It was November of 1944, and we had settled down to our long Winter Nap. Unfortunately it was a season of surprises. By then, of course, we felt were too hardened or too smart for any kind of surprise. Boy, we were wrong.
We passed through Melmedy then entered the woods to replace members of the 9th Division. We were walking up one side of the road, and they were coming down the other side. They had tired, gray faces and their staring eyes were eerily expressionless. There simply was no life in those eyes. Few words were exchanged, except for this one stubbly, thin faced guy who yelled at us, “You’ll be sorry,” in a tone of mocking, bitter resentment.
Going through a street through a village, it had been snowing. Now it was raining hard on our heads.
We returned to their former fox holes or bunkers that they had dug in the frozen soil. The sodden snow was very deep, especially where it had drifted to one side of the road. In the woods were, the snow fell almost every day. It was bleak, dreary, and thankless duty. The woods had a Germanic quality, trees planted in perfect rows except where an artillery shell had torn things up. There was no activity to be seen. If you gazed out, and after about a 1,000 yards the country rose in a gentle rise, but there was no one out there.
The snow kept falling. When I went to cross the road, I plunged into a snow bank up to my neck. I suddenly felt myself surrounded by colored lights, and got panicked and confused until my men helped me to climb out.
I don’t know if you’ve spent a lot of time in a bitter winter cold, but it’s tough as hell to endure. At the beginning, the snow was creaking under foot, and the icy air made us catch our breath. The inside of our nostrils stuck together, and the cold made our teeth ache. You never got used to it. We devised a lot of tricks. Field jackets were useless against a cutting wind, so we learned how to sew blankets into their inner linings. We learned how to wrap sheets of newspaper around our bodies as a buffer against the bitter wind. We would stuff newspapers into our socks and boots, to keep from getting trench foot, which you can catch easily if your feet are wet all the time. We learned how to heat pebbles in a tin can and dump them into our boots with our wet socks in order to dry both.
But when we started, we didn’t know any of that stuff; we simply knew that we were living in teeth-chattering cold.
*******
We didn’t believe the rumors. The weather was still miserable, snow falling, the bitter cold, and it was at four in the morning of Dec. 16, when a hellish scene sprang to life around us as virtually hundreds of dazzling searchlights directed their glare into the American positions, and the artillery and the rocket launchers unleashed an unearthly fire such as we had never before experienced. The incredible whine of our own guns made clear we were firing directly at German forces in front of us. It was a terror-fraught attack, let me tell you. There were lights of all descriptions, lighting up the sky and the snowy ground. The lights pointed up into the sky and some were directed on our positions. They beamed from German trucks, tanks, and pillboxes. They caromed off the low hanging clouds to light up the roads and open fields. They were meant to scare us, but they also made the German stand out better, and we fired out at them, and some of them fell.
Then our hearts sank into our shoes.
We heard ominous sound of creaking tank treads. Of course those reports about a German build-up had been dutifully transmitted to division headquarters but were dismissed as unlikely because “the terrain was not suited for tanks.” Right. Except now we were hearing the mass movements of trucks, tanks, trucks and men. Conflagrations erupted near by, and we could hear piercing screams, the screams of death coming from those who had been hit.
We got a hurried radio message that said that the whole regiment was being hit by shells. We tried not to show it, of course, but panic began to set in, but we had to keep our heads down. We had to endure. The most dangerous thing came from the Krauts shelling the tops of the trees, and huge branches rained down and people were killed if they were out in the open, crapping.
We tried to radio for help, then we then tried to use the phone, but the wires were all down. We felt frantic: I mean, all systems of fight or flight were going full blast in us. Then, hardly able to believe our eyes, vague figures in white suits began to appear several hundreds of yards away. Initially, we in a shocked, stunned state. My unit had remained in place in the outskirts of Lanzereth, and we had earlier made contact with task force from the 14th Cav., and they had machine guns and anti tank guns to cover our right flank, but the task force were from a different corps which meant that communication was sketchy. Our biggest fear was that other units near us had been outflanked and had fled.
Suddenly our tank destroyers moved out. Just like that. No word. Not a word to us. They just left. A very abrupt exit to say the least. The walkie-talkie finally worked, and I contacted regiment to get instructions. A Col. Bridesworth told me to move some of my guys into Lanzereth to make sightings from a farm house a house that had been previously occupied by artillery observers. I realized that I was now basically commanding only a platoon of 23 guys, instead of a company of 120 men. Lt. Harris was missing, someone had said that he had taken a bullet; I realized we were not much of a company anymore. But the task was clear: we going to look for places to fight, a rock here, a depression there a ditch, a manure pile. You made use of anything you could, you see.
I looked assessingly over the men I was commanding for this mission, especially Sgt. Oakhurst. When I first met him he acted as if he had never heard of fear. Stories about him were plentiful. He was a big, burly guy. His hair was cropped short, and with his helmet off, he displayed a head shaped like an artillery shell. His head sort of sloped down into his huge shoulders, which also sloped down, which gave Oakhurst a look of bull-like strength. He was a nasty, boastful man who had a thin voice like a giggling chicken. But he was a bully. He would say things like, “I’ll jump up and down on the Kraut’s balls until they squirt like jelly,” and stuff like that. He carried a small bottle that he claimed contained real human eyeballs.
