Her face is inches from a corpse, bloated and reeking of feces and decay. A corpse in American uniform.
She crawls around it and already the smoke is dissipating, but there’s Jenou on her right, on hands and knees, her carbine slung over her back. The Germans have spotted her, and Rio sees the little splashes of bullets landing all around her friend.
Rio fumbles for a smoke grenade of her own and throws it as Stick yells, “More smoke!”
And this time, as soon as the smoke pours forth, Rio jumps to her feet and runs, hunched over, trips—another body—rolls away, gets up again, and runs. Jack is ahead of her with Pang and now, in a tear in the smoke, she sees plain as day the muzzle protruding from beneath a log roof piled high with dirt.
The opening is narrow, tough to get a grenade in, so she drops to one knee, aims, and fires off a whole clip at that muzzle.
Pang slams into the bunker, just to the right of the hole. In a desperate voice he cries, “Fire in the hole!” and twists to almost gently roll a grenade inside.
It’s an incendiary and explodes in a shower of white phosphorous, so the firing hole is suddenly a brilliant greenish-white gash of mouth. Rio tries to push a fresh clip in her M1, but it jams from grit amid the mud.
A German soldier, screaming, pushes out through the firing hole. He’s been hit by the white phosphorous, which burns without regard to water, burns like acid through the German’s uniform.
Rio sees his face. A fright mask of agony as the chemical eats into his body in a dozen places. He sees her. He looks at her, pleading and crying something in a begging voice.
He wants me to shoot him.
Geer shoots the burning man in the neck, turns a savage grin to Rio, and shouts, “My turn!”
Rio climbs to her feet and follows Geer forward, a dark shape wreathed in smoke and rain and darkness.
Suddenly Geer falls into the earth, and Rio realizes there’s a trench ahead. Geer is bellowing and guns are blazing and Rio raises her rifle, remembers it’s jammed, and stares helplessly as Geer faces three German soldiers, the four of them blazing away at close quarters. Jenou is standing at the lip of the trench behind the three Krauts, and she fires carbine rounds pop-pop-pop-pop! into their backs and necks and heads. Geer, miraculously unhurt, clambers up out of the trench raging at the top of his lungs. Jenou jumps the trench, Rio just behind her, Pang and Stick off to the right.
They’ve broken through the first line of defenses, but there’s no one coming up from behind to strengthen them. Now the Krauts are to their left and right as well as ahead, and the air is practically a solid object, a ceiling of lead as the squad hugs the ground, shaking, and Geer continues to rave, “I’m comin’ to kill you! I’m comin’ to kill you!”
For long minutes they are paralyzed there, unable to so much as lift their heads. Then Sergeant Cole is trudging up from the river, leading two squads, all firing into the darkness over Rio’s head.
But it’s no good, it’s no good, the Germans are too strong, too dug in, too determined. Cole yells, “Fall back!” and then twists wildly and drops to his knees.
Rio yells, “Cole!” while crawling to him, and then pushes him down as tracers arc toward him. “Where are you hit?” she demands.
“Leg. My goddamned leg.”
Blood pours from his calf, the red stain joining rainwater as Rio tears the fabric away from the bullet hole. She practically faints from relief.
“Through the meat!” she tells Cole. “You’ll live.”
“Tell Stick to fall back,” Cole says through gritted teeth.
“We are,” Rio assures him. “Come on, you can crawl.”
And they do crawl. Back to the riverbank, not onto the bridge that is clogged with dead and wounded, but pulling themselves along through the water by gripping the sagging hand rope.
Back across the river. Again.
There is no respite from the far shore, with continual German fire, so they crawl and then stand and run hunched over, Pang and Rio each with an arm around the hobbling Cole.
Behind them, the Americans draw back from the river and call in artillery, which now blasts the water and the mud and makes the ground tremble, but it does not force the stubborn Germans to fall back.
An ambulance sits with engine idling behind the scant cover of a stone wall. Medics are working feverishly to bandage and splint and pile their charges into the steaming, overstuffed ambulance.
