The sergeant rode beside the driver of the leading jeep. Then came a second jeep, then the car, and the third jeep brought up the rear. The cortege sped fast over the snow-covered track, which wound snakelike through the forest, avoiding rocks and large trees. They were heading north with a westward trend; that was about parallel to the enemy front, as well as Lanny could guess it. While everyone but the drivers peered anxiously into the thickets and through the forest vistas, Lanny was busy with the papers he had grabbed from his bag. Any one of those would have identified him to the Germans, and there were few persons near the front whom they would have been more pleased to capture. The P.A. worked at tearing them up into the smallest pieces and dropping half a dozen at a time from the speeding car. They were inconspicuous in the wet snow and would soon disintegrate. It hurt him to destroy the precious letter from his Boss, but he could get another—assuming that he got out of this trap alive.
They came to a small open space, and a track crossing their own. They came upon it suddenly, and the sergeant swung up his arm. The four vehicles ground to a halt, only a few feet apart. At the crossing of the tracks stood four infantrymen in American uniforms and carrying “burp” guns; they had been taken by surprise and stood staring. “Who are you?” shouted the sergeant, and the reply came promptly, “Second Battalion, 318th Infantry, 106th Division.”
The voice sounded American; but then many Germans had lived in America, and they had plenty of prisoners from whom they could learn accents. “You, squad leader, what’s your name?” demanded the sergeant.
“Pete Collins.”
“What state do you come from?”
“Iowa.”
“And what is the river that forms the eastern border of Iowa?” It was a trick that had been taught to many of the combat troops, and geography lessons had been held especially to prepare for it.
Perhaps the enemy had heard of the trick and perhaps he hadn’t. The reply of this squad leader must have been a whispered order, for the four men swung up their weapons together and poured a blast of fire into the column of vehicles. There was a crash of splintering glass and dented steel. It happened so quickly that Lanny saw only part of it; he saw the sergeant drop, and saw the man who sat beside the driver of Lanny’s car with blood spurting from a hole in his head. Other men in the jeeps leaped out and flung themselves flat in the snow and began shooting; the enemy guns were turned upon them, and in that second or two of respite the driver of Lanny’s car threw it into gear, swung past the jeeps in front of him, turned off the track and went crashing through a thicket in low gear. In another second or two the car was on the cross track, headed west.
XIII
That was orders, and nobody could object. The three horrified art experts sat speechless while the car hightailed it out of there, swinging this way and that, leaping over the bumps and down into the ruts, tossing the three passengers up to the roof and hitting their heads, then dropping them half dazed into their seats. The dead man’s blood was spattered everywhere, and you would have thought he was alive by the way his body behaved.
That went on for a mile or two until they came to a place where there was a turn and soft mud covered a stretch of road; the car started to slide, and the driver jammed on his brake, enough to slow the car but not to stop it. It skidded and hit a tree, with force enough to jolt their necks and bruise their arms but not enough to injure their legs—thank goodness!
They got out and examined the damage. The front axle was bent, the wheel jammed, and the car immobilized. The soldier said, “Sorry, sirs,” and they could readily believe him. Being polite persons, they assured him that it wasn’t his fault.
What to do next? Should they walk back and rejoin their party in the hope of getting a jeep? But maybe their party hadn’t won the battle; or maybe more Germans had come up. Walking back, they would be going toward the enemy. Furthermore, the soldier pointed out, it would be a grave risk to drive a jeep where paratroopers were about. Walking, they could travel in the forest and have a chance to stop and listen and hide. There were villages and farms scattered through this district, and American troops were in all of them.
Lanny took the carbine from the dead man; it was a Budd, whose development he had followed for forty years; he had been taught to take Budd Gunmakers products apart and put them together again at an age when other children were building houses out of blocks. One of the other officers took the automatic pistol, and the third took the sheath knife and a couple of grenades. Assimilated officers were noncombatants, forbidden to carry arms; but when the enemy was breaking the laws of war by wearing American uniforms it seemed useless to expect consideration from him and better to fight back.
The others wanted to lug their bags, but Lanny persuaded them against it. They might have a long and rough journey, and they were not outdoor men, hardened and tough. They would have to travel fast because they were leaving plain tracks, and enemies might be trailing them, using the captured jeeps.
What became of their escort they never knew. They had no chance to go back, and probably couldn’t have found the spot if they had tried. This patch of forest, hills, ravines, and ice-covered streams became the scene of some of the wildest fighting in the history of a blood-soaked earth. A million men were coming from all the points of the compass, prepared to trample this ground, to stain fresh layers of snow with blood and track them with the treads of monstrous machines. Armies would advance and retreat and advance again; men would die by the hundreds on every hillock and ridge. Reinforcements would be rushed up, on foot, by truck and train, or through the air. For a full month the struggle would rage; it would be known to history as the Battle of the Bulge, and it would be the Gettysburg of the western front, as Stalingrad had been of the eastern.