But Oakhurst could back up his bluster; he wasn’t simply a big mouth. One night in Paris, a couple of tough street punks, had stepped out of the shadows and demanded money. I don’t know if they were armed. Without missing a beat, Oakhurst had snap kicked the first one in his lower leg, snapped kicked him again, then did it a third time, driving the howling man backward, grabbing his leg. Oakhurst then took a step forward and kicked him again, and the punk had gone down for good, clasping his leg and screaming. The other punk, who was tall, tried to punch Oakhurst, who had turned sideways to him. Holding up his left hand, to block the punch, he rammed his right elbow into the punk’s stomach with incredible violence. When the man doubled up, Oakhurst used the same elbow to smash him viciously in the face. Grabbing the punk by his long hair, he had bent him over, then drove a knee into his face. The man went down, and then Oakhurst had walked off down the street, whistling.
I wasn’t there, but I had the story from guys who were. I mean, there was one punk, lying in the street, screaming over his ruined leg, and the second one, dazed, was leaning against a lamppost, blood dribbling quickly off the end of his chin, as if his face was leaking.
At bottom, we hoped the Germans would be as afraid of Oakhurst as we were. He was a sergeant in his 20s, did I tell you that? So I was looking at Oakhurst because he was no longer a man who despised fear. The grenade incident had changed all that. I was a replacement captain, an officer of the line, commanding a company, and over time, the men had accepted me and treated me with respect. I mean things when I say them, and I don’t scare. I hated sloth and hated any infringement of discipline.
Another of my men I looked at was Paul Dewey, a corporal, who seemed the exact opposite of Oakhurst. The U.S. Army manual had said something like, “The basic building block of all Army organizations is the individual soldier.” Oh, sure. Good luck with that. See, Dewey was tall and a bit good looking if you thought about it. He had a high forehead crowned by a dark widow’s peak, dark, close set eyes, and a small mouth with the lower lip larger than the thin upper one. His eyes were habitually furtive, always darting this way and that like minnows. He was twenty-three years old, which was pretty old for our outfit. Most of the rest of our guys were either in their late teens or early twenties. Dewey was a draftee. I think he came to our outfit because he spoke German, but I saw right away that he was a problem soldier.
From the very first, we all saw that Dewey’s heart wasn’t in it. He was not a comfortable personality. He disliked the Army. If he had been given orders, he’d do it, but his performance breathed reluctance and evasion. He was a voracious reader; one of the men called him, “Mr. Nose-in-Book,” and clearly, he was one of those guys that simply worshipped the printed word. But the minute you turned your back on him, his mind was off somewhere, reading, looking up, jotting notes, thinking about something that afforded him immediate interest and satisfaction -- never mind doing the job at hand. He couldn’t care less about that. For example, one morning, I put him to work doing reports, fitness reports for the company. The back of the line office was cluttered with envelopes, newspapers, postcards, and letters. Typists were clacking away. This job clearly had no appeal for Dewey. First of all, he had been enjoying a bit of free time, reading, and his eyes went dead at my saying that I needed his help. He was probably wishing a bomb would drop on me, and, after trying to dawdle, he got up and did his usual listless performance. I was busy with other stuff, and when I came back, Dewey was still at it, but his demeanor just as dull and unenergetic and as lackadaisical as before. Frankly, it pissed me off. 1499
“Dewey, the Army isn’t here just for you to get an education. The Army needs chores to be done. This stuff has to get done. Get used to it.”
Well, he almost jumped out of his skin when he heard my voice. He was off in Dreamland again. He got to his feet, saluted, his eyes not meeting mine; he fidgeted and was reaching back to try and tuck in his blouse. His blouse was always hanging out of his baggy pants. But at that moment, he was acting like a housebreaker who’s been caught trying to jimmy open a jewel casket.
“Will you stand still, please?” I said.
“Standing still; yes, sir.” Dewey tried to stand still, but he still looked totally unnerved, as if he were trying to escape a snake trapped in his shorts. He kept clearing his throat, absolutely unnerved.
“Not everything in life is interesting, Dewey,” I told him with a severe tone.
He didn’t look at me. He looked up, down, off to the side, but all the same, he said, “Sir: I’ve been sorting these reports for three hours, and you’re telling me that not everything in life is interesting? Thank you, sir,” as if I was some stupid son of a bitch.
“Don’t mess with me, Dewey.” Because I wanted to hit him. He was still not meeting my eye. “Don’t mess with me, Dewey. You’ll regret it. ”
“Yes, sir. I will not mess with you. No, sir,” he said.
“Do understand what I’m saying?”
“I understand what you’re saying. Yes, sir.”
That was Dewey. He clearly didn’t like doing another’s bidding, and so he did as little of it as possible. It was somebody else’s pet idea, it clearly wasn’t his.
*******
Dewy and Oakhurst hated each other on sight. Once when Oakhurst was loudly throwing his weight around, boasting that he was afraid of nothing, Dewey, in his flinching, nervous, furtive way, said under his breath, “A skull with a rampart of brass.”
“What the fuck was that? Huh? What the fuck was that?” Oakhurst said. Dewy almost died: he had no idea that Oakhurst had been close by and had heard it. He went as white as paper.
Up came Oakhurst. “You said something about me. What was it? You little, milk toast prick?”
Dewey repeated it quietly, tucking his blouse in, “A skull with a rampart of brass,” he muttered. Dewey of course didn’t meet his eye, but was turning his head to adjust his collar. He looked really scared, but with a kind of lunatic stubbornness, he repeated quietly: “A skull with a rampart of brass,”
“What did you say?” Oakhurst bellowed, looking around at the men. Dewey looked even more scared when Oakhurst bent down and whispered to him that he was thinking of cutting Dewey’s balls off.
Except Dewey sort of looked in Oakhurst’s general direction, and said in a timid mumble, “Are you sure?”
This utterly baffled Oakhurst. “What do you mean, am I sure? Am I sure that I’m going to cut off your balls?”
