Once a Warrior (16 page)

To hell with it, he finally decided, hotfooting it toward the warmth and temporary shelter of the command post. He was off duty, dammit. And besides, he reasoned as he entered the reinforced dugout, the private would have to be stone-deaf not to notice that they’d quit singing that damn beer-hall ditty.

But when he finished his coffee and stepped out into the silent night to head for his foxhole, Charlie could only hope that this wasn’t the quiet before the storm.

* * * *

Rolling thunder jolted him out of a restless sleep.

Charlie jackknifed into a sitting position, shearing off his helmet when he bumped his head against the heavy pine boughs he’d used to cover his foxhole.

Still wearing his coat and his gloves, with his wool blanket wrapped around him and his M-1 cradled like a baby in his arms, he’d been dreaming about the Christmas that John and Mike and he had all gotten BB guns. And the trouble they’d been in when Mary Frances Walker’s father had caught them using their outhouse down in the hollow for target practice. He’d taken his punishment as manfully as the other two, but to his ever-lasting embarrassment, he was the only one who’d missed the mark.

In a nightmare of bewilderment now, Charlie checked the luminous hands of his watch, saw that it was only 5:30 A.M. and wondered if all that noise meant the kitchen trucks were finally here.

“The Germans have broken through!” someone shouted.

“Counterattack!”

Enemy artillery started falling like rain then, one explosive drop after another descending in a savage barrage upon the slumbering compound.

His skull rattling from the concussion of the salvos and his hands shaking with fear, Charlie groped around in the darkness for his helmet. He finally found it, lying behind him, then somehow managed to knock his glasses askew when he plunked it back on his head.

“Get up!” someone hollered.

“Everybody up!”

Charlie was trying to get up, dammit, but he was all tangled up in his blanket. He suddenly realized that he was sitting on the edge of it and, in a fit of frustration, yanked it out from under him. Free at last, he pulled on the boots he’d taken off to let dry, but didn’t bother tying the laces. Then he grabbed his rifle with his right hand and shoved the sheltering tree branches away with his left.

Just as he stood to leap out of his foxhole, a lightning-bright flash of shellfire flowered in front of him and threw him backwards.

He lay in the trench, dazed and confused and winded, until there was a slight break in the barrage. Then he raised his head ever so cautiously to peer out over the top. A red drapery of blood ran down over his glasses, blocking out his sight, and he realized he’d been hit.

Oh Jesus, oh God, oh no, was he
blind
?!?

His heart hammering frantically in his ears, Charlie ripped off his glasses, breaking an earpiece in the process. As he bent his head to wipe the lenses on the front of his coat, more blood dribbled onto the bridge of his nose. Tentatively, he touched his forehead and felt a sting over his eyebrow but below his helmet brim. A sting that told him that a stray fragment had probably nicked him.

But that was the least of his worries.

Praying like he’d never prayed before, he stuffed the broken earpiece in his coat pocket and carefully slid his glasses back on . . . and went limp with relief when he found he could see again.

What he saw was the sky falling in.

Searchlights played off the low-hanging clouds, creating a kind of artificial moonlight that reflected onto the forest floor and bathed the Germans’ targets with an eerie glow.

Those targets were the American soldiers, still befuddled from sleep, now pouring out of the trenches and the command post to man the company’s emplaced machine guns and mortars.

A chill raced up Charlie’s spine when a tree burst scythed the top off a pine, showering fragments of red-hot metal downward and dropping three GIs in their tracks.

“Medic!” a fourth screamed in agony.

A corpsman wearing the big Red Cross on a white background that was supposed to give him immunity rushed out to pull the wounded soldier to safety, only to disappear himself amidst the flame and smoke and fire of an exploding shell.

“You dirty bastards!”  Another dough stood and shook a furious fist in the direction that the enemy artillery was coming from.

As if to answer his epithet, a piece of shrapnel severed the arm attached to that fist as neatly as if it had been a surgeon’s scalpel.

His face hollow with shock and surprise, the maimed man fell to the ground.

