Soldiers of ’44

Chapter One

December 11, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Monday, 1530 hours.

In an open jeep and two heavy trucks, the soldiers of D (Dog) Battery’s Gun Section Eight followed a steep and twisting road to the crest of a hill layered with drifting fogs above a silent valley in the forests of the Ardennes.

Gusting winds shook the canvas sides of the laboring trucks and swept in erratic spirals around the sergeant driving the support jeep and the corporal scanning the white ravines below them through binoculars.

They had been out of contact with Battery headquarters for two days and nights, but knew that somewhere ahead of them in the mountains were divisions of German soldiers pulling back toward the Siegfried Line and the Rhine, the last barriers between the Allied forces and the heartland of Nazi Germany.

Sergeant Buell Docker raised a hand and Corporal Schmitzer in the lead truck acknowledged the gesture with his horn, the single beeping note lost almost instantly in the rasp of wind through the frozen trees. The small convoy slowed and stopped near a tangled mass of thorn bushes that gave them some relief from the winds.

Schmitzer swung his truck about in a circle and positioned its hood against the front of the second truck, providing the cannon and machine guns behind them full fields of fire.

When Docker and the corporals turned off their engines, the silence that settled seemed intensified by the thick snow and rolling fogs. The sergeant listened for sounds of transport or planes, but heard only the rising winds and the occasional fragile snap of icicles.

Corporal Matt Larkin, in the passenger seat beside Docker, turned and looked at him.

“Well?”

“Well what?” Docker said.

“I don’t know. What’re you worried about?”

“You tell me.”

Corporal Larkin smiled bleakly, his teeth white against black whiskers; dirt and grease smudged his forehead beneath the rim of his helmet.

“I mean our nonpareil leader,” Larkin said. “I mean that ninety-day fuck-up, Whitter.”

Docker picked up his binoculars and looked across the fogs toward hills almost lost in the shifting patterns of low clouds. “We’ll break here,” he said. “Take a few men and cover the east side of the hill. Keep your eyes open. I don’t want any smiling faces missing when you come back.”

Larkin had more to say but looked at the sergeant and decided against it. Climbing from the jeep, he yelled with ritual exasperation at three soldiers standing near the truck, and led them back down a narrow road to the floor of the valley.

The sergeant looped his binoculars around his neck, grabbed the windshield bar and swung himself from the jeep, his boots making splintering sounds as they broke through the crust of snow on the ground.

Docker was tall but not as slim as he appeared at a casual glance; there was a precision in his movements that masked the power and size of his body. He wore a field jacket with his stripes on it and a wool-lined canvas coat with a fur collar. A bolstered .45 automatic was clipped to his cartridge belt and a carbine was looped across his shoulders.

Docker was twenty-seven but looked ten years older; his eyes were hard and there were flecks of gray in the dark hair at his temples. The single and obligatory requisite of his rank was responsibility, which had left its mark in his eyes and in his lined and weathered features.

From the top of the hill. Docker followed Corporal Larkin’s detail down the slopes through his binoculars, checking to make sure the men were on opposite sides of the road, moving out with proper intervals between them.

Docker called to Schmitzer, who walked over frozen ground to the jeep, his thick and powerfully muscled shoulders leaning into the wind, his hands swinging almost down to his knees. In new units, Schmitzer was occasionally called Monk or Monkey, but seldom twice by the same person. With Section Eight only three weeks now, he had already booted Spinelli hard for rolling a rock at him and shouting, “Think fast! Live coconut!”

The sergeant told Schmitzer to take a second detail and cover the west side of the hill; the steep pitch of the ridge would protect the other two flanks of their position.

“I ask for volunteers?” Schmitzer said.

Docker glanced through the gathering dusk toward the guns. Joe Pitko and Ed Solvis were at the controls of the cannon, seated in the metal seats beside its wide breechblock. They were the oldest of Docker’s men, in their middle thirties, and liked working together. Sensibly enough (in Docker’s view) they preferred one another’s company to that of the noisy youngsters in the section.

Docker answered Corporal Schmitzer with, “Take Linari, Pierce and the other kid, what’s his name, Sonny Laurel. Linari is solid bone upstairs but he’ll do what you tell him. Pierce and Sonny Laurel, I don’t know.”

“They ever see any action?”

“They shipped here as replacements a month ago. Fired at sleeve targets in England, that’s about it. They know the manual of arms and how to unbutton their flys.”