But Dewey replied, “My question is, how you know you were thinking? Because if you had done thinking before, that you remember it. The new experience would have to match the old one.” All of this was said by a man who was very scared and pale.
“What did you just say, you little, mouse pussy!” brayed Oakhurst, spitting from his thick lips.
Dewey seemed scared out of his wits, but his question dumbfounded Oakhurst. Private Mamet said to him, “Sergeant Oakhurst, what Corporal Dewey means is that he thinks you’re dumb.”
Well, the startled Oakhurst began to roar in his thin pitched voice, “I’m dumb? Is that what you’re saying you little milk toast prick? I’m the one who’s dumb? You little pansy prick??” And he lunged for Dewey who shut his eyes but didn’t run, watching as guys pulled Oakhurst away, Oakhurst muttering how he was going to take Dewey’s head off and shit down his neck,” and all that sort of stuff. Oakhurst was yelling like a demon that had lost its mind. I told Oakhurst to shut up. He did.
Once, when Dewey was at ease, I asked Dewey what he thought of Oakhurst. I shouldn’t have asked that. Asking him broke all the rules, but Dewey replied, “We’re not on the record?” “No.” Dewey shrugged and said, “Well, Oakhurst would in handy if you needed someone to pull vehicles stuck in the mud, or he might be useful if you placed him out in a field to scare crows away from the crops. Otherwise, he is merely thickheaded tree stump with a bad temper.”
“You still have to follow his orders,” I said.
“Yessir,” Dewey said. It was clear that Dewey despised him to the heart.
And for weeks after their encounter, whenever they ran into each other, Oakhurst would make loud, enraged, abusive remarks within Dewey’s hearing, while Dewey simply looked at him with pitying superiority.
One day, a group of us were marching. There we were, walking up the narrow, snow-caked road, and I glanced back to spotted Dewey, slinking along the line. He always presented a picture of pure misery on a march because he marched with incredible caution. He moved as if his body needed to be oiled. He was half stooped as if he was eighty years old and was being forced to carry a heavy block of marble on his back. Only his head worked. His head acted like a swivel, like a wind indicator, revolving all the time. He was always casting these unnerved looks all around him. Once, Kevin Clark, another sergeant, under Oakhurst, said to me, “Dewey will never make it. He’ll crack. He’s too frail. He shouldn’t even be up at the front.”
Who knew? I thought.
I remembered one particular march. Dewey’s rifle pointed forward, looking glumly at the dark, forbidding haze-shrouded woods, and of course, Oakhurst was at the front, all gung ho, his submachine gun pointing out, and his jaw jutted, ready to inflict mayhem and massacre on the world. All of a sudden, I heard a yell, a startling yell, and a frenzied voice was screaming, “Grenade, get the grenade!” What grenade? I thought with horror. What grenade??? Voices were yelling at Oakhurst who was speechless, his dark eyes as big as teacups, his mouth opening and shutting like a fish’s mouth. He had frozen to statuary.
“GET THE GRENADE! GET THE FUCKING GRENADE,” we were all shouting. But suddenly some force hurtled into Oakhurst, knocking him over to one side, and as he lay sprawled on his back, spread eagled, we saw Dewey bend down and disappear. Seconds ticked away like years. I was trying to yell but only a dry, hoarse croak came out. I ducked down, hunched and turned away, waiting for the explosion, my heart like tightened knot on a snarled shoe string. Nothing happened. I waited. Nothing happened. I looked up and saw Dewey. He grabbed the grenade and pegged the sucker like a base ball into a clump of shrubs out in a clearing. I ducked. I was expecting an eruption of dirt and branches of trees and pine needles showering and raining down, but nothing happened. Oakhurst just lay there like a stuffed bear the whole time.
He’d lost the grenade somehow – it worked loose and fell to the ground, but the pin hadn’t been pulled. There was no explosion. We were vastly relieved, and started back up the road, when Dewey said, “Wait. Wait a second.” His voice was imploring. We stopped. It seems he had pissed his pants. No one said anything smart; we simply traded looks. Dewey had gone and gotten the loose grenade and hurled it away, and if the cost of his keeping his head when we had lost ours was to piss himself, it was fine by us. (None of us were turning into nose gays as it was.)
Dewey stopped, took out a spare pair of combat pants from his pack, (of coarse, he wasn’t supposed to be carrying any spares,) but he came out, not looking at us, his lips blue with cold. He had gone over and thrown his soiled pants into the woods.
“He may not be cracking up as soon as we thought,” Sgt. Clark said to me under his breath.
******
We finally got to the farmhouse and flopped down exhausted and hungry. By then we had somehow gotten new additions: Dyer, Toland, Astor, MacDonald, McMillan, Combs, Weepen, Queen, and a new sergeant whose name I didn’t know. They had simply appeared because their units were all mixed up. There must have been thirty-five of us by then. We didn’t move around at all, but lay still, looking out, on alert. Suddenly a guy named Wooten came bursting in the room, all excited, saying, “One of our silly damn guards of ours took a shot at me when I stepped out to take a piss.” I found this very puzzling when, with no warning, a shell or a grenade exploded in the yard, throwing glass down on us. We froze in place. When it happened again, someone yelled in terror, “Shit! Let’s go to the basement before these fucking shells kill us!” Shelling is for the birds, and so we hastily went down the stairs. About half way down the stairs, I heard a noise, and then heard someone speaking German very rapidly. I assumed it was one of the group’s interpreters, but then I heard several voices, all speaking German. My heart shot up into my throat. I placed my hand on the person in front of me and whispered a warning, “There are Jerries in the basement.” But then I suddenly realized that all of our helmets had netting on them, and, with sickening surprise, I realized that the helmet I was holding had no net on it! Fuck!
