The Coldest Night (17 page)

“We cannot hold,” Lew said, and somehow brought the radio to life and called for artillery.

They waited for the answer to Lew’s call, but it never came.

A whistle blew. Their fire faded and ceased altogether. The attack ended and there was silence and the enemy was gone and then the sound of firing began again. The enemy had flowed past them and moved on the perimeter, cutting them off. The perimeter now was encircled and they were on its outside, a half mile beyond its laagered surround.

Chapter 24

I
N THE MORNING THE
radio crackled with the order to withdraw, and so they were headed back down the road they’d come up. The road would be a gauntlet of enemy soldiers. They’d have to get riflemen onto the heights to secure the ridgelines and cover the flanks. For seventy-eight miles, every hill commanding the road had to be taken.

Words crackled through the radio,
guide on the bright star,
and then the radio died.

As the darkness began to lift there came Corsairs and dive bombers firing rockets, dropping bombs, and strafing the dead. Into the valley dropped silvery canisters of napalm. Then came the flying boxcars parachuting food, ammo, and supplies, much of it going to the enemy.

The men gathered around Lew and he told them to burn everything of a personal nature: photos, cards, letters, wallets, rabbits’ feet.

“Etcetera,” he said.

They were to keep their weapon, ammunition, bayonet, pack, and one pair socks. All else was to be burned. Everything, and then they’d start back. All that they emptied from their pockets was thrown to the ground, doused with Sterno, and incinerated. Similar fires began lighting the hilltops and ridgelines, and in the valley stronghold huge bonfires began.

Lew took out his Hawaiian shirt and paused to consider the loss of it. He stripped off and pulled on the shirt, his upper body, naked and pink, losing heat at a furious rate.

“Sweet, Lew,” one of them said, and whistled.

On Henry’s cartridge belt were ten clips of M1 ammunition, a wound packet, and a bayonet. He rolled his sleeping bag into a long horseshoe, tied it off, and looped it over his shoulder. He slung his rifle, picked up a BAR, and gathered what clips he could find. He charged the .45 and sheathed his knife. He kissed the letters he carried and committed them to the fire pit.

“Quit your monkeying around,” Lew was saying.

“I got the hiccups,” a marine was saying.

“How the hell can you get the hiccups?”

“It’s time to go,” Henry said, and looked to Lew—which way?

“Thataway,” Lew said, pointing to the stone spur behind them.

Henry jammed his fist into a crevice and pulled himself up the first height. The rest followed as he made his way between the rocks and climbed again until he found a little path.

“So this will be easy,” Lew said, and all around them the hilltops began exploding as the howitzers fired a barrage from the south. Fifteen hundred feet below them and distant in the valley, the enemy were running into the flames of the abandoned stores to save what food and clothing they could.

Inside the burning piles explosives began to detonate. White phosphorous burst in cottony plumes. Blown and burning remnants shot through the air; fountains of flame spurted out and pirouetted through the sky. The explosions carried all manner of waste and discard. They killed the soldiers they’d fought for days and still there were thousands more between them and the column.

Below them the long column staggered into movement, black and spectral, the long march of miniature slow-moving men, deep in the coma of war, walking back down that frozen road. Inside the column was the medical train, a hundred vehicles long. Dead men had found their place on every means of conveyance possible. They were slung across the hoods of jeeps and stockpiled in trucks. They were lashed to the gun tails. They were strapped to the gun tubes, icicles of blood hanging from their bodies.

Dearest Mother . . . We are on the run . . .

On the next crest they found a lone marine, sentry to the valley below.

“Whatta ya say, Ace?” Lew said, but the marine said nothing as he maintained his vigil.

“What about him?” Henry said.

“We’re going,” Lew said, as if in answer to his question.

“S’long,” Henry said.

“S’long,” the marine said.

At a high lookout point Henry lifted the glasses and to the east was the corrugation of rugged mountains as far as a hundred mile reach. Out there were the artillerists, their mouths gaped open to equalize the pressure in their ears, their shells timed to explode in the trees and above the ground sending splinters of wood and steel and shock waves flying through the air. Here and there were towers of risen black smoke.

A shot clipped the air and Lew fell to the snow. Tongues of flame blinked in the gray. Henry stepped forward, leaned his back against the wind, and opened fire. The others came up and began to fire also. The wind collapsed and they stumbled to keep from falling.

Lew chastised them for their lack of fire discipline, the waste of so much precious ammunition.

“I am truly shot to pieces,” one of the soldiers said, and fought back a fit of despair. Bullets had broken the bones in the man’s legs and another bullet had gone clear through him and out the other side.

With agitated fingers he kept trying to light the cigarette. He began to cry and asked for help and Henry lit one for him. They helped him into the rocks and handed him their grenades.

Lew sent a man ahead to recon the next saddle. Henry fished a cigarette from his pack.

The returning marine half raised an arm and a gush of blood spewed from his neck. Bullets ripped combs of snow at their ankles and they returned fire. Henry pulled himself forward and held the man’s head back to open his air passage, but it was too late. He was drowning in his own blood.

“How is he?” Lew yelled.

“They got him real bad,” Henry yelled back.

He’d been shot through the armpit. The bullet’s violent dig had found a heart line and blood swelled from the pumping wound.

“I will die soon,” the man said, his voice drowning.

“Hush,” Henry said, holding him to his chest.

“I’m all fucked up inside,” the man managed to say. His chest was like a bloody sponge. The ground was frozen and so the pumping blood that slugged from the severed artery pooled bright red. For all Henry had seen it was still hard to believe there was so much blood in a man.

“You got any bombs on you?” the man said, his breath rapid and shallow. Between gasps he purred in his throat.

“You won’t need them,” Lew said softly.