As for three art experts and one soldier boy from Brooklyn, they would be like four grains of salt in a shaker. They would be hurled here and there, hardly knowing what was happening to them. They would be in the midst of uproar and racket, chaos and confusion. They would know only what they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears, and would have to wait until near the end before they began to form an idea as to which side was gaining. It was two or three weeks before even the commanding generals knew, and four grains of salt counted for nothing whatever in their calculations.
3
No Rest Day or Night
I
Three highly trained art experts and one very young garage mechanic from Brooklyn stole through the rough Ardennes Forest, putting their feet down softly in the snow and turning their eyes this way and that incessantly. When they came to an open spot they would stop before emerging from the brush and stand with their ears cocked, listening attentively. A twig crackling beneath their feet would make them jump; a partridge taking flight would leave them with hearts pounding. It was Indian fighting, which all four of them had read about but had enacted only as children at play. Now it was reality, and far more deadly, for no Indian had ever dreamed of such weapons as the enemy here had made.
The fugitives avoided the roads, on which the enemy was most apt to travel; they avoided the thickets because they could not see through them or penetrate them without making a noise; they preferred stretches of forest with great trees because they could stand behind trees and see a long way. The land was cut up with ravines, and these were bad because, both in descending and climbing, you might set a loose stone to tumbling, and were a helpless target because you couldn’t move fast. Frozen swamps were bad too, for they wouldn’t hold your weight, and if you got your legs wet, how would you get them dry? These and other things you had to learn, and your first mistake might be your last.
They were not left long in doubt as to the presence of the enemy. They came in sight of one of the tracks—you couldn’t really call them roads—which crisscrossed this wild region. They heard the sound of engines and backed away into a thicket and lay flat. Peering out, they watched a terrifying procession going past, perhaps fifty yards away: first a clanking steel mons
ter, one of the new Tiger tanks, weighing as much as seventy tons, and with a long gun barrel sticking out in front. This land battleship carried eleven-inch armor and was capable of a speed of forty miles an hour; now it was moving with majestic slowness, and behind it, walking in the tracks left by the tank treads, came two columns of men. They carried automatic guns and about their waists a string of grenades, objects like gourds with long necks. They were the Panzer grenadiers, whose job was to protect the tanks against men who might try to sneak up on them with explosives or combustibles. Behind them came Panzerfaust teams and officers, then medical-aid men, all precisely spaced.
There came another tank and another marching column, then another tank, and so on and on—good God! it was the whole German Army, thought the cowering fugitives. But it wasn’t; it was just one Panzer Grenadier Battalion, and the Germans were sending in four whole divisions of them, about sixty thousand men; also four Wehrmacht Panzer Divisions, that is, of the regular Army, and four SS Panzer Divisions, who were Hitler’s own chosen troops, his private army, as you might say, trained from childhood to be cruel and deadly killers.
The four Americans couldn’t know all that; but one thing they understood clearly, that the enemy had broken through the thinly held American lines. Somebody had blundered, somebody had underestimated the reserves the enemy could command. It was also clear that this tank column wasn’t just wandering blindly through the forest; it was heading for some town where there were known to be American forces—and that was surely a town at which the fugitives did not desire to arrive.
The Germans had had every opportunity to make themselves familiar with this territory; they had driven through it in World War I to capture Sedan and rout the French Army; they had done the same thing thirty years later and had held the land until the American First Army had driven them out a couple of months ago. It was a commander whom Lanny had met at Berchtesgaden, Field Marshal Karl Rudolf Gerd von Rundstedt, who had performed the feat in 1944, and Hitler had picked him for this new offensive, meant to rout the American Army and win the war.
II
When the column of steel pachyderms had passed out of sight and sound the fugitives conversed in whispers. They realized now how serious their plight was; they were no longer fleeing from a sprinkling of parachutists but from the German Army. No Panzer column like that would go without infantry to follow; no such column would go without other columns proceeding close by. In short, one such column meant an army. To have arrived where it had so early must mean that it had by-passed towns and villages held by the Americans, leaving them to be cleaned up later on. This was to be a surprise attack, and to go far. “They’ll be all over these woods,” Lanny said, “and it’ll be hard to dodge them.”
They started again, choosing a route slightly more to the north. They had no detail map of this district, but the soldier had one priceless possession, a tiny compass dangling from a chain at his waist. “If anything happens to me, don’t fail to get it,” he said; “and don’t forget that it’s the blue end that points to the north. I forgot that once and I was sunk. I have made myself a word that I say to myself—bengas—blue north, gray south.”
He was a Jewish boy named Abramson; he had been one of those who had shyly asked permission to stand and gaze at works of European art. He knew all about cars and internal combustion engines but was dubious about his abilities as an Indian fighter; he admitted that he had never fired a shot at a human being. He was taking the advice of an art expert who had more than twice his years. Like all GIs, he addressed such learned persons as “Doc.”
