Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Thirteen

December 17, 1944. The environs of Lepont, Belgium. Sunday, 1500 Hours.

In the afternoon of the day that would be known as Bloody Sunday, Dog Battery’s Section Eight took cover in a grove of fir trees, protected from wind and observation by heavy green limbs weighted almost to the ground with layers of ice and snow.

The men were exhausted, but Docker had ordered the stop only for cold K-rations. From his maps, he estimated they were about five or six miles from Lepont. Above the village was a promontory identified as Mont Reynard, and he knew if they could get the trucks to the top they could control the river and bridges below with their guns.

Trankic had been checking Battery and Battalion headquarters every hour since the first German attacks but so far had raised neither unit.

Dormund and the Hogman were opening K-rations and spooning the contents into mess kits. Private Joseph Pitko had cleared snow from the base of a tree and sat cross-legged reading his Bible, a short and powerfully built man with a totally bald head and brown eyes that seemed to darken with the intensity of his emotions, a state he achieved effortlessly when temporal distractions were not besetting him and he was able to pursue and savor a complete union with his God. Pitko had no need to look at his Bible in order to read from pages flyspecked with dirt and faded and stained from exposure to weather; he knew the Word of the Lord by heart. Now he stared at the white fir trees, his body motionless, a carven figure of Old Testament fervor and purpose, relevant in a mythical fashion to storms and sleet and the sound of artillery on the horizons, but detached and unrelated to the men of the section who were preparing food and checking the guns and maps.

Pitko did not believe Almighty God had been speaking in metaphors when He called the human body a temple for His presence. The religious conviction that had seized and permeated him since earliest memory was a natural, elemental force he had no interest in trying to explain or share; he did not believe in the rationale of those who became converted to the Lord on reaching the age of reason. Or at any other age. The Hand of God was offered to each man and woman at birth and he who refused it was either blind or foolish, and Pitko had no tolerance for those who would not see and believe, who needed to be “converted” to the truth.

Dormund brought a mess kit of food to Pitko and shifted his weight uncertainly from one foot to the other, scratching his neck and searching for words, because while he wasn’t afraid of Pitko, he was awed and puzzled by him.

“Joe, it’s kind of wretched stuff, but Sarge says no fire.”

Pitko’s fingers continued to move across the page of his Bible but his eyes remained fixed on the trees. “Compose your mind to the indignation of the Lord,” he said in his quiet, resonant voice. And then, “He hath said: ‘The mountains shall be thrown down, and the hedges shall fall and every wall shall fall to the ground. And I shall judge him with pestilence, and with blood, and with violent rain and hailstones. And I shall be magnified and they shall know that I am the Lord.’ ”

Pitko pointed at the fog-shrouded mountains where the sound of artillery was like an avalanche rolling down the hills.

“Reflect on what He has spoken, Dormund, and what He is now bringing forth, because He said, ‘For I will rain fire and brimstone upon him and upon his army, and upon the many nations that are with him.’ ”

Pitko stared at Dormund, his eyes almost black now in the pallor of his lined and angry face. His finger had stopped under the word “Lord.”

“There will be fire soon for all of us, Dormund,” he said. “You may trust the Lord.”

There were times when Dormund thought Pitko was crazy, because Pitko believed everything in the Bible and that made Dormund uncomfortable since he wasn’t sure about anything he read, even in comic books. Maybe somebody just made it all up. Even the Bible. He thought of making a joke about that with Pitko, but knew it wouldn’t work, that it would come out wrong. So he backed away and took the rations over to Farrel and Sonny Laurel, who were playing with the big dog.

Trankic called to Docker. “Hey, Bull, I’m getting something.”

Docker walked to the jeep, but by then only static was sputtering from the speaker.

“What was it?”

“It was some English but mostly German,” Trankic said. “Maybe it’s a lot of bullshit. They say they got Bastogne surrounded. The Twenty-eighth Division is knocked off the line, the One-hundred-sixth is kaput. They say nine thousand men captured, ammo, gasoline, the works.”

Shorty Kohler said: “That’s the outfit the guy we picked up is from, the One-hundred-sixth. They got a lion on their shoulder patch, the Golden Lions, that’s what they’re called. Golden fuck-ups, you ask me. All fucking POWs now.”

