Ordinary Heroes

BEFORE TRIAL-ARREST AND CONFINEMENT-WHO MAY ORDER:

METHOD-THE FOLLOWING CLASSES OF PERSON SUBJECT TO MILITARY LAW WILL BE PLACED IN

ARREST OR CONFINEMENT UNDER ARTICLE OF WAR 69, AS FOLLOWS:

OFFICERS-BY COMMANDING OFFICERS ONLY, IN PERSON, THROUGH OTHER OFFICERS, OR BY ORAL OR WRITTEN ORDERS OR

COMMUNICATIONS. THE AUTHORITY TO PLACE SUCH PERSONS IN ARREST OR CONFINEMENT WILL NOT BE DELEGATED.

In other words, Martin could only be arrested by someone directly under Teedle's command, a member of the i8th Armored Division. After some debate at the time the arrest order was issued, our staff had concluded that Teedle, rather than Winters at OSS, remained Martin's commander, because Martin had disobeyed the very order transferring him back. But surely I wasn't under the General. If so, I couldn't arrest Martin without jeopardizing the ensuing court-martial.

Maples pinched his thumb and forefinger through his long mustache, which had gone completely white in the last few months and now resembled a smear of shaving lather. As usual, he remained reluctant to buck Teedle and came up with a lawyerly solution. He would get Third Army G-1 to designate me to the i8th solely for the purpose of carrying out Martin's arrest.

"We'll have to button up the paperwork. But you best get up there, David. Patton won't be amused if Martin slips away again. What a peculiar situation." The Colonel wobbled his hoary head. "Human misconduct, David. There's more imagination and mystery there than in the world of art."

"May I take Bidwell, Colonel?"

"Yes, of course." He sent me off to find a replacement in court for the day.

By noon, Biddy and I had our papers and were once more on the road. It was dank, with fog again gathered like smoke over the hills, and we had full side panels mounted to the canvas top on the jeep. Houffalize barely showed up on the maps, but it was somewhere in the vicinity of Saint-Vith, about 15o miles away. We'd be approaching areas of serious fighting and figured we'd do well to make it there by sunset the next day. Not knowing exactly what we'd encounter, we traveled with full packs and winter overcoats.

As we neared Metz and the territory the Americans had taken in recent weeks, we encountered signs reading ACHTUNG MINEN, left behind by the retreating German Army. I was not sure if these were warnings for their own troops, or a form of psychological warfare. When we made a stop, I checked with units from the Sixth Armored Division, who reported that minesweepers had been over the roads, but otherwise to proceed with care.

"You wouldn't be the first guy, Captain, who walked behind a bush to take a leak and got a leg blown off instead," a sergeant told me.

Proceeding north, we passed occasional lines of ambulances heading to the local field hospitals. For lack of Red Cross trucks, jeeps had been commandeered, with the wounded strapped on stretchers over the hoods and backseats. Near 4:30, after we began thinking about putting down someplace for the night, we encountered an MP roadblock. A squint-eyed policeman pushed his head all the way inside our vehicle. I removed our orders from the inside pocket of my overcoat, but the MP didn't bother with them.

"Where does Li'l Abner live?" he asked me. "Are you sober, soldier?"

"Answer the question, Captain."

"Dogpatch."

"And what's the name of Brooklyn's baseball team?" He was pointing to Biddy at the wheel.

"The Dodgers," he answered grumpily. "And they ain't no kind of a team neither." Amazingly, that response drew a laugh from the MP and immediately solved the problem. All day, the policeman told us, they'd had reports of German impostors in American uniforms who'd crossed our lines to engage in sabotage, cutting phone connections, removing signs, and occasionally pointing our units toward German forces, the same stuff Gita had done to them on D-Day.

"This happens again," the MP said to me, "show them your ID card. Theirs all say 'For Identification Only." Our officers' IDs bore a typo, Indentification,' quickly noted among the newly commissioned as a token of the value of their promotion. Some stone-headed Kraut had been unable to resist correcting the Americans on their English.

We crossed into the First Army zone and spent the night in Luxembourg City, in a hotel being used as rear-echelon headquarters by elements of the Ninth Armored Division. We had gotten farther than we expected, and it looked as if we would reach Houffalize by the next afternoon. I was awakened at about 5:3o a. M. by heavy shelling to the north. We would be headed straight that way, and I asked the major who'd arranged our billet what was happening.

"No worries. The Germans like to fire their guns while they still have them. They're not going anywhere. Bradley's pulled VIII Corps back for the time being. We're thin up on the front lines, but the Krauts know they'd just be running right into a huge force if they pushed forward. All this banging won't last more than an hour."

On our way out of town a young bazooka man with a strange accent asked if he could hitch a ride to his unit about ten miles north and climbed in back next to our packs. From a small town in Pennsylvania where they still spoke a German dialect, he was an amazingly cheerful kid, utterly indifferent to the war. He sang us several songs he'd learned at home in a strong, if not always perfectly pitched, tenor, and was in the midst of a ballad about a young lass pining for her lover gone to battle, when the jeep suddenly vaulted through the air aboard a tidal wave of sound and dirt. Next thing I knew, I was in a wet ditch at the roadside. When I looked up, there was a smoking pit in the farm field beside me, probably from a heavy mortar. The jeep was several yards ahead, canted at a thirty-degree angle with the front and rear right wheels also in the ditch. The canvas coverings I'd been thrown through flapped uselessly in the wind, while the young Pennsylvania Dutch boy was nearby in the field, still smiling as he got to his feet. I yelled to him to watch for mines, but promptly discovered that the rocket had fallen out of his bazooka and landed in the mud alongside me. I looked at the shell in a little pool of still water, afraid even to touch it for fear it would arm itself. I was edging away when another shell hit about a quarter mile ahead, leaving a crater that had taken out the road from side to side. The Germans had to be closer than anyone figured.

I yelled twice for Bidwell. He turned out to have been thrown only to the vehicle floor, and he poked his head up, none the worse for wear. The jeep was still running, but Biddy looked it over and announced that because of the angle at which the vehicle was pitched, the differential wouldn't let the rear wheels turn. We swore at the thing as if it was a spavined horse, and tried to shoulder it back up to the road, well aware that another shell could land any instant.

A small convoy arrived behind us. The gold-bar lieutenant in charge jumped down from the truck to help, while he sent his sergeant ahead to try to figure how they were going to get past the crater in the road.

"Some hellacious fighting up ahead, Captain," he told me, when I explained where we were headed. "You picked the wrong day for legal work. Looks like Hitler's decided to make his last stand." He suggested we proceed west.

With the help of several of his troops, we got the jeep out of the ditch and fixed a flat on the right rear tire. The bazooka man put his weapon together and climbed onto one of the convoy's trucks, while Biddy and I headed in the direction of Neufchateau. Two of the canvas panels had torn and flapped as we drove, admitting a frigid breeze.

The sky was too low and bleak for aircraft and thus for bombs, but the pounding of heavy artillery was constant. About an hour later, we reached a crossroads, where the roads wagon-wheeled in all directions, beside signs for Aachen, Luxembourg, Dusseldorf, Neufchateau, and Reims. Two MPs stood at the center of the intersection, holding up every vehicle. When one reached us, he asked for our papers, which he examined for quite some time.

"If you're headed north, how come you're going west?

I told him about the shelling.

"Uh-huh," he said. "And how long you been stationed in Nancy?" When I'd answered that, he said, "What's the name of the main square there?"

I answered again, but pulled my ID card from my wallet. "See here." Biddy pointed out the word Indentification' but the MP stared as if we'd chosen another language.

"Sergeant, aren't you trying to make sure we're not German impostors?" I asked.

"Captain, all due respect, but I'm trying to make sure you're not a deserter."

"Deserter!" I was offended by the mere notion.

"Believe you me. Yes, sir. If you don't mind my saying so, Captain, those RTC boys," he said, referring to the replacement troops, "they don't know what the fuck to do when the shells start flying. Over in the 28th it seems like half the division has taken off for the rear. I found several hauling along dead bodies, making like they were looking for the medics. Another one told me he was a messenger, only he couldn't recall what he was going to tell anybody. And plenty waving their hankies and giving themselves up to the Krauts with barely a bullet fired. I hear close to ten thousand boys from the io6th surrendered to the Germans already. And not just enlisted men, not by any means. We got plenty of officers running from the bullets today, saying they were going to check with battalion."

"Are we talking about Americans?" I asked. "What in the hell is going on?"

"Heavy woods up north. Apparently the whole fucking SS Sixth Panzer was hidden in the trees. Von Rundstedt busted out of there with tanks and artillery, going through our lines like grease through a goose. The VIII Corps is getting a pretty good pasting right now I'm hearing a lot of crazy stuff. Some guys are claiming there are German tanks fifty miles west of here already. We had an antiaircraft battalion in retreat come through twenty minutes ago, and some of the enlisted guys were saying rumor is their orders are to fall all the way back and defend Paris. I'll tell you one thing, Captain, this fucking war ain't over yet.''

We turned north from there, but within half an hour, as the MP had warned, the road was choked with trucks and armored vehicles streaming south in full retreat. Many of these units were in complete disarray, separated from command and driving on only to find safety. We came upon an armored battalion stopped on the side of the road, completely out of gas. A young boy, a buck private, was sitting on a wheel well, crying with abandon, wailing and looking around as if he expected someone else to tell him how to stop. Every minute or so, another soldier gave him a few pats on the shoulder. A sergeant explained that the boy's best buddy had been blown to bits not three feet from him this morning.

Back in the jeep, Biddy said, "Sir, this here ain't no time to be arresting somebody, not in the middle of a battlefield."

"We have orders, Biddy." I really didn't know what else to do.

"I'm just saying, sir, gotta have a way to carry out your orders. Better to hold back here for a day or two till the smoke clears. Wherever the hell Martin was, Captain, he's gotta be on the move now, probably comin right this way."

He was making sense. We headed west again, where we were stopped twice more by MP patrols pushing back deserters. Near dark, we finally arrived in Neufchateau. It was a postcard of a town, with a crush of pretty, narrow buildings and steep streets of cobblestone, but there was an air of chaos. We reported to the rear-echelon headquarters for VIII Corps, in the columned Palais de Justice, where they were receiving grim reports from forward command in Bastogne. Men seemed to be rushing in and out of every office, shouting information that someone else immediately screamed was wrong. Several regiments had given up under white flags, while many other units were unaccounted for. Whenever I could get someone's brief attention, his eyes seemed to wander to the windows, expecting to see the German Panzers out there any second. Clerks were in the halls boxing papers, separating what needed to be carried along so the remainder could be burned at the inception of the retreat.

After a long wait in the signal office, I finally got a young corpsman to send a wired message to General Teedle, giving our current position and asking for further direction. Then I conducted a reconnaissance for a billet. I was directed to officers' quarters that had been set 'up two blocks away in the city hall. As I passed down the corridors, looking for an empty bunk, I encountered little knots of off-duty officers, huddled and often passing around whiskey as they talked in suppressed murmurs. No one seemed able to accept what was happening. There hadn't been a day since I'd landed in Europe that the Germans had made progress across a broad front. A fellow who claimed to have seen the latest maps said we'd been suckered too far east, that the Nazis were about to split the Twelfth Army group, dividing the First Army from the Third, and the Ninth from the other two, with pincer actions to follow on the northern and southern flanks. No one knew the limits of today's German advance, but it was clear they had the upper hand, and several of these officers remarked about earlier reports of Nazi movements that General Bradley had ignored. Every face reflected the same thoughts: We were not going home soon. We were not going to win the war by Christmas, or New Year's, or even Valentine's Day. When I bedded down, I finally asked myself the question that nobody would utter: Were we going to win the war at all?

We were, I thought then. We had to. We had to win this war. I would give my life in order to stop Hitler. And I knew, despite whatever panic gripped the replacement troops who'd deserted on the front, that most of the seasoned officers sleeping in this building felt the same way. I turned off the light and realized only then that I'd forgotten to eat. There was a K ration in my pack, but I was too tired and disappointed to bother.

Light across my eyes woke me a few hours later. My first thought was another explosion, and as I gathered myself I couldn't understand how I had missed the sound. Instead, I found the young corporal from the Signal Corps who'd taken my message to Teedle holding the flashlight against his face so I could recognize him. My watch said z:Io a. M. He whispered to avoid waking the other five officers snoring around me in the old office, and led me into the hall, still in my briefs.

"Captain, this signal just came through, sir, labeled 'Immediate Attention." I could see from the boy's face he had read the telegram in the envelope and thought immediate attention was warranted. It was from Teedle, and had arrived in code, the boy said, requiring deciphering by the cryptographers.

Classified Information/Top Secret/Destroy After Reading OSS states man you seek Soviet spy STOP Arrest top priority STOP Further instruction by radio 0600 STOP

Chapter 15. JUMP

Teedle never got through on December 17. Many of the Allied communications centers around Saint-Vith had been cut off by the Germans. Although we were south of there, the remaining lines and relays were dedicated to signal traffic more important than the fate of one man, even a spy, and I spent approximately forty hours on a bench in the VIII Corps signal office, waiting to hear from the General.

In Neufchateau, like many other places, the Signal Corps had established its headquarters in the dusty offices of the PTT-Poster, Telegrapher et Telephones-which was housed in a narrow pinkish building on a corner. Topped by a strange iron cupola, it looked as if it were wearing a helmet.

From my seat inside, I could watch the young women, with their bright lipstick and the sleek hairdos required to fit under their headsets, plugging and unplugging the lines in the tall switchboards. American enlisted men strolled back and forth to keep an eye on them, just as the Germans had been doing a few months ago. Every now and then, civilians would enter to mail a letter or package, which the dour clerks accepted with no assurance that the item would ever get through.

The one compensation in my wait was that this was probably the most informative location in Neufchateau. I asked no questions, but overhearing the messengers and aides who rushed up the stairs made it possible to piece. Things together. The news was almost completely dismal. Sepp Dietrich's 6th. Panzers were rolling steadily in our direction, overrunning the thinly manned VIII Corps positions. Nor was it clear yet if any force could come to their aid, since the 5th Panzer Division was advancing south to hold off Patton.

Listening from my outpost on the bench, it was difficult not to admire the Nazi strategy, however reluctantly. Given the salient Dietrich was cutting, Runstedt's plan seemed aimed at severing the American forces, then crossing the Meuse and driving on toward Antwerp. If the Nazis succeeded, the Allied troops in Holland and northern Belgium would be cut off entirely, without avenue for retreat.

Dunkirk would look like a minor setback by comparison. With a third of the Allied forces held hostage, Hitler might be in position to negotiate an armistice. Or, if his madness prevailed, he could destroy them and then turn south, with other forces roaring out of Germany in one last effort to reconquer western Europe. The betting in the signal office was that, insane or not, Hitler would make peace, if only to give himself time to rebuild his military. On the bench, I thought repeatedly about Martin's predictions of war and more war. It was hard to believe a victory that had seemed inevitable could be imperiled in only days. Every few minutes the same simple resolve lit up in me like a flashing sign, as it had since I arrived here. We had to win this war. I had to help.