“I’ll watch ’em,” Schmitzer said.

The corporal went back to the trucks and called out the names of his detail, and three young soldiers hurried to join him at the top of the rutted pathway into the valley.

The sergeant watched them through his binoculars until their figures merged into the mists, then turned and studied the mountains and valleys stretching toward the Rhine, rolling and open country, fields bright with snow and occasional stands of pines that looked dull green through the fogs. He was searching for roads or farmhouses or signs of a village but the driving sleet had blurred the valleys into an opaque expanse of swirling white mists.

Over the years it seemed to Docker he had matured and hardened as a soldier in several distinct stages. At first he had tried to mask his anxiety and fears by pretending they didn’t exist, because this seemed the only acceptable attitude to assume, the one he had absorbed from books and school and other recruits. Then he had learned something different from the panic they had all been seared with at Kasserine in North Africa, and in Sicily he had begun to trust his unrooted anxieties, to depend on unspecific suspicions about terrain and incongruous silences, examining these intuitive alarms as carefully as he would the condition of his weapons.

Eventually the instincts that caused him to be aware of danger escalated through repetition to a higher perception, a complex set of reflexes that were like physical sensors, monitoring devices as dependable as his eyes and ears. And now, standing alone on a sleeting hill in Belgium, Docker was paying close attention to the warning of his combat instincts.

Everybody was so goddamn sure the war was about over. That was part of what disturbed and alerted him. (“Ah tell yuh, Dockah, this lil ole pig-stickin’ is over,” Whitter had told him just a week ago.) And it wasn’t only green troops regretting they’d missed all the action, it was the noncoms talking about the jobs and women they were going back home to, and sewing new hash marks and stripes on their tunics, officers ordering Ike jackets and “pinks” run up by tailors in Paris and Brussels. Talk of eating and drinking, wistful discussions of glorious foods and beers and whiskeys; these had always been a traditional, time-honored preoccupation and fantasy of soldiers in all armies, but now there was a sense of the immediate in the leisurely discussions of crab and turkey gumbos. New England chowders, baked beans and hams and steaks and fried potatoes and pies and cakes and doughnuts, not as if these delights were waiting in the fantasy kitchens of towns like Duluth and Mobile and Boston and New York, but were in fact steaming and frying and bubbling for grateful soldiers just beyond the next range of hills.

Air Force Intelligence (according to Lieutenant Whitter again) insisted there were no German troops in the Ardennes. But Allied planes hadn’t been flying for a week. And no one knew for sure what might be moving under that heavy cover of fog and clouds.

Nevertheless, everyone was certain it was winding down, even Dave Hamlin was convinced of it, Hamlin, three thousand miles away on a college campus in Pennsylvania, was just as complacent as everybody else. Only last month he had written: “It’s not that I’m tired of being a surrogate cock for you heroes because I’m not. But fair is fair; wrap things up, come on home and get yours.”...

Corporal John Trankic checked the breechblock of the cannon, climbed down from the firing platform and walked through the snow to Docker. Trankic’s bulk was emphasized by the wool sweater and scarf he wore beneath a field jacket and overcoat as he studied Docker now with an appraising frown.

“What the fuck’s bothering you?”

“We’re taking a break here,” Docker said. “Long enough for a piss call and chow.”

“You worried about the new guy? What’s his name — Schmitzer?”

“No, I think he’s all right.”

“I’d say it was pretty chicken shit of him kicking Spinelli in the ass that way. Live coconut. Hell, it was just a joke.”

“Schmitzer didn’t see it that way,” Docker said. “Look, try to get a signal through to Battery or Battalion.”

“I been trying all day. Bull.”

“Unless you want to switch to smoke signals, stay on the radio. If you get through to Battery, I want to talk to Captain Grant.”

Section Eight’s X-42 radio receiver-transmitter was packed in its leather carrying case and strapped to the side of the jeep where its antenna had free play above the windshield and rear seats. It was essentially the same communications system used in command cars and spotter jeeps; it could monitor signals from the divisions on their flanks and occasionally — depending on the weather and configuration of the valleys and mountains in their immediate vicinity — could pick up German units ahead of them and transmitters operating to the north with Montgomery’s British armies.

“Okay, let’s get with it.” Docker walked to the big trucks, ghostly shapes in the fogs now, and cupped a hand around his mouth and yelled for Dormund.

