Wayfaring Stranger
Our regiment is made up of National Guardsmen, draftees, and regular army. The officers and enlisted men get along fine. It’s a good outfit. Except for Major Fincher. Someone said the German army has been trying to find him for years in order to award him the Iron Cross. When the joke was reported to Fincher, a corporal had to explain its meaning.
I didn’t get to complete my entry. Sergeant Hershel Pine stuck his head over the pile of frozen snow and dirt by the edge of my foxhole and stared down at me. His narrow face was red with windburn, his whiskers reddish-blond on his cheeks, his helmet fitted down tightly on the scarf tied over his ears. “We got a problem, Lieutenant,” he said.
“What is it?” I replied, placing my pencil between the pages of my notebook, closing the cover.
He slid down into the hole. His breath was fogging, his field jacket flecked with ice crystals. He was carrying a Thompson, three magazines taped together, one of them inserted in the frame. Before he spoke, he rubbed his nose with his mitten to clear the mucus frozen in his nostrils. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger. “Steinberg is coming unglued,” he said.
“About what?”
“Waffen SS don’t take Jewish or wounded prisoners.”
“Send him to me.”
“I say use him on point or get him out of here, sir.”
“On point?” I said.
“If somebody’s got to step on an antipersonnel mine, I say better deadweight than a good soldier, sir.”
“Steinberg is a good soldier, Sergeant.”
He was crouched down on one knee. He dropped his eyes. I knew what was coming. I didn’t hold it against him, but I didn’t want to hear it, either. It was the curse of his kind, in this case a man who was raised on a cotton farm in one of the Red River parishes of central Louisiana, an area notable only for the fact that a mass execution of Negro soldiers by the White League took place there during Reconstruction. “I say better one of them than one of us, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Who are ‘them’?”
“I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.”
“I’m very interested in what you have to say. Take the crackers out of your mouth, Sergeant.”
“They own the banks. They’re the ones who lent Hitler the money to finance his war machine, sir. Actually, the Krupp family are Jews, aren’t they?”
“Lose the rhetoric, and lose it now. Are we clear about that?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. He didn’t look up. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s, his cheeks as bright as apples under his whiskers. I could hear him breathing, trying to hide his anger and distrust of those he would call people of privilege.
“What do your folks do on Christmas Day, Pine?”
His eyes met mine, uncertain. “Pick pecans out on the gallery.”
“What else?”
“My mother usually bakes a fruitcake, and my daddy fixes a big bowl of eggnog and puts red whiskey in it, not moonshine. Me and my little brother and a colored man who works for us go squirrel hunting. The weather is almost always mild on Christmas.”
“That sounds like a fine way to spend the occasion,” I said.
“I need to tell you something, sir.”
“Go ahead.”
“Last night on patrol, Steinberg got the heebie-jeebies when we ran into a listening post. He could have got us knocked off. It’s the second time it’s happened.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“Sir, there’s something else I need to say.”
I waited.
“I can smell money. That’s the honest-to-God truth, sir. I can smell old coins buried in the ground. I can smell oil and gas before the drill punches into a pay sand. You ever see a well come in? The pipes sweat all over just before the drilling floor starts to vibrate.”
“I’m not sure what you’re telling me.”
“I got a second gift, Lieutenant. I sweat when a situation is about to hit the fan. Maybe Steinberg has a right to be worried. I think the Krauts might try to bust through right where we’re at. I’ve been sweating inside my shirt for two days, sir.”
His eyes were red along the rims, the bone structure of his face as lean and pointed as an ax. He was breathing through his nose, his nostrils white with cold, waiting for me to speak, clearly wondering if he had said too much. “Sir, I’m not crazy. I don’t go to fortune-tellers or anything like that. I just know things. A nigra midwife delivered me. She was a voodoo woman from New Orleans. She said I was touched. She meant I had a gift. Nigras got a sense sometimes.”
“Maybe you’re right and we’re going to have Krauts in our lap before dawn,” I said. “Whatever happens, we’ll do our job. I don’t want to hear any more about Steinberg or clairvoyance or somebody sweating inside his clothes. Now get back to your position.”
A HALF HOUR LATER, as the last gaseous, silvery remnant of sun died on the horizon, I heard the sound of small arms popping on our flank. From a great distance, the sound was like fat raindrops dropping on lily pads. It grew in intensity until the sporadic popping became an uninterrupted, self-sustaining roar, followed by the coughing of a fifty-caliber machine gun down the line, the tracers streaking like bits of neon into the winter darkness.
I climbed out of my foxhole just as I heard the creaking of tank treads, then tree trunks snapping, their snow-laden boughs slapping against the forest floor. The visual and auditory effect of a King Tiger tank’s intrusion into an area defended by light infantry is difficult to describe. Its weight was almost seventy tons. Its Porsche engine could generate speeds of over thirty miles an hour. Its 88mm cannon could hit and destroy a Sherman tank at twelve hundred yards. Bazooka rounds and even the French 75mm often ricocheted off its sloped sides. Forty yards out, beyond a knoll, I saw giant trees crashing to the ground. Then the King Tiger topped the knoll, its front end jutting into the air, not unlike a horse rearing in a corral. I could feel the earth shake under my feet when the full weight of the tank slammed down on the incline, grinding boulders into gravel. For a moment I saw the head and shoulders of the tank commander sticking out of the cupola, its sides painted with the Iron Cross. He was wearing a black cap and a black jacket and had a face that was as one-dimensional and expressionless as bread dough in a pie pan. He sank down into the turret and pulled the hatch shut as the two MG-34 machine guns mounted beneath the cupola began firing.
