Soldiers of ’44

Chapter Two

December 11, 1944. Eastern Belgium. Monday, 1700 Hours.

The sergeant climbed into the jeep and drove to the base of the ridge where Larkin was waiting with the old Belgian and the little girl.

The pair stood close together, watching Docker anxiously through a darkness relieved now by only a filigree of white snowflakes. The sergeant could see the girl’s intent eyes, round and polished like marbles, and the jagged black bangs on her forehead, but the lower half of her face was concealed by a red wool scarf. The old man looked to be in his sixties, short and stocky with ragged gray hair and chin whiskers. His dark overcoat was worn at the lapels and elbows, but his woolen cap struck an incongruous note of cheer, coarse and white with a blue tassel that hung down alongside his tobacco-stained whiskers. It was the only cheerful thing about them, Docker thought, because they were both obviously afraid, the old man like a dog at a strange campfire, eyes tense and wary, his old body coiled as if to dodge a blow.

“He wants a hundred francs for them,” Larkin said, nodding at the heap of vegetables. “The bottle of booze is on the house, I guess.”

“Fair enough.” Docker glanced at Spinelli and Kohler. “You guys got some chocolate for the kid?”

Shorty Kohler took half a D-bar from his field jacket and offered it to the girl, but she wouldn’t take it, hiding her hands in the scarf and pressing closer to the old man.

“Comment s’appelle?” Docker said.

The sergeant had learned French from his mother, who had grown up in Montreal, but she had died in an automobile accident when he was ten and so his knowledge of the language was limited to a simple vocabulary and a few songs and nursery rhymes.

The old man’s smile became easier, relaxing the tension about his eyes.

“Je m’appelle Claude Gerard.”

“Et la jeune fille?”

“Margret. Elle est ma petit-fille.”

The sound of her name seemed to reassure the child, who suddenly reached out and plucked the bar of chocolate from Kohler’s hand. He laughed. “Sarge, I could make a contender out of her. See them reflexes?”

Claude Gerard told Docker that he lived on his brother’s farm near Verviers and was taking his grandchild to her cousins in a village on the Salm River.

When Docker asked him if he had seen any German soldiers in the area, the old man shook his head quickly and emphatically.

Docker opened his wallet and took out some French and Belgian francs, a few American dollars. The old man smiled and pointed insistently at the Belgian francs, the smile doing little to relieve the anxiety in his seamed face.

To test a sharpening suspicion, Docker pulled out a slim sheaf of Allied Invasion scrip from his wallet. The old man backed away from him and shook his head.

“Hell, he wants the Belgian gelt,” Larkin said. “Why not give it to him?”

“He’s sure as hell earned it.”

“What does that mean?”

“Think about it.” Docker put the Invasion scrip back in his wallet and gave the old man a hundred Belgian francs. Monsieur Gerard smiled gratefully and bowed from the waist, the blue tassel on his cap swinging about like an antic little bird.

“If he’s picked up, he doesn’t want any American loot on him,” Larkin said. “Is that it?”

“That’s what he just told us,” Docker said.

Spinelli and Shorty Kohler collected the vegetables and piled them in the rear of the jeep. The old man waved a good-bye but the little girl kept her arms tight at her sides as her red scarf and the old man’s stocky figure soon disappeared into the snow-white darkness.

“So what now? We wait for Whitter, or we push on east?” Larkin said.

Docker looked up the hill through the swirling snow, observed the silhouettes of their guns and the tiny orange glow of Dormund’s wood fire.

“We’ll wait for the lieutenant,” he said.

After a hot meal of fresh vegetables and K-rations, Docker ordered the fires out and split the section into two shifts. Half the men were now asleep in the trucks or stretched out on the ground under blankets and overcoats. The rest were manning the guns and standing guard posts at twenty-yard intervals below the crest of the hill.

The night was bitterly cold. Snow and sleet had stopped but the winds were high and fogs rolled in heavy masses over their position, cutting like damp knives through heavy GI overcoats and curling in lacy patterns around the barrels of the cannon and machine guns.

Stretched out in one of the trucks, Private Edward Solvis brought his diary up-to-date, using a small flashlight to track his pencil across the page of a ruled notebook.