Private Chet Dormund climbed awkwardly over the tailgate of the truck and stood panting in front of Docker, his head hanging and his fingers moving nervously along the seams of his fatigue trousers. His mouth was open and his breath caused the heavy snow to melt and form drops of moisture on his chin and lips. When Docker told him this was a chow break, the section’s cook shifted his weight uneasily, his boots making a liquid sound in the sleet and snow crusting the ground.

“The guys’ll get on me, sarge,” he said. “It’ll be all cold. I can’t light a fire, so the guys’ll get on me.”

“Start your fire between a couple of trees and put a tarp over it.”

“You mean like tie it between the trees?”

“Right. Let’s have some good hot food. Open a dozen cans of K-rations, beans and franks, roast beef hash, whatever you got. This may be the last meal today. Any biscuits left from breakfast?”

“They’re cold and hard as wretched rocks, sarge. They’ll get on me for it.”

“The engine blocks are still warm. Start one of the trucks and put a pan of biscuits on the block and close the hood.”

“You damn right, sarge.” Dormund nodded vigorously and went to collect his supplies.

“Any luck?” Docker asked Corporal Trankic.

Trankic closed the top of the leather case to protect the radio from the snow and made a thumbs-down gesture with his hand.

“Not a fucking thing, Bull,” he said. “Some yackety-yak from a civilian station in Brussels, could have been a resistance transmitter, and some shortwave static from God knows where.”

Docker removed a map from a clip under the dashboard of the jeep and spread it across the frosted hood, securing two of its sides with his carbine and binoculars against the gusting winds. When one corner of the map continued to snap and flutter, Docker pinned it down with his helmet. The canvas straps in the helmet liner had made deep creases in his thick dark hair, and the settling snow formed patterns in them that matched the touches of gray at his temples.

“With a shave and a good night’s sleep, you could pass for fifty,” Trankic told him.

Docker studied the map, his eyes narrowing against the stinging winds. He rubbed a hand over his head, enjoying the pleasant discomfort of massaging hair and scalp against the constriction caused by the canvas straps of his helmet. With a gloved fingertip he drew a line south from Liège to the Allied railhead at Bastogne. Fifty miles, perhaps sixty. He couldn’t judge the distance in terms of time; bridges might be down, narrow mountain roads packed and impassable with snowdrifts. His section was somewhere between those big towns, traveling on a line roughly east of Trois-Ponts and Malmédy.

“So what the hell’s bugging you?” Trankic said.

“Take a look at the map.”

The battalion had crossed the Meuse River at Namur the first week of December, the mission of its thirty-two gun sections to provide antiaircraft and antitank protection for various elements of the 28th and 106th Infantry Divisions.

Docker and Trankic studied their line of march, which curved in an easterly direction from Namur toward Germany. The towns of Werbomont, Manhay, Vielsalm were behind them now. They had passed through them at night, the houses and shops blacked out, trucks and guns noisy in the narrow streets and windswept squares, with Larkin at the wheel of the jeep and Docker beside him plotting the course on a grid map braced against his knees.

Bastogne, the site of VIII Corps headquarters, was also behind them, but south by twenty or thirty miles. They looked at the names of villages on the Salm and Amblève Rivers — Stoumont, Foix and Lepont — and in other directions — Spa and Malmédy and St. Vith and Stavelot.

They studied the contour of the terrain, the bridges and roads, the mountains and valleys where the other guns of the 269th were posted in a thin north-south line through this sector of the Ardennes.

“I can read maps all right,” Trankic said, and looked at Docker, “but I ain’t any good at reading minds, Bull. So you better tell me about it.”

“We’ve traveled about sixty miles the last few days,” Docker said. “On the same line as the battery, according to our maps and orders. But if there was an error in parallax of only two or three degrees between the section and the battery at the IP, the error would be compounded fifty times by now. That’s one thing. The second is that you haven’t picked up any German units on the radio for the last thirty-six hours.”

“So now we don’t know where the battery is, and don’t know what’s in front of us. That about it. Bull?”

“That’s about it,” Docker said.

Trankic nodded again and uncapped his canteen. “You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

Docker held the canteen in his gloved hand and took a swallow from it. The whiskey was ice cold and stained his lips blue-black but he was grateful for the swift and powerful heat it churned up in his stomach.