Now and then, in mild desperation, I would cross the street to the rear headquarters in the Palais de Justice, a vast columned building of orange stone, to see if my orders had been misdirected there. Biddy also visited on occasion, and we walked in circles up and down Neufchateau's tiny sloping streets, although the cobbles proved icy and treacherous on the steeper grades. It snowed both days, heavy flakes descending from a sky so low it seemed only a few feet over our heads. Hitler had either planned well or been lucky, since the cloud cover made it impossible for us to put planes in the air, unless they wanted to fly right over the barrels of the German antiaircraft guns.

I hesitated at first to share Teedle's highly classified message with Biddy, but decided I had to tell him, so he would understand whatever happened next.

"A spy!" I was ready for Biddy to say he'd always had suspicions about Martin, but he seemed to have the same difficulties I had in accommodating himself to the idea. "Cap, how in the world's that make any sense after what we seen?" I'd pondered that and one of the most disconcerting thoughts to invade me in the last two days was that the operation at La Saline Royale, which we'd so proudly joined, had been undertaken in reality to hinder the U. S. Army for the benefit of the Soviets. Despite Patton's outrage about the timing of the explosions, I couldn't quite make the notion add up, but then again, I realized, that was how spies succeeded, by making themselves appear to be patriots. OSS was bound to have had reasons for its conclusion.

At 4:00 a. M. on December 19, the same corporal, Lightenall, shook me awake on the bench where I'd been sleeping. Teedle had gotten through, once more using the encrypted teletype. I sat down in front of the keyboard myself. I'd had time to learn how to use the machine while I waited.

"Confirm receipt of my signal of 12/16/44." I did.

"Not even I thought that," Teedle continued. "London insists there is evidence." Without fears of interception, the General proved expansive. I imagined him after a day of battle, his canteen in hand while he shouted at the teletype operator and, in the midst of another sleepless night, diverted himself with one more duel with me. The dialogue was stranger than ever because of the eerie interval before his response emerged with a sudden violent clatter.

In a gauged way, I asked what had been on my mind, whether the operation we'd taken part in at La Saline Royale was somehow in service of Martin's new allegiance.

"No idea. London still talking riddles. Seems our man not working against good guys in current game. Instead, getting ready for next one, moving ahead so he can inform red team re our team's movements, also try to slow them. If our team, red team don't come to blows, red team gets bigger piece of what's been taken when this game ends. Following?"

"Roger."

"London desperate for arrest, but per usual won't put in writing. Prefer not to explain to 535 fans in D. C. how star began playing for other team. Continue proceeding on my order. Our man still believed in VIII Corps sector. Contact General Middleton to make arrest."

I explained the problems with that directive. By now, Middleton had decided to abandon Bastogne as a forward HQ. His artillery, six or seven battalions of 155mm guns and eight-inch howitzers, had already begun a staged withdrawal, but none of them had been able to occupy their prepared rearward positions because the Panzer elements were upon them so quickly. They were basically on the run back here. A faster-moving Airborne Division, the mist, was going to take over and was trucking up from Reims. I told the General it was chancy for any communication to get through. More important, there were legal issues. As I had discussed with Colonel Maples, only someone under Teedle's direct command could arrest Martin. Teedle reacted as I expected.

"Goddamn Army's been fucked up since they put Washington on a horse."

"Rules, General. We would have to free him."

There was a long wait for an answer. I was sure Teedle was contemplating how he would explain it to both the OSS and Patton, when Martin waltzed off through a legal loophole.

Finally Teedle wrote, "You volunteering to go?"

My fingers faltered on the keys. But I understood the logic. Bidwell and I were the nearest soldiers for 15o miles who were even arguably under Teedle's command. I couldn't imagine how two men in a jeep were supposed to move on terrain under assault by Panzer forces, but what I'd been thinking for three days remained close to my heart. I would do what I had to to win this war.

I wrote, "Yes, sir."

"Good," he fired back in a moment.

"Sir, will need better information on our man's whereabouts. Unlikely still at Houffalize." Biddy had told me an astounding story, which he swore he'd heard from the MPs who'd been at Houffalize on December 17. American and German military police had stood back to back at an intersection in the town directing traffic, both sides too busy and too lightly armed to bother battling one another. The Americans pointed their forces toward retreat, while the Germans waved on the reconnaissance and mine-clearing crews that were making way for the Panzers only a few miles behind them. By now, Houffalize had fallen.

"London already contacted Supreme Headquarters, which understands utmost priority. Will seek their assistance. Stand by for further orders.

I thought we were done, but a second later the keys flew again.

"How bad up there?"

"Fine here," I typed. "Hell on wheels a few miles forward."

"Tell them, hold on. Cavalry's coming. Will see you at the Siegfried line. Expect that SOB in chains. Out."

It took two more days before further orders came by cable.

Confirmed officer you seek commanding battalion NW of Bastogne STOP Proceed RAF airstrip Virton for transport to make arrest STOP

Late in the day on December 21, Biddy and I drove due south. Snow so solid that it looked like someone emptying a box of baking powder had been coming down all night, letting up only with the arrival of a cold front that felt just like the Canadian Express that bore down on Kindle County in the worst of winter.

The so-called airstrip at Virton proved to be no more than a wide dirt path recently bulldozed through a snowy field, but we found the small ground crew, mostly flight mechanics, expecting us. There were no hangars, because it would have been mad to house airplanes this far east in the face of the offensive, but the Brits had been landing in the dark here for a few days, hauling supplies cadged from Montgomery's forces, which were then trucked to our troops. Our soldiers, once expected to slice through the Germans in no time, were now short of everything, except, ironically, fuel, which had been stockpiled for their lightning advance.

"You the one going to Bastogne, then?" a flight sergeant asked me. "Place is damn near surrounded, you know, sir. Germans battering the hell out of everything. All the big roads go right through there, so Jerry can't go rolling on without taking the town." The Ardennes had provided an excellent hiding place for the Panzers, but one reason Bradley and Middleton had discounted the reports that the German tanks were massing there was because a forest was such an unpromising locale for a tank assault. It was easier to run over men than thousands of trees. Once the Panzers had crawled from the woods, they still were not able to maneuver freely, because the fall we'd been through had left half the fields swamps. I'd heard often about our tanks sinking. The Panzers were regarded as better machines-our Shermans were so likely to ignite that the troops called them Ronsons-but German treads got stuck in the muck same as American, and the weight of the biggest of Panzers, the King Tigers, would literally bury them in the wet ground. Because the Panzer forces were confined to the existing roads, holding on to the paths and byways for as long as possible was the key to slowing the Germans and allowing the Americans to reassemble for a counteroffensive. Patton reportedly had outflanked the 5th Panzer and was still speeding north to help out.

"Sounds like it's going to be a difficult landing there," I said to the sergeant.

"Landing?" He had a wrench in his hand and was toying with an engine part, but now he turned full around, a craggy English face. "Crikey, mate. Don't you know you're getting dropped?"

"Dropped?"

"Parachute. You know, big bedsheet in the sky?" His smile faltered. "You're a paratrooper, then, sir, ain't you?"

"I'm a lawyer."

"Oh, Lord Jesus.,, His reaction said it all. It was so absurd, I laughed out loud. As I left to tell Biddy, I heard the sergeant explaining my situation to his crew. "Poor sod," he said, "thought he was going to Bastogne in the royal carriage.''

Biddy couldn't even manage a pained smile.

"Parachute? Shit, Captain, my knees are lard when I get up on the roof of our tenement. I don't know about no parachute. You got any parachute training?"

I'd had none. Yet I had told myself for three days that I would do whatever I had to to win this war. It was a vow I'd taken and now would keep. If Martin was really intent on impeding our troops in Germany, I had to do this.

"Biddy, there's no need for both of us to go."

"Aw, hell, Captain. You know I'm just blabbing. Ain't no way I'm gonna let loose of you now, so let's not bother with that talk."

The plan, as it was explained to us, was essentially an experiment. For the moment, there was no way to resupply the troops in Bastogne. The main road from Neufchateau had been cut off and in Hitler's weather, flyers could not navigate by sight to make airdrops at heights safe from antiaircraft fire. The RAF pilots had agreed to try one low-altitude night flight, thinking that if it worked, more planes would do the same tomorrow evening. Three pallets of medical supplies were going to be parachuted in with us. If Biddy and I made it, doctors might follow.

There were a couple of hours before the plane was due and in that time we got what would pass for jump instruction: toes down, knees and feet together, eyes straight ahead. We made dozens of efforts to practice rolling as our boots struck the ground. The knee I'd cut when the dump exploded had healed well and had given me no pain for weeks, but now there were little phantom throbs each time we reenacted landing. After the first half hour, it was clear to me that our instructors, with all but one exception, had never jumped themselves. Nonetheless, they made a good case that if the chute released, we didn't have much to do but hang on and try not to break our legs. Real training, which addressed maneuvers in the event the chute ripped or inverted, or the suspension lines or risers snarled, would do us no good anyway from five hundred feet. None of those problems could be fixed before we hit the ground.

"Telling you the truth, Captain, t'ain't the jump what ought to concern you. Hanging like an apple on a tree, if Jerry works out you're there-that's a worry, sir.

The crew packed our chutes for us, then bundled our overcoats and cinched them beneath our valpacks, which would come down behind us with the medical supplies. We donned jumpsuits over our wool outdoor uniforms, and traded our headgear for paratroopers' helmets with their leather chin cups, the better to absorb the shock of the chute opening. Then we waited. Every ten minutes, I wandered outside to pee. My body temperature was about the same as marble. I simply could not imagine the circumstances under which I might be alive in another two hours.

Nearing 8:30, the truck convoys that would carry off the supplies on the arriving aircraft began to form in the field, but there was still no sign of the planes. By 9:00, I began to suspect they would not get here and wondered if I could pretend to be disappointed, when the mere thought flushed me with relief.

And then they came. The initial drone might have been insects if it were another season. The ground crew ignited dozens of Coleman lanterns and ran them out to illuminate the borders of the strip, and the planes came down with barely thirty seconds between them. The convoy crews rushed forward to unload.

The flight sergeant who'd been assisting me helped me into the rest of my parachute gear. First was a Mae West, the life vest required because there was no guarantee we wouldn't settle in a lake or pond, then I stepped into the harness, a web of straps and buckles that were tightened on each side of my crotch.

"Not exactly comfy knickers, but your nuts might still be rattling round once you land, Captain." What I had on already was cumbersome, but it turned out I'd just made a start. Since we could put down on enemy ground, the sergeant inserted a Thompson submachine gun under the waist web, and clipped on two five-pound boxes of machine-gun ammo, then strapped a fight knife on my leg and, for good measure, a small Hawkins mine, looking like a can of paint thinner, against my boot. He turned my woven waist piece into a combat tool belt, hanging off it a trenching shovel and a canteen, my pistol in its holster, a skein of rope, a pair of wire cutters, and a folding knife. An angle-headed flashlight went under a band on my chest. Then, when I thought he was done, he put a reserve chute across my belly. I expected to topple any second. Even Biddy, huge as he was, looked weighed down.

"You're traveling light, mate, 'cause you're firsttimers. Paratroops usually carry a Griswold bag under one arm.

Biddy and I were jeeped to our plane, a light bomber called a Hampden. It had two engines, a silvery fuselage, and a low glass nose that made it appear like a flying turtle. We stood with difficulty on the car's hood and with two men steadying us from below climbed a ladder through the bomb bay into the bare sheet-metal belly of the plane.

There was a four-man crew there-pilot, bombardier, gunner, and radioman-but their attitude toward us seemed slightly standoffish, even for Brits. I wondered if the RAF would have been trying this run without Teedle's-or the OSS's-insistence at Supreme Headquarter's on the paramount importance of Biddy and me reaching Bastogne. Perhaps, I decided, these four were just exhibiting a natural reluctance to develop attachments to the doomed.

With all the gear on, we could get only the rear edge of our butts onto two fold-down seats bolted to the fuselage, but the radioman harnessed us in with the strapping that had secured the unloaded cargo. The pilot, a Flying Officer, came rear to brief us. We would reach Bastogne in twenty minutes, he said. As soon as the joe hole, the bomb bay in the silver floor in front of us, opened, we should hook our rip cords to the line above and get out on the double. Our drop area was in open fields just west of Bastogne, near a town called Savy. If the Germans figured out we were in the air, the gunner and radioman would put down covering fire with the Vickers machine guns on turrets in the gun wells in front of us. However, the pilot thought the Nazis would never see the chutes in the dark, because the sound of the plane would draw all the fire. He was businesslike but made it plain that if there was a fools' contest here, they were probably the winners. I understood then why we'd received such an unenthusiastic greeting.

Sitting there in the instants before the plane took off, I felt completely detached from myself. I thought I had given up on life, but as soon as the engines triggered, a sharp whinny of protest rose straight out of my heart. This is crazy, I thought. Crazy. Men down there are going to try to kill me, men who have never met me, men I've never tried to harm. Suddenly, I could not remember why that made any sense.

We built speed, enduring that second of weightlessness when we left the ground. I looked to Biddy, but he was staring at the floor, clearly trying to contain himself. As we climbed, I remembered that I'd passed all that time waiting without writing to my family or Grace, but I couldn't think of what I would have said besides 'I love you, and I am going to leave you for the sake of madness.'

As we flew, the interior grew unbearably hot, but I was principally preoccupied with trying to ignore the urgency of my bladder and my bowels. The bombardier came over and crouched beside me. He was a Leading Aircraftsman, the British equivalent of a corporal, a handsome dark-haired kid.

"First jump, then?" He had to repeat himself several times because the throbbing buzz of the engines filled the entire belly of the plane.

I nodded and asked for last-minute pointers. He smiled. "Keep a tight arsehole."

Almost on cue then, Biddy vomited in front of himself and sat there shaking his head, manifestly ashamed. "It's the heat," I yelled. The interior of the Hampden was like a blast furnace, and fouled with the sickening fumes of the plane's exhaust. I felt woozy myself. The bombardier acted as if he'd seen it all before.

"You'll feel better now," he told Biddy.

When the phone beside the hatch flashed, the bombardier grabbed it, then motioned to fix our chinstraps.

"All right, then," he yelled, "who's first?"

We hadn't discussed this, but Biddy raised a hand weakly, saying he had to get out. He hooked on, then crawled to the edge of the joe hole. The doors fell open slowly, emitting a frozen gale. Some part of my brain was still working, because I realized the plane had been overheated in anticipation of the cold. The bomb bay was not even fully extended when Gideon lowered his head and suddenly disappeared without a backward glance.

After hooking overhead, I tried to stand, but my legs were like water, and it would have been difficult anyway given all the equipment I was wearing and the shimmying of the plane. Like Biddy, I went on all fours, remembering too late to avoid the puddle he had left behind. The instant he was gone, I was at the edge, leaning into the great rush of icy air. My face went numb at once, as I looked down to the vague form of the land moving below in the darkness. In the white leather jump gloves, my hands were clamped to the edge of the bomb bay. The bombardier placed his face right next to mine.

