Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Twenty-Eight

December 23, 1944. Mont Reynard-sur-Salm. Saturday, 0630 Hours.

The big dog began growling and barking. Docker swept the road and trails to Lepont with his glasses, checking the open stretches and trees wrapped like cotton candy with the swirling fogs, but nothing moved down there and the silence was broken only by the cries of birds and whining winds forcing a passage through the ice-laden trees.

Trankic joined him. “What’s spooking Radar?”

“Nothing that I can see.”

“Look, Bull, Kohler wants to see you.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know, he says it’s important.”

“Christ,” Docker said, and gave Trankic the glasses.

The dog bounded from the revetment and joined Docker as he walked through the snow toward the right flank of their line, where Linari, Kohler and Sonny Laurel manned the machine guns. Docker had posted Schmitzer, Tex Farrel and Dormund to the left flank, leaving Solvis and Jackson Baird at the cannon.

Kohler’s battered face was tense with exasperation. He nodded at Guido Linari. “Sarge, you better make this rupture-head tell you what’s bothering him.”

“Shit, I don’t need no kind of trouble like that,” Linari said.

“What trouble?” Kohler shouted. “That tank comes up here, blows a round up your ass while you’re worrying about some piece back home, that’s trouble.”

“She ain’t no piece. Shorty.”

Sonny Laurel said, “Could I explain it, Guido?” He was trying not to laugh. Docker realized. “That way you didn’t tell anybody, I did.”

A dim understanding glinted in Linari’s eyes. He shrugged. “You wanna tell Docker about it, that’s your business. It don’t matter to me.”

“Sarge, Guido got engaged on his last leave in New York. Now he’s worried because he never told Captain Grant or Lieutenant Whitter about it.”

“Why should he? It’s none of their business.”

Kohler punched Linari on the arm. “That’s what we been trying to tell this ginney bastard.”

Linari said, “Well, I thought... I mean, everything we do is supposed to be written down. Like fuckin’ short-arm inspection. Like you got to put your initial and serial number on your clothes, even a jockstrap if they gave you one. Insurance, your pay, your ma and pa’s names and where they live. It’s all written down, Korbick’s got it all somewhere — so I got worrying about it ’cause I never told anybody. With that tank down there, I figure somebody should know about it.”

“You have a picture of her?” Docker said.

The dog was circling them, whining and yelping, then standing still to bugle across the valley, the echoes coming back mournfully from distant fog-banked peaks. Docker looked over to the revetment where Trankic stood with the binoculars to his eyes.

“She’s in the middle, sarge. That’s her mother next to her.”

Docker took the wallet from Linariand glanced at the photograph tucked behind a celluloid shield, a festive group in tuxedos and long dresses and flowers, the smiles stiff but blurred because the camera was out of focus.

“Her name’s Josefina,Josie Carducci. I known her all my life.” Linari was so pleased to have Docker look at his girl, with Sonny smiling and Kohler pretending to be mad, that he thought of telling them about when he was little and his mother called him “pretty star-baby,” mixing up the words so they came out “Guido bambini, Linari stellini,” and how his father had once explained that he could never be in the second half of the class because their initial L was number twelve in the alphabet, so he would always be in the first half when the teacher called out names. But it was too late now, the sergeant wasn’t looking at Josie anymore, he was watching Trankic.

“I hope it works out great,” Docker said, and started for the revetment. Radar bounding ahead of him and Laurel following him for a few paces.

“You took a load off his mind.”

Docker stopped and looked at the young soldier. “You got any last requests?”

Laurel smiled and pushed his helmet back. The wind and sleet stirred his blond hair. “Sure, sarge. I’m the only guy in the section who’s never had a taste of our famous black whiskey.”

“Well, we can fix that.” Docker uncapped his canteen. “Good health.”

Sonny took a sip of whiskey and almost immediately began to cough. When he could speak, he said hoarsely, “Wow, it’s even worse than Baird said.”

Trankic suddenly waved to them and pointed into the valley, where they now heard a car, the laboring strokes of its motor muffled by the inversion of heavy fog.