They came to another woodroad—that seemed the best name for such crude forest tracks. Taught by experience, they hid in a thicket and listened, and this proved a wise precaution. There came a distant rumble, and it grew into a roar, and here was another column of tanks, bigger yet; they must be the Royal Tigers, of which Göring had boasted but which Lanny had not seen. They were going faster, and behind them came armored cars loaded with grenadiers and Panzerfausts. These were in a hurry and not yet near enough to their foes so that they had to take precautions. They went by like a storm, while the watchers clung to the earth like so many baby rabbits or quail.
The four got up and started again, more anxious than ever. They had taken it for granted that if they got to some American military group they would be safe; but now they were not sure. They might find the group in the midst of a battle—and not winning it. But what else could the fugitives do? They had no food, it was turning colder and starting to snow again, and how could they spend a freezing night without blankets or shelter? To build a fire would be suicide. What they wanted was to find some Americans who were not yet under attack; vehicles would no doubt be bringing in reinforcements and would consent to take out a load of Monuments on the return trip.
Where were the Americans anyhow, and why were the roads left entirely to Tigers and Royal Tigers? Where were the General Shermans and the TDs—tank destroyers? The fugitives soon got their answer, for straight ahead of them there burst a solid mass of sound, big guns and little guns roaring together, and continuing so that it was all one sound. It had been like that pretty much since dawn, but the sound had been behind them, and distant, whereas this was near, and ahead. Evidently one of the tank columns was making an attack and being resisted. The four fugitives chose another point of the compass.
All this was hard on the two younger experts, for they had lived soft lives and had had little basic training. Lanny, although he was some fifteen years older, had been climbing mountains, escaping from the Vichy militia, and before that from the Gestapo in Germany and Italy. Soft snow and mud clung to his feet and made heavy going; a carbine in one hand and an overcoat over the other arm did not make things any easier; but he stuck it out, and it was one of the younger men who first called for a breathing spaced.
III
They came to a stream and drank, which refreshed them slightly; but the periods of rest grew longer and those of walking shorter. Snow was falling again, and the light was growing dim; the short day was ending. It was the 16th of December, and the longest night of the year was only five days away. They had dreamed of a cave in which to hide, but they had found none. They had dreamed of a hollow log into which they might crawl, but they found that fir and pine trees rarely grew that big and the oaks didn’t seem to rot. There was firing all around them now, and no longer any hope of escaping beyond the battle; the Panzers had been too fast. The four were reduced to imitating the life of rabbits, hiding in one patch of undergrowth and peering out for another patch to run to.
Traveling thus, they came to a clearing and saw a little farm. They hid and studied the place carefully, to make sure whether it was in the hands of friends or foes. So far as they could see it wasn’t in anybody’s hands; there was no sign of life. Perhaps the peasants had fled to some hiding place they knew about. They were accustomed to war, an invasion every generation and perhaps oftener. The Germans had come in 1914 and stayed nearly four years; they had come in 1940 and stayed even longer; then the Americans had come, and now the Germans were coming again. No wonder a farm was deserted, not even a duck or a chicken left!
They discussed in whispers what to do. There was a barn, extremely tempting. A barn has a place for the cow and the horse below, and a high place above where the hay is stored, and hay is marvelous to hide in. No one there had tried it in winter, and they weren’t sure how warm it would be, but if you burrowed deep it would surely be better than remaining out in the open, to be covered with snow or soaked with rain if the weather turned warmer. They weren’t sure now whether they were in Luxembourg or Belgium; in either case the peasants would probably be friendly; but you couldn’t be sure, for there were Germans in both Belgium and Luxembourg, and Germans were always Germans—so declared the Jewish boy from Brooklyn, who surely didn’t like them.
They decided to wait until dark and then sneak into the barn. If there was a cow they might get some milk; one of the art experts had been ra
ised on a farm in Wisconsin and understood the technique, so mysterious to a city dweller. If there was no cow one of the four might approach the house and try to buy food, not mentioning that there were others or where he meant to spend the night. All that sounded good, and four votes were cast for the program.
There was a council of war, discussing both strategy and tactics and including all the eventualities they could think of. They weren’t there to fight but to get away, and they would resist only if they could be sure of success. Somebody might have to decide in a split second, and they chose Lanny for their leader because he was the oldest and knew more about both the natives and the enemy. He did not tell them his special reasons for being unwilling to surrender; he warned them that in an offensive like this, where the enemy’s chances would depend entirely upon speed, prisoners would be an inconvenience and the enemy might be taking none. “A nice cheerful thought!” said the farm boy from Wisconsin who had become the assistant director of an art museum in his native state.
Stepping softly, in Indian file, they stole across the clearing, climbed a stone wall, and came to the barn. There was no sign of life; the door was padlocked. They quickly pried it open, went in and stood listening, then groped around and found the nailed-on boards which served as a ladder to the loft. It was half full of hay, as they had hoped, and they dug themselves into it and piled the stuff over them, all but their faces. Lying side by side, they kept one another warm, and it was bliss compared to the snow and wind outside.