"Captain, I'm afraid you must be going. Otherwise, sir, I'm going to have to put my boot in your bum."

Ma, what am I doing? I thought. What am I doing? And then I thought, I must do this, I must do this, because it is my duty, and if I do not do my duty, my life will be worth nothing.

But still, my body would not surrender to my will. I shouted to the bombardier, "I'll take that kick in the ass.), It was like diving into a pool, the shock of cold, the sudden distance from sound. I did a complete somersault in the air and came upright with my heart pumping nothing but terror, while one thought leaped at me with startling clarity. As my chute snapped open and I was slammed against the sky, a white pain ignited in my arms. I had forgotten to grip the harness, falling with my hands spread before me like a child taking a spill, and I feared for one second that I had dislocated my shoulders. But even that was not enough to distract me. Because in the instant of free fall, I had realized I hadn't really come to find Martin. The form I'd seen as I tore through space was Gita Lodz.

For half the descent there was no sound or sensation except the racing cold. I saw only the earth, black on black, a swimming form without perspective. And then it was as if the night, like the shell of a hatching egg, was suddenly pecked by light. Volleys of antiaircraft fire came from at least three sides and the rockets tore by like massive lethal bugs. Then, without warning, a squeal of red flares brought day to the sky. I caught sight of Biddy's chute, mushroomed below me, and took heart for just a second, knowing I was not alone here, but that was replaced at once by another spasm of terror when I realized that the Germans were firing at us. The AA was still blasting, but smaller rounds also ripped by like shooting stars. In the instantaneous glow, I actually saw one make a hole in the canopy of Biddy's chute, whose descent accelerated. It would be a good thing for him, though, assuming he survived, to get out of the barrage.

Paying my nickel on a Saturday afternoon, I'd heard the shots whanging past Tom Mix in the movie-theater speakers. But the real sound of a round that misses is just a sinister little sizzle and a wake of roiled air, a bee farting as it passes, followed instantaneously by the sharp report of the rifle the bullet came from. The German infantry, thank God, hadn't practiced shooting falling objects. A dozen shots missed by only a few feet. But as the ground came near, my ear was bored by an intense pain.

My next memory is of lying in the snow. Under my nose, Biddy was waving an ammonia ampoule he'd extracted from the first-aid kit on the front of his helmet. I flinched from the driving odor.

"C'mon, Captain. Those 88s will be on us any minute." I continued to lie there while I put things together. Somewhere along, I realized he'd already cut me free of my chute. "You passed out, Cap. Maybe a concussion." He wrestled me to my feet. I reached to grab my pack, which he'd also collected, then stopped dead, astonished by what I felt against the back of a thigh. I retrieved the sensation at once from the remote memories of childhood. I had shit in my pants.

Behind Bidwell I ran in a half crouch through a farm field where the snow was up to our knees until we reached a wooded border. All that worry about parachute training and it turned out we were landing on a pillow. After the flares, we knew American forces would be looking for us, assuming we'd come down in an area they controlled. While Biddy struggled in the dark to read the compass strapped to his arm, I shed my parachute harness and pushed farther into the brush, where I dropped both pairs of trousers. It could not have been more than ten degrees but I still preferred to stand there naked, rather than go on with crap trailing down my legs. I cut my briefs off with the jackknife from my belt, cleaned up as best I could, and hurled away my underwear, which ended up snagged on one of the bushes. Biddy was watching by now, but asked for no explanation.

A recon group arrived five minutes later. We raced with them to gather up the medical bundles before the German artillery turned on us, then clambered into the backs of a pair of two-ton trucks from an ordnance unit that had pulled up. As the vehicles rolled out, Biddy, beside me, reached up to touch my helmet. Removing it, I saw a dent in the steel above my right ear, and a fracture running down two inches to the edge. That was from the round that had knocked me out. I shook my head, as if I could take some meaning from the nearness of the miss, but nothing came to me. There was alive and there was dead. I wasn't dead. Why or how close really meant nothing compared with the elemental fact.

We had ridden half a mile before I picked up on the radio traffic blaring from the cab. Someone had not been found.

"The Brits," Biddy said. "The Hampden went down right after you landed." The Kraut AA had caught it in a direct hit, a giant ball of fire and smoke, he said, but they were east of us by then, over the Germans. I thought about the four men we'd flown with, but I could make no more of their demise than I had of my own survival. Instead I turned to Biddy to complain for a second about the cold.

The soldiers who had collected us were elements of the 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division who had been cut off in their retreat and ended up here, formed up with the mist Airborne, which was the principal force defending Bastogne. They drove us back to their command post set up in the hamlet of Savy. The town consisted of a few low buildings constructed of the native gray stone. In the largest of them, a cattle barn, the acting combat team commander, Lieutenant Colonel Hamza Algar, had established his headquarters.

Algar was working at a small desk set in the center of the dirt floor, when we came in to report. The orderlies had done their best to sweep the place clean, but it was still a barn, with stalls on both sides and open beams above, and the residual reek of its former inhabitants. Four staff officers were standing around Algar, as he went over lists and maps beside a lantern. They were in field jackets and gloves, shoulders hunched against the cold. It was better in here, because there was no wind, but there was still no heat.

Algar stood up to return my salute, then offered his hand.

"How much training did you have for that jump, Doc?" he asked me. "That was damn brave. But, Doc, you came to the right place. Unfortunately." This made the third or fourth time since we'd landed that I'd been addressed as 'Doc.' Perhaps it was the concussion, or the numbness of surviving, but I realized only now that this greeting wasn't being offered in the fashion of Bugs Bunny.

"Begging your pardon, Colonel, but I'm afraid you have a misimpression. I'm a lawyer."

Algar was small, five foot six or seven, and perhaps in compensation was plainly attentive to his good looks. He had a narrow split mustache over his upper lip, carefully trimmed even on the battlefield, and his hair was pomaded. But he was clearly bewildered.

"I was told you were dropped with medical supplies. Sulfa. Bandages. Plasma." Algar sat down and turned to his aides. "We get lawyers by parachute," he said. "What about ammunition? Or reinforcements? Jesus Christ." In a second, he got around to asking why I was there. He stared at me even longer than he had when I'd said I wasn't an M. D., once he heard my explanation.

"Martin?" he asked. "Bob Martin? They've sent you to arrest Bob Martin? Don't they know what the hell is going on here? We've got everybody firing a weapon, including the cooks. I have three companies under the command of NCOs. I've got two second lieutenants who between them have a total of one week's experience in Europe. And they want you to arrest one of my best combat officers?"

"Those were my orders, sir."

"Well, I'll give you different orders, Captain. You arrest Major Martin or anybody else who's able-bodied and firing back at the Germans and I won't bother arresting you. I'll shoot you, Captain Dubin, and don't take that for jest."

I looked to the circle of officers for help.

"Three days from now," Algar told me, "four, whatever it takes to deal with the Krauts, we can sort this out. McAuliffe can talk to Teedle. They can take it up with Patton if they like. Or even Eisenhower. They'll hash it out at the top. Right now we're all trying to save this bloody town. And ourselves. Understood?"

I didn't answer. There was a silent moment of standoff, before Algar spoke again.

"Just out of curiosity, Dubin, what is it exactly that Martin's supposed to have done?"

I took a second evaluating what I could say, then asked to speak to him alone. It was too cold for Algar to ask his officers to step outside, but he shooed them to a corner.

"Colonel," I said in a whisper, "there's a question of loyalty.

Algar leaned forward so quickly I thought he meant to hit me.

"Listen, Dubin, Bob Martin has been fighting with the 110th for almost a week now, leading a combat unit, and doing one heck of a job. As a volunteer. He's been through hell, like the rest of us, and he's just taken on another mission that requires more guts than common sense. I'll stake my life on his loyalty."

"Not to the Allies, sir. It's a question of which one.

Algar watched me, once more trying to figure me out. He betrayed his first sign of nervousness, nibbling at the mustache over his lip, but that, it turned out, was only as a means to control his anger.

"Oh, I see," he said, "I see. More red-baiting? Is that it? I've been watching the brass give the cold shoulder to a lot of the French resisters whose politics they don't care for, men and women who risked everything for their country, while half of France was kneeling down in Vichy. Well, I've got no use for that, Dubin. None.

"I'll tell you the truth, Captain. I feel sorry for you. I do. Because that jump took some guts. And it was for a bunch of silly crap. And now you're not just out of the frying pan into the fire, but straight into a volcano. The Germans have us surrounded. We have damn little food, less ammunition, and the only medical supplies I've seen are the ones that fell with you. So I don't know what the hell you're going to do with yourself, but I promise you this-you're not arresting Bob Martin. Ralph," he said, "find Captain Dubin and his sergeant a place to sleep. Gentlemen, that's all I can do for you. Dismissed."

Chapter 16. NIGHT VISIT

Biddy and I were 'transported about a mile to the town of Hemroulle and a small stone church that stood amid a clutch of dark farm buildings, where we put up for the night with an infantry unit under Algar's command. I slept on an oak pew, better than the cold floor, but too narrow to be comfortable. Between that and the reverberations of jumping and deflecting bullets, I could not really manage much sleep and I woke easily at the sound of two men, Americans, shouting at each other in the back of the sanctuary. Somebody else hollered to take the row outside. The radiant dial on my watch showed nearly 3:00 a. M. I lay there a second longer determined to sleep, then suddenly recognized both of the quarreling voices.

When I bolted up, Biddy was visible in the light of a candle beside the door, dragging Robert Martin along by the collar of his field jacket, looking like a parent with an unruly boy. I took just an instant longer to convince myself I was awake, then grabbed my tommy gun and rushed back there. Biddy's woven belt was tied around Martin's hands. The Major was furious.

"Why is it when you tell even a good man that he's a policeman, he turns into a thug?" Martin asked as soon as he saw me.

According to Bidwell, Martin had driven up only a moment ago, while Bidwell was on his way back from the outhouse.

"Smiles like he was my auntie come to visit and asks for you," said Biddy. "My orders say arrest him and that's what I done."

I knew Biddy had laid hands on Martin just for the pure pleasure of it, given what we'd been through. Nor did I blame him. But Algar would treat this as mutiny.

"Let him go, Gideon."

He looked at me in his way. "Hell, Captain," he said.

"I know, Biddy. But untie him. We need to get things straightened out first."

One of the men from the platoon sleeping behind us sat up on his pew and called us jerk-offs and told us again to take it outside.

We passed into the church's narrow entry, just beyond the sanctuary. Two candles had been placed in the corners for the benefit of those using the outhouse. As soon as Biddy untied Martin, he banged out the old wooden doors. I assumed he was leaving, but the Major returned in an instant with his steel flask. Apparently he'd lost it after offering it to Bidwell. Martin's knowledge of judo might have given him a fair chance, even against Gideon, but Biddy had fallen on him without warning, while Martin was offering him a drink.

I remained astonished to see Martin. If he knew we were here, he had to know why.

"Come to taunt us, Major?"

"More to pay my respects and clear things up. That is, until I ran into Primo Canera here. I understand it was you two we saw being shot at in the sky last night. What kind of training did you have for that, Dubin?"

I was not sure I wanted to answer, but shook my head a bit.

"Quite heroic," said Martin. "I hope you weren't patterning yourself after me." He found the comment amusing. Martin was dressed as he was at La Saline Royale, in a field jacket and combat fatigues, with a vest full of equipment. He was dirty and unshaved and rubbing at one of his wrists, which must have been a little sore after his tussle with Gideon. Every now and then he reached down to swipe off more of the snow that had collected on his trousers when Bidwell had pinned him out on the church steps.

"I don't fancy myself a hero, Major. It's not a label I deserve. Or that I'd exult in."

"Is that a personal remark, Dubin?"

It was, but I wouldn't admit it. "I admire what you've done, Major."

Is that why you've come to arrest me?" He said he'd heard about my orders from Ralph Gallagher, Algar's Exec. I still had a copy of Teedle's written directive in the inside pocket of my tunic, now wrinkled and still moist with my sweat. Unfolding it, Martin walked closer to one of the candles to read, his shadow looming enormously behind him. Biddy was crouched down along the paneled wall opposite. His hand was on his tommy gun and his eyes never left Martin.

"Seems like everybody's quite vexed with me, Dubin," said Martin as he handed the paper back. "Including you."

"You lied to me, Major. And stole away in the dead of night."

"I told you I was about to depart on a mission, Dubin, when you arrived that day at the Comtesse s.

"You were referring to blowing the dump at La Saline Royale."

"Was I? Your misunderstanding. I'm sorry. Have you spoken yet to OSS? What is it they've told you about my current orders?" I realized then that was why Martin had come around. He wanted to know what OSS surmised about his disappearance-whether they thought he'd gone mad, or had deserted, or if, more critically, they'd figured out that he was working for the Soviets. I was determined to give him no answers to that.

"London has approved your arrest, Major."

"Rubbish. I'd wager a large sum, Dubin, you have not heard that personally from anyone at OSS. They're the ones who sent me this way. Don't you recall? I told you several times I was being dispatched to Germany." To link up with his old network and save lives, he had said. There was no doubt OSS would want German supporters at this stage.

Across the entryway Bidwell's eyes had jumped from Martin to me to be certain I wasn't going to be taken in again, but he had no need for concern. The motto of the law remained with me. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus. False in one thing, false in all. One lie was enough to deprive any witness of credibility and Martin's fabrications were beyond tolling. Whatever the irony, I reposed considerable faith in Teedle's veracity by now He was too direct to lie. I simply shook my head at Martin.

"You make it your business to get to London, Dubin, and to speak with Colonel Winters. You'll see I'm telling the truth."

"For your sake, I hope you are, Major. But there is no ambiguity in the orders I have. You are to be arrested. Whenever we can make safe passage to the west, Bidwell and I will escort you back to Third Army Headquarters. As an officer you'll be held under house arrest until your trial."

"House arrest?"' He chuffed some air after the words. "That sounds like my childhood. And won't Teedle be satisfied?" That thought wilted him. He slumped against the wall across the entryway from Bidwell, and opened up his flask. He offered me a slug, which I declined. I wanted no more of Robert Martin's generosity.

"Do you read Nietzsche, Dubin?" Martin asked after a moment.

"I have."

"Yes, I have, too. General Teedle has read Nietzsche, of that you can be certain. life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.' It's all rot," he said. "And Teedle is not Superman. Do you know why the General wants the world to think he's a great man of action, with his arms across his chest? Have you seen him strike that pose in the newsreels? The General is a fruit," Martin said. "Have you learned that yet?"

I said nothing.

"I don't mind faggots," said Martin. "There've been several who've done some damn good stuff for me over the years. One of them was a waiter in Paris. Can't imagine what a waiter overhears, Dubin. But he was one of those wispy queers who made no bones about it. The General thinks he's just a man who sleeps with men."