Docker ran back to the rocky shelf in front of the revetment. Taking the glasses, he picked up the dark line of the logging road where it cut through the woods and across open fields, tracking it until he focused on the gray shape of the German command car driving at speed toward Mont Reynard. Without lowering his binoculars he said, “If the tank moves out, cover whichever flank it heads for. Make damn sure no one hits the plungers too soon.”

A rising wind swept down the valley, driving patches of fog ahead of it like huge tumbleweeds. Docker lowered his glasses and saw the German officer climbing from his command car and running the last dozen yards toward the great tank.

One of the Tiger II’s treads ground powerfully into the frozen ground, turning the tank and cannon to face the upper slopes of Mont Reynard.

“I say we open up now. Bull. I say it’s about fucking time.”

“Not quite,” Docker said.

Earlier he and Trankic had used local maps and the heights of trees to make rough, visual triangulations, from which they had estimated the distance from their positions down to the floor of the valley as approximately a quarter of a mile — somewhere between four hundred and five hundred yards.

Using Baird’s stats on the tank, they figured the tank’s uphill speed at between ten and fifteen miles an hour. They had calculated that — unless it were stopped by the charges of dynamite — the Tiger II would reach the machine guns on the left or right flank of their position in about sixty seconds. One minute.

The tank was moving forward now in low gear, its laboring engine shattering the silence and its tracks digging deep into the frozen rock, sending trails of sparks spinning through the early morning curtain of mist.

“Christ, don’t cut it too fucking fine. Bull!”

Docker looked to his right where Kohler and Linari and Sonny Laurel were crouched behind the machine guns, hands on the firing grips. To his left Schmitzer and Farrel were on the other guns, Dormund behind them with shiny belts of ammunition. All the men had turned to watch Trankic and Docker.

“All right, hit it!” Docker said.

Trankic pumped a fist high in the air and the machine guns tore the silence apart, the bullets ricocheting instants later with shrill drawn-out whines against the thick armor of the tank. Echoes of the bursts streaked through the valley, and the tracer ammunition formed brilliant looping arcs above the hill, fiery guidelines for the moving tank.

The Tiger II was accelerating rapidly now, gathering momentum for its charge at the mountainside. The sound of its engine and the grind of its tracks shook the ground; Docker felt the tremors through his boots and could see miniature avalanches starting on the hillside, streams of rock and shale and ice hurtling down to the floor of the valley. He also saw the Tiger II’s huge cannon tracking swiftly toward the machine guns on their right flank. As he yelled at the men there to take cover, the ground and air shook with cannon blasts and the twenty-five pound projectiles pounded against the overhang of the mountain. A storm of splintered rock and shale burst around them, one taking an inch-long strip of flesh from Docker’s forehead and so disorienting him that only the feel of the cold rock against his face made him realize he had been knocked to the ground.

Crawling to his knees, he saw that the Tiger II was coming straight up the mountain at their cannon, ignoring the baited flanks, traveling swiftly and safely between the charges of dynamite below the machine guns. And for an instant he saw the tall German officer and one of his soldiers running in a crouch behind the tank, machine pistols in their hands.

The tank’s 88-millimeter cannon was now swinging back toward the center of the hill. Docker ran toward the revetment, but the Tiger II fired again and the projectiles exploded into the overhang behind him, the concussion striking him in the back and throwing him against the sandbagged walls around the cannon... The whole world seemed shredded by noise, the staccato bursts of their machine guns, the rupture of frozen rock under the tank’s tracks, the fire from the tank’s big cannon breaking over them like flails. The weight of it all pressed almost unbearably on Docker, the churning sounds fragmented and seemingly inflamed by the blood filming his eyes.

Trankic had run toward the right flank of the hill when the tank’s cannon turned in that direction. By the time he saw — as Docker had — that the tank was heading toward the center of their position, the first shells were already smashing into the mountainside, the impact stunning and driving him to his knees... When his head cleared, he could smell the stench of powder in the air, its smoky taste mingling with the wet snow and smell of fresh earth churned up by the cannon blasts. When he stared around, instinctively tightening his grip on his rifle, he saw Docker on the ground, and Baird climbing over the revetment wall above him... Kohler and Linari were firing down the hill at the tank. Laurel was lying beside them, an arm over his helmet. The tank was not heading for the machine guns and the dynamite, Trankic knew then, it was coming straight at their cannon. Firing the dynamite was a long shot, maybe they’d get lucky, Trankic thought, the blast could take out the Germans behind the tank, a slab of rock might crack one of the tank treads... he twisted around and slammed a fist down on the plunger of the detonating machine.