At that moment, a German officer in the basement pointed a flash light directly at me, and said in perfect English, “Hands up, boys. The war is over.” My men were being held at gun point. The German I had just whispered to now had big, saucer eyes, he was very scared, and I yelled at the man with the flashlight, “Like the hell it is,” and pushed the first German below me on top of the officer below, and then I fled, scrambled up the stairs and hurtled out the farmhouse door only to see a German with a burp gun in a ready position. I almost crapped my pants. That sight that gave me the worst scare of my life. I pulled back into the house, when I heard someone else nearby, and felt someone was groping for my arm, and I turned to see Dewey standing there. The men came back up. We stood and watched the Krauts pulling Oakhurst from a nearby room. They had found him trying to hide behind a big table by the kitchen, and he didn’t help the Krauts at all. He just sat there inanimate, like a big, heavy bag of feed. When I saw him, his face was paper white, and he looked completely whipped. By then, more Germans came up and all of us were captured. A German voice was shouting, “How many are you? How many are you?” over and over. They were searching the house.
Outside, in the cold, the Germans were searching our packs and pockets, and it as then that a vivid fear smote me, centering on the danger of any of my guys possessing German souvenirs. I had been warned that if the Germans found any German souvenirs on any of our guys, or if any were discovered in their packs or pockets, the Germans would think the American had killed the original owner, and they would shoot the offenders dead on the spot. Or if they would kill the American offenders, then slash a warning X across their chests, leaving the offending items at the intersection of the lines. We had all heard the story of the GI that the Germans had found with one of their watches. He was shot, his body cut open, and the watch sewn inside him.
The German officer with the flashlight appeared. He saluted me and I returned it. “You and your comrades are brave men,” he said and then vanished.
So we were bagged.
Shit, were we pissed! When the Germans took us outside, we saw the road was bumper to bumper with tanks, troop carriers, and infantry milling around, and we heard the shovels clearing stuff off the road. My spirits hit the floor with a thud. We had no chance. We had been suckered.
********
That night we slept on plank boards in the farmhouse. It smelled bad, and the room was crummy and unsanitary. There were about twenty of us from different units, and it was crowded and there was no heat. A couple of the guys had dysentery, and it wasn’t long before the place began to stink. There were no thunder mugs at all in the place. There was no T.P. Dewey said something to a German officer and was told him to shut the fuck up. I learned later that Dewey had asked for treatment for dysentery. There was a latrine in back of the house, but we were ordered to stay where we were. If anyone on of us moved in the night and before 0500, they would risk getting shot.
But lying there awake that night I was in the dumps. You don’t forgive yourself when you’re captured. You feel cheated for being out of the war. You feel down on yourself because you feel that if you’d done your job properly, your men wouldn't be captives. Now my job would be trying to keep them together. I knew that the Germans would probably break us up into officers and noncoms but at least for now we were one group. My biggest fear was that our guys would start to become more individually-oriented -- thinking only of themselves instead of thinking of what we failed to do for the Army. I was afraid the men would become selfish, no longer worrying about how we had failed, instead thinking only of surviving at any price. We had to behave like soldiers or we would shrivel up and die. I was not going to let that happen. It was my job to lead these guys, period. 4100
The next day, under the gun muzzles of the guards, we were assembled outdoors in bitter cold weather. We formed up into groups that stood by the side of the road. A string of German vehicles was parked there. (after our capture, we would soon be supported by a network of PW parents, but we didn’t know that yet.) That morning we marched for an hour, then stopped in the hilly, snow covered country. We were played out. We stank, some of us could hardly stand. We could hear big guns firing in the distance. Then came trouble. A German guard with a big, red, disagreeable face had spotted Dewey’s watch. The guard was tall, squat, wearing snow clothes. He gestured impatiently at Dewey. He held out his hand for Dewey’s watch. I went on alert, but before I could act, Dewey started talking to the guard, telling the guard in German that taking a watch off a prisoner was forbidden by the Geneva Conventions of 1924. Our little bookworm, I thought with pride.
For a moment, the guard looked stunned, then he exploded in fury. His face looked like a red balloon about to burst. Dewey had loosened his watch, his face scared a sick white, and he seemed about to turn it over to the German when Dewey smashed the watch against his helmet, grinding it around, the glass dribbling thinly down like sparkling flour dust. Dewey had moved with incredible suddenness. He dropped the ruined watch in the dirt and stepped on it.
Well, the guard lost it. He started screaming, his blue eyes popping whitely out of his head, veins bursting at his temples, teeth bared, spitting like a sprinkler. Dewey then threw the ruined watch into the wood as far as he could. My soul was filled with wonder and fear. We thought Dewey was going to be shot, as sure as Caesar, when another German came up, a German officer, and told the guard in a stern, severe voice to pipe down and move out.
The enraged, big-faced guard gave Dewey a look of pure murder. I felt deep fear in myself because of the lethal rage in that look.
That night we marched into this town and they put us in a small room of this house, about thirty five of us. They locked us in. We bitched loudly to the guards about not being fed, we had little water, and finally well asleep in a huddle, using our body warmth to keep from freezing. Even at night, we had to wiggle our toes in our boots to keep them from freezing. Well, as you would expect, by morning, we were up to our ankles in excrement. Once again, they hadn’t even given us thunder mugs. Guys would yell, and we’d pass a helmet, but sometimes people wouldn’t make it in time, and a circle would quickly clear while disgusted faces looked way or people held their breath, their eyes and faces crinkled up in distaste. The floor of that room as like the off-putting floor of a stable before we left.