"Are you saying that feeds his grudge against you, Major?"

"Who knows? Probably not. For Teedle it's probably all about me supposedly being a Communist. Have you asked him about that?"

I took a second to consider what I should say. I couldn't entirely surrender my curiosity now that he'd raised the subject.

"Teedle says you were a party member, Major. In Paris."

Rarely given to laughter, Martin managed a short high-pitched cackle. "Well, I've always liked a good party," he said. "And for that I'm to be arrested?"

"You're to be arrested for insubordination, Major. But General Teedle would probably tell you to your face that he suspects that when our armies meet, you'd follow the orders of Russian generals rather than his." Given my experiences with Martin, I wouldn't have placed much faith in his denials. But I was still taken aback when he made none. Instead, he chuckled again.

"You can lay good money on that, Dubin. I'd sooner take directions from a squawking parrot than Teedle. But fortunately I'm here under a fine commander. I have no problems with Algar, you'll notice."

"The Lieutenant Colonel said you were about to undertake some new operation, Major?"

"Indeed. We start about an hour from now." I expected him to invoke the privileges of required secrecy, but apparently the mission was common knowledge. The military situation around Bastogne was even worse than the flight mechanics at Virton had suggested. The Germans had cut the last roads yesterday and fully encircled the area. Now they would tighten their grip until they could blast the American troops into submission. Our position was tenuous, but the men I'd encountered, including those with Algar, and Martin now, remained calm. Patton was on the way, supposedly, but the troops all felt that what they needed was bullets and equipment so they could break out themselves. That was what Martin's operation was about.

On December 19, as the Germans had flanked Bastogne to the south and west, they had cut off an American supply train near Vaux-les-Rosieres, blocking the tracks with tanks and leaving the train there, probably waiting to determine if they could make any use of its contents themselves. Along with some of the men from the 'loth Regiment whom he'd been commanding for a week now, Martin aimed to reach those railcars full of ammunition.

The bet was that when his troops and his three Hellcat tank destroyers cut into the thin German lines, the Nazis would fall back to consolidate their position, thinking this was the spearhead of a concerted American effort to pierce the encirclement. Martin and his men would probably have an unimpeded path to the train. If Martin could get the locomotive moving, they would steam into Bastogne. If not, they would off-load as much as they could of the 75mm ammunition and the bullets for smaller arms and then dash back before the Germans closed in again.

The only difficult part, Martin thought, might be getting through in the first place.

"The infantry's thin," he said. "We'll go right past them. The Panzer Lehr are roaming out there somewhere, but even McAuliffe thinks it's a solid plan," he said, referring to the commander of the mist who was directing the defense of Bastogne. "Even if the Lehr show up, we can fall back. And if we make it through, our chances of success are very high."

"Trains and ammunition," I said. "You seem to have a motif, Major."

"Old dog, old tricks," he answered. "It's damn boring to be a specialist. I never wanted to specialize in anything when I was a boy. But then I fell in love with the railroad."

I asked if he was the kind who ran model locomotives around a track decorated with miniature trees and stations.

"Never had patience for that. I was somewhat frenetic as a child. I suppose you can still see that. No, trains for me came at a later point. I left home for a spell when I was seventeen. Hopped a freight car. First taste of freedom I'd had in my life was when that car went hurtling out of Poughkeepsie. I decided at that moment that the railroad was the greatest of mankind's inventions. I loved being around trains. When I went to my mother's people in Paris after I dropped out of college, that was the work I sought. Started as a porter. Ended up as an engineer. The idea that I was a common workingman appalled my father, but it delighted me."

"I don't think I've heard you mention your parents before, Major."

"No accident in that, Dubin." He nipped at his flask again and looked at the candles. "My father's a professor of Romance languages at Vassar College. Met my mother when he was at the Sorbonne. Very distinguished fellow, my father. And the meanest man walking God's green earth. I agree with him about everything. Politics. Music. I don't like his attire, I suppose, I don't like his hats. But it goes to show you beliefs aren't everything. He's a complete son of a bitch."

"Hard on you?"

"Very. And harder on my mother. She couldn't get away by hopping a train. So she blew her head off with his shotgun when I was sixteen."

As the wind came up outside, the wooden doors knocked and the candles guttered, but he didn't take his gaze from the corner. I expressed my sympathies.

"Well," he said. "It was hard, of course. Horrible. But it wasn't a picnic before then. My mother was always in bed, an impossibly beautiful woman, but utterly morose. I can barely remember her features because I rarely saw her anywhere but a dark room." He drank and looked at the wall. "These aren't stories I often tell, Dubin."

I could understand that. But I recognized Martin's instinct always was to master the moment however he could. His. charm had been undermined by his lies. So now he would prey on my sympathies. Or parade out Teedle's perversions.

"I think I should come along on this operation with you tonight, Major." I had been considering that for a while. Across the entryway, Biddy could not contain himself.

"Jesus Christ crucified," he moaned. I found a pebble on the floor and tossed it at him, then repeated my request of Martin.

"Afraid I'll run away, Dubin?"

"That would not be without precedent, Major."

"Well, right now you have the Germans to ease your mind. Every road has been cut. And the snow is high. And I've got a team to bring back."

I said I still wanted to come.

"Don't be an ass, Dubin. You won't be there for the mission. You'll be there to keep an eye on me. Which means you'll be a danger to both of us. And damn certain to get in the way."

"We didn't get in the way at the salt mine."

"At the salt mine, Dubin, you stayed in one place.

This is a mobile operation. In armored vehicles on which you've never been trained."

"I'll speak to Algar."

"It's not Algar's choice. It's mine. And I don't want you there."

The chance that Algar would overrule Martin was minimal, but given the situation I needed to try. I asked if Martin was willing to drive me back to Algar's headquarters so I could make my case to the Lieutenant Colonel. He wound his head disbelievingly, but smiled brightly at my doggedness, as usual.

"I have to get ready, Dubin, but I'll drop you there. Come along."

I told Biddy to stay and sleep. He seemed unconvinced.

"He's got a tommy gun with him, Sergeant," said Martin. "I think he'll have a fair chance against me." Martin called Gideon "Bruiser" when he gestured goodbye.

As soon as we were under way in his jeep, Martin said, "Aren't you going to ask me about Gita?"

hook a second. "I hope she's well."

"As do I."

"I understand she's near Houffalize."

"You won't find her if you look there, Dubin." Martin turned from the road with a tart, narrow look and we stared at each other. It was the first instant of actual hardness between us, undeflected by irony. He wanted me to ask where she was, and I wouldn't give him the pleasure. Even so, this friction reminded me yet again what a terrible mistake I'd made with her.

"If you have a complaint with me, as far as Mademoiselle Lodz is concerned, Major, feel free to lodge it."

"No complaints," he said quickly. "She wouldn't stand for it. Her life is her own. Always has been and always will be." This was a disciplined answer, like a soldier taking orders. "She's in Luxembourg. At least I hope she is. Roder. Overlooking the German border. We both sent reports to Middleton that the Germans were massing tanks, but nobody wanted to hear that. God bless the United States Army." He tossed his head bitterly, as he pulled the vehicle in front of the barn where Biddy and I had been with Algar a few hours earlier. When Martin's hand came forward, I lifted my own to shake, but instead he pointed at my side.

"I wouldn't mind having use of that tommy gun, Dubin. We don't have anything like that around. It might come in handy and you have my word it will be returned. I'll swap you my MI for a few hours."

I looked at the submachine gun. I was glad Bidwell wasn't here, so I didn't have to hear the sounds he would make at the idea of giving Martin anything.

"Will you promise to surrender yourself to me, Major, when we're capable of moving out?"

Martin laughed. "Oh, Dubin," he said. In the darkness, he looked out to the snow. "Yes, I'll surrender myself. On the condition that you reach OSS personally before turning me over to Teedle."

We shook on that and I handed him the gun and the one ammo box I had with me.

"You'll have it back in a few hours," Martin promised before he drove off.

He was barely out of sight when the sentry outside the barn told me that Algar had gone up to the staging area to go over the maps one last time with Martin and his team. He said that Martin and Algar had set that meeting only half an hour ago when Martin first stopped here. I stood there in the wind. I would never be sharp enough to deal with Martin. I was not even angry at myself. It was simply the nature of things.

I considered walking back to Hemroulle, but I had a faint hope Algar might return before Martin's team set off. There was a hay locker attached to the barn, a platformed area raised so that the fodder could be tossed in from the back of a cart or truck through an opening outside. The sentry told me troops had slept in there the last two nights. He promised to rouse me as soon as Algar came back.

Only a little hay remained in the height of winter, but its sweet smell lingered. My predecessors had swept up the remnants and mounded them into a couple of beds and I lay down on one and fell soundly asleep. My dreams seemed rough and desperate, the kind that make you cry out in the night, but I stayed for many hours in that world, rather than this besieged circle in Belgium.

My name roused me. Hamza Algar, looking weary and nibbling at his mustache, was a few feet below me in the barn. He shoved my tommy gun across the board floor of the hay locker.

"Martin told his men to make sure this got back to you," he said and turned away. As I crawled out, Algar walked to his desk at the center of the barn. There was daylight visible in the seam between the stone walls and the tin roof of the building. Sitting, Algar rested his face in his hands.

"How did they do?" I asked Algar.

He sighed. "Poorly. The Krauts pinned them down and then blasted the shit out of them at first light. The men who made it back came on foot."

"And Martin?"

"Gone," Algar said.

That was the same word Bettjer had used when I'd awoken at the Comtesse's after we blew the dump. I'd known it would happen. I reviewed in my mind what I'd been through-the terror of the jump, the shot, and the enduring indignity of fouling my trousers-only for Martin to have run from me again. Sisyphus came to mind.

"Any idea where he headed?" I asked.

I received another fixed uncomprehending look from Algar. So far all our conversations had somehow devolved into a competition in provoking speechlessness. The Lieutenant Colonel sighed deeply again.

"Well, if there's anything to your arrest order, Captain, he's probably headed to hell. Captain Dubin, you didn't understand me. Bob Martin is dead."

Chapter 17. CHAMPS

Since December 16, Robert Martin had been in command of units that had been isolated from the 110th Infantry Regiment during its retreat from Skyline Drive in Luxembourg in the early hours of that day. Regrouping here with the remains of the regiment, Martin's two rifle companies and two towed guns from a tank destroyer battalion had been teamed with a platoon of M18 Hellcats. It was these troops Martin had led toward Vaux-lesRosieres, where the ammunition train was marooned. North and west of the town of Monty, they had crossed our lines and encountered thinly manned German positions, which they quickly pushed through.

Half a mile on, however, they were engaged by the Panzer Lehr, the tank division formed from Nazi training units. Less brazen forces might have fallen back to form a stronger line, as McAuliffe and Algar had anticipated, but the Panzer Lehr prided themselves on backing off from no one and had spread out to take on Martin's team. During the protracted firelight that resulted, Martin and his men moved to the top of a knob, which allowed them to destroy a number of the German tanks. Near daybreak, the Panzer Lehr withdrew. Martin and his unit leaders had gone up to the second floor of a small lodge on the hill to assess whether they still had a chance to reach the ammunition train. From there, they saw what had provoked the Germans' retreat, a battalion of American tanks emerging like specters through the falling snow. Patton had arrived.

Even when the first rocket came screaming toward Martin from a turret of the approaching armor, no one in his command had caught on that the tanks they saw had been captured by the Nazis from the 9th Armored Division. Never mustering a defense, Martin's unit had been left with only isolated survivors. The Major himself had gone down when the initial tank shell flew in the window at which he stood. At least four other shells hit the building, reducing it to a bonfire.

All of this was related to me the morning after we jumped into Savy by a boy named Barnes. He was perhaps five foot two, and slight as a butterfly. His nose was dripping the entire time I spoke to him, and he flinched whenever a shell exploded in the distance. For the moment, the fighting seemed to he a couple of miles off, to the north and east.

"Captain, we was blown to shit, there just ain't no other way to put it. I mean, those was American tanks. How was we supposed to know any different?"

Algar had corralled this boy, and one of the few other survivors of Martin's team, Corporal Dale Edgeworthy, and the two of them sat with Biddy and me, on wooden chairs in a corner of the empty barn.

"Martin got it right at the start of the attack," said Edgeworthy. "That's what came over the radio. We all saw the building go, Captain. It was the only thing standing out there. Sort of looked like when you toss a melon out of a truck and it hits the road. Pieces everywhere. The tech sergeant had command after that. But that couldn't have been more than fifteen minutes. Soon on, Captain, it was just run like hell and scatter, run for your life. There wasn't any choice, sir, but to leave the dead and wounded behind."

Edgeworthy, a tall man close to thirty, began to cry then. He kept saying there wasn't any choice about running.

I was ready to dismiss them, when one more question occurred to me. I told myself not to ask, then did anyway. These men had been with Martin nearly a week.

"What about the woman? I heard there was a woman with Martin originally."

Barnes and Edgeworthy looked at each other.

"I don't know, Captain," said Barnes. "When the offensive started on the sixteenth, we was up near Marnach in Luxembourg. The first night, when Major Martin took over after Colonel Gordon got it, the Major led us around to this farmhouse after dark. There was three people there, this farmer and this round old doll and their daughter. Seemed like they knew Martin, at least I thought so, 'cause the Krauts was a pretty good bet to take that ground, but they was still letting us in, a few soldiers at a time, so we could warm up while we ate our rations. But that was just a couple of hours. The Krauts never stopped fighting that night. They had their tanks painted white to match the snow and bounced them klieg lights off the clouds and they come right up that hill. They've got all that territory now

"How old was the daughter?"

"Young, I guess." Barnes dragged his sleeve across his nose. "You know, Captain, I'm like any other fella, but I was pretty grateful to he out of the cold, I wasn't gonna give that girl the hairy eyeball. She was small," said Barnes, and smiled for the first time in the half hour we'd been with him. "You know, I'm kind of always watching out for short women. That's about all to tell you. I remember she was the right size.''

Once they were gone, Biddy and I waited for Algar to return, shooting the breeze with the troops and officers who passed through the headquarters. The shelling continued in the mid-distance. It had begun at daybreak and started and stopped intermittently. Reports on Patton's progress were mixed. For each man who'd heard the Third Army was gaining, there were two bearing rumors that its divisions were stalled. In the meantime, the shortages of food and ammunition were past critical, not to mention the complete lack of medical items. This was not the moment to get wounded. The wises Division Clearing Station, and the eighteen doctors who manned it, had been captured on December 19. Yesterday, American artillery units south of the German troops had tried to cannon in bandages and plasma in howitzer shells, but the firing charge had blown all of it to smithereens. Everybody we encountered thanked us for the medical supplies that had fallen with us.

However, what the men here really craved was a few more degrees on the thermometer. They had stopped referring to the town as Savy. Everyone, officers included, usually called the village 'Save Me,' with salvation from the cold being their chief desire.