Jackson Baird was seated on the tailgate of a truck, his helmet beside him. He had a mess kit of K-rations in his hands but wasn’t eating; he was watching the dog playing with Farrel and Sonny Laurel and his food had whitened with a powder of snow.

He looked strong and wiry, Docker thought, of medium height but on the thin side, with sandy brown hair, and what Docker’s father would have called a “good” jaw — hard and firm, a hint of stubbornness in its bony strength.

Docker had not yet had a chance to talk with him, so he joined Baird and said, “I’m Sergeant Docker. I’m going to tell you something just once now. Put your helmet on and keep it on.”

In a scramble, Baird put his mess kit aside, slid off the tailgate and crammed his helmet onto his head, buckling the chin strap with shaking fingers. “I’m... I’m sorry, sergeant. I was brushing snow from under my collar and I forgot that I took it off.”

“Okay,” Docker said. “Remember to keep it on. Where’s your rifle?”

“My rifle? I don’t know, sergeant, in all that firing, with the shells landing, it got knocked out of my hands.”

“Let me have a look at your dog tags.”

“Well, I lost them, too. I fell down the side of a hill and they got snagged on a bush or something.”

“You have a wallet, letters from home? Any ID at all?”

“All that stuffs in my musette bag. It was with my bedroll and I didn’t have a chance to get it.”

Docker said, “Start at the beginning, Baird. How did you get separated from your outfit?”

“Well, our company was on the left flank of the division somewhere near the Losheim Gap. The Fourteenth Armored was on the line north of us, I think.”

Shorty Kohler and Farrel and several others had gathered in a loose semicircle behind Docker.

“Yesterday morning — I guess it was around six o’clock — we heard artillery and saw a lot of rockets to the east of us. Then while it was still dark, the German tanks and troops came across the fields. It was like a nightmare after that, everybody running and shooting. There was so much noise we couldn’t even hear what the noncoms were telling us.”

Baird looked uneasily at the men standing behind Docker, his eyes shifting away from Kohler and Linari and Matt Larkin. “Nobody knew what was going on.” Moistening his chapped lips he pushed a strand of hair back under his helmet. “It was like, I don’t know — like we were caught in a tornado or something.”

“Who’s your commanding general?”

“Major General Jones. Major General Alan Jones.”

“And your company officers?”

“The company commander is Captain George Dilworth, sergeant. The lieutenant in charge of my squad was Lieutenant Rick Russo. Our sergeant was Floyd Greene.”

“Were you on guard when the Germans attacked?”

Baird nodded quickly. “Another private and me, Tommy Guthrie, we were posted about two hundred yards from company headquarters.”

“Did you sound an alarm?”

Baird moistened his lips again. “Sure, sergeant. I mean, we yelled and fired our rifles.”

“Did an officer or noncom tell you to fall back from your guard position?”

“I don’t know who gave the orders, sergeant.” Baird’s eyes were blinking more rapidly now. “But somebody yelled at us to get out of there. It might have been Lieutenant Russo or Sergeant Greene.”

Docker said, “Baird, you’d better try to remember your last orders. And who gave them to you. Because you’re at least a dozen miles behind your division now. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I’m not sure, sergeant.”

Without any particular emphasis, Kohler said, “You’re a fucking deserter, that’s what the sarge is telling you.”

“At ease, goddamn it,” Docker said. “Baird, what happened to the other soldier on guard with you?”

“Tommy Guthrie? I don’t know, sergeant. After I fell down the hill, I didn’t see any of them again.”

“Where you from in the States, Baird?”

“Well, I was born in Chicago but we moved a lot. We’ve been living in New York State for the last ten years or so, in Peekskill—”

Trankic’s call to Docker interrupted. “Hey, Bull, you better get over here.”

Most of the men followed Docker to the radio, but Sonny Laurel stayed behind and looked at Baird, who was picking listlessly at his food. Tex Farrel stood nearby, holding Radar on the leash they’d made from strips of knotted tarpaulin. “I wish Kohler would keep his big mouth shut,” he said.

Baird saw them watching him and managed a narrow smile. He whistled to the dog. “Looks like he’s half Alsatian.”

“His name’s Radar,” Sonny Laurel said. “It’s what we call him anyway. We requisitioned him from Werpen.”

Farrel pulled the lunging dog over to the truck and gave the lead to Baird. “Hold him,” he said. “There’s foxes around here and he’d like to go AWOL.”