In the morning a door opened, and we streamed out. The sunlight was bright and blinding. The thick clouds had cleared. The air was still bitterly freezing, but it didn’t smell like shit at least. There was a vegetable patch right there by the road, and in spite of fright, weakness and pain, the our guys fell on their all fours and grubbed out carrots and turnips and beets, jamming recklessly them into their hungry mouths until the guards made them stop and stand up.
I took a look at Oakhurst. His face was drawn and hollow eyed. His eyes glassy. He didn’t recognize you. He seemed unable to shake off the deep, lethargic daze he was in. If you spoke to him he just looked at you vaguely, as if you were some object in the distance.
The guards collected us in a crowd, and off we went again. Then, tramping up the icy, winding road, we saw bodies for the first time. They were American. Our hearts contacted instantly. German soldiers, practical jokers, made the dead Americans on their feet or arranged them on their hands and knees, making intricate, fanciful, sculpture groups. The German jokers made the frozen, dead Americans stand with their fists raised or with their fingers spread wide. Some of the bodies looked as if they were running, their heads pulled into their soldiers. We made a vow: we are going to kill them all.
At night, the fields of snow looked blue under the bright moon, and we saw more the dark bodies that stood upright in the snow, placed there by the Kraut jokers. We heard that one of them was in his underwear, wearing a newspaper jersey, of all things.
*******
There was no was organized system of “March and halt,” just a steady, grueling trudging ahead down the hilly, thickly wooded, frozen road. We could still hear big guns in the distance, coming from our rear. By now, we were weak from hunger and exhaustion. Our men in the rear of the column had difficulty keeping up. They would call at us to slow down, but the German guards were poking and prodding us to keep going, and they seemed to have a cruel pride in the exhausting pace they kept up. Fear drove us. We had heard the stories, about how some guy squatting to take a crap and had been bayoneted in the buttocks, so we kept moving.
We all suffered from thirst to a degree that you couldn’t believe. We were down on all fours to drink from puddles of melted snow on the road, and we couldn’t think straight. We were growing uneasy and uncertain. The march was wearing us down. There was just this dull, mechanical tramping sound, a disconsolate slogging as we moved, hearing always the scuffling, and weary traipsing of booted feet. Suddenly stumbling along beside me was Corporal Dewey.
“Sir?”
“What is it, Dewey?” I wasn’t in the best of moods.
“You’ve got the rank. Why don’t you halt the column?” he was out of breath, puffing like a bellows, stumbling along beside me.
“I’m a fucking captain,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“But don’t you see? You are the ranking officer. The German herding us is a sergeant.”
“So?”
Dewey was looking around, pointing at my collar tabs. “So halt the column. You outrank these guards. You know how Germans are about authority. Tell them to halt the column.”
“Halt the column? You mean just stop it?” It seemed entirely ludicrous.
“Pretend the guards aren’t here.”
] I thought. It suddenly made sense.
“Just try it, captain, sir.” Dewey was absolutely dead set on it.’
Halt the column. The idea had real logic in it. That would take some doing. Suddenly I thought, I’m going to halt the column. I turned round and faced the red-faced guard, holding up both my hands. “Halt the column,” I yelled. “Halt and fall out to the right.”
The German guard was stupefied. Others arrived. Several drifted up, guns pointed. There was a knot of them nearby, talking together.
“We’re taking a ten minute break,” I told them.
Several German guards came bustling up, walking very quickly. There was no German officer. I was standing there, in my uniform, trying to look relaxed. I was thinking, “I can do this – I have the balls.” And I did. The problem was that they were up around my ears.
The big-faced guard was incensed. His face looked like angry red wine. Hate was bursting from his eyes. Dewey, at my elbow, said, “Tell him that if you have to control the march we’ll make better time, and they will be better discipline. Tell him that.”
The German shouted something in response, snarling and spitting as he spoke. I was startled. “What the hell was that?” I asked.
“He says he’s going to shoot you,” Dewey said, not looking in the least calm or determined -- he looked scared shitless, but he wasn’t going to budge either.
“You understand German?”
“Some,” he said.
“Tell him I’m leading this march.”
As this was being translated, the German’s eyes widened with incensed astonishment. He advanced on me angrily, and my balls really hit the floor with a thunderous thud. His body was tensely coiled, ready to lash out. But I didn’t scare this time. “Tell him we’re tired. If he’ll let me control the march, we’ll make better time and they will be better discipline. Tell him that I am the ranking officer. Tell him.”
He stared at me then suddenly spun around, screaming, “Trottel Amerikaner.” Idiot American, and then he yelled some more German. We’re dead, I thought.
Dewey, looking nervous as always, looked pleased at the same time. He turned to me. “He says that you’re in charge.”
“I’m in charge?” I couldn’t believe it.
“That’s what he says,” said Dewey watching the guard, his face furious, who was clearly cursing us suddenly was striding stiffly away.
“What was that?” I asked.
Dewey shrugged. “He called us a bunch of stuff.” Then he added, “It’s your column, captain, sir.”
We got more rest breaks.