Tank turrets and gas lines had frozen, and the soldiers routinely found their Mis inoperable until the bolts were freed by beating them with hand grenades. Some of the men who'd started suffering frostbite a couple of days ago claimed that they'd been cold so long that the intense burning sensations had ceased. The troops called themselves 'doggies' and everybody made the same joke: "This doggy can't feel his paws."

Algar came in, stamping the snow off his boots. He asked if I was satisfied after the interviews.

"Not to be grisly or cynical, Colonel, but I'm going to have to view the remains when they're recovered. Martin's been fairly slippery and there are people in London who'll want proof positive. I'd like to be certain myself."

I had irritated Algar again. He told me I'd know better than to say that if I'd ever seen a wooden building hit by four tank rockets. But he promised that as soon as the skies cleared and supplies came, we'd all be back on that hill, not so much for my sake but so that the men who'd died there, including Martin, could receive a proper burial. At his desk, Algar spent a minute shooting fire into the bowl of his pipe.

"And have you had a chance to consider what kind of duty Teedle's orders foresee for you now, Captain?" Algar asked this neutrally, as if it were not a loaded question. Biddy and I had discussed the answer at length this morning once Gideon had walked up here.

"Well, sir, Bidwell and I called a Yellow Cab so we could get back to Nancy, but they say there will be a delay picking us up, so we thought we might be able to serve with you, sir, in the meantime." Biddy had grumped around when I told him we had to volunteer for combat, but by now I understood that for him that was simply a prelude to bravery. He knew the score. If we didn't volunteer, Algar would have to order us into action. And there was no choice, anyway. The town was surrounded. It was a matter of fighting for our own survival.

"I don't suppose you two have any combat experience, Captain."

I said that Bidwell had gone up Omaha Beach. Algar had been there, too.

"That was a bitch," he said to Biddy.

"Hell on earth, sir."

"That's about the size of it. And what about you, Dubin?"

I told him I had only been shot at twice, including last night. "But I was trained as an infantry officer before I went to JAG school, sir."

Algar actually jumped out of his seat.

"A trained infantry officer? Ho my God," he said. He turned to his Exec, Ralph, who'd just arrived. "A trained infantry officer fell out of the sky, Ralph. Christmas has come early."

The 110th Infantry Regiment, what little was left of it, had been aggregated in a combat unit which Algar and his officers had named Team SNAFU. They were now under the ioist Airborne, plugging gaps as General McAuliffe designated, working in coordination with the 5oznd Infantry Regiment. I was placed in command of a re-formed rifle company in a re-formed battalion. Given my lack of experience, I would have been challenged as a platoon leader, but on the other hand, G Company, which at full complement would have numbered around 193 troops, was all of 98. I had no lieutenants, just three sergeants, including Biddy, in charge of three platoons, and sparse support personnel.

On the afternoon of December 22, the newly reformed G Company was assembled at the center of Savy. By daylight, Save Me was no more than it had seemed at night, a cluster of farm buildings composed of small slate-toned stones with thick joints of yellowish mortar. The tin-roofed structures had been added on to over centuries, and the windows and doors were all different sizes and varying heights, making them look as if they'd been thrown onto the buildings.

My first sergeant, named Bill Meadows, functioned for all purposes as my first lieutenant. Meadows greeted me when we met as if we were going out together for a night of drinking.

"Whatta you know, Captain?" He smiled widely and seemed on the verge of delivering a comradely poke in the shoulder. Bill Meadows was a stocky man in his early forties, wearing metal-framed specs. Like every other soldier I had, he was unshaved and his face after nearly a week of fighting was grayed by perspiration, gunpowder, and the airborne debris of shell bursts. "All right, boys," he called out to the troops. "Bend an ear. Captain Dubin's going to give us our orders.

Outmanned and outgunned by virtually everyone, Team SNAFU had been positioned here on the west of Bastogne because it was the least likely point of attack. Most of the German tanks and artillery remained north and east. Given the difficulties of moving over the snowy hills, particularly with the remaining softness in the bottomlands, the odds were against the Germans mounting a major offensive from this direction. The fact was they didn't have to. Due to the thinness of the western defenses, Team SNAFU had been unable to prevent the Germans from working their way around us, flanking south toward the town, where they were now positioned.

For all of that, no place around Bastogne was secure. There had been a skirmish outside Champs earlier yesterday, when a German grenadier team and one half-track had briefly appeared there. But just as McAuliffe situated Algar to be less in harm's way, so Algar was locating G where we were not as likely to suffer attack. We were assigned to seal off a narrow farm road that came down from the west through Champs and Hemroulle and joined the main byway at Savy. Algar wanted G to go out after dark and dig in, in a wooded draw just north of Champs, on high ground that looked down on the road and the railroad track and a cow path directly to the west. The Germans, in theory, could come from any of those approaches. We were relieving E Company, who had been closer to Hemroulle and were taking a shellacking from German artillery which had gotten a fix on their position. E, which was down to seventy-two men, would serve as Headquarters Company, waiting as reinforcements if there was an assault.

Algar was certain that yesterday's encounter near Champs was a diversionary feint. If the Germans launched a significant western attack, they were far more likely to come at Savy, which was on one of the main roads to Bastogne. It ran north to Longchamps, and was big enough to make it vulnerable to the King Panzers. For that reason, Algar kept what little armor he had with him. Naturally, if the Krauts sent an armored column toward Champs, he would use his tanks and half-tracks and tank destroyers to reinforce us. Our job would be only to hold the road for a short time until the cavalry arrived, but that was a formidable assignment given our lack of ammunition. Algar ordered us not to shoot, even when fired on, unless we could see a human target. I was with Algar when Colonel Hunt, the soznd's commander, called, and Algar described his intended defense of the Champs road as consisting of "a couple of empty muskets." It was something less than a vote of confidence.

I sent the men to pack up, ordering them to be in formation at 1615. Meadows drew what few rations we were allowed and gathered the maps. At 4:15 p. M., as dark was falling, I walked down the line for inspection, greeted every man by name and checked his equipment. Not one had an overcoat. They were dressed only in field jackets, sometimes more than one. All of them looked dirty, grim, and sleep deprived, but I was already proud to be their CO. They were prepared to fight, and that, I recognized, was what I'd really wanted to know in all my fretting about combat-what was worth fighting for.

The feelings of admiration were far from mutual. Most of the men hated me on sight and were sullen at best when I addressed them. For one thing, I had warmer clothes and a Thompson submachine gun, neither of which I was about to surrender, even after I learned that the undersupplied mist had been instructed to shoot anyone in an overcoat, on the theory they were German impostors. Envy, however, was not the primary motive for my troops' discontent. They knew they were under the command of a man with no combat experience, and might as well have been led by a crawling infant.

I had little appreciation at that point for what these boys had been through, since nobody ever talked about the beating the 110th had absorbed in the last week. After my time in the VIII Corps signal office, I knew that the LVII Panzer Corps had literally swept the entire 28th Infantry Division, of which the 110th was part, from the map. But positioned with only two of its three battalions along Skyline, the paved highway that paralleled the border between Luxembourg and Germany, the 'loth had absorbed the worst of the initial assaults, when the Panzer infantries had crossed the Our River in rubber boats in darkness and overwhelmed them at dawn.

In the desperation of the first hours, with no Americans behind them, the 110th had been ordered not to surrender and had forced the Germans into house-to-house fighting in towns like Clervaux, Consthum, and Holzthum. Most of the men I commanded were alive only because they had run when their lines finally broke, and, given their orders, probably didn't know how to regard their survival. The majority of my troops had been replacements themselves, with less time on the Continent than I'd had, but they all seemed to feel they had unfinished business with the Germans, whatever the perils.

At 163o, Meadows called out, "Drop your cocks and grab your socks, gentlemen, we're heading out." We marched south a few blocks to the crossroads, then turned north and west out of town, proceeding a little more than a mile. Despite the cold, nobody complained, knowing they were warmer than they'd have been traveling in the back of an open truck. Halfway to our position, we passed E Company marching in. A sergeant was in command, because the other officers were dead, and he and I exchanged salutes. The enlisted men were less formal. Some wished us good luck. Several suggested my troops should write their wives and sweethearts now and tell them to forget about having a family. "The only good your nuts will be is for ice cubes." Meadows put an end to the banter. We were on foot because it was imperative to arrive unnoticed. Yesterday's skirmishing had made it clear the Krauts were nearby. The intelligence officers in McAuliffe's G-2 believed the grenadiers were hidden north and west of us in the trees.

When we reached the place the maps called for us to set up, we found a zigzagging network of foxholes already there, each of them set about five yards apart. They had almost certainly been dug in the late summer by the Germans, rearguard units protecting the retreat from Allied forces coming up from the south. After consulting with Meadows, I ordered most of the men to shovel out these holes, rather than digging our own. Each of the three platoons had a Browning water-cooled machine gun, a cumbersome high-caliber piece manned by a three-soldier crew, and I directed the Brownings to be set up on three strongpoints running around the curved edge of the woods. Then I ordered two squads to scout defensive positions at our perimeters, forward and rear. The squad moving back discovered an old pump house, good news since the closed structure would provide a few men at a time some relief from the biting wind.

Shoveling the snow out of the holes revealed the Germans' debris-empty rations and rucksacks, spent ammunition, rusted rifles and canteens. Despite the severe cold, there was a distinct odor. This area had been liberated in mid-September by the V Corps, First Army, and I had no memory of hearing about any major action at Hemroulle. The Nazi company that had preceded us here-probably SS given the difficulty of their assignment-had to engage the Allies and slow them, knowing that there were no reinforcements behind them. Two of the foxholes in the group had been hit by Allied artillery, reducing them to half circles twice the depth of the others. I suspected that what we smelled was the German soldiers who had been in there, literally blown to bits that had moldered through the wet fall and now were sprinkled under several inches of snow.

When we were done digging, we cut boughs from the surrounding fir trees and laid them in each hole to form a base. A few pine branches were left at the edge, to be used, when the men were allowed to sleep, as a roof to catch the snow. There was no question that German forces were out in the woods, because when the winds bore down from the north, we could smell their fires, a luxury I couldn't allow if we hoped to maintain the element of surprise.

Each platoon had responsibility for a flank in our three main perimeters, and we set up a watch schedule and ordered the men to turn in, which many were eager to do, becadse they were still warm from digging. As I was to learn, it was possible to be too cold to sleep.

Biddy and I took the same hole, which appeared to have been the former command dugout, its architecture a tribute to German precision. It had been cut in a perfect trapezoid that allowed two men to fire side by side, but left more room for living behind them. The face was reinforced by a log retaining wall into which a ledge had been cut for personal possessions. I put books, some hand grenades, and my razor there, not that there was much chance of running water. It seemed odd to be unpacking as if this was a hotel room, but that thought was cut short by Biddy's cursing.

"Left my toothbrush in town," he said. "No shave, no bath. Least you can brush your teeth. Damn." I understood at once that the toothbrush was an emblem of the security we'd relinquished on this quest for a man who'd turned up dead, and I offered him mine.

"We can share it," I said. "It won't be the worst of what we share in this hole." With orders to remain out of sight, we weren't going to be making any trips to the latrine during the day. And Biddy and I were past the point of pride or privacy. The last of that had passed when he scraped me off that snowy field with a load in my pants.

Biddy, though, seemed struck by the gesture. He stared at the brush as if it was burning, before he took it.

Near 9:00 p. M., when most of the men had settled in, I heard the rumble of motors behind us, and one of the machine gunners on the point demanding the password. I had motioned Biddy and one of his squads forward, but he came back explaining that it was Signal Corps. They had driven up the road without lights, a fairly daring maneuver in the heavy darkness left by the thick clouds. The signal team was here to extend lines for field telephone connections for me running to Algar, and to each platoon. I was relieved not to be out here alone, but the signalmen reminded me to use the phones sparingly and only in code. Communications by ground wire were subject to interception sometimes a mile away, a radius that almost certainly included the Germans in the woods. We also had a backpack radio, the SCR-3oo, in the event we were forced to move.

Before turning in, Biddy and I both inspected positions. He went to look after his platoon, while I checked the forward strongpoints manned by the Browning crews.

"Flash," a gunner called.

"Thunder," I answered, the password G had been using all week, according to Meadows. The Browning crews' holes were dug deeper and rounder than the rest of ours. In the most visible location, the men needed to be. entirely below ground level but able to swing the gun in a full circle in the event of an assault. I found each of the three crews pretty much exhausted. The men lay in the holes with their feet sole to sole with the boots of their mates, a device to keep them from falling asleep.

Returning to our hole before Biddy, I could feel at once that my pack was not where I'd left it. By flashlight, I found it had been ransacked. An extra pair of field pants was gone and my second gloves, too. I had already decided to give up what I wasn't wearing, but I regretted that a thief was the beneficiary. He'd taken personal effects, too, including three of the letters from Grace I had been carrying. And the card from Gita.

The adjoining holes, where I'd heard voices when I was coming up, now had fir boughs and ponchos drawn over them. I debated my options, then ran down to Sergeant Meadows to tell him someone had acquired' some of my gear. He said it had been going on in G Company from the beginning.

"Don't ask me to make it sensible, Captain. Stand and die beside a man then steal his stuff, I know it's crazy. I'm just trying to tell you that you're not the first."

"But this didn't happen unnoticed, Sergeant."

"Probably not, sir." He looked away and back. "They don't like anybody new, Captain, and new officers most of all."

"Because?"

"Because you don't understand, Captain. Listen, these men will fight for you. I've seen them. They're good men, every one of them, and they'll fight because they know they'll die otherwise. They hate you because they hate being here. Only way out of a rifle company is dead or wounded. It's like those turnstiles that only go in one direction. They let you in, but you can never get out. There ain't a man here, sir, who doesn't start praying at some point, God, please let me get wounded so I can go home. Plenty of them would give up an arm or a foot. I'm telling you what every soldier thinks. And what you're going to be thinking, too. And I can see just looking at you that you don't believe it. And that's why they hate you, Captain. Because you hold a better opinion of yourself than they have of themselves, and they know they're right. But don't worry about it, Captain. None of this will matter much, if we don't have battle. And if we do, they'll be fine with you afterward."

I spent two hours too riled to sleep, and then got up for night guard. As an officer, I wasn't required to take this duty, but we were too shorthanded to stand on formalities, and I thought it would be good for morale. On the way, I stopped in the pump house, a brick box dug into the hill that flanked our rear, fully embedded in the earth to keep the hydroelectric pump from freezing. There were no windows on the single exposed wall, just a half-size wooden door, which my men had broken open. Inside, I found most of the soldiers in the second squad from Meadows' platoon, who'd chosen to play cards by the light of a Coleman lantern rather than sleep. They jumped up and I put them at ease. The pump, an old black hunk of iron, reached down into a well hole, and the men had fanned out around it. I took a moment to ask each of the eight soldiers where he was from, but I got the same surly responses, and headed out.

"You a Yid, Captain?" When I turned back, nobody in the pump house was looking at his cards. The speaker, staring hardest at me, was a Mississippi boy, a private named Stocker Collison.