Rio sends Pang to fetch ammo and haul it back forward. “We got plenty of .30 cal, get all the smoke grenades you can carry! And see if they have any more of those limey phosphorous grenades.”
The medics offer Cole a syrette of morphine as they quickly bandage his leg, but he waves it off. “Later. Listen to me, Richlin, Stick’s got his hands full, so get your ass back up there.”
Rio nods, overwhelmed by the stark fact that they are piling Cole into a newly arrived jeep. “You’ll be okay, Sarge,” Rio tells him. “You’ll be okay.”
“It’s not me I’m worried about,” he says. He feels in his pocket for a fresh cigar, but what appears is a swollen, soggy mass of brown leaves. “Well, hell.”
He’s leaving us.
He’s leaving me!
“Sarge,” Rio says, and emotion chokes her. “I . . .” What can she say when she has so much to express? There is not the slightest doubt in her mind that she’s gotten this far, stayed alive this long, because of the gap-toothed man before her.
Her father had told her to find a good sergeant and stick to him. She had found that sergeant. She had stuck to him.
And now . . .
Cole sticks out his hand. She shakes it.
“You’ll do fine, Richlin. You’re a natural.”
Suddenly there’s the captain cursing a blue streak. “Back up to the line, damn you all, get back forward!”
Rio ignores him until the jeep guns its engines and goes tearing off into the night bearing Sergeant Cole.
“Bye, Sarge,” Rio says.
Pang comes struggling by, loaded down with four steel ammo boxes, two in each hand, and a heavy satchel slung over his shoulder. Rio lifts the satchel, peeks inside, can’t see, so thrusts a hand in to find the familiar and somehow comforting shape of the British-made white phosphorous grenades called SIPs and nicknamed thermoses for their cylindrical shape. They go trudging forward, their hearts in their boots.
“How is he?” Stick asks anxiously when they rejoin the others.
“Million-dollar wound,” Pang says.
A lieutenant neither of them knows runs out of the gloom and says, “What platoon?”
Stick tells him, and the lieutenant says, “We’re making another push. Right now.”
“The hell we are,” Stick says. “Where’s Lieutenant Stone?”
“He caught a frag. He’ll live, but he’s gone and I’m it and my goddamned orders say to move up!”
“Shove your orders up your ass. Sir,” Stick shouts.
“Listen, Sergeant, we’ve got a whole platoon across upstream, and they’re catching it on both flanks.”
“Fug!” Stick yells.
“Now!” the officer bellows with the eerie energy of terror.
And without a word to his squad, Stick starts forward on his own, unwilling to ask anyone to follow him. Rio hesitates and sees Cat looking to her as if for guidance.
“Shit!” Rio snarls and goes after Stick.
Back to the river.
Back stumbling across GIs dead and dying.
Back to the bridge now mostly gone, but with the hand rope still in place so they pull themselves across, fighting the current, pushing floating dead men and women aside, some cursing and blaspheming, others praying, most just putting one foot in front of the other.
Again, they climb the far bank, and the Germans only then spot them. The fire is less this time. The phosphorous in the German bunker has flamed out at last, and they spill into the reeking bunker.
For the first time in an eternity, they are out of the r
ain. Two German soldiers lie dead. One still burns, his uniform wicking melted human fat into a flame.
With shaking fingers Rio taps out a Lucky Strike and settles it in the corner of her mouth. She pulls out her Zippo and lights it, letting the smoke fill her nostrils and disguise the stench of burning flesh.
“What now, Stick?” Geer asks.
“The Krauts will counterattack, try to push us out,” he says. “So we don’t let ’em. Castain, check that Kraut MG.”
“Barrel’s bent,” Jenou reports. “And the ammo’s mostly cooked off from the phosphorous.”
“Okay, Cat, get the BAR set up here.” Cat has inherited the BAR. He points to the crawl hole that forms the entry to the bunker. “Get as far up as you can without exposing yourself.” Then, to Rio, “Richlin, up on the roof, take Geer with you. The rest of you, dig in on both flanks.”