*********
We finally climbed up the steep cobbled slope and marched into a small village of yellowish stone houses that had sharply peaked roofs, all of them white with snow. The houses stood on both sides of the road, some windows stared like empty eye sockets, while sections of the roof or the front part of the houses looked eaten away. Lots of debris was strewn about the streets. We smelled the stink of bodies under the rubble, the odd, unmistakable smell of decomposition, like honey poured on herring. We went on alert when we saw people leaving their houses to look at us. Mainly they were women, old woman and men and children. As we passed, they spit on us threw stones or vegetables kicked at our legs, the guards holding them back. It was ugly. We just kept walking, Dewey looking all over the place, swallowing, fiddling with a scarf he wore. I saw an old woman looking at me and I saw the wave of hate pass over her face. She screamed something in a harsh voice
“Dewey?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
He was supposed to say, “Sir,’ but I guess he was too tired. 5735
“Did you hear that?”
“The woman?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d she say?”
“She called us murders and assassins and told the guards to shoot us.”
“Oh, great.” I was so glad that I’d asked.
“Well, their town is a bit beat up,” Dewey said. “Our planes did it.”
Once I spotted Oakhurst in the column. He was acting crazy slinking along by the side of the road, making odd whimper noises, his lips working the way a cat curls up his trembling lips when he sees a bird.
*******
Dewey’s mind was a little engine that knew no rest. One day he whispered to me how we could screw up the count. We were counted twice by number, once in the morning, we fell out and made lines, and then again in the evening.
“Listen,” he explained.
“Listen, sir,” I corrected. We were still in the U.S. Army.
“Okay – listen, sir. He was an astute observer, and a small series of unexpected truths had begun to dawn in his mind. “In the morning when we lined up and we count off by number.” I waited. “But we could take a guy and have him step into a line that has already counted, and when the Germans count, they will find one too many guys. Or we…”
“..Dewey,” I began. I was tired.
“…or we could hold a guy back from a line that’s is about to be counted, and when the Krauts found they were one short, they would have to start all over again.”
The astonishing thing was that it worked. It would delay the march by as much as an hour each morning. The Krauts went crazy trying to figure out what was going wrong, until finally an officer came up; and after that, two man were ordered to stand at the end of each line. It was the same German officer who told me my men were brave. He gave me a horrible look.
It was fun while it lasted,” I thought.
******
The group of us had grown. By then, the continued strains of uncertainly were destroying our morale. We had over forty of us now. I was still in command. Some of the original group was missing. We couldn’t find Kevin Clark. I felt a sharp, agonizing pang of sorrow, but then I thought maybe he had gotten lost. I was sure he was with us somewhere in this mess.
One day a group of slave laborers, Poles, I think, slyly gave us raw potatoes. We gobbled them down in an instant. Man, I can still remember how good they tasted! Water became an obsession. Even small streams or springs were contaminated by or human or animal waste. The presence of dead animals in a farm stream was not uncommon. We filled our canteens from streams, then put in Halazone tablets to purify it, which means you’re supposed to wait before you drink it. But the morale of the man was gone and they drank it straight off. They were half-off their heads. Of course, the pills gave them diarrhea, or else they threw them up. Food was always a problem. Rations were scarce. Finally, the guards issued two bags of hardtack per man and a can of cheese to be split among seven people. We had heard stories of some prisoners who had attacked each other and fought over food. The idea disgusted me. Our group was not going too do any such thing. Fighting over food would disgrace our name as American soldiers. I shouted and cursed and yelled to emphasize my point. I wasn’t kidding, either.
We went ahead, heading deeper into Germany.
My feet were numb. I constantly worried about getting trench foot. Only when we stopped, did I realize had badly the pain was in my feet. In addition, the men were worn to a frazzle. They were becoming scrawny. Some walked with a limp. Some just sat down and refused to march. They were shot, of course. You flinched when you heard the shots behind you. You would get lightheaded and your mind would blur and become giddy for a bit. By now, vermin and lice were feasting on us. At any spot where your clothes were tight, lice had infected our clothes. It drove you completely nuts. At night we huddled in a pile to keep warm but the bugs were a plague. Only exhaustion gave us some sleep.
More and more we concentrated on getting food. Some of our guys in the column would pretend to run away, and wile the guards went after them with leash dogs, would race into the fields to dig for roots or potatoes. It was risky business. One morning, while we had stopped, and the guards were smoking, Dewey took off, ran into a field, fell to his knees, and dug into the ground and dug out some beets. He put them into his pockets. He heard the dogs coming after him, and he lay flat on his back, lying still while the dog stood over him, barring big, jagged teeth in a snarl. A guard came over, a typical Kraut type – thin, cruel face, glasses on his nose, and he kicked Dewey hard, twice, and then made Dewey empty his pockets. All the stolen beets were on the ground, and the guard stepped on them. Dewey was roughed up a bit. He came back walking with a limp, holding his side, (I thought he had broken a rib,) but when got to the big faced guard, Dewey reached held out a beet he had hidden in his fist, and he handed to big-face.
The big faced man gazed at it without expression, then yanked it out of Dewey’s hand while covering him with his gun. Big-face then stepped on it crushing it to a smeary lump of mush. Dewey looked at him, then began imitating him, and he too pretended to grind the beet into mush. I thought the guard would kill him, but he just stared at Dewey and let him go back to the ranks. When it was safe, Dewey took several big beets out of his underwear, and we shared it six ways.
Southwick, a rude asinine PFC bitched about his share, accusing us of cheating him. then he started bitching about Dewey's watch. Southwick is one of those guys who thinks he knows it all. “You shouldn’t have pissed off that guard,” he told Dewey. “Now, all he’s doing is waiting for a chance to kill us.”
“Who?” Dewey asked.
“The guard, moron. Why didn’t you give him your stupid watch? What is the watch to you.”
“It was mine,” Dewey said firmly. “Besides, it’s against international law to rob personal possessions, moron,” said Dewey.
“:Yeah? Well now he’s out to kick our ass.”