The exploding dynamite ripped the ground open, clouding the hillside with dust and black smoke, sending bursts of ice and rock and clods of frozen earth arcing, wheeling through the smoke-threaded mists, and then as they lost their thrust and fell spinning back to the ground they rattled noisily but harmlessly around the turret and armor of the charging tank...

Shock waves from the first dynamite blast knocked Schmitzer off his feet. Shouting at Dormund to take his place at the machine guns, he scuttled across the ground to fall across the plunger and detonate the charges on the left flank of the hill...

Docker and Baird crouched a few feet apart outside the wall of the revetment, ducking instinctively when fragments from the second blast whined over their heads.

“You all right, sergeant?”

“I’m okay.”

“There’s some blood on your face.”

Raising his voice. Docker shouted, “Get back on the cannon, Baird. Move it now!”

When Baird had crawled over the sandbagged wall, Docker ran back to the edge of the cliff and saw through screens of smoke that the Tiger II was only a hundred yards below him on a course that would bring it to the top of the hill a dozen yards to the right of the revetment. One of the German tank crew was lying on the ground halfway down the hill, his face dark and wet in the frame of his helmet, but the officer was still on his feet, firing alternately with his machine pistol at the left and right flank of the hill.

The blood from the gash on Docker’s forehead streaked his eyes and vision, and in his distorted view the German tank looked like some huge animal trying to tear the mountain open. He shook his head, trying to focus better. Slabs of armor gleamed through smoke made red with his blood, like the scales of a great beast, the ranging cannon suggesting feelers or antennae directed by a frightening intelligence. Only the squared black cross on the steel plates above its treads defined the rampaging object as an engine of war and not, as it appeared in Docker’s bloodied vision, some vestigial monster out of memory and time.

He rubbed the haze from his eyes and ran back to the revetment, where, climbing onto the loading platform of the cannon, he gestured urgently to the right. Solvis, his face streaked with smoke, nodded and cranked the gun barrel to the point where the tank would breach the precipice.

Baird was trying to say something to Docker then, shouting to make himself heard, but the words were whipped away in the wind and gunfire. Docker had the impression, though, that there was a new confidence in the boy’s face, surely no sign of panic... He gripped Baird’s shoulder quickly, but there was no more time for talking, no time for deliberation or choice. The Tiger II was suddenly on them, the flaming muzzle of its cannon coming over the edge of the mountain only twenty yards from the front wall of their revetment.

Solvis and Baird made the last corrections in their sightings, and when the tank — its grinding tracks almost vertical, the cannon pointing straight up at the low skies — reached its full extension, its underbelly of thin armor most exposed and vulnerable. Docker slammed his boot down on the firing pedal and their own cannon came to life as it poured round after round of point-detonating ammunition directly into the bottom armor of the climbing tank.

The steel heads of the cartridges smashed into, pierced the Tiger II’s belly-plates; the payloads of trinitrocellulose exploded in a series of flashes that caused the tank to quiver for an instant like an animal in torment. When its center of gravity suddenly shifted, the left treads lost their traction and spun out of control, and the right tracks ground into the earth, twisting the tank sideways in erratic convulsions.

Black smoke now began to stream from the rim of the tank’s turret. Docker covered his bloody face with his arm and fired three more rounds, the explosions creating storm waves that knocked him from the loading platform back onto the rocky floor of the revetment.

Those final blasts tipped the Tiger II back over the edge of the hill, where its own ammunition began exploding, the interior eruptions causing it to slide down the slope, its descent stopped only by trees and boulders sundered by the blasts of dynamite. At last, when the tank crashed slowly and heavily onto its side, the roar of its cannon spent a final projectile harmlessly into the gray skies above the valley of the Salm.

Trankic took Docker’s hands and pressed them around his canteen. “Go ahead, take a drink.”

Docker tried to sit up but the effort was too much for him; his head rang and his eardrums throbbed with pain.