Rio climbs atop the bunker, up onto logs covered with mud held together by straw that had been crushed down into the seams between logs. It’s not a comfortable firing position, prone on those logs, but it gives her a good field of fire. Without needing to discuss it, Rio takes the left, Geer the right. Twenty yards away, Jenou digs a hole with Pang, and on the other side, Geer’s side, Beebee digs in with Jack. Stick stays in the bunker to help feed Cat and watch the firing hole, which now points back toward their own forces, but which might be turned by determined Germans.
It is not much of a position, Rio reflects, but farther away on both flanks the Americans are making similar preparations for the counterattack, which is not long in coming.
This time it’s the Germans who favor smoke to cover their assault. They appear like creatures from a nightmare, emerging from smoke and fog, their Schmeissers chattering, their Mausers pop-pop-popping, tossing their twirling, baton-like grenades.
Cat’s BAR erupts first, followed instantly by the rifles and carbines of the rest of the squad.
Mortar teams start dropping their bombs on the advancing Germans with decent marksmanship that blows holes in the smoke and produces screams of pain.
Rio aims and fires, aims and fires, aims and fires, and for every two rounds she fires, a German soldier falls dead or wounded. Geer beside her is, as usual, cursing as he shoots, but shoot he does and with some accuracy.
Days of mud. Days of rain and cold. Days of cold canned food. And above all, days of helplessly marching into prepared positions to be gunned down. It all forms a burning core in Rio’s heart, and at last, at long last, the boot is on the other foot. Now she is the one with some cover. She is the one with altitude. She is the one who can lie there taking aim and taking a life with a twitch of her right index finger.
They keep coming, even as a welcome breeze wafts the smoke away and multiplies Rio’s targets.
She kills and laughs, kills and yells, “Hah!” She kills and yes, yes it is pleasurable, yes, she is enjoying it. Yes, each time one of the gray-uniformed Kraut bastards drops she exults, she gloats, and aims and fires, curses when she misses and bares her teeth each time her bullet finds German flesh.
A chant has started off to the right somewhere, voices yelling, Die! Die! Die! and for a while the squad takes it up, yelling, “Die!”
Rio hears Jenou’s voice, her husky alto yelling “Die! Die!” as Jenou stands in her thigh-high hole, stands foolishly exposed but heedless, her carbine level, muzzle blazing, brass flying away, magazines dropped, and new ones popped in.
It is pure and clean: infantry against infantry, rifle against rifle, and Rio pops in a new clip and fires again and again, a chest here, a head there, a scream, a gurgle, a wounded man flinging down his rifle to run away and taking Rio’s round in his spine, a coward’s wound.
Now the German advance wavers. They are tripping over the bodies of their own dead. Someone, somewhere, maybe the captain, maybe just some keyed-up GI, yells, “Advance!”
Up come the Americans, up out of foxholes, out of their appropriated German bunkers, up from the slick banks of the river behind, men and women in dirty green, walking forward firing from hip and shoulder, and the Germans break.
A fell roar goes up, an animal sound, a brutal, murderous noise that tears from hundreds of throats, from hundreds of GIs tired of taking it and lusting to dish it out.
Cat Preeling, looking like some comic book illustration, her helmet gone somewhere, her BAR at her hip, walks forward like the messenger of doom, firing and yelling something wordless.
It can’t last long, they all know it in their hearts, all except the green kids. This is the Wehrmacht on the run, but the Wehrmacht never runs except to reach yet another prepared defensive position.
They push the Germans back a quarter mile before reaching the next line of bunkers and firing positions, and there the disciplined German fire forces them back down into the mud.
34
RIO RICHLIN—MONTE CASSINO, ITALY
They take the next German position, and the one after that. Day after day the rain falls and the mud slides and the artillery drops out of the sky and maims and kills.
Day after day, night after night, one firefight after another, they move along the ridges that lead to Monte Cassino, to the taking of that great and terrible massif with its gloomy, ethereal monastery.
Three times Stick has asked Lieutenant Stone, who has reappeared after treating a minor wound, to demand they be taken off the line. Three times Stone has told him that the captain isn’t having it, because the colonel isn’t having it and the general isn’t having it.