Every candidate in OTS learns the same thing.

Rule one, make sure they respect you. If they like you, that's okay. But if they don't, fear will do.

"Is that a Southern term?" I asked Collison. "Just askin."

"Does the answer matter to you, Collison?"

Of course it did. It probably mattered to half the men in the company, maybe more.

"No, sir."

"Good. What time you stand guard, Collison?" "At oh three hundred, sir."

"Why don't you walk the perimeter now to be sure everything's okay.), He spent a long time looking at me before departing. The other men remained silent. I had been better at this than I'd imagined, but I knew whose manner I'd instinctively assumed. Teedle's. I would have to think about that.

I had drawn guard with the platoon of Sal Masi, a shrewd little guy from Boston who was my third sergeant. He'd been promoted from corporal on the battlefield and still had the doglegs on his uniform. Along with two of Masi's soldiers, I had watch on the rear hill, a position I'd assigned myself because it was at the highest point we occupied, and thus the most exposed to the wind.

My spot was about fifteen yards from the pump house, and the tin chimney that poked through the roof was designed to vent the pump's heat in the summer, but now it funneled the sound from within as if it were being broadcast. On their first night here, the men inside clearly didn't realize that. As a result, I spent much of my two hours on watch listening as the north wind carried along the squad's conversations, including their commentary about me, which began when Collison got back from his snowy trip around the perimeter.

"Jesus fucking Christ, Collison. Why didn't you just ask him to stick out his pecker so you could check?"

"Man oughta say what he is. He ain't got no call to hide it."

"Hell, man, you're white trash and I don't see you wearing a sign.

"Aw, go soak your head, O'Brien. The thing with the damn Jews is you don't never know when you got one.''

"That's bull, Collison," said somebody else. "You can tell by lookin. You just haven't seen any 'cause you're an ignorant Mississippi peckerwood."

"You got no call to talk to me like that, Marshall."

"Whatsa matter, Collison, did he hurt your feelings? I'm gonna cry, I'm not kidding. I'm crying already. I ain't cried like this since I read My Friend Flicker."

The line, from O'Brien, a thin sharp-faced kid from Baltimore, provoked a storm of laughter inside the pump house. Encouraged, O'Brien took off on Collison.

"Know the difference between a zoo in the North and a zoo in the South?"

Collison didn't answer.

"In the South, they don't just write the name of the animal on the cage. There's also a recipe." The uproar rocked out again. "Know what they call a Mississippi farmer with a sheep under each arm? Huh? A pimp."

Apparently O'Brien decided Collison had had enough. The men went back to playing poker, largely silent except for the grousing when somebody won. Without that distraction, and with nothing to see in the farm field that lay ahead of me, I worried. I worried mostly about whether fear would paralyze me in the midst of combat as it had when I jumped, and what would happen then to the men I was supposed to lead. The moment in the plane had drifted with me all day, like the lingering weakness from a fever. It had taken something away from me, from everything I saw and every breath I drew. I was a coward. I didn't expect myself to be unafraid. But I had been dashed to discover that I could not overcome it. The man who had volunteered to jump, the American who believed in the right things, had no control over the other part of me. It was as Gita had been trying to tell me when she lifted her skirt. Everything except instinct was a pretense.

Hoping for other thoughts, I began searching the sky. The clouds to the south did not look quite as thick. If I was right, that would mean air support, supplies, maybe even reinforcements. I hung, yet again, in that uncertain zone, not knowing if I wanted to be replaced before the German attack. At least a demotion to platoon leader would let me pull duty I'd prepared for. If Meadows went down, I'd literally have to call Algar every hour for instructions.

As 5:00 a. M. approached, somebody else who'd gotten up for night guard entered the pump house, clearly another squad member, who received a full account of the evening, including the ungodly amount Bronko Lukovic had won, and Collison's encounter with me.

"Oh, Collison, you sure know your oats. Way to impress the new CO."

"I just like orders better comin from a Christian, is all," said Collison. "We're already fightin this fuckin war to save the Jews.,, "Jesus, button your flap, Collison. You sound like Father Coughlin."

"Says you. Wasn't them Nazis that attacked us at Pearl Harbor. What the hell we care what ole Hitler's Join? I'm tellin you, it was all them Jews around Roosevelt. That's why we're here fightin."

"Collison, we're all fighting for the same damn reason. Because we have to. Because nobody gave us a choice."

"This platoon," answered Collison, "we got to be the worse-off bunch of doggies on the front. We been gettin nothin but screwed. I'm not kiddin. Two-thirds of our men dead and now they send us this Jew officer when we're surrounded."

"Shit, Collison. Don't snap your cap about Dubin. We've lost every officer we've had. And they knew what the heck they were doing. How long you think it's gonna take before this one stops a bullet? He's still looking around the woods for the men's room.

They all laughed. A minute later, I heard a familiar voice. Biddy had gotten up to spell me on night guard.

"Pipe down in here, y'all. Sound come outta that hole up top like cheers at a football game. Hear y'all fifty yards away." There was silence then. I'd wager some were wondering for the first time how far off I was. "And let me tell you something else. The Captain's a good man, y'all gone see that."

I could hear O'Brien ask, "Is he hep? I just can't take these officers who don't know nothing but what they read in the rule book."

"He's hep," Biddy said. He arrived at my position a minute later. He said nothing, but offered a cut-down salute when I left him to go back to sleep.

Chapter 18. COLD TRUTH

Bill Meadows shook me awake a little after Too a. M., as the faintest light was leaking into the sky. He wanted to go over orders for the day. To conceal our position, we couldn't risk contact with the men on point or relieve them once the sun was up. Meadows wanted to replace the crews who'd been out there freezing all night and I told him to proceed.

Before he left, we took a moment to inspect the terrain. The open, rolling hills-hayfields or grasslands grazed by beef cattle-were now deep in snow with no animals in sight. Most, I imagined, had been killed or eaten long ago. North of us, beyond the railroad tracks and the drifts mounded here and there on the road, several fields undulated, separated only by stone markers. With my field glasses, I saw that the land had already seen combat. The Germans who had once occupied our holes had been hit hard before retreating. The blackened form of a Panzer was out there, with snow heaped on the tracks and the turret, and I also could make out the axle and fenders of a truck. My guess was that there had been more wreckage, which our engineers had towed off to assemble the crude roadblock that stood a couple hundred yards from us. It was comprised of commandeered tractors and two burned-out tanks, one ours, one German.

To the west, in the distance, lay dense green woods of tall pines, where the German grenadiers were probably hiding. Even in daylight the forest appeared black and impenetrable. I thought of the Brothers Grimm, and their goblins and spooks stealing from the trees to snatch souls and visit curses.

The last thing Meadows pointed out was the stand we occupied, a mixture of the same skinny, thick-branched pines that were across the way and deciduous trees, most of them beeches still wearing some of their coppery leaves. The Germans were delivering daily artillery barrages across a broad sector, wherever they figured Americans might be positioned to protect the roads, often utilizing their 20MM antiaircraft guns, which had proven effective as offensive weapons, or the dual-purpose 88s. Fixed on quad mounts and half-tracks, the guns were tilted forward and fired into the treetops. The result was a little like a bomb exploding in midair, raining shrapnel down on everyone below. Algar had sent us north of E's holes in hopes that the Germans might not have been aiming here, but up high the trees were ragged, as if they had been eaten away by moths. Several of the beeches had most of their boughs blown away, the remaining trunks standing like solitary amputees, blackened by the shell bursts. In other words, we were going to get it. The Germans had been firing in the hour after dawn and just before sunset, periods when they could be certain that our planes, which could navigate only by daylight in this weather, would never be in the air.

"I want to tell the boys to stay low when that starts," said Meadows. "Or else get out and go hug the trees."

"Right."

"But the sergeants need to keep watch. It'd be a good time for that Panzer infantry to come out of the woods, with us hunkered down."

"Right," I said again. Commanding with Bill Meadows as your top NCO was a little like driving with a chauffeur. He and I exchanged salutes, but Meadows hung back.

"Captain, I hear you had a hard time with Collison last night."

"It was a short conversation, Bill. Nothing to be concerned about."

"Don't let Collison bother you, Captain. He's not a bad Joe, especially once he gets used to you. We got a lot of country boys in this man's Army just like him, and it don't matter if they're from Mississippi or the North Woods. First time he lived with indoor plumbing was in basic training. They've been through a lot, Captain, these boys. Sometimes they just talk a little bunk."

When Meadows left, Gideon crawled into his boots and coat to inform his platoon about today's orders. He'd been back in the hole only a few minutes, using my toothbrush for the first time, when the shelling began. If nothing else, the Krauts were punctual.

In the midst of combat, I was to discover that certain phrases would become lodged in my head, as if my brain was a Victrola stuck on a scratch. That day, the saying was "Forewarned is forearmed," mostly because it proved completely untrue. The Germans were employing a technique I'd learned in infantry school called TOT, or time on target. The idea was that their shells would fly at several areas at once, before anyone could scramble back to his hole. Not knowing precisely where we were, the Germans calibrated each gun at intervals of roughly thirty yards.

The first rounds were screaming meemies, rocket-propelled shells that bore down with a constant heart-stalling screech like a car's tires when its clutch is popped, and that proved to be nothing compared to my dread when the ordnance started landing. I had thought it couldn't be worse than the bombing at the Comtesse's, but there was no way to anticipate the emotional effect of being under sustained bombardment. I will never hear anything louder-ears simply can't absorb more sound-and combined with the way the earth rocked, I was soon rattled with a primitive panic whenever I detected the sound of the 88s. It was distinctive as somebody's cough, to which it bore a thunderous resemblance. The shells exploded with a magnificent bouquet of flame and snow and dirt, raining down hot shrapnel, pieces often a foot or two long that ricocheted off the trunks, while huge limbs crashed around us. The closest blast to me, about fifty yards away, made my eyes throb in their sockets and squeezed my chest so hard I thought something was broken. After each detonation, just as a way to hold on, I promised myself it was the last, trying to believe that until I heard the throaty rumble of the artillery firing and the keen of the next shell heading in to knock us flat.

And then after almost an hour on the dot, it stopped, leaving the air hazy and reeking of cordite. In the sudden silence, you could hear only the wind and the thud of branches that continued to fall from the trees. After the first few minutes of the shelling, between explosions, a scream had gone out for medics and that shouting resumed now I phoned Second Platoon. Masi told me that two men in the same hole had been struck by a tree burst. I didn't know what the CO should do, but I couldn't believe hiding was the answer, and I scrambled up there, weaving between the trees. The Krauts couldn't see much anyway, with all the smoke and dust in the air.

Arriving, I found a red-haired kid named Hunt dead from a piece of shrapnel that had descended like an arrow from an evil god and penetrated the soft spot beside his clavicle, plunging straight into his heart. He was lying in the hole, his eyes open and still. I was most struck by his arms, thrown back at an angle no one could have maintained in life.

The other man was being attended by a medic. His leg below the knee was a red mash. The bone was shattered and he was crying from the pain, but the medic thought he would live. They would move him out, once night fell, for what little good it would do. At this stage, this man, Kelly, was facing roughly the same chances for survival as soldiers wounded during the Civil War. The medics were using some sulfa powder, which they had been pilfering from the aid kits of the dead for days, in hopes of disinfecting the wound. Kelly would be transferred to an aid station Algar had set up yesterday at the church where we'd slept in Hemroulle. Back in my own hole, I took reports from the other platoons by phone. Only two casualties. Doing the arithmetic, I knew we had come through rather well.

During the barrage, it had started to snow. I had thought it was too cold to snow-we used to say that at home-but apparently the weather in Belgium didn't adhere to Midwestern rules. It was not a storm of great intensity. Instead the large flakes drifted down almost casually. Like most little boys, I had grown up regarding snow as a thrill. It was pretty. It was fun. But I had never endured it in a foxhole. The snow danced down for more than two hours. As soon as Biddy and I shook it off, it collected again. Eventually, we were soaked and frozen. And it kept snowing. With overcoats, Biddy and I were better off than many of our troops, who were sitting in their holes wrapped in their ponchos and blankets, with their cold Mis held next to their bodies to keep the trigger mechanisms from freezing. But I had no feeling in my hands and feet, and I was increasingly amazed that the blood didn't just go to ice in my veins.

Dealing with the cold proved a matter of will. I was desperate for distraction, and on pure whim decided to light one of the cigarettes that had come in my rations. Cigarettes were probably the one thing not in short supply, although the men complained relentlessly about the fact that the cheaper brands-Chelsea, Raleigh, Wings-had been sent to the front.

The skies had remained so dim that it seemed as if the light was oil being poured in by the drop. Now I found myself keeping track of the birds. It was hard to believe any were left. The artillery barrages must have killed most of them, and during the German occupation food had been scarce enough that I'd heard of the locals routinely eating sparrows. A few crows scavenged in the forest, and some swift long-tailed magpies darted by. I pointed out a hawk to Biddy, but he shook his head.

"Ain't no hawk, Cap," he said. "That there is a buzzard."

By midday, we knew there was little chance an attack would come. The offensives were taking place around us-the air spasmed from artillery rounds, and the sputtering of machine guns and the sharp crack of rifle fire a mile this way or that carried distinctly through the cold. In considering things, I'd decided that our most likely role would be as reinforcements if the Germans attacked Savy. But if that happened at all, it would be tomorrow or the day after. While the sun was up, there was little to do but stay out of sight in the hole and battle the cold.

"You think it ever gets this cold in Kindle County?" I asked Bidwell.

"As I recollect, sir, yes. Colder. I still have in mind, Cap, walking up to high school eight blocks, and the mercury stuck clear at the bottom of the thermometer. Colder than twenty below."

I'd made those trips myself and laughed at the memory. Insane with adolescent vanity, I'd refused to wear a hat. I could recall my mother screaming at me from the back porch and the feeling once I'd reached the high school's hallways that if my ears grazed something hard, they'd break straight off my head.

In the middle of the day, there were suddenly shouts from within our midst. I jumped out with my tommy gun, certain the Germans had somehow snuck up on us, only to find that two men in Biddy's platoon had uncovered a discarded Luger in their hole-the breach mechanism had seized up-and a fistfight had broken out between them about who would get the souvenir. I put both men on discipline-meaningless now-and said the Browning crews, who'd been on the strongpoints without communication for hours, could draw straws for the pistol when they were relieved. We had to reassign the two soldiers to other holes, and even though I demanded silence, I could hear both calling one another "motherfucker" as I left. That wasn't a word used much among the officer class, who usually adhered to a certain gentility.

"You ever know of anybody who actually fucked his mother?" I asked Biddy.

"Had a friend in high school who fucked one of my buddy's mothers. I heard of that."

"Well, that's not the same thing."

"No sir, not at all." We fell silent for a while. "Biddy, where in the world did you go to high school, anyway?" He'd told me before that he hadn't quite made it to graduation. His family needed money.

No place you'd know, sir."