Sonny and Farrel slogged through the snow to the jeep, where the rest of the section stood with Trankic and Docker, listening to a miniature, static-threaded, voice.

“... a First Army unit, I’m sure, shoulder patches of the Seventh Armored...” The voice was British, exhausted but charged with tension. “This is Tail Gunner Euan Perlough in a farmhouse about a mile from the village called Baugnies. I have a bad leg since bailing out over Cologne. Made it this far on plain luck. There’s been a frightful massacre here... a hundred or more Yanks herded into a field and gunned down... cut down in their tracks with their hands in the air. Seventh Armored chaps, most of them...” The British gunner’s voice rose in a burst of emotion. “Command Group Peiper, it was his outfit... the Yanks had their hands in the air, thought they were being taken prisoner, some of them even laughing. More than a hundred in all, never a chance... at Malmédy...”

Silence then, broken only by humming threads of static. A few seconds later they heard, “I’d better make a try—” and then there was a final click and the set went silent.

Docker gave his orders, the sharpness in his voice discouraging discussion or reflection. “We’re pulling out. Nobody inside the trucks, everybody on the gun mounts, rifles off safe. Jackets open so you can reach grenades. No goddamn talking. Pitko, you ride shotgun in the first truck with Schmitzer. Shorty, take the cab with Trankic. Larkin, you and me in the jeep. Now let’s haul ass.”

When everyone was in position, the huge dog tied to the stake of the lead truck. Docker climbed into the jeep and pumped his fist twice and the two trucks followed him out of the clearing, their motors making a rasping sound against the heavy silence of the hills.

In the truck behind the jeep. Corporal Schmitzer slowly and carefully applied the brakes as they started down a slick grade. At his side, Pitko lightly stroked the pages of his Bible with his fingertips. Schmitzer peered out the open window and saw nothing but fogs and falling snow. Anxiety had created a cold twist of tension in his stomach; you couldn’t see the enemy, couldn’t fire at him, you couldn’t even run from him... His mood was agitated, bitter; he had seen the warmth between the three youngsters in the section — Sonny Laurel, Farrel and the straggler they’d picked up, that Jackson Baird. Their youth and excitement seemed to draw a circle around them, shutting everybody else out... He felt a sudden exasperation for Pitko and his Bible, which were both about as useless as the Hogman, if you got down to it... “Look, I don’t mind you reading your Bible, that’s your business, but keep an eye out your side of the truck, okay?”

Pitko’s face was reflected in the windshield, eyes shining darkly in the frosted glass.

“A man doesn’t read the Bible,” he said. “The Bible reads the man. A man doesn’t choose the Word of the Lord. It chooses him.”

“You mean it’s like a Ouija board?” Schmitzer’s attempt at a light tone failed; the intensity of Pitko’s manner tightened the already painful knots in his stomach.

“Listen to what I’m reading,” Pitko said. “Listen to the Word of God.” Without glancing at his Bible, he intoned quietly, “The sun was risen upon the earth, and Lot entered into Segor.”

To Schmitzer, it seemed as if the sound of artillery had begun to rise on all the horizons... Well, he tried to reassure himself, Pitko couldn’t know... he’d hardly spoken to the boy in the last week... except he now remembered what had happened the night Docker had gone back to Battery headquarters with Larkin and Kohler, and the guilty thoughts created a furtive riot in his blood, the heat of it flaming his cheeks and starting a pulse of guilty pleasure throbbing in his spine... Schmitzer had no way to analyze his emotions, no guide to lead him from his shameful needs. He had grown up despising queers, fairies, fags, whatever you called them, encouraged by the priests to dump them on their soft asses if they ever tried anything funny. But there had been no money for dates and taking girls to the movies or anything like that, and the one time he had been to a whorehouse he had gotten drunk first and the big black woman had laughed at him and poked his limp sex organ with her finger and said in her soft, chortling voice, “Maybe it’ll grow up when you do, honey.”...

It had been a gray afternoon, the light diffused by the fogs, when Dormund and Linari had got into a noisy, good-humored wrestling match with Sonny Laurel, trying to pin him to the ground in the snowdrifts piled up between the section’s trucks.

Suddenly the playful mood of the game had changed and Laurel began squirming and shouting in genuine anger, his voice breaking in an adolescent tremor, because Linari had trapped his arms with a scissors hold and Dormund had pulled his trousers down and was stuffing lumps of snow into his underwear.