He wrote the date, December 11th, and then: “A quiet day. Covered 18 miles, going north by east. Good chow tonight. No mail this past week. It’s hard on the young guys.”

The tarpaulin Solvis was lying on had bunched into a hard ridge under his hips. Twisting around to a more comfortable position, he pushed Spinelli’s cold, damp boots away from his face. Spinelli grunted but didn’t wake. The slender beam of the flashlight palely coated the vulnerable faces of the other men sleeping in the truck, Private Leo Pierce, knobby wrists locked around his knees, and Tubby Gruber, slack and content on his back, tiny bubbles of saliva collapsing on his lips in rhythm with his soft, shallow breathing.

Solvis wet the tip of his pencil and wrote: “Docker is worried. Half the section is on guard now and he said no fires or cigarettes. I asked Pitko if he knew what was up but got the answer I’d expected, which was that our lives are in the hands of the Lord and we must put our trust in His infinite wisdom and mercy. I envy Pitko” — Solvis paused, thinking for words — “his faith, for him, is like a deep river, running calm to the sea, his God. He prays every morning and evening and isn’t upset by profanity and the lack of faith of Kohler and Linari and some of the others. Faith is a fine thing, but I didn’t find Pitko’s answer much help. Will turn in now. On guard in three hours.”. .

Corporal Larkin was trying to sleep in the cab of the other truck, lying under an overcoat and blankets that smelled of wood-smoke. Heavy winds banged the canvas sides of the truck; he looked up for stars but saw only heavy banks of fog drifting under the clouds. He closed his eyes again, forcing himself to breathe carefully... gulping the cold, damp air could trigger one of his coughing spells.

In the crook of his arm, Larkin cradled a canteen of Trankic’s black whiskey. The other hand rested on the stock of his rifle. His eyes ached, maybe from the glare of the snow, or maybe he was coming down with something. Too restless to sleep, he sat up and drank some whiskey.

The talk with Shorty Kohler had brought back times he despised, and with them a millrace of unwelcome memory and emotion; his uncles and cousins on paydays, tearing up dollar bills and throwing them into gutters or into the wind because they couldn’t stand taking those paper symbols of slavery home to their women and children in bleak cold-water flats. Or so they claimed. But it was a justification born of self-pity, because they would spend money at steak rackets, swilling booze and beer, heaping noisy abuse or approval on a slob like Kohler getting his brains beat out, raising their dumb immigrant laughter in chorus with other hopeless losers, krauts and polacks and wops. Then, for the ultimate explosion of good sport, there were the free-for-alls, the battle royals where eight or ten blindfolded niggers would celebrate their fucking emancipation by battering each other senseless with a double sawbuck going to the bloody, reeling black who was still on his feet at the end of three rounds... Kohler brought all that back, and the old Belgian and the little kid, with knots of hunger and fear in their stomachs, they brought it back too. They were all pathetic fucking losers, buying cold withered vegetables for pennies and drinking black whiskey made out of goddamn rubbing alcohol.

Pathetic assholes, he thought, and drank more whiskey... And Hogman Gelnick, he knew that poor fuck’s secret, afraid the guys would start riding him if they knew he was married, landing on him with their dumb fucking jokes, call her a schmuck-fucker or a Hebe-jeebie... sure, that was his secret, hidden from everybody but old Matt Larkin, not even a picture of her in his wallet or footlocker, and maybe he was smart to be scared, because Korbick had pounded on him around the clock all through basic just because he wasn’t a Christer...

Larkin was suddenly drowsy and his thoughts had become erratic... What the hell did he care about the Hogman? “Hup-tup-thrup-four,” he began shouting. “Left, tup, three, four! Your left, two, three, four—”

“Goddamn it, shut up. Matt,” Docker called from the darkness.

Larkin blinked and realized with sodden surprise that he had finished off most of the black whiskey...

Sergeant Docker made a check of the guard mount, exchanging a word with Corporal Trankic before joining the cook, Dormund, who sat on an outcropping of rock staring down a narrow trail leading into the valley. “Sarge, remember when we looked at planes on movie screens at Camp Stewart?”

“Dormund, when you were at Camp Stewart I was in Sicily.”