“Lew,” the man said, his torment so great, and Lew knelt down and took him in his arms. Lew held his face, his gurgling mouth to his neck, a .45 between them. He held him like that and then Lew pulled the trigger.

On the next ridge there came the clatter of traversing fire. Henry ducked his head and started to run, clambering up a knob and throwing himself beneath a pointed outcrop in shallow defilade. A head came up from the lip of a trench and he fired the BAR. Two grenades went off, concussing the man next to him. In a state trancelike, he began speaking what sounded to be an incomprehensible language.

A hollow roar built from below the ridgeline, the strain of climbing engines overwhelming the shearing wind, the machine-gun fire.

“The future’s coming fast,” Lew said, when suddenly Corsairs and Mustangs heaved into view, contrails gyring, and they were splitting the sky. Henry lifted himself and slid over upon his back. He watched as they napalmed the gun emplacement and the enemy were incinerated, and more of them yet ran from caves and from deep furrows to warm themselves by the lighted fires. They stretched their frozen hands toward the fire and when the next plane made its passage they too were burned alive.

They kept on, crossing the hilltops, following the ridgeways that joined them. They were drifting east by northeast. The sky turned from crimson to the darkening shape of violet until a chaplet of reddish light wreathed the valley below. Henry thought, Get to the water, get to the water. He broke snow, slipping and falling and getting up. When finally they scrambled up the next steep slope, the enemy manning their positions were dead of cold, the white snow piling up on their shoulders.

He pulled himself erect and marched on. He thought to keep going. He thought, This is the last time I will exist.

“What do you think our chances are?” Lew said.

“I suppose they are impossible.”

“Let’s just say if we don’t win, there ain’t no second prize.”

They could hear the bugles in the distance, their ragged blatting echoing off the slopes. By that time he held no fear for the embrace of gathering darkness in that desolate landscape, no fear of the night shapes that would rise up before his eyes. His hands were cracked open and his feet ached with chilblains. Without the cold there was nothing else.

He could not remember what happened to all of them, but one by one they were gone and it was as if they’d never really existed. And then it was only him and Lew.

Chapter 25

H
IS TURN AGAIN,
H
ENRY
climbed the ridge to see what was beyond. He walked alone across the open ground and found another stony ridge and another glimpse of the road and the valley below. The last twilight was draining away this day’s gray, and way down below was a vehicle, the tires slewing away, careening over the edge and men jumping off in all directions.

He waved and Lew joined him and they watched the last Sabre of the day hurtle its tank of fire-jelly into the valley. It bounced and skidded and then was blossoming with black and red and yellow oily flames.

Henry and Lew slid from the ridgeline and found a crag where they harbored for the moment’s rest. Lew opened a can of peanut butter and licked out the goo with his fingers. His eyes were sunken in his face, his fingers white as paper. He was as if an old man exhausted by a long life and retired to the porch.

“What are we gonna do?” Henry said.

“They’re down there and we’re up here,” Lew said, sucking his fingers.

“Should we help?”

“If we do, who’s going to help us?”

They got up again and slogged on and then there was a ridge where could be seen the vast lake in the distance, with open spaces of black ice where the wind had blown away the snow. They watched the lake, the landscape white, gray, and black, making their decision.

As the light faded the frozen lake turned to gold. A strand of thought came into his mind and he did not recognize it as such, did not recognize it as thought or the working of his mind. He was wandering somewhere between reality and vision.

“This is some kind of bad shit,” Lew was saying.

“I feel like I already died and I’m just walking with you for a while. What do you think our chances are?”

“Fifty–fifty.”

“In whose favor?”

“Ours,” Lew said.

In his mind Henry saw again the long wounded column bristling with weapons and armed men unwilling to die.

“Time to giddyup.”

“Not yet,” Henry said, pointing to the lake.

They watched in silence as the icy surface of the reservoir began to move. There were thousands of them. They’d been on the white ice the whole afternoon under white sheets and canvases, having marched ten miles down lake and now they were on their hands and knees and crawling south toward the shore’s stony rim where they’d join the battle. Already their silhouettes were moving onto the ridgeline.

Henry and Lew moved out again, letting the land make decisions for them. They picked up a frozen stream and then a winding stone trail that passed through an evergreen forest moving slowly. They went down the trail, settling on one foot, then the other, sometimes no more than twenty-five yards in three minutes. It was snowing again and there was no visibility and they could smell smoke and came to a clearing and then a shoreline where suddenly before them was the vast frozen reservoir.

“I say we head onto the ice,” Lew said.

“Stay close to shore?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

They stepped onto the frozen plane and moved ever east. Near the shoreline lunules of snow waved across the ice and farther out the ice was rough surfaced but clean of snow as the wind swept it away. They moved farther out, where the going was easier and in the moonlight they could see better the paths of icy chutes where the inflow of streams and rivers was crowned and frozen. Farther out and they were periodically hidden inside a white cloak of snow. The ice groaned and cracked. The air was metallic with cold and tasted like a mouthful of gin.

To the north they could see the wavering black silhouettes of soldiers crossing. At first there were a few and then the snow curtain opened and there were so many. They could not tell who they were and began to tack for cover along the shoreline when a machine gun opened up on them.

There came the sound of an engine in the sky and then another, the engines screaming and straining. It scraped low and its underbelly exploded the snow in the tree tops. The first Corsair dropped its tanks and flames shot from the blackened gun ports as the napalm bounced and splattered fire. Parts began to fly from the Corsair’s fuselage. It speared into a low altitude as it passed over their heads, a burning trail of streaming fuel in its wake. The air dazzled with a flaming whiteness that smudged and smoked. As the ice rushed up to meet it a wing folded and it began to roll. When the pilot ejected, his chute was no more than a rag of laundry against the moon’s watery light.