The whiskey came from Normandy, from the invasion area designated Utah Beach in France where the 269th had landed on the third week after D-Day. Utah was north of the other American invasion beach, which was code-named Omaha, and still farther north of the British beaches, which were coded Gold and Juno and Sword. Utah was divided into two sections, Tare Green and Uncle Red, and Dog Battery’s guns had been on Beach Red with units of the 4th and 79th infantry divisions.

In the shatteringly noisy chaos of those landings and regroupings, with beachmasters shouting commands through bullhorns and 40- and 90-millimeter cannons pounding the skies at strafing Focke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts, Trankic had spotted and appropriated eleven five-gallon jerry cans of ethyl alcohol which (they’d decided later) had probably been ticketed for the engineers or medics.

Trankic, who had been a sandhog and bootlegger in Chicago before the war, had distilled the alcohol to get rid of contaminants, and then stirred oak chips in the mixture to absorb its fusel oils. After adding color and sweetness with sugar charred in a mess kit to the shade of tawny molasses, Trankic had at last triumphantly evolved a “whiskey” that tasted no better or worse than a cheap, blended bar bourbon. The only flaw in his eventual product (and everyone agreed it was a minor one) was that on interaction with metal canteens and cups the whiskey turned glossy and dark, as rich and glowing as black satin. It was known throughout the battalion as Trankic’s “Old Black Jolt” and it had an effect so intense that it seemed to explode like a series of linked grenades from the back of the throat to the top and bottom of the skeletal system.

As Docker studied the map and felt the winds becoming warmer on his numbing lips, he realized in some curious warping of time that those tumultuous hours on Utah Beach seemed more distant to him than Sicily, where he had been hit, and Africa, where the Big Red One had been blooded for the first time, and battle flags of American units had been ground into the sands in the scorched files of the Kasserine Pass.

He remembered that someone had been firing at them on Utah in France, they didn’t know who, they saw only the explosions of dust and shale in the ground beside their trucks, holes appearing magically as if made by some invisible sewing machine, and that Trankic was shouting, “Hold it, for Christ’s sake, these goddamn cans are full of alcohol...” And Larkin at the wheel of the truck had yelled at him, “If you’re trying to be the first immortal, go fuck yourself...” But Trankic, his face smudged with smoke and wet with sweat, had stood fast in that noise and chaos and had thrown can after can of the alcohol up to Shorty Kohler and Tex Farrel, scrambling onto the tailgate himself only a split second before Larkin floored the accelerator...

Trankic took a drink now of his black liquor, wiped a black blur from his lips, put the canteen in the canvas pouch hooked to his cartridge belt and said, “So now I know what you’re worried about. But there’s something else. We got a couple of guys in the section, Dormund and Gelnick, who’d be just as much good to us if they were back in the States peeling potatoes. And five to six kids who’d do fine if there was somebody ’round to change their diapers.”

“So don’t worry about Schmitzer pounding on Spinelli. It might help toilet train him.”

Dormund came sloshing awkwardly through the snow. “Sarge, I got the biscuits hotting up on the engine block, but the guys are gonna get on me anyway ’cause I got trouble with the pump-stove and it’s gonna take a long time to cut firewood.”

“Where the hell is Gelnick?” Docker said, ignoring him. “Did he go down the hill with the other guys?”

“He didn’t go with nobody. He’s in the truck in his fart sack with a lot of blankets on top of him.”

“Goddamn him.” Docker replaced his helmet and walked through the snow to the trucks.

Dormund looked anxiously at Trankic. “I didn’t mean to get him in trouble.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“Sarge won’t send Gelnick back to the CP, will he?”

“He’ll probably scare the shit out of him, but he won’t transfer him back there.”

“You sure he won’t?”

“Shit, I just told you. Maybe I should have fixed you a head out of a tin can after all.” Trankic rapped Dormund’s helmet with his knuckles. “That one of yours got some holes in it.”

“Come on, you’re joking with me. It’s just a wretched joke, okay, Trankic?”

Dormund had come on the word “wretched” in England. A girl in a pub had smiled pleasantly at him one night and called him a “wretched drunkard” and since then he had been addicted to the word.

“Sure, sure,” Trankic said. “Now get a fire going.”