"Don't bet on that. I think I swam against every school in Kindle County."

"You didn't never hear of Thomas More, sir. Wasn't no swimmers there."

"Thomas More? In the North End? Wasn't that all colored? I didn't know there were any white men in that school."

"Wasn't," he said. "Two white girls. No white men.

I had been looking at the sky, just realizing that blue was starting to edge past the dirty gray masses. That meant the planes would be flying. When I finally processed Gideon's words, I was sure I'd misunderstood. He had removed his helmet and, big as he was, I found him staring down at me, unconsciously drumming one finger on the MP stenciled in white on the front.

"You heard me, Captain."

"What the heck are you telling me, soldier?" "I'm trusting you is what I'm doing. Against my better judgment.

A hundred things fell into place. After the artillery barrage, I was too drained to feel shock, but I was lost in some fundamental way.

"Now what're you thinking?" he asked me. "Truthfully? I don't think I believe you."

"You better. Because this here's no off-time jive." He was sullen and probably more astonished with himself than I was. His choice of words, however, went to make his point.

Now that he'd said it, of course, now that I was actually looking, appraising his nose, his hair, I suppose I could see how he might have been colored. But there were men in the next hole, Rapazzalli and Gomez-not to mention me-who were probably darker complected, and none of us with eyes as light as Biddy's green peepers.

"I got my draft notice," he said. "I went down there. I didn't never say one way or the other. They just looked at me and. Put me in. You know, I'd always had that, folks saying as how I could pass. When I was a kid in Georgia, and we was away from home, I always knew I could go strolling free as a bird into places my brothers couldn't. It didn't seem to matter all that much once we got North. But there I was now. I come home and told my folks.

"Did you lie?' my daddy asked me.

"Not a solitary word.'

"My mom and he really got going. She wanted me to head straight down there and tell the truth. If the Army didn't want me doin no fighting, she was in no mind to quarrel. But Daddy wudn't hear none of that. 'What truth is that? That even though he looks every bit as good as any other man, even though he is every bit as good as any other man, he ought not get treated like it 'cause he's actually colored. Is that the truth? The day ain't dawned yet where I'll let a child of mine say that. Not yet.' I'm not sure the two of them have patched it up completely even now.

"But how it was really, Captain, I went along with it mainly because I was just like you. I wanted to fight. I wanted to be like Jesse Owens and rub old Adolf Hitler's face in the dirt so hard that that damn mustache come off his face. And I knew they wouldn't see hide of many colored troops near the front.

"Once I got in the middle of Omaha Beach, I gave that another think, all right. I'd'a been just as happy to set 'em straight and go back to England. It's full crazy, what I got myself into. Ain't a day that passes I don't think once or twice I should have listened harder to my mom. Times I feel like I'm not being true to my own, even though I never said a false word to nobody. And I'm always tellin myself I gotta get home alive, just so ain't nobody there sayin how it's a mistake for a colored man to think he can do the same things as white folks. It's just all one hell of a mess."

He peeked over at me again and reached onto the ledge for my toothbrush, which he'd pulled from his mouth and thrown in there as the shelling began.

You want this back?"

The word 'yes' was halfway to my lips, but I retrieved it without a flicker.

"Yeah, damn it, I want it back," I said then and snatched it from him, jamming it into my mouth. The toothpowder had frozen hard on the bristles. "I didn't get a chance to use it this morning. And tomorrow I'm first. You can be first the day after that."

He looked at me for a while.

"Yes, sir," he said.

Chapter 19. THE SKIES

Late in the day, American C-47s passed overhead. Looking back toward Savy, we could actually see the chutes and supplies drifting down out of the big Gooney Birds, and the glowing trails of the German antiaircraft fire darting at them like malign June bugs. The parachutes, red, yellow, and blue, resembled blossoms, a lovely sight in the clean sky, but not one we enjoyed for long. Nazi bombers and fighters appeared from the other direction, and the fierceness of the AA soon cleared the skies. Once our planes were gone, the Germans repositioned their guns and another artillery barrage began. They clearly feared that with their AA occupied, the Americans might have moved out ground forces, and the new volleys seemed to go on twice as long as they had in the morning. As we huddled in the hole, I felt my teeth smash against each other so hard I thought I might have broken one of my molars.

Once it was over, the field telephone pealed. It was Algar, who'd chosen the code name Lebanon.

"What's the condition out there, Lawyer?"

We'd sustained two more wounded from the last barrage, both relatively minor injuries. One man would need to be moved back to town, along with the young fellow with the leg wound. Algar promised that the ambulances would be there after dark.

"I'm hearing that your Army commander has broken through to the south," Algar said. "Punched a hole, they're saying. We should start seeing reinforcements. Make sure your men know. We had a hundred sixty supply drops here, now Not enough. But there's some ammo. Medicine."

"Yes, sir." The news about Patton was welcome, but my men would believe only what they saw. Everything was rumor until then.

"How's the mood?"

The mood, I said, was good, considering. The men realized there was nothing to do about the cold, but they were complaining often about not being allowed out of the holes in daylight, especially to relieve themselves. Orders were to shit in your hat if you had to, but since nobody was going to abandon his helmet with two tree bursts every day, the directive put the troops to a ridiculous choice.

Sunset came shortly after that, a moment of great solemnity, as it signaled a lessening of the dangers. The Panzers wouldn't come at night in these conditions when they could get stuck so easily if they veered off the roads. And the Germans, after the huge push that drove us back from the Ardennes, were too short supplied to engage in the harassing artillery fire they normally would have ordered up in darkness. We had to be alert for Kraut scout teams, who could sneak across the field in an effort to assay our position, but we all knew we had survived and would soon be able to move around. The sun, which had edged in and out for hours, knifed through in the distance, breaching the clouds with an intense coppery shaft blazing on the forest across the field. Biddy grabbed his camera, somehow seeing a blackand-white picture in all that color.

Meadows called and we made night assignments. Bill also had a request. The men wanted to make a fire in the pump house. There would be no light. The issue was the smoke, which might betray our position. But the wind was still coming from the north, which would carry the odor back toward town. It was a calculated risk, but we decided it was worth it. I doubted that even if the wind shifted the Germans would be able to tell our smoke from their own. Each squad would be allowed in the pump house for half an hour to eat their rations, as well as fifteen minutes before and after night guard. The gunners who'd been out on the strongpoints all day without communication would get stretches twice as long and go first.

The ambulance arrived near 6:00 p. M., accompanied by a supply truck. The quartermasters were supposed to be bringing tomorrow's rations, but they had only two C ration containers. It meant I was going to be able to feed the men just once tomorrow.

"Colonel hopes for better Christmas Day," said the quartermaster sergeant. I knew he was husbanding whatever he had for a Yule treat, but starving the troops in advance seemed like a poor way to enhance their appreciation. "He did send these, though. Requisitioned them from a local cafe in Bastogne. Owner beefed something terrible, but hell, he ain't doing much business these days anyway."

I stuck my field knife into one of the soft pine boxes and found table linens. It took me a moment to catch on, then I summoned my three noncoms, Meadows and Biddy and Masi, to distribute them to their platoons.

"What the hell?" Meadows asked.

I explained that the men could use the white tablecloths as camouflage, if they needed to leave their holes during daylight. We were lucky the linens had been starched. Otherwise they would have been shredded for bandages.

Once he'd handed out the cloths and napkins, Meadows returned. He wanted me to know this had elevated me in the eyes of the men, an effect that would undoubtedly be lost when they got hungry tomorrow. Nevertheless, I appreciated the fact that Meadows was looking out for my morale, too.

"If Algar had any sense, Bill, he'd have made you the company commander."

"Tell you a secret, Captain, he offered. But I don't see myself as officer material. Second lieutenant, frankly, that's the worst job in the Army. At least in the infantry."

Biddy, across the hole, grumbled in agreement. I'd heard the statistics, but I answered, "The food is better at headquarters."

"Suppose that's so," said Meadows. "I'm just not the one to give orders, sir. Not in combat." "Because?"

"Because if you live through it and your men don't, that's something I don't want to deal with. All respect, sir.

It was another problem I'd never considered, because I was too green, and I dwelt on it in silence while Meadows went on his way.

As captain, I'd assigned myself the last stretch in the pump house, and I decided to try to sleep before then. I took off my overcoat. The snow had frozen it solid and it actually stood up by itself, leaned against one wall in the foxhole. I was too cold to fall off. Instead, near the end, awaiting my turn in the pump house, I actually started counting to myself. When I finally walked in, the heat was one of the sweetest sensations of my life, even though my hands and feet burned intensely as they thawed. The men of Meadows' Second Squad were in there again, taking as long as they could to consume their rations. I knew they'd overstayed by the speed with which they all jumped up when I entered.

"As you were, gentlemen."

O'Brien told me to go slow approaching the fire. These men were familiar with the hazards of frostbite.

"Captain," said O'Brien. "Can I ask you a question? You ever heard of a fella getting frostbite of the dick? Collison's worried that his dick will fall off."

I'd never heard of that. I thought back to high-school biology and explained that what imperiled the extremities was their distance from the heart.

"I told you, Collison," said O'Brien. "You're so dumb, you know what they call the space between your ears? A tunnel. You know what you got in common with a beer bottle, Collison? You're both empty from the neck up."

Collison, on his haunches, looked toward the fire as O'Brien laid into him. I suspected that O'Brien was giving him the treatment for my benefit, after last night.

"Take it easy, O'Brien. Save a few cracks for the rest of the war."

Saved by an unexpected source, Collison looked my way briefly.

"How's he even remember all these? I can't never remember no jokes."

"That's because you're a marching punch line, Collison," said O'Brien.

Meadows came in then to send the squad back to their holes. First Squad was on the way up. I crept closer to the fire and Meadows stayed with me a minute to warm his wire-framed glasses, which were frosting over. The little red dents stood out beside his nose.

"So, Bill, what was your racket before this started?"

"Me? I was on hard times, Captain, if you want to know the truth of it. I grew up in California, close to Petaluma. My folks were farmers but I got myself down to Frisco, worked as a longshoreman and made a good buck, too. But there was no work come '34 or '35. It didn't go right between me and my wife, then. I was drinking. Finally, she took herself and my two boys back to Denver where her people was from, put up with her folks. I just started hopping freight cars, looking for work. But there were lots of chappies like me sittin 'round fires in every freight yard in every city. Those were bad times, Captain. I was first in line at the Army recruiter when the mobilization started in '40. This damn war was a piece of luck for me. If I live through it. Wife remarried but it didn't work out and she's all lovey-dovey now when she writes me. I really want to see those boys. Oldest is sixteen. I sure as hell hope this war ends before he can join up. I don't know how I'd keep my senses if I had to worry about him being in this mess, too. You think it's gonna be over soon?"

I'd thought so, just a week ago. At the moment it looked as if there was more fight in the Nazis than any of us had expected. Still, it seemed important to tell the men I believed victory was not far off. Meadows looked at me hard to see if I really believed it.

I ate a cracker out of today's K ration and decided to save the rest for morning. I caught two hours' sleep, then warmed up again in the pump house before my watch. The men of Masi's platoon, too small to be divided into squads, began filing in. Meadows and I were on the same schedule and headed out together.

"Gee whiz," said Meadows, putting his gloves on again, "how do you figure they took a fella from California and sent him to the European theater?"

"Man, you ain't countin on the Army to make any sense, are you, First Sergeant?" asked one of the men coming in.

We all laughed. I stood outside listening to my men for a minute as their talk rose into the night through the chimney.

"You figurin it's some bad luck we're here rather than the Pacific?"

"Lot warmer in the Pacific, I know that."

"Every letter I get from my brother," said someone else, "is about how damn hot it is. But it's not how that's a blessing or nothing. They get every kind of rash. He says he got stuff growin on him, he didn't even know a man's skin could turn that color. And a boy's got to have some absolute luck to get himself a drink. Ain't like here in Europe with all this wine and cognac, nothing like that. Best that happens is somebody with an in with the quartermaster gets hold of some canned peaches and sets himself up a still, makes something tastes like varnish. Guys is drinkin so much Aqua Velva, quartermaster's never got any in stock. And they-all's fighting among themselves to get it."

"But it ain't cold there."

"Yeah, but I'd rather get killed by a white man, I really would."

"Now what kind of fucking sense does that make?" another asked.

"That's how I see it. I ain't askin you to feel that way, Rudzicke."

"Don't be a sorehead."

"Just how I feel is all. Think it would be a little easier to go out like that. Just don't want the last face I see to be brown."

"I can understand that," said another man.

"I tell you another thing," said the first man, called Garns, "them Japs is savages. They're like the wild Indians, eat a man's heart. They think we're some inferior species like monkeys. They really do."

"They're the ones look like monkeys. Don't they? The Krauts at least, they'll treat you okay if they take you prisoner. Buddy of mine wrote me how he was fighting on this island, Japs caught one of their men. They sliced this guy's backbone open while he was still alive, then they poured gunpowder in there, and lit the poor son of a bitch. Can you imagine? And the rest of his platoon, they're hidin out and listening to this shit."

There were plenty of hideous stories from the Pacific. I'd heard several times that the Japs cut the ears off living prisoners.

"Yeah, but its warm," said someone. That drew a laugh.

"I don't figure war's much good wherever you are," somebody else said.

"You hear about these Polynesian dames. Buddy wrote me they landed in a couple of places, girls didn't even have no shirts on when they got there. And they fuck sort of like saying hello."

"Ain't no women fuck like saying hello. Ain't no woman do that lest she's gettin somethin out of it. My daddy tole me that and I ain't never seed how he was wrong.

"Yeah, but I still hear these dames in the Pacific, they're something else. This buddy said one of these dolls, she could pick up a silver dollar with her you know what. Finally, somebody got the idea of taking out his business and laying the dollar on there and this girl she took up both. That musta been a sight."

"You think it's true what they say?"

"How's that?"

"That the Nazis travel with whores. They bring them along."

"Sounds like Nazis."

"Yeah, we're goddamn Americans. We believe in freedom. The freedom not to get laid."

Meadows came crunching back through the snow. He gave me a wink, then opened the door to tell the men to keep it down.

"Krauts are still there," he said.

When I left, a soldier named Coop Bieschke was carving his name in a copper beech about halfway to my guard position. He'd been at it both nights, using up his sleeping time for this enterprise. I thought to ask him what was so important, but I wasn't sure Coop could explain it. Maybe he was planning to come back here after the war ended, or perhaps he wanted his people to know the spot where he'd died.

Maybe he simply hoped to leave a mark on the earth that was definitively his. I watched him at work with his jackknife, oblivious to me and everything else, then continued up the hill.

After guard, I returned to the pump house, then rushed back to our foxhole before my boots could freeze again, placing them under my legs, in the hopes that my body warmth would keep them from hardening overnight. It was a wasted effort. When I woke up, my pants legs had actually frozen together and it was a struggle even to get back on my feet.