Schmitzer had come around the side of the truck at that moment, staring at the writhing figures on the ground, moved so strangely by the sight of Sonny Laurel’s exposed flesh that he was powerless to move or act or speak. Laurel’s skin, bare from his chest to his groin, seemed white and translucent as silk, his slim muscles trembling in spasmodic contractions against the melting snow. And below the boy’s thrusting hips, Schmitzer could see the arch of a golden crest, soft curls of fine hair glinting like a spray of new wheat.

It was an interval of emotion attenuated by a willing conspiracy of all his senses; he had stood motionless for how long he would never know, his nerves bared to pleasure that was like a sweet agony, and it wasn’t until he felt the shocking weight of desire, a shuddering contraction at the very center of himself, that the terrible awareness broke the instant of physical bondage and he had shouted hoarsely at them, “Goddamn it, cut it out... you don’t have work to do, I’ll find you some.”...

He gripped the steering wheel now as if he would splinter it in his powerful hands. “Why did you read that stuff to me?”

“I told you, a man does not choose the Word of the Lord.” Pitko began reading again, his voice running deeply under the sounds of battle. “And the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of Heaven.”

Feeling threatened in ways Pitko couldn’t really know — could he? — Schmitzer said between his teeth, “Fuck the damn Bible.”

“That defileth his neighbor’s wife, that grieveth the needy, that lifteth up his eyes to idols, that committeth abomination—”

“Stop it, for Christ’s sake,” Schmitzer said, a sound inside matching the swell of artillery in the mountains.

“Seeing he had done all these detestable things, he shall surely die, his blood shall be upon him.”

Schmitzer thought helplessly of the Lexington and his father’s footprint on the wall near the ceiling.

“Listen, listen for grace,” Pitko went on. “For the Lord asketh: ‘Is it My will that a sinner should die,’ saith the Lord God, ‘and not that he should be converted from his ways, and live?’ ”

And from the depths of his anguish, Schmitzer heard himself ask... “How did you know?”

“I have seen you look on the boy,” Pitko said, like a judgment. “From the tribe of Levi, the truth of Leviticus, I know the punishments for unlawful lusts. For if anyone lies with a man as with a woman, both have committed an abomination and their blood shall be upon them...”

Docker saw it the same instant as Larkin, an ME-109 crossing the valley on a flanking course with the section’s jeep and trucks. When it streaked away and disappeared into a bank of fog. Docker hit the brakes in pumping motions and stopped on the shoulder of the road. Sounding his horn twice, he listened tensely as the trucks braked and skidded on the slick ice behind him.

They couldn’t use the cannon or machine guns in this position; the richochet of their own fire from the trees could be as dangerous as an attacking aircraft. The sergeant told Larkin and Trankic to spread the men on both sides of the road, where they could use their rifles. Most of them had long since filed the sears off their M-is, making the weapons fully automatic — without sears to lock the operating rod spring after each shot, one trigger pull emptied the clip in a burst. But in spite of their deployment the plane flared around the mountainside and was over and past them before they could fire. And with its passage came the whistling roar of its props and crescendoing bursts of gunfire, the bullets stitching their way up the frozen ground of the white hills.

Above the noise Docker heard someone shouting, “Pitko, get up!” He ran along the road to the first truck and saw that its windshield had been smashed out by bullets. Shards of glass hung from its metal frame, trembling like cobwebs in the sweeping winds. Other bullet holes gaped in the canvas body of the truck.

Somebody shouted, “Christ, look at him!”

Pitko was lying on the ground beside the open door on the passenger side of the truck. A single bullet had pierced the front of his helmet and had come out the back, furrowing the surface of the road and leaving flecks of metal and bone and blood on the glistening white snow.

Docker’s hands were shaking; he tightened them on his rifle and looked around at the men. “Schmitzer, you and Laurel get a tarp and take him into the woods. You know what to do with his dog tag?”

Schmitzer barely nodded, a man walking in a daze.