“Look,” Dewey said, with patience, “look; hell, he’s a miserable as we are, doing all this tramping up and down. The guards are starving too. Have you looked at them lately?”
Southwick got nasty, “He’s a Nazi, you stupid jackass. He’ll kill us and make jokes about it afterwards.”
“He’s just a dumb fuck like the rest of us,” Dewey said.
“You’re the dumb fuck,” Southwick said. “I mean, he’s pissed off because of you: you can feel him right there, waiting.”
“Waiting?” Dewey asked.
“He hates our guts.”
“Wafting for what?” Dewey asked.
“Waiting for us to make a mistake.”
A little later, as Dewey and I hiked up a sloping road, I said, “What do you think of the Germans, Dewey? You think we’ll be okay?”
“They are human beings. You’ve got the brutal, fanatical, vicious ones, but you have others with good hearts. They feel things. Every nation has its villains.”
I hope he’s right, I thought.
******
We were suddenly ordered to climb up into in German military trucks. That took two hours. We bounced and jounced over the road like dice in a cup, cursing and trying to hang on. We are so crammed in, that my knees were doubled up under my chin. We were aching, weak, strengthless. All of us had hollow, dead, empty eyes. A few of the guys hollered for the guards to stop because the gas cans to piss in were full, plus the little patch of straw was useless – too many people had used it already. There was no TP. It was so awful, you hade to avert your eyes. And your nose.
We arrived at a town. We saw neat stone or half-timbered houses, but they had no roofs, or their fronts had collapsed. Dead animals littered the road which was criss-crossed with a network of fire hoses. Our bombers had hit the place two days ago, and they had wrecked the town. The entire town was a burnt, cratered wreck displaying hundreds of burnt out shells of what had once been shops and houses. All the walls of the place had an even, ragged look that resembled someone who had gnawed the edges off of soda crackers. The population seemed numb and dazed. They lined the streets on both sides. We embarked at a little square that was full of other military trucks. The big-faced guard was still with us. Mean as hell still. We soon found out what our work was.
When my men were ordered to do tasks, I would join in. That seemed fair. Once we were assigned to dig corpses out of the collapsed buildings. A few of us were ordered to retrieving the furniture from some of the burning buildings. The rest of us were ordered to dig for the corpses. You could smell them right off – that sweetish honey on herring smell. I can still smell it today. I cant shake it.
I don’t really want to write about the bodies. I remember that in the street, I stepped on something that gave a little; and I could see part of a shirt or a dress. I was then ordered into a building where I saw a dead man. Something had hit him at the waistline, and, the burnt body had been cut in half. Big-faced appeared and indicated I should use my belt and loop it around the corpse. It was surprising how much he could communicate with hand motions. So I looped my felt around the guy’s neck and started to drag him away, but the body broke in half. I lost it then. I was told that I began to scream and yell and dance around. I don’t really remember much, but I was told later that it was big-face who came and calmed me down. I just wanted to get out of there. I didn’t know where Dewey was. But then big-face pointed to a bottle on a table and insisted that I take some big swallows. And I did. But I was made to pick up the upper half of the body and lay it on a stretcher, while another guy, a soldier, grabbed the bottom half. He didn’t like it any better than I did. We carried the remains out into the street and laid them along side several others.
We kept on doing this grisly work, when someone found a refrigerated room in the basement; it was full of meat. Well, we chopped right through the floor, let ourselves down, and began to grab big pieces of ham. Oakhurst went off and ate almost a whole ham by himself. Clearly, it was dangerous to near him; he was hunched over like an animal, wolfing down the ham. I tried to preside over the group, but Dewey thrust a nice piece of ham at me, and I gobbled it down like a kid eating candy of Halloween.
I immediately threw up most of it. My stomach was not used to rich food. And then the ham made me sick. By the next day, the ham had clearly done me in. Out in the street, in full view of German women, children and the elderly soldiers I would suddenly cramp and would race to unbuckled my belt in time and squat right then and there. I couldn’t help it. The big faced guard came up as I was squatting. I was in such pain, my intestines were in hard knot, but nothing came out. I knew then how bad it was. I went faint, pale and sweaty when I got up and refastened my pants only to have to unfasten them again in a panicked hurry.
An old woman spat on me as I squatted.
We were marching to a new building, and I ran to the side of the road and take me pants, and kids would throw stones, and I’d squat, except only a little dribble came out and afterwards, I’d break out in a sweat and start shivering. Dewey had gone up to the big-faced guard, asking in German, “Can you give him something. He’s sick.” The big-faced guard, mean to the gums, moved Dewey back with the muzzle of his rifle. “You’re wasting your time,” I said, “He’d like to see us die. Give it up.”
The men were starving. Living on green soup with a tiny amount of potatoes. I was simply getting weaker all the time. My squatting seizures were not getting any better.
The big faced guard told us to go into a building, prodding us with his gun. We went in. There was a wood fire burning in the stove, and big face pointed out some potatoes there. I watched, grimacing, staying near the door in case I had to rush outside. Dewey, under the eyes of big-face, who was gesturing, put the potatoes to the edge of the fire to cook. I almost wanted to cry. Just help me, I thought. Just help me, you, heartless German prick.
The guards pointed at Dewey making clear he wanted to him push the potatoes closer to the fire.
“Oh, come on,” I pleaded in a helpless, beseeching tone. “Please.” The potatoes were starting to turn black in the blaze.
All the guard’s pent-up hatred, his unexpended spite was coming out. All of his loathing for us. Southwick had been right. This goddamn stupid, Dewey, I thought, grimacing.