The Tiger in front of me was one of many. The forest was being denuded. The trees were dropping so fast they didn’t have adequate space to fall, colliding perpendicularly like kitchen matches tumbling out of a spilled box. I saw our BAR man firing at the viewing slit on a Tiger, then a spray of 7.92 rounds danced across his field jacket. He dropped his weapon and began walking into the trees, one hand pressed to his chest, as though he had heartburn. He fell to his hands and knees, his back shaking each time he coughed, chaining the snow with red flowers.
I cannot say with any degree of accuracy what occurred in the next few minutes. Someone was yelling for a medic. I saw Private First Class Jason Steinberg and three other men get hit by automatic weapons fire and run over by a Tiger. I remember picking up the BAR man and trying to pull him into a hole. I also remember shooting two Waffen SS at close range with my .45. I saw German infantry coming out of the fog behind the tanks, some of them wearing belted leather overcoats, small lightning bolts painted on the sides of their helmets. Then I was on one knee behind a boulder, firing a carbine that had a splintered stock and wasn’t mine. Half my face was printed with wood splinters, one ear wet with blood, though I had no memory of a bullet striking the stock.
The Tigers smashed over our foxholes, their cannon firing into a snowfield behind us, one as white and smooth and glazed under the moon as the top of a wedding cake. The eruption of flame and sound from the barrels of the 88s was surreal, so loud and powerful that I couldn’t hear the creaking of the treads ea
ting up anything in their path, the explosions literally shaking the senses, as though my eyes, my brain, my organs were being emptied one by one on the snow. Out in the field, I could see two Sherman tanks burning. Three of the crew members were trying to run across the field to a distant woods, their legs locked knee-deep in the snow, their shadows as liquid and dark as India ink, their arms flailing under the stars as rounds from a machine gun danced toward them.
Behind me I heard a fir tree that must have been sixty feet tall topple through the canopy. I stared at it, stupefied, perhaps a bit like a condemned wretch watching the blade of a guillotine fall on his neck. The fog inside the forest and the screams of the wounded being executed and the guttural commands of the SS noncommissioned officers all melded into the creaking sounds of the Tigers, clanking like a junkyard across the snowfield. The tree crashed with the weight of an anvil on my helmet, razoring the rim down on my nose, mashing me into the earth.
Hours later, I woke at the bottom of a shell hole, my body covered by the branches of the fir. The canopy of the forest was gone, and the sky was clear and black and patterned with constellations, the temperature close to zero. I thought I could hear a mewling sound, like a baby’s, coming from under the snow, not five feet away.
Chapter
3
I FOUND AN E-TOOL and started digging. The snow had been as tightly compacted as wet sand by tank treads. One foot down, the blade of the collapsible shovel struck a log, then another one, and I realized I was digging into someone’s reinforced foxhole. The opening had been squeezed shut, as though someone had drawn the string on a leather bag, sealing a trapped infantryman inside a frozen cocoon that was hardly bigger than an obese woman’s womb. I folded the shovel into the position of a garden hoe and began chopping at the rocks and snow and dirt and broken timber until I had created a hole large enough to stick my hand inside. My fingers touched an unshaved face that was as cold and rough as stone.
The trapped man’s knees had been pushed almost to his chin. He was trying to speak, but his teeth were chattering so violently he could not form individual words. I grabbed him by the wrists and dragged him over the cusp of the foxhole and wiped his face. Tears had frozen in his eyelashes. He raised his right hand and placed it against my chest, as though reassuring himself that I was real. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger.
“Are you hit?” I asked.
“Dunno, sir,” he replied.
“Where’s your Thompson?” I said.
“Dunno.” He looked around and shook his head. “Where’s everybody?”
“Dead,” I said. “They shot the wounded. Can you walk?”
He had lost his steel pot, and his hair was studded with chips of ice that resembled rock salt. He stared at the splintered trees on the ground and at the blackened areas where German infantry had thrown potato-mashers over the tops of their tanks into our midst. He looked at the Tiger tracks leading right across the hole I had pulled him from.
“Did you hear me, Sergeant? We’re behind enemy lines.”
He seemed unable to fathom my words. I pointed toward the west and the lights flickering at the bottom of the sky. The intermittent flashes looked like heat lightning, or electricity bursting silently inside a bank of thunderheads. “That’s our artillery. Neither of us is in good repair. We don’t want to be captured.”
He lifted his eyes to mine, as though remembering a dream. “What happened to Steinberg?”
“He got it.”
“How?”
“Under a King Tiger.”
“He was alive?”
“I don’t know,” I lied.