Docker then told Dormund and Gelnick to remove the splinters of glass from the frame of the windshield and ordered the others to get back on the guns. He picked up Pitko’s rifle, pushed back the operating handle until it caught, tilted the rifle, put his thumb in the breech and looked down the barrel. His thumbnail gleamed in a faint light reflected from the falling snow. The lands and grooves were clean and shining; Pitko had taken good care of it. Docker let the bolt fly home, the sound a dry crack in the silence, then threw the rifle hard at Jackson Baird. To his surprise, Baird caught it competently, one hand above the balance, the other on the stock. “You got yourself a rifle now,” Docker said.

He walked to the jeep, feeling less that they had lost something than that they had wasted it.

The big dog was barking exuberantly, its head looming above the tailgate of the truck. Larkin offered Docker his canteen. Docker took a short pull of the black whiskey, then yelled to Tex Farrel to make the damned dog shut up.

The forest was quiet, the artillery distant. The snow fell through the willow and poplar trees and settled in layers on growth of heather and lichens and honeysuckle. Schmitzer and Sonny Laurel laid Pitko’s body in a natural hollow between two towering silver fir trees. Schmitzer wrapped the tarpaulin tightly about the body, securing the corners with the straps and eyelets spaced along the edges of the water-repellent fabric. When he slipped a fold of the tarpaulin under Pitko’s head. Sonny Laurel knelt and took off his helmet and thought that this wasn’t at all the way he’d imagined it would be back there on a green lawn in his hometown of Chicago when a neighbor’s beautiful wife read him those stirring letters from her husband in the Pacific...

Schmitzer opened a button of Pitko’s field jacket, found his dog tag chain and broke it with a twist of his wrist. He put one dog tag in his wallet. Sonny Laurel watched with wide, shocked eyes as Schmitzer forced open Pitko’s mouth and dropped the other dog tag into it. With the heel of his hand, Schmitzer forced the dead man’s jaw shut, letting several inches of the chain hang from the stiffening lips.

“Something happens to us, there’s a chance some-body’ll find the other tag on him,” Schmitzer said.

“Shouldn’t we say a prayer?”

“I guess so.”

“What would be right?”

“I don’t know. He was the expert on that.”

Schmitzer looked at the snowflakes melting in Laurel’s blond hair and coating the shoulders of his overcoat. Standing above and behind him, he could see the curve of the boy’s cheek and the smooth, soft arch of his throat. He looked quickly away, before Laurel might turn and see what was revealed in his eyes and on his face.

Pitko had seen it, a mark, an abomination. And Pitko was dead. He had warned him, though. To save the boy. Maybe to save them both...

Schmitzer remembered the words in the Spanish poem his uncle had sent them from the jail in Barcelona. Maybe it wasn’t just right, he thought, but what the hell, and in a low and earnest voice he said, “Just remember, I’ll never forget. All those Christmas days gone by. Ineradicably” — he stumbled on the word — “stamped in my head. Lovely memories are held high.”

“Lovely memories are held high,” Laurel said. “That’s nice.”

His skin looked soft, pale against the rosy color in his cheeks, but as he secured the tarpaulin over Pitko’s face, Schmitzer made himself think of the other deaths hounding his life, a defiant uncle, his father at an empty coal bin with the gun, his brother on the Lex when the planes tore her hull apart — he forced himself to think of them and he vowed, he vowed bitterly in the cathedral silence that his abomination of feeling would never contaminate anyone but himself, that it would die here and forever under the trees with Joe Pitko.

“Now listen to me good. Sonny,” he said. “It’s part my fault Pitko got hit. He got talking about something that had nothing the fuck to do with staying alive. Like I told you, we gotta make sure nobody takes our place over here. Pitko forgot that, he forgot what he was here for, and it’s my fault because I let him.” Schmitzer drew a deep breath. “So get this. I ever say anything to you, anything, that isn’t about our job, you take that rifle and ram the butt into my face, understand? Goddamn it, you understand?”

Laurel was startled, almost frightened by his intensity. He nodded quickly. “Sure, I understand.” Except, of course, he didn’t.

They looked for a moment at Pitko in the canvas shroud already layered with snow and then turned and went down a trail to the trucks. “Lovely memories are held high...” Shit, Schmitzer thought. The wind was cold and strong in his face and he was glad because it froze the tears in his eyes. The other guy knew more about it... “The age demanded that we dance, and jammed us into iron pants...”

When they swung themselves up into the trucks. Docker shouted, “March order,” and within the hour they were cresting a hill that sloped down toward the Salm River and the village of Lepont.