Corporal Larkin sat perched on a cold tree stump in the valley below Section Eight’s temporary gun position. He was reading a Rex Stout paperback and thinking, as he looked up to check around, that he liked Archie Goodwin better than Nero Wolfe. Not that he had anything against the fat detective and his beer and flowers, but Goodwin had the run of the city and that’s what Larkin liked best, reading about neighborhoods he’d grown up in and worked in. Even the Village which was full of queers was all right. The upper Bronx was better and Yankee Stadium, where everybody said DiMag would be the first guy to hit a ball out. Ruth and Gehrig never did, and DiMag hadn’t either, not yet anyway. But it was the bars on Third Avenue near where he lived that he liked best, all those Irish names with basements where they had steak rackets every month, all the steak you could eat and all the beer you could drink for three dollars, and fights by young brawlers trying to make it to St. Nick’s or the Garden. And battle royals, the kind his uncles had the hots for...

Private Irving Gruber, who somehow managed to remain overweight on GI field rations and was usually called Tubby, carefully packed a large snowball and lobbed it at Carmine Spinelli as he stood urinating with thoughtful precision into a rotted hole in the trunk of a tree. The snowball struck Spinelli just above the collar of his jacket, soaking and splattering his head and neck and shoulders. Wheeling around, his piss cutting a ginger arc in the white snow, he looked resentfully at Gruber.

“Goddamn it, Irv, that ain’t funny!” Spinelli brushed the clinging snow from his shoulders. “It ain’t funny at all.” His lips were trembling. “Goddamn it. Tubby. It’s melting down my back...”

“Put your cock away, Spinelli,” Larkin said.

“A guy can’t even take a piss without some lard-ass dumping snow on him.”

Tubby Gruber was laughing at Spinelli’s shivering discomfort, but Shorty Kohler looked at him with disgust. “That’s your trouble, you ginney bastard. You take shit from everybody.”

Kohler had a forehead ridged with cartilage and a nose broken twice and reset both times by a rubber at Still-man’s Gym in New York. He had been an amateur boxer before he was drafted and that, plus an explosive temper, had earned him an uneasy respect throughout the battalion.

“You know why you take your lumps from guys?” Kohler told Spinelli, “it’s ’cause you don’t have any belief. Like no character. You gotta stand up for yourself, know what I mean? Like that fucking Corporal Schmitzer. Goddamn baboon prick. Kicks you in the ass and you don’t do nothing about it.”

“So what’s to do about it?” Spinelli said. His feelings were raw and his voice was breaking. “He’s got the stripes, he’s bigger than me, and lots older and everything.”

“It don’t make no difference,” Kohler said. “Lemme tell you something. Fights are won two ways. The first is before anybody throws a punch. Lemme show you. A guy comes up to me in a bar, a big guy, he’s got fifty pounds on me. So he wants to look good to his girl or his pals. So I move away from him, give him space at the bar, keep my eyes on my drink, he’s already won the fucking fight. Acting that way, I give him balls. So the minute his elbow touches mine, what do I do...”

Larkin said, “You figure he’s a queer so you ask him if he wants to go down on you, right. Shorty?”

Kohler looked pained. “Shit, corporal, this is for Spinelli’s own good. What I do, Carmine, is I swing the edge of my palm against the guy’s arm, hard. And I stare right into his eyes. Then I say something to him. No bullshit lines like you hear in movies. Just something quiet, like maybe... ‘You looking for trouble, pal?’ ”

“That’s great,” Larkin said. “I heard John Wayne say that in a movie. But he said it to a girl.”

Gruber was laughing because it was safe to now, but Spinelli’s expression remained intent and serious.

“Okay, Shorty, that’s one way,” he said. “But you said two ways. What’s the other one?”

Kohler rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “Well, you just win it, that’s all. What the fuck you think? You come out of your corner fast, and you try to rock him with your best shots and no matter how hard he belts you, don’t let him know it. If your eye’s bleeding, fuck protecting it, keep wading in. Don’t ever let the son of a bitch know he hurt you. Then he starts to worry and forgets what they tell him in his corner. And pretty soon, nothing’s working for him.”

Kohler raised his hands, shrugged and let them drop to his side. “That’s all there is, Carmine. Just them two things.”

Corporal Larkin regarded him with what seemed to be frank admiration; the smile beneath his smudge of beard suggested only an innocent sincerity.

“So tell me something. Shorty,” he said. “Where was all them big fights of yours? At the Garden or was it maybe St. Nick’s Arena?”

Kohler looked away from Larkin, his eyes moving across the white valley. “You know the fuck it wasn’t no St. Nick’s or the Garden. I fought at smokers and steak rackets and if you won you got maybe ten bucks and if you lost you got some beers and a steak on a poppy-seed bun. So it wasn’t any fucking main event, but we didn’t fight niggers.”