The squad moves like zombies, no longer capable of conversation, no longer really capable of thought. They fire and throw grenades and they fall in the mud and lie there, so gone, so destroyed they might as well be dead. And yet, they rise when Stick calls them or shoves them or kicks them, and they advance.
Everyone is sick. Some have picked up malaria, others have dysentery, there are cases of pneumonia and frostbite. Men and women alike find their feet have gone numb, the flesh a puffy, disintegrating white. They urinate and defecate in their fighting holes rather than risk a sniper’s bullet and sleep in their own filth. They are no longer men and women, they are beasts, unshaven, dirty, stinking, grunting beasts.
Sometimes a soldier has had enough and simply throws down his or her weapon and walks toward the rear. Some keep walking until they get back to Naples, where many hide or join in black market activities. But most who walk away come back after a day or two. It upsets the officers, but the GIs understand—they all know it could be them in a week, or a day, or an hour.
Rio no longer has any sense of how many days have passed, no clear notion of how far they’ve advanced, and very little hope of something that could be called victory. Sometimes, from some positions, she can look up and see the monastery through the rain, and it never seems any less far away. The more they push toward it, the farther away it seems, for after each hill, there is another hill; after each German position, there’s another. On and on, and endless repetition, always moving forward and somehow never getting anywhere.
At last comes the word.
Stick pulls back a corner of the tattered shelter half over the hole Rio is sharing with Jenou and Jack and says, “They’re taking us off the line. Move out in five.”
It should be time for relief, even exultation. But emotion is an impossible luxury now. So they pack up their gear and clamber up out of their hole and trudge downhill, downhill for the first time in . . . in forever.
Rio walks asleep, or very near to it. One foot moves in front of the other with the regularity and mindlessness of a machine. She walks past rows of bodies laid by the side of the road, bloated, decayed, gruesomely torn bodies that have lost their power to move her.
Off the road, in ditches, on the stony sides of ridges, lie the German dead. All have been stripped of souvenirs, so their uniforms lie unbuttoned and askew. Here and there a dead Kraut has been propped against a tree or a rock so some grim joker can stick a cigarette in his mouth, or scrawl a clever sign and hang it around hi
s neck.
One German, his head gone, has been leaned against a blasted German 88 and a cardboard drawing of Adolf Hitler has been propped on the stump of his neck to suggest a dead Führer.
After an eternity they stumble onto waiting trucks and are hauled like cattle to the rear staging area a mile away at the edge of a town that is now little more than a rock quarry.
And suddenly, there is hot food. There are proper tents with channels dug around them like moats to keep out the water.
Rio makes it no farther. She falls face-first onto a cot and is asleep before her body hits the canvas. No dreams. Nothing. She is destroyed, finished, drained of every last ounce of energy, a body without a mind.
When she wakes it is to the sound of hail pelting the roof of the tent. She is still in her vile uniform, her boots still on her feet, weighed down now with dried mud rather than wet.
Her body is a single, unified mass of aches and bruises as she sits up, blinks owlishly in the gray half-light, and sees Jenou in the next bunk, writing in the back of Magraff’s sketch pad. That fact should surprise Rio, but what draws her attention with far greater force is that Jenou is wearing a clean uniform. A damp uniform, but a clean one.
“D’jget that?” Rio mutters, tongue woolly.
“Well, hello, sleeping beauty,” Jenou says.
“Fresh gear?”
Jenou nods. “Uniforms, hot chow, and a shower, which is available for women from ten a.m. to . . . Well, you could just make it.” Jenou sets down the pad, stands up, gives Rio her hand, and hauls her to her feet. “Follow me.”
The shower is a fifty-five-gallon drum raised on a platform, with four pieces of pipe welded in place, each ending not in a showerhead, but in a simple valve that releases a moderate stream of icy cold but mud-free water. The four shower pipes are set up in a canvas-walled enclosure. An official stenciled sign reads: GI Janes Only, 10 to 2. An unofficial, handmade sign below reads: Any male organ found on the premises between 10 and 2 will be removed and sent to the mess tent.