Trankic’s broad face was swollen, his eyes bloodshot and angry. “They didn’t give it to us on a fucking platter, Bull. The kid here and Sonny.”

Docker was sprawled on the rocky ground behind the cannon. He drank a mouthful of black whiskey and gave the canteen back to Trankic. The gash in his forehead ached, and the wind was like sandpaper against it. He put both hands under him and stood up, feeling groggy and sick. The big dog circled him, whining anxiously. On the wet cold wind was the stench of cordite.

Docker looked up at the cannon. “Oh, Jesus!”

Jackson Baird’s body hung in the metal seat beside the cannon’s breechblock, boots swinging slowly in the wind. The boots were caked with mud, shoelaces white with frost and snow. A piece of shrapnel had pierced the front of Baird’s helmet and had come out the back of it.

Docker walked stiffly from the revetment to the rim of the hill, where Solvis and Farrel stood together, dazed with shock.

Schmitzer knelt beside the body of Sonny Laurel, whose face looked clear and tranquil in the thin light. There seemed to be no mark on him, only dark patches of blood on the front of this fatigue jacket.

Docker felt drained. The wound in his forehead throbbed. He could hear it as well as feel it, but in the falling snow everything else was weirdly still... until from far below, he heard a distant motor. The pounding in his ears made it impossible to tell, though, whether it was traveling toward or away from them.

On the hillside a dozen yards from the wreckage of the tank, Docker now saw the sprawled body of the German commander, a sheen of snow already gathering on his greatcoat and black boots. And below him was another body in German uniform, a twisted heap on the mountainside.

Docker turned to Solvis. “Where’s Linari and Dormund?”

“They went to heat up some water.”

Farrel said, “At first Kohler thought Sonny didn’t look so bad. He said some sulfa and hot water was all—” He rubbed his lips. “Then we opened his jacket.”

Docker saw that the German officer had raised his head and was staring up at him. He told Farrel to watch for the vehicle he’d heard and started down the hill, arms raised against the backlash of thornbushes, climbing over the heaps of earth and rock churned up by the Tiger II and the dynamite charges.

He stopped near the tank and looked down at Karl Jaeger. A vivid burn was on the left side of the man’s face, his lips were flecked with blood.

“My soldiers...” He turned and pointed to the smoldering tank. “In God’s name, do what I can’t, sergeant... do you understand?”

There was no way to open the fused turret of the tank, no way to get the German crew out of it. And if they were still alive. Docker thought, they didn’t deserve that final ordeal. No one did. He unholstered his .45 and walked to the tank and fired four spaced rounds through a vision-slit into the interior of the Tiger II. And hearing the bullets ricocheting inside the metal walls of the tank, he remembered with the therapeutic irrelevance of shock a demonstration he had once witnessed at Fort Benning: one round from an M-1 rifle fired into a Sherman had made nine hundred and forty separate gashes against the white paint on the insides of the tank.

Smoke drifted from the tank’s turret and flames flickered on the heavy gray armor, the light glowing yellow in the snow. The echoing sound from the bullets had intensified the ache in Docker’s ears, but he could still hear a vehicle somewhere in the valley.

Jaeger told him, “You can shoot me if you like. But I’ll be dead soon enough.”

Docker put the .45 back in its holster.

“I can’t repay you.” The words were soft, blurred. “I have nothing left—”

“For God’s sake, there’s nothing I want from you.”

Jaeger thought of his wife and daughters, grateful for this instant to think of them before he died. Then another thought forced him to raise himself on one elbow. “But there is something I can give you.”

“Look, colonel, just go ahead and die” — he thought of Laurel and Baird — “it’s what you wanted, goddamn it. You sent your tank straight up at our cannon...”

Staring up the hill, he listened to the approaching vehicle, louder as it turned off the road toward their gun position. It was an American jeep, and it stopped now near the revetment, and Docker saw an officer climb out and return Trankic’s salute—

“I give you righteousness,” Jaeger broke in. “It’s very useful. We have had it and I know.” His face tightened with pain. “But it is also a very great burden...”

The other members of Section Eight had joined the American officer and Trankic on the rock shelf in front of the revetment. The blackout headlights on the jeep cut pale tunnels through the falling snow and transformed the flakes into a froth of radiance.

