, some with signs:
Boulangerie
or
Boucherie
. The church tower had a pointed steeple atop a rounded dome, like the spiked helmets of the kaiser's army in the previous war. They stopped outside a square, gated, institutional-looking building with an American flag over the doorway.

They unloaded and walked through the gates and up the short path to the door. The freckled man beside Heck said, without looking at him, “They should have told you. We're here to shoot a deserter. We're the firing squad.”

“What?” Heck said.

The freckled man strode ahead. Heck understood what had been said, but understanding seemed to leave him uncomprehending again, in a cycle, fast and flickering, white and dark.

A voice behind Heck said, “Something wrong?” and Heck realized he had stopped. He was blocking the doorway. The freckled man disappeared down a hallway, and Heck stumbled after him.

They were billeted in two ranks of bunks in a large room. On the wall beside Heck's bunk was a blackboard, and a crowd of school desks stood in a corner—they were in a schoolhouse. Still hardly anyone spoke. The men wrote letters, smoked cigarettes. Heck's thoughts tried and failed several times to achieve some order. He thought to himself, “I do not understand.” But he did. It seemed he should have questions, but he could not think of what the questions should be. He wanted to break something, but the things to be broken were impossible to break, and he sat not moving.