He tried to get to his feet, one knee giving out, then the other. He began swinging his arms. “The bastards left us?”
“No, they all died. They died right here.” I found a knit cap and beat the snow crystals off it and fitted it on his head. “Pull yourself together. This will probably become a staging area. We don’t want to be here when that happens. Are you hearing me, Sergeant?”
“I cain’t walk, Lieutenant. My legs are dead.”
“You will walk whether you want to or not. Place your arm over my shoulder and put one foot after another. It’s just like Arthur Murray dance steps.”
He tripped, then held on to my shoulder as tightly as he could. “There you go,” I said. “We’re the boogie-woogie boys from Company B. Am I right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have to find a safe place before daylight. One way or another we’ll find our lines. Do you believe me when I say that?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, limping along next to me, through the shattered trees and the detritus of battle. “Lieutenant, I got to explain why I was crying when you pulled me out. It wasn’t because of the tank.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yes, sir, it does. A Kraut is just a man, nothing more, nothing less. When I was a baby, I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet. A nigra woman hanging wash looked through the window and rushed inside and saved my life. My face was already blue. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since. I’m in a tunnel, and my arms are pinned at my sides, and I’m hollering for my mother. It’s the worst thing ever happened to me, sir. Being down in that hole was like living it all over again.”
“I understand, Sergeant.”
“No, sir, you don’t. Nobody does. I’ve been afraid of closed-in places all my life. I wanted to die in that hole and have it over with. If I’d had a weapon, I would have punched my ticket.”
His breath was labored, his hip knocking against mine. I held him around the waist and used my other hand to keep his arm tight across my shoulders. I could see the eastern edge of the woods and a snowfield blazing as brightly as a flame under the moon. I had no idea where we were. The war had not only moved on, it seemed to have lost interest in us. In the distance, I could see a serpentine river shining like black oil, and beyond the opposite shore, a railroad embankment and a water tower. If the sky remained clear, our planes would be in the air at dawn, blowing up fuel depots and nailing every armored unit they could spot. But where were we going to hide when the starlight faded from the heavens and the sun broke on the horizon, and what would we eat?
We trudged across the snowfield, clinging to each other, our eyes tearing, our ears like lumps of cauliflower, the wind as sharp as a barber’s razor when I turned my face into it.
WE STAYED IN the woods the entire day. A flight of bombers with a fighter escort passed high overhead, vapor trails barely discernable. Later we could hear the explosions of bombs through the earth, probably blockbusters designed to blow gas and water mains before the incendiaries were dropped in strings that looked like cords of firewood. The forest contained no signs of either human or animal life. I could only assume the animals had been killed and eaten. That there were no human footprints except our own was more than disconcerting. As the sun descended, shadows formed in the sculpted, funnel-shaped tracks we had left in the snow, creating a trail not unlike ink dots leading to our hiding place.
Just before sunset, a lone Messerschmitt painted with zebra stripes came in low across the field, close enough for me to see the pilot’s goggled face as he swooped past us. The area around his wing guns was black with burnt gunpowder. It seemed grandiose to believe that the pilot of a Luftwaffe fighter plane would have interest in two escapees from a one-sided slaughter, weak with hunger and in the first stages of frostbite. Less than one minute later, I heard his guns rattling as he strafed a target by the river, and I realized that others had probably survived the massacre. For a committed hunter, no target was too small or insignificant.
As soon as night fell, Sergeant Pine and I made our way down to the river and pushed a rowboat free of the ice and frozen reeds along the bank and rowed to the far side. We huddled at the base of the train tracks. I was exhausted and colder and hungrier than I had ever been, the kind of hunger that is like
a rat eating a hole through the bottom of your stomach. To the east was another wooded area, and beyond it lighted buildings of some kind, perhaps factories manned by slave labor, operating twenty-four hours a day. I climbed up the embankment and placed my ear to one of the rails. For me, at that moment, the sound inside the steel could only be compared to the warm and steady humming of a woman’s circulatory system when you rest your head against her breast.
The headlight on the locomotive wobbled past us. Most of the cars looked empty, rocking on their undercarriages as we ran alongside the tracks, gravel skidding under our feet. I jumped aboard a boxcar whose interior was blowing with chaff and smelled of grain and livestock, then I reached down and grabbed the sergeant by the wrist and pulled him through the door, the riparian, marshlike countryside dropping behind us. I prayed that we were headed north, into Belgium. I prayed that a great deliverance was at hand.
The train gained speed and began to bend around a long curve that took us due east. Far up the line, I could see the glow of the firebox in the cab and sparks fanning from the smokestack. I lay down in the back of the boxcar and covered myself with a pile of burlap bags, too tired to care where the train took us. As I closed my eyes, I heard the sergeant push the sliding door shut. Soon I was fast asleep, the boxcar’s wheels clicking on the tracks, the floor rocking like a cradle.
I woke at sunrise with a start, the way you do when you realize that the problems surrounding you are real and that your sleep has only placed them in abeyance. The train had picked up considerable speed; the boxcar was one that Depression-era hoboes called a flat-wheeler because it had no springs and bounced a passenger all over the floor. “Where are we?” I said.