The men of the section now stood facing an American officer who leaned against the hood of his jeep, a boot hooked on the bumper and a Browning automatic rifle slung over his shoulder...

“Sergeant, listen to me,” Karl Jaeger was saying.

Docker saw that the German officer’s expression had changed; the smile, fixed against what must have been awful pain, had gone, and as he listened to the voices floating on the winds from the revetment, a frown replaced it... “Since you are probably the last person I will ever talk to, I want you to know this. I am a husband, the father of two small girls. My home is in Dresden.” The words were slurred again but held a sudden intensity. “I haven’t lived what you would call a casual or flexible life. Condemn me if you wish, but at least I’ve lived by the rules.” Jaeger shifted his weight to one elbow and looked up the hill. “By my rules, I have been a good soldier. And for these reasons, I would like to make one last request of you.”

“What?” Docker said, still staring up at the officer and his men.

“I wish to surrender my sidearm to you. We cannot speak of mercy, we can leave that to diplomats. But it would be merciful of you to accept it.”

Docker held out his hand, at the same time trying to isolate and identify the source of his sudden anxiety.

Jaeger barely managed to unsnap the flap of his holster. Play-acting and charades, he thought bitterly; reducing it all to sham and masquerade, destroying whatever dignity battle might have with caperings more fit for a harlequinade than honest war, the trade of kings... And he thought of the bedroom in Dresden, not of the eiderdown on the bed or his love for Hedy, but of the trophies on the dresser that he had won in shooting contests as a cadet...

The officer on the hill was giving commands. “Okay, let’s line up there, men. Forget about Sally Rand freezing her tits out here...”

Jaeger drew his Luger from its holster and extended it butt-first to Docker, his eyes never moving from the officer in the American uniform who stood above them bracketed by the jeep’s headlights.

Something in the intensity of this dying German officer’s expression sounded another warning to Docker—

“That man is out of uniform, sergeant,” Jaeger said abruptly.

And as Waffen SS Captain Walter Brecht unslung his automatic rifle, Docker shouted a warning to his men. But before the first echoes of his voice sounded on the sleeting winds, Jaeger had reversed the Luger and fired three shots up the hill — shots, which struck “Der Henker” in the face and formed a pattern there so compact and tidy it could have been covered by the hand of a child.

The two of them died at almost the same instant — Brecht collapsing at Trankic’s feet, the BAR slipping from his arms... Karl Jaeger alone, finding a unity at last in the darkness that came to him on the slopes of Mont Reynard.

“Sarge, you think I should go down and tell the Bon-nards?”

“Tell them what?”

“About Sonny,” Farrel said. “It seems to me one of us should tell Felice about it.”

“All right, tell Felice. If there’s anything of his she’d like, a snapshot—” He let out his breath. “Make it fast, we still got a gun section here.”

Corporal Schmitzer had wrapped the bodies of Jackson Baird and Sonny Laurel in tarpaulins and taken them to the high ground in the woods and laid them down alongside Gelnick. They had found no radio in the VIII Corps jeep, only maps of the area, GI binoculars, a thermos of cold coffee, a pack of Camel cigarettes... and stenciled under the lining of the driver’s seat — WAFFEN SS CAPTAIN WALTER BRECHT.

On Docker’s orders Linari parked the jeep behind a stand of shrapnel-torn bushes and joined Solvis and Kohler in repositioning and reloading the guns.

After the bodies of Captain Walter Brecht and Colonel Karl Jaeger had been covered, Trankic and Docker walked to the shelf in front of the revetment and looked out over the valley. Trankic uncapped his canteen and offered it to Docker. “Only thing. Bull, there’s nothing fucking much to drink to.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Sure,” Trankic said. “I forgot about that.”

The German officer had said something to Docker before he died, something about war being the trade of kings. Docker wasn’t sure he understood that, and anyway, it all depended where you were when the war was going on.

“So Merry Christmas,” he said.

The two soldiers drank from their canteen cups, the cold metal rims burning their lips, and looked down the slopes of Mont Reynard, where the falling snow turned blue on the smoke rising from the wreckage of the German tank.