“You got a real soft streak in you. Shorty,” Larkin said. “I’m kind of surprised.”

“What the hell you talking about?” Kohler’s tone was uneasy; he could guess something was coming but knew no way to defense against it.

Larkin was black Irish, with black hair and dark eyes and a cough that bit into his lungs like the teeth of a saw, a condition which wasn’t helped by sleeping on frozen ground for months and smoking several packs of cigarettes every day. Still, though he was wasted and thin, everyone except Docker treated him with a cautious, wary respect, because Larkin knew how to use words so they stung and hurt, sometimes worse than blows.

“Shit, Kohler, you’re a real patsy,” Larkin said, but when he laughed there was just the flash of white teeth against his black beard. “A real lover, aren’t you?”

Kohler looked at the low skies. “You gonna tell me what you’re talking about? Is this Twenty Questions or something?”

“I mean, Shorty, you were so kind to all them spades. Kid Chocolate and Beau Jack and Sugar Ray. Imagine all those black assholes twitching and puckering with relief. Think of Jersey Joe Wolcott and Hank Armstrong and don’t forget that clown Joe Louis, all of them on their knees thanking the good Lord because Shorty Kohler wasn’t going to whip their asses for a stein of beer and a bowl of beans at some fucking mick steak racket.”

“Look, I didn’t say I could beat any of them guys.” Kohler looked for support to Gruber and Spinelli. “Did I, for Christ’s sake? Louis and Wolcott, shit, they’re heavyweights. Sugar Ray and Armstrong, they’re welters like me, but they’re the best there ever was.”

Corporal Larkin stuffed the Rex Stout into the outer pocket of his soiled, coffee-stained GI overcoat. The coat was singed black at knee level, charred streaks that circled the back and front of the coat like an extra hemline. The black singes, acquired from standing too close to glowing field stoves, were among the unissued insignia of combat field soldiers, along with bleeding gums and trench foot and hands blistered from cradling scalding canteen cups.

Larkin unhooked his canteen and took a sip of Trankic’s black whiskey. It felt good, warming the coldness in his lungs that made him cough so much, but looking at Shorty Kohler didn’t make him feel good, because Kohler was staring at him now like some dumb beaten dog. “Forget it, Shorty,” Larkin said. “I saw you fight once. You were all right.”

“Yeah? You’re a big bullshit artist.”

“You want to put next month’s pay where your mouth is?”

Kohler looked uncertain. “No shit. You saw me fight?”

“Twenty-ninth Street between Lex and Third, Jimmy Ryan’s bar, a steak racket in the basement. You fought an Italian kid, his name was Bonelli or Bottelli, something like that. Your cut man was drunk and the referee was that old priest from St. Stanislaus, he’d been a lightweight contender, and a chaplain in World War One. So, big mouth, I see you fight or I didn’t see you fight?”

Kohler had begun to smile; his eyes were small and bright under the ridge of cartilage. “Shit, yes, you saw me fight. Hey, Carmine! Hey, Tubby! You hear Larkin? He saw me fight Don Bonavinci.”

“Bonavinci, right,” Larkin said.

“But, wait a minute. How come you never mentioned it before? Something like that, it figures you’d mention.”

“Some things you remember, some things you forget.” The look in Larkin’s eyes made Kohler decide to change the subject. “It happened to me once with a girl,” he said. “I forgot her name and I knew her all my life, seen her for years sitting out on the steps and playing in the street. But then I took her out, and I’m calling her ‘hey’ and ‘you’ and ‘babe’... It was funny because I never thought of her one way or another when she was just a kid on the block. But I’m out with her, she’s a different person and I don’t know her name anymore.” Kohler shrugged and feinted a flurry of rapid punches at the trunk of a tree...

Private Tubby Gruber saw them first as they came out of the woods and down a twisting lane that brought them to the road where they stopped and stared at the soldiers. “Hey, corporal!” Gruber swung his M-1 around to cover an old man in a black overcoat and a little girl whose face was almost completely concealed by a coarse red scarf. The man carried a burlap sack in one hand, and with his other had a firm grip on the child’s shoulder. As he stared and blinked at the Americans, standing now and silhouetted against the valley, his smile became uncertain.

“Yanks,” he said. “Yanks. Amis...”