The morning of December 24 was cloudless and our Air Corps was in the sky not long after first light. As the formations of bombers, and the P-47s to protect them, roared overhead, my men waved from inside their foxholes. The German antiaircraft was intense, especially as our planes penetrated German territory. We could see the red trails of the AA rising, and several times aircraft suddenly becoming a star of flame. But the ranks of bombers and supply planes kept appearing for nearly five hours, vapor trails behind each motor, making the sky look a little like a plowed field. The escorts weaved up and down, on the lookout for German fighters, while the chutes on the supply drops continued to unfurl in the skies near Savy. Occasionally, when the wind died down, we could hear the rumble of the trucks fetching the medicine and food and ammunition back into Bastogne.

The men remained in their holes, but now with the camouflage, I was able to move out every hour or so to check our positions. I dashed through the woods, wrapped in a tablecloth, with a linen napkin knotted beneath my chin like my grandmother's babushka. When I ran up to their holes, several soldiers looked at me and said, "Trick or treat."

For the most part, I was in the hole with Biddy, trying to tell myself that I had borne the cold yesterday, so I could make it today. Today would be easier, I told myself, because now I knew there would be a fire in the pump house later. But perhaps that made it worse, since I could recall now what it felt like to be warm.

Every hour, I lit a cigarette. In the interval, I took to sniffing the odor of the tobacco on my gloves. I couldn't understand the odd comfort it seemed to bring me, until I thought of Gita Lodz and the strong scent of her hair and clothing. I wondered if I'd ever see her again. Or if I cared to. Then I asked myself the same thing about Grace. And my parents. If I had to choose only one of them to be with last, who would it be?

"Lord, Biddy," I said suddenly, "doing nothing but standing in this hole and thinking is enough to make a man stark raving mad."

He grunted as a form of agreement.

"I wonder if we'd be better off if the Germans just came and we got it over with.,, "Captain, you don't want to say that. Take it from me.

I asked him to tell me about Omaha Beach.

"I don't know, Captain. It ain't nothing like whatever we-all gonna get ourselves into here. The thing of D-Day was the size of it. I was there D plus one. And it was war everywhere, sir. Them battleships was behind us firing at the Germans on the cliffs, and the Germans was shooting down. Our bombers was up above and the Kraut AA batteries were roaring. And you had thousands of soldiers running up that beach, shooting whatever there was to shoot at. It was fighting everywhere, men giving battle cries, and all that moaning and screaming of the wounded. When the troop carrier dropped us and we sloshed up through the water there, it was red as a stop sign from the blood, and I couldn't see how we'd ever get to the rendezvous point. There were bodies all over. You couldn't pick a straight line up that beach without tromping on the dead. And each step, I looked at them and thought: This here is my last step, the next one, it's going to be me. When I got my squad assembled, I turned back and I realized it was just like I'd imagined it. I'd imagined this my whole life."

"War, Biddy?"

"No, sir. Hell. It was the devil's hell, all right. Sitting in church, having the preacher tell me where the sinners was gonna find their ugly selves, and thinking so hard about it, that was what I'd seen. The banging, the screaming, the pain. Even the smells of the bombs and the artillery rounds. That's a saying, sir, you know, war is hell, but it's a truth. The souls screaming and sinking down. And the skies falling. When I get to thinking about it, sometimes I wonder if I'm not dead after all." He shook his head hard as if to empty it of thought. "I don't like going on about this, Captain."

I told him I understood. He was silent for a second.

"You know, Captain, about Martin?"

"What about him?"

"Men like that who've been at war for years now. I understand why they keep doin it. Because it's the truth, sir. It's hell. And it's the truth, too. Ain't nothin else so real. Can you figure what I'm saying?"

I couldn't really. But the idea frightened me as much as the thought of the Germans waiting to attack.

We were an hour from sunset when there was a little aimless putt-putting overhead. My first thought was that it was German buzz bombs, the V-is that I'd heard about, but when I got my binoculars, I followed the sound to a little single-engine plane. The field telephone growled at once. It was Meadows, telling me the aircraft was a Nazi scout and that we should yell to all the men to get their tablecloths on and hunker deep in their holes. But about five minutes later, the plane circled overhead again. When I heard the engine nearing for a third pass, I knew we'd been observed. I raised Meadows.

Any question he's seen us?"

"No, sir."

"Well then, let's try to shoot him down."

"We don't have bullets to waste, Captain."

We agreed that the Browning crews had the only real chance of hitting a. Target at five hundred feet and we both dashed forward to the strongpoints to issue that instruction. It seemed to take the three-man crews forever to get the unwieldy machine guns elevated, but even at that, one round took a piece out of the plane's left wing, before the craft climbed out of range.

I called Algar.

"Shit," he said. "Any chance the plane didn't make it back?"

There was a chance, but it was still in the sky when we'd last seen it. If it made it, we'd be sitting ducks for the Kraut artillery. We had to move out, but not until we had another defensive position as good as the one we were giving up. Algar also wanted to see if our recon had provided any clues about where the Germans were in the woods. Putting down the phone, I thought the same thing all my men would. Another position meant giving up the pump house.

Algar was back to me in a few minutes. Both intelligence and operations thought that the Germans were repositioning much of their artillery in light of the morning overflights. If so, they were probably not ready yet to fire on us, and both G-2 and G-3 doubted that the Germans would risk a barrage at night, which would pinpoint their guns' new positions to air surveillance, inviting bombing at dawn.

Its your choice," Algar said about staying put for the moment. "We'll reposition you by morning, either way."

This was my first real decision as a commander. For the sake of the pump house and the fire, I decided to remain here, but in the next thirty minutes, every creak of the trees in the wind seemed to be the first sound of incoming shells. I stood up in the hole, examining the skies, hoping to smell out the artillery like a pointer. The field telephone rang as soon as darkness began to settle over us. It was Meadows.

"Captain, a lot of these men, they'd like to get that fire going. It's Christmas Eve, sir. They want to have a little service. I guess they figure that if God's gonna protect them, it has to be tonight." I gave permission.

Having gone last to the pump house the night before, I was entitled to an early trip and I took it, before the prayer service began. As Meadows had predicted, coming up with the table linens had broken the ice for me with some of the men, and I found one of Biddy's squads in there anyway, troops better disposed to me for his sake. A lanky Texan, Howler, had taken a place on a stone near the fire, and looked up at me as I warmed my hands beside him.

"Captain, you married?"

"Engaged," I said, although life in a foxhole made that seem more chimerical every minute. Home was so far away.

"Pretty," Howler allowed, when I found my wallet. "This here is my Grace," he said.

"Grace. Why, that's my girl's name, too." We marveled at the coincidence. His Grace was sunny and buxom. In the snapshot, her hair was flowing behind her in a wind that also formed her dress against her.

"Fine-looking."

"She shore is," he said. "Shore is. Only thing is, that works on my mind. You think your Grace is gonna wait for you?"

Eisley and I had bunked at the Madame's with two different fellows in Nancy whose women had Dear Johned them. I wondered how it would feel, if Grace got some intimation of my fling with Gita and abandoned me. I'd excused myself because of the excesses of war, but what if she didn't? Grace had two suitors left at home, boys she had been going with before me, one a 4-F because of a glass eye, and the other running a factory critical to the war effort. Now and then, when I listened to men like Howler worry that their gals could two-time them, the idea that Grace might take up with one of these boys would pierce me like an arrow, and then, like an arrow pass through. I did not believe she would do it. It was that simple. Boredom, longing, loneliness-even jealousy and anger-were not forces capable of conquering Grace's virtue. Until I met Gita, I might have called it principle. But even by Gita's view, even if she were correct that every man and woman was a story they had made up about themselves and tried to believe, that was Grace's-that she was a person of virtue so lightly borne that it did not really touch the earth. She could never do that to me. Because, in the process, she would destroy herself.

"I hope so," I answered.

"Sitting out here, it kinda gets in my mind that she can't possibly wait for me. She got any sense, she'd know I'm three-quarters of the way to dead anyhow, being out here surrounded. And likely to come back with some piece of me missin, if I make it. Why should she wait? There all those 4-Fs and smart guys and USO commandos at home, makin good money 'cause there ain't many men left. Why shouldn't a dame get herself a beau?"

I still had the picture in my hand.

"She doesn't look like the kind of girl to do that, Hovler."

"I hope not. I'd hate to live through all this just to come home to a broken heart. I don't know what I'd do. I'd mess her up, I think." The thought made him so unhappy that he left the fire and went back to his hole.

At 9:0o p. M., a jeep came creeping up the road. I'd been summoned into town to see Algar. He was at the same desk where I had met him, now trimmed out with pine boughs. His pipe was in hand, but I could tell from the aroma that he'd been reduced to filling it with tobacco from cigarettes.

"Merry Christmas, David." He offered his hand. He and his staff had been contemplating my company's situation and the way it fit into the overall picture. Creeping ever closer, the Krauts had issued an edict today to McAuliffe to surrender and he'd reportedly said "Nuts" in reply. There was reason to think he'd made a good decision. Patton's forces were said to be advancing down the Assenois road on Bastogne now, and more than ',zoo loads of supplies had fallen by parachute today. As a result, General staff was convinced that the Germans had no choice but to mount an all-out attack tomorrow.

They could not position their tanks to take on Patton without control of Bastogne. And they knew that with every hour, supplies were being distributed to peripheral forces, meaning the longer they waited, the stiffer the resistance.

Given the scout plane, Algar figured there was now some chance that one of the Kraut attacks might come from the west, perhaps through Savy. Perhaps even through Champs. There was no telling. And in any event, whatever force was in the woods would move on us, at least for a while, to keep the company in place. So Algar and his staff still wanted us in position to hold that road. They were just going to move us a little, into the woods on the eastern side, in order to lessen the chances of the German guns fixing on us. If the first attack came at us, we were to move north and contact the enemy. With luck, we'd catch them by surprise and be able to flank the Panzer grenadiers. Either way, we were better off attacking than waiting for the Germans to mass and pin us down. If we did get the first attack, Algar would send tanks and reinforcements, even call in air support if the weather held. It was more likely that we'd get called to reinforce Savy. Those were the orders.

Ralph, the Exec, came in to report on a conversation with McAuliffe's staff in Bastogne, who were suddenly disheartened about Patton's progress.

"Ham, I don't know what to make of this, but this guy Murphy, he was sort of implying that maybe Bastogne is bait."

"Bait?"

"That Ike wants to draw as many of the German assets as possible tight around the town, and then bomb it to all hell. Make sure there's never another offensive like this. Better in the long run."

Algar thought about that, then gave his head a solid shake.

"Patton might bomb his own troops. Never Eisenhower. We want to keep that one to ourselves, Ralph."

"Yes, sir."

When Ralph left, Algar looked at me. "Here's another thing to keep to ourselves, David. A couple of things. I don't like to say either of them, but we're all better off being plain. Don't let your men surrender to the Panzer forces. Name, rank, and serial number won't get them very far. After the job we've done on the Luftwaffe, most of their intelligence comes from what they can beat out of our troops. Once they've got what they want, the buggers have no means to keep prisoners. And they don't. Word is they flat-out shot dozens of our troops at Malmedy. But understand what I mean. I was with Fuller at Clervaux, when Cota wouldn't let us retreat. I'm never going to issue that command. I don't want to lose that road.

But I don't want a bunch of soldiers with rifles trying to stop tanks. Fight like hell, as long as you can, but protect your men. Those are your orders."

I saluted.

I passed through our strongpoints, giving the password. Walking up, I encountered another member of Masi's platoon, Massimo Fortunato, a huge handsome lump, on guard duty. An immigrant, Massimo claimed to have lived in Boston "long time," but he spoke barely a word of English. Even Masi, who said he knew Italian, generally communicated with Massimo by hand signals like everybody else. Fortunato had come in as a replacement, but one with combat experience, which meant that he was not subject to the usual ridicule. He had fought through North Africa and Italy, until a sympathetic commander transferred him to Europe, following an incident in which Fortunato believed he was firing at a boy he'd grown up with.

I asked Fortunato if all was quiet.

"Quite," he answered. "Good quite."

I went back to the pump house to find Meadows. O'Brien was helping Collison with a letter home, writing down what Stocker told him, sometimes framing the words for him. Bill and I agreed that he'd send a scout team across the road to assess our new position. After that, we'd give the men orders to pack up. Bill went out to make the assignment, as Biddy's platoon was filtering in.

"Think we'll ever have a worse Christmas, Captain?" Biddy's second-in-command, a PFC named Forrester, asked me.

"Hope not."

"Nah. Next Christmas, we'll be dead or the war'll be over. Right?"

"It'll be over. You'll be home. That'll be your best Christmas, then."

He nodded. "That'd be nice. I'm not sure I ever had a best Christmas." I didn't say anything, but I'm sure my face reflected my curiosity. "I was adopted, Captain. Old man got it at Verdun. My mother, she ran out of gas somehow. Some friends of my aunt's took me in. They had six other kids in that house. I don't know what made them do it. Good sods, I guess. Irish, you know. Only Christmas, somehow, that was always strange. They were Catholic, went to midnight Mass. My family was Scotch-German, Presbyterians. Not such a big deal, but Christmas would get me thinking. These here ain't my real brothers. Ma and Pa ain't my real ma and pa. Adopted like that, Captain, at that age, it didn't seem there was anything real in my life. Not like for other people." He looked at me again. I couldn't think of anything to do but clap him on the arm, yet the gesture drew a smile.

When I returned to our forward position, I wrote letters to my parents and to Grace, as I had in the hours before we'd attacked La Saline Royale, just on the chance the messages might somehow reach them if worse came to worst. Writing to Grace was getting harder. I knew what to say, but I seemed to mean less of it each day. It was not my stupidity with Gita Lodz, either. Instead, there was something about my feelings for Grace that seemed to suit me less and less. After standing there with Howler, thinking about whether Grace could do me wrong, I now experienced a pinch of regret that stepping out was beyond her, since it might even have been for the best.

While I was writing, I gradually became aware of music. The German troops were in the woods singing Christmas carols, the voices traveling down to us on the wind. Many of the tunes were familiar, despite the foreign tongue, whose words I could make out here and there because of my limited Yiddish. "Stine Nacht," they sang, "Heilige Nacht." Rudzicke scrambled up to my hole.

"Captain, I was going to sing, too," he said. "A lot of us wanted to. Seeing as how we're moving out anyway.

I debated, undertaking the unfamiliar arithmetic of pluses and minuses that an experienced combat officer probably had reduced to instinct. Would I mislead the Germans about our position in the morning, or give something away? With an assault in the offing, could I deny the men one meager pleasure of Christmas? And how to cope with the ugly worm of hope that this demonstration of fellowship might make the Krauts less savage at daybreak?

"Sing," I told him. And so as we packed up, G Company sang, even me. Christmas was nothing in my house, a nonevent, and I felt as a result that I was not a participant in the festival of fellowship and good feeling that Christmas was everywhere else. But now I sang. We sang with our enemies. It went on nearly an hour, and then there was silence again, awaiting the attack which all the soldiers on both sides knew was coming.