“Please, please, please,” I whined bitterly. The guard was making Dewey push to potatoes closer to the fire. Suddenly I had to rush outside. Grimacing with pain, I squatted but only an agonized squirt came out. Almost clear liquid. I waited. Nothing. Big face had watched me. I went back in. shaking and unsure, but by then, I saw the potatoes were all burnt and charred.
I began to cry. In the Army, you can’t cry, but my lips were clenched, and the tears came out anyway.
Then Dewey appeared, holding the charred things, and he told me in a sympathetic voice, “Eat them. Eat them right away.” Big-faced was standing right there too.
“Eat what?” I cried. “There is nothing to eat.” The potatoes ere little scorched rocks.
Dewey bent down. “He wants you to eat them.” Dewey was suddenly all will power.
“ Fuck him,” I said bitterly.
“ I’m not kidding,” Dewey said.
“Eat what? They’re all burnt.”
“He says you’ll feel better.”
I stood up straight, and I ate them to show how stupid the guard was. They tasted like dry charcoal, but I ate them. And Dewey was saying, “I told you, the Krauts were good people.”
I exploded into fury. "He has no soul,” I wailed loudly, indicating big-face. “He’s just puke shit! Tell him that!”
Dewey was talking to big-face who listened with no expression on his face.
Dewey came back.
“It’s for diarrhea,” he said to me. “The potatoes will make you feel better.”
I looked up uncertain, and gazed at big face. There was no smile or anything inviting in his face. But , slowly, he nodded, his blue-gray eyes on my face.
And I did feel better. The cramping seizures came less often. I smelled like a latrine, but so did everybody else. My soul began to fill with wonder. Who would have thought? So he hadn’t wanted to kill us, I thought. He had taken pity on us. He had a good heart.
As we climbed back aboard the trucks, I realized I hadn’t seen Oakhurst for a while. We had finally found Clark, which to me was a huge relief – Clark was a man I thought of with respect and affection, and he was in a bright and animated mood when we talked. I asked him about Oakhurst Clark’s face grew somber. He said Oakhurst had died of diarrhea that night after he’d eaten the ham. He shook his head, sad. But I knew better. It wasn’t sickness that had killed him. His soul had already died., What killed him was the incident with the grenade, making him realize his own powerless and lack of pluck. Oakhurst had to have an audience in order to be brave. He was simply a performer, and the grenade had laid bare the underlying hollowness of his act.
**********
I met Dewey after the war. About eight years had gone past, and I was living in Washington, D.C, when we got together. Dewey had become a teacher. We met at a Chinese restaurant that was on the second floor of this place, and I was sitting at a table when he came up the stairs. He was as cautious as a cat His eyes darted here and there like minnows. But his face brightened when he saw me. He had gotten a bit heavier and wasn’t quite as spooked as before, but he socially was still the most jumpy and award man I’d ever seen.
We were a bit constrained at first, but then the whisky warmed us and before long we were quickened by it, enlivened and became talkative. When we had finished eating, I finally asked him, “Dewey.”
He looked at me. “What?”
“You have to answer me this.”
“Sure.”
“How did you keep going?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean during all those marches. What drove you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s hardly an answer.”
Dewey took thought. “I don’t know. To me, life consists of fighting back. Doing chores at the bidding of others, you may think it builds character, but it deadens and stupefies you. Because the chores have noting do with you. To arouse effort, there has to be something where you feel you have a stake in its outcome.”
Thad made no sense. But I said, “I’ve never heard of life consisting of fighting back. But I want to know. What was truly important for you?”
“To survive. Not only to survive but to live, and not only live, but prevail. All I wanted to do was to lick the goddamn Germans.”
“Wait. Prevail over what?”
“Over everything. Prevail over everything that was happening to us. We couldn’t fight them. We had no weapons. All we had was hardship, starvation – but we could fight those at least. Lack of energy, hunger, fucking lice, numb feet – those things we could fight. The harder the force pitted against you the harder your resistance has to be. It’s only fair that a man lives up to his own standard of character.” He blushed and stopped. “I sound as if I’m giving a speech.”
I took a big sip of whiskey, shaking my head in amazement.
“I still don’t know where you got the strength. “
“I wasn’t strong. I simply refused to give up.”
There was a pause. I looked at Dewey.
“How did you know that Oakhurst wouldn't last?”
“There was something missing in him. I don’t know.”
Well, I began smiling with real gratitude at this man. “You realize you saved my life,” I said in a warm and grateful tone.
“Oh, come on.” He blushed a deeper red.
“Oh, yes you did. You saved my life. I will always be grateful.”
“You’re embarrassing me.” He lowered his eyes, and then looked up at me. “Anyway, the Kraut guard saved your life, not me.”
“How so?”
“It was his idea to feed those potatoes to you. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Did you ever find out who he was?”
“The guard?”
‘The big-faced one, yes.”
Dewey brightened, his face intent. “We write to each other. He’s got a jewelry repair business in Wienersen.” And he smiled a delighted and meaningful smile.
I suddenly thought of how simple human kindness, such as sharing a scrap of bread or a potato with an enemy, is a core of humanity that persists despite all brutality and despair.
“You write to him?” I was quite amazed.
“He tracked me down after the war. “
I was amazed. “No, shit.”
“Oh yeah; we correspond. He’s got a family there. Three children. I just wrote to him the other day. It was his birthday. He was turning forty. I sent him a present.”
“That was very nice of you to do, Dewey. What sort of present, if I can ask?”
“I thought he might need one, Dewey said.
“One what?” I was puzzled.
“A watch,” he said.
And for the first time, a bashful, sly, devilish smile traced itself across Dewey’s mouth.
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