“That’s right, Yanks.” Larkin’s eyes swept the woods behind the bearded man and the small girl. Nothing moved except the swaying crowns of the winter-black trees. The silence was broken only by a distant cry of birds.

“All right, get this the first time.” Larkin stared at the three private soldiers. “I don’t want any more fucking snowball fights and no more goddamn talk about who pounded John Doe’s ears down to his hips. Keep your mouths shut and your eyes open.”

In English and then halting French Larkin tried to find out where the pair had come from, but the old man only nodded at the questions, repeated the words “Yank” and “Amis,” and then held out the burlap bag.

Larkin took the sack and spilled its contents on the ground — potatoes, leeks, bunches of shriveled carrots and a half dozen large purple and white turnips. The old man studied him and made an age-old gesture with his thumb and forefinger.

“Maybe we can do some business later, pop,” Larkin said, and jerked a thumb at Gruber. “Go get Docker, he can talk to this guy.”

When Gruber started up the slopes, the man pulled a brown bottle from his coat pocket and offered it to Larkin with a tentative smile. Larkin nodded his thanks, but then noticed that the child was staring off across the valley, her dark eyes very round and intent.

Glancing in the same direction, Larkin saw — or believed he saw — a slim flash of light on the horizon, a fiery ball that disappeared almost instantly into a background of driving sleet and low black clouds.

“You see that, Kohler?” Larkin said.

“I see what?”

“Something funny across those fields. Some kind of light.”

But Kohler hadn’t seen anything strange in those shifting gray mists. Nor had Spinelli.

From where he stood on an adjacent flank of the hill. Corporal Schmitzer looked through his binoculars and watched Tubby Gruber hiking up to the ridge, where Dormund was building a fire and the sergeant was standing with Gelnick, whose nickname, Schmitzer thought, was pretty goddamn appropriate. The Hogman... Swinging his binoculars the other way, Schmitzer saw Larkin talking to some farmer and a kid wearing a bright scarf.

“Hey, corporal, what do you think that was?”

Schmitzer lowered the binoculars and looked at Sonny Laurel. “What do I think what was?”

“You didn’t see it?”

“See what?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

Sonny Laurel pointed to a stand of trees on the horizon where the winds were rising and the snow and fogs were torn into shreds by the force of convulsively spinning thermals.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I’m not sure. It was like a flash of light behind those trees.”

Schmitzer looked at the black trees that were in shrouded relief against the white mountainside. “Could be you’re getting snow-blind. Happened to us in the desert in Tunisia from the heat on the sand. What they call an optical delusion.”

“No, I saw it, whatever it was.”

Schmitzer frowned and wondered what Laurel might have seen behind that stand of dark trees. He knew the Russians had developed multiple rocket launchers called “Katyushas” — recoilless weapons firing thirty-six to thirty-eight projectiles simultaneously. He had read they were called “Stalin’s organ music,” which was probably a lot of crap, a cozy nickname for the dumb peasants. But Schmitzer knew the nearest Russians were at least a thousand miles north and east of there, so it was damned unlikely there were any rocket launchers in the Ardennes.

“You sure you didn’t hear nothing. Sonny?”

“Not a sound. It went by so fast, it looked like a bolt of lightning on its side.” Laurel pushed his helmet back and absently rubbed his fair, curly hair, staring at the trees where he had seen the streaking lights. “I don’t know, corporal, I never saw anything moving that fast before.”

Corporal Schmitzer had been in the army almost five years. With a gut instinct for survival, he knew that staying alive now depended to a significant extent on how much their section could rely on these youngsters; but standing stiff and heavy in the spiraling snow, Schmitzer was betrayed by a distracting thought, a wish that his father and brother and Uncle Ernie could have had some of his guts and instincts.

Pushing those shadows from his mind, Schmitzer said, “Laurel, you damn sure you didn’t hear anything — no engines, no prop-vibes, no nothing?”

“I may be wrong but I don’t think so, corporal.”

“Well, don’t worry about it. You could be trying too hard.”

Goldilocks, that’s what the youngsters in the section called Sonny Laurel, Schmitzer knew... Goldilocks because of his blond hair and his slim, quick-moving body, and the blue eyes that got darker when he was serious or worried about something, working on the guns or writing letters home. Laurel always looked fresh and clean even with a fine beading of sweat on his forehead and throat.

Telling him to stay alert, Schmitzer walked abruptly off into the fogs, knowing that what he was feeling would embarrass or disturb the boy if it showed in his face or eyes.