“I keep forgetting that.” Dormund frowned and rubbed his finger up and down his soft cheek. “We were in England when you took over, right after you got out of the hospital.” Dormund turned and looked at Docker, a worried frown clouding his lumpy face. “I could never figure out them planes, sarge. They’d show little pictures on the screens and ask us what they were, and I never knew.”

“All right, Chet, what did you see tonight?”

“Look, sarge, where’d you get hit in Sicily?”

“A place called Licata, the fourteenth of July, by a sniper I didn’t see. I’ve told you that. Now cut this fucking crap. Did you see the same thing Larkin and Sonny Laurel reported to me tonight?”

Docker was on to him now, Dormund knew, and that brought a guilty heat to his face. But he wasn’t going to tell him, not about a shape in the air that looked like it didn’t have propellers, because that was crazy and if he told Sarge they’d get on him about it with the jokes that really scared him, about Trankic making a new head for him...

It had started in basic training. Trankic got mad at him about something and threatened to make a new head for him out of a tin can. Dormund remembered watching with growing nervousness while Trankic, with a big metal shears, cut and fashioned a mouth and eyes in a number ten can he’d got from the mess sergeant. Dormund knew it wouldn’t work, it was crazy, but it scared him anyway when the other guys laughed and Trankic began welding nuts and bolts and cartridge casings inside the big can. One night, after some beers, Trankic, to Dormund’s great relief, dumped the tin can and its contents into the trash bins behind the mess halls. But the fear stayed with Dormund and he’d decided to be sure to keep out of trouble after that and try not to attract attention...

Avoiding Docker’s eyes now, he said, “I didn’t see any wretched thing, sarge. I was getting the wretched chow ready. That’s a fact.”

Footsteps sounded on the frozen ground as Trankic walked up toward them from the guns. “Laurel’s getting something on the radio,” he said. “You better check it out. Bull.”

Sonny Laurel and Kohler stood at the jeep listening to a mix of static and voices sounding from the X-42. When Trankic and Docker joined them, Laurel said, “I thought it was England, sarge, because it was a British voice. But that faded away to this.”

They heard a sibilant voice saying, “Amis, amis...” A brief tempest of static, then a new voice, a deeper voice saying, “Venez—” After another eruption, the French word for “come” was repeated several times.

Then they distinctly heard the words “La Chance, La Chance...”

“What’s it mean. Bull?”

“I don’t know. But La Chance means luck...”

After a stretch of whistling and windy silences, there was a German word, spoken by a voice they hadn’t heard before.

The word was “Vergeltung,” followed by the numeral four in French, repeated three times — “quatre... quatre... quatre...” Then came an initial and numeral — “V-quatre.” And again the word: “Venez...”

Docker knew the German word “Vergeltung” meant “vengeance,” and knew also that the Germans presently had two operational V-weapons, the pilotless V-1 buzz bombs and the V-2 rockets, which had been pounding Liège and Antwerp and most of England for months.

And the V-3, Docker knew, had been a quarter-mile system of cannons emplaced in massive concrete bunkers at Calais, designed to fire salvos into the heart of London at twelve-second intervals. Allied bombers had destroyed the V-3 emplacements before the systems were functional.

The next burst of words listed French and Belgian towns — Malmédy, Nancy, Lepont, Houffalize — and spaced emphatically between these place names were the repeated initials and numerals: V-4... V-4... V-4...

The broadcast was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Corporal Larkin, who swayed drunkenly around the side of a truck near the jeep, a canteen of whiskey in his hand and only one arm through a sleeve of his overcoat so that it trailed behind him on the ground like a long, muddy skirt.

“I’ll tell you assholes something,” he was shouting.

Docker cut him off with an angry gesture. “Goddamn it, shut up!”

“I’ll tell you fuckers why Gelnick burned his fancy uniform,” Larkin said, and in tipping his head back to drink from the canteen he lost his balance and fell in a tangle of arms and legs against the side of the truck, and from there in a heap to the ice-splintered ground.

Docker told Kohler and Sonny Laurel to take him back to the jeep and when they were gone, the sergeant and Trankic bent their heads again to the sputtering radio. They listened for another hour in the stinging winds until the set went dead, but in that time they heard only bursts of static and the word “luck” repeated over and over again in French, and Docker could only hope that this was an omen for all of them that night, the fifteen soldiers detached and isolated in the vast white storms over the Ardennes.