Sickened by the sight of that shoulder bone gleaming whitely through the bloody gore, Charlie retched, the remains of the coffee he’d had a couple of hours ago boiling up into the back of his throat.

“Move up and man those guns!” Captain Quinn roared.

Charlie forced himself to swallow the bitter, burning bile, then staggered to his feet to follow the company commander’s order.

“Hit the dirt!” someone else bellowed over the stomach-churning howl of incoming “screaming meemies.”

Diving back down into his frozen hole, Charlie hugged the ground, nearly paralyzed with terror under the lethal barrage. He could feel the earth heaving from the force of the mortar bursts and hear stricken men crying out for a medic who was no longer there. The stench of fresh blood filled his nostrils. His eyes burned from the cordite, and the smoke was so thick he could hardly breathe.

“Help!” a vaguely familiar voice shrieked in the chaos of explosions.

Charlie looked up, past a grisly array of corpses, rifle clips and combat boots, and saw the private who’d relieved him as sentry come charging out of the trees and into a hail of splinters and metal that sent him sprawling, face down, into the snow.

“Fuck this shit!”  A terror-stricken GI burst from his ditch and ran a broken field pattern toward the captain’s jeep, which was parked in front of the CP. “I’m bugging out!”

“Hey, wait for me!”

Charlie watched, horrified, as a mortar scored a direct hit on the jeep’s hood and the two men who’d just jumped into it went flying through the air when its engine exploded.

The German shelling continued unabated for what seemed like hours, knocking out most of the company’s guns and keeping the American defenders who might have used them to repel the attack bogged down in their trenches.

And then, almost as abruptly as it had started, the terrible bombardment stopped.

That wasn’t the end of the horror, though, as Charlie discovered when he gathered enough courage to lever up and look out into the gloomy half-light of dawn.

Hundreds of German grenadiers stepped out from behind the fog-bound pine trees that encircled the American camp. Draped in white sheets, they were beautifully camouflaged by the snow. They had even covered their machine pistols with white cloths.

We’re surrounded
, Charlie thought, his heart sinking as his gaze swept over the ghostly figures that had obviously stolen into their positions during the blitz.

“Surrender!” the German commander demanded in English.

But his American counterpart had not yet begun to fight. Captain Quinn scanned the anxious faces of his men, now down to less than half their original strength of two hundred, then cupped his hands around his mouth like a megaphone and yelled back, “Go to hell!”

The Germans advanced on the Americans from all sides then, shooting on the run and shouting something that sounded like, “
Sturm
!”

Standing behind the machine gun he’d stepped up to, Quinn waited until the grenadiers were about twenty yards away before ordering, “
Fire
!”

Charlie adjusted his broken glasses and sighted his rifle, planning to do exactly that. This was his first chance to prove himself, and he wanted to do it right. But when he squeezed the trigger, nothing happened.

“My gun’s frozen!” the man in the foxhole next to his cried.

“Work the bolt!” Quinn directed.

“No time!”

Charlie’s jaw dropped in utter disbelief when the dough urinated into the chamber of his M-1, trying to provide enough heat to thaw it out.

“That one’s for the medic!” he declared not two minutes later, after he’d mowed down a German with his now-working rifle.

Realizing that his gun was probably frozen too, Charlie reached inside his coat for his fly . . . and found that he’d already pissed in his pants.

“The hell with it!”  A disgusted GI threw down his disabled weapon and sat back to await his fate.

That fate, Charlie was stunned to see, was a German bullet between the eyes.

“Stay down!” a scared rifleman warned as slugs flew over the trenches from north and south, east and west.

“Stand up to the sonsuvbitches!” Quinn countermanded above a steady volley of machine-gun fire.

Desperate for a weapon to use, Charlie threw his ice-bound M-1 aside and started to climb out of his foxhole to retrieve one of the rifles littering the snow. But a bullet whizzed past his head like some berserk bee and he had to slide back down.

“Fight back, goddamn you!” an enraged Quinn ordered when he saw how easily his men were being overrun.

But dazed by the devastating barrage and demoralized by both that withering crossfire and their own inability to return it, many of the Americans were breaking down their rifles and raising their hands.

The German commander called a halt to the attack and, as the firing died away, repeated firmly, “Surrender!”

Bleeding profusely from a gaping hole in his thigh, Captain Quinn reeled at the sharp directive but somehow managed to remain on his feet.

His ruddy face seemed to crumple in on itself with grief as he looked at the wounded and the dead piled up around him. With a visible effort, he pulled himself together and turned to the men who’d survived the onslaught but had failed to follow his orders. He glared at each of them in turn, telling them without words that they had been weighed in the balance and found wanting.

Then Quinn drew his service revolver out of his shoulder holster and brandished it in their wincing faces. “Stand and fight, you yellow-bellied—”

A crescendo of cracks ruptured the air. Bullets hit him from all directions. His head snapped back and his body thrust forward from the impact, and he was dead before he reached the ground.

Several Germans stepped forward in the ensuing silence. One kicked Quinn’s pistol away. Another picked it up for a souvenir. Yet a third expertly looted the deceased’s pockets, taking his cigarettes and his money, while a fourth slid his watch off his wrist.

“At least he kept his honor,” one of the besieged GIs muttered under his breath.

“Quiet!” the German commander barked.

“Blow it out your ass, you motherfu—”

A single deafening explosion cut off the GI in mid-curse. He slumped back in his hole, his head falling forward as if he were peacefully taking a nap. Only the small scarlet circle staining the front of his graycoat indicated that he’d died violently.

No one moved for several shocked seconds. Finally, the remaining GIs let go of their weapons and got to their feet. In a final token of defeat, they removed their helmets before they raised their hands in surrender.

Figuring that this was the end, that he was going to die without ever having fired a shot in his own defense, Charlie said a silent goodbye to both his wife and his unborn child and followed suit.

The victorious Germans swarmed in, machine pistols at the ready, and started rounding up the vanquished Americans.

Charlie was still standing in his foxhole when he was shoved from behind. A sudden, murderous rage shivered through him, supplanting the stark terror that had rendered him totally impotent during the shelling and the subsequent firefight. He swung around, hands fisted, and found himself facing the barrel of a burp gun.

He looked up, into Teutonic blue eyes that blazed like acetylene torches in the bleak morning light. At the same time that his pride goaded him to fight, every muscle in his body tensed for flight. But there was nowhere to run, he realized as his gaze widened to encompass the furious orange fire staining the horizon behind the trees. And even if by some miracle he did manage to escape into the woods, something told him there was no safe place to hide for miles around.

Overwhelmed by a rush of shame so profound that it damn near drove him to his knees, Charlie dropped his eyes, relaxed his fists and surrendered without a fight.

The cold steel barrel of that burp gun burned into his temple as his German captor said in guttural English, “For you, the War is over!”

CHAPTER  EIGHT

Ste. Genviève, France

Except for the late February chill having driven the patrons of the sidewalk café inside, the village looked pretty much the same as he remembered it.

Mike stood in the square, where the driver of the Army truck had left him, feeling as if he’d stepped into another world. A peaceful world, away from the blood and the mud and the misery of war. He looked around him, at the store windows with their meager display of goods for sale, and couldn’t help but smile when two children ran out of the bakery, laughing. It had been ages since he’d heard the laughter of children. And something told him that it would be a long time before he heard it again.

“
Bonjour, m’sieur
,” said a woman carrying a long loaf of bread under her arm as she followed the children out of the shop.

He nodded in a friendly manner but his smile disappeared as soon as she ducked into the butcher’s. There was no use getting accustomed to the sights and the sounds of normal life. No sense in relaxing his guard too much. Because in four hours there would be another truck—a truck full of replacements rolling east, toward Germany. And by this time tomorrow, he would be back at the front, directing fire on the enemy and sweating bullets himself.

But today—or for these next few hours, anyway—he was a man on an entirely different kind of mission.