Shrapnel Page 8

  After that, the Colonel says we’re brave boys, and he’s going to put us in for bronze stars, but, of course, he never does.

  In the attack the next morning, it turns out there’s literally nothing out there for about three miles. The troops move ahead and nothing happens, no enemy action at all, the Krauts have pulled out. The Colonel gets a silver star for the advance, so he isn’t about to take away his glory by giving us bronze stars. Of course we’re convinced by now we deserve them, but we don’t make a stink. That’s the way it is in the army. We’re not complaining too much, we’re just glad to be alive.

  In fact, Wilkins and I start worrying that they’re going to find us out. What in heaven’s name do they do to people who bring back false information? Hang them as traitors, torture them, fire them?

  The strange thing is that after this attack, which goes on for almost four days, we mire down again in the mud, pure ineptitude and fear as far as we can figure. A kind of inertia sets in, everybody begins to see something behind every hill, bump or tree. Also, we have time to think. The Germans are doing the same thing too, probably.

  We settle down and stay there for almost a week and this is just before we moved out to the Ardennes for some R&R, rest and recuperation.

  We have some pretty bad things happen to the I&R around Metz because we have other patrols, one horrible one, in which we lose some of the Second Squad and Thompkins is killed. Four members on that patrol never come back.

  We’re pulled into reserve. We actually pull back to our original lines. Somebody with a ruler must have drawn a nice straight line and decided to get rid of all the little bumps, including our forward one. We lose all the gain we made. All this scared-ness, all this effort, all this everything, absolutely for nothing.

  THE GALOSHES CAPER

  It’s near my nineteenth birthday now, and we’re near Metz. It’s just continually raining. There’s no way to get dry, the big worry is trench foot. That is, it’s a worry for the few people out to win the war. For us, getting trench foot and being sent back to some hospital sounds like a special kind of heaven. Guys start sleeping in their wet socks and boots, hoping and praying. Trench foot looks as if your toes have turned black and you have gangrene. I guess, in a certain sense, that’s what’s happening. We’re hearing all the time about how at the hospital they need to cut off toes or sometimes an entire foot. Most of us consider losing a few toes a small price to pay if we get to snuggle into a warm cosy hospital bed, miles away from this insane scene, and more importantly, have a chance to live.

  But the officers find out about guys trying to get trench foot on purpose so they give lectures and demonstrations about not sleeping with boots on, taking our socks off, wringing them out, wearing them next to our chests to dry when we sleep and then changing them every day. But that won’t stop trench foot, if all day long we’re in mud with boots that absolutely soak up the water and just about every night we need to spend a minimum two hours on guard in a foxhole filled with water.

  So, they bring up old time galoshes with clips on them that fit into slits and then are bent over. The trouble is they rattle. It’s the kind of galoshes I used to wear to school in the winter as a kid. When we wear them they make more noise than a tambourine. Guys start throwing the galoshes away. They’d rather have trench foot than get shot. I can relate to that.

  Next the word is sent out, that anyone who gets trench foot will be court-martialled and given a dishonourable discharge. Everybody’s caught between a black foot and a hard place. But intentional trench foot goes on anyway.

  Now I, personally, have a slight foot fetish. The calcaneus spur thing is quite enough. The idea of having black toes, or a foot cut off, is something I can’t live with. I’m trying to figure out a way to live and keep my toes. I come up with a crazy solution. I hunt around until I find a pair of galoshes somebody’s thrown away, much bigger than I usually wear, about size fourteen. They’re regular boats and a boat is just what I think I need. I try to dry out my own boots some, mostly by wiping them on my sopping blanket, then look around for someone with my boot size, eight and a half C, who’s ready to trade four pair of reasonably dry socks for my boots. I convince this guy in L Company he can keep one pair of boots in the fartsack with him drying while he’s wearing the other pair.

  After I make the trade, I have eight pair of fairly dry socks. I put them on all at once and then slide my enlarged feet into my enlarged galoshes. I wiggle my toes around in there, then sleep with galoshes and socks in my fartsack tucked up against my stomach or between my legs. There’s hardly enough room for the rest of me, but it works great. I make too much noise walking around, but my feet are comfortable. Every night I take off the galoshes and all the socks. The inner socks are generally dry. I sleep with all the socks tucked under my shirt. It works like a charm.

  That is, it works like a charm until Sergeant Ethridge notices how big my feet look. Under pressure, I explain. He says I’d better get my boots back or he’s telling the Captain how I’m trying to get trench foot. What a moron. Three days later I slip the boots off one of the line company men who’s dead. He’s lying in the mud with a piece of shrapnel in his neck. The boots are size twelve D, almost like galoshes, and I wear them with all my socks. So, I escape Ethridge and trench foot. I’m pretty proud of myself until things get worse and a few toes missing doesn’t sound so bad. Being in the infantry can certainly change one’s priorities.

  Another hard part about the mud is trying to keep the jeeps from getting stuck in it. We have chains on all the jeeps, but this mud is like thick glue, dark brown and deep. It’s so deep that when we’re trying to go over a hill off road in a field, one jeep pulling an equipment trailer gets stuck. We send another jeep to pull it out. This jeep gets stuck, too. Finally, we have six jeeps with two trailers stuck in that mud. Some of the chains need to be put on in the mud, another job for the I&R. We’re all pushing, shoving and pulling, but the wheels keep spinning. The end is when the differential and axle sink into the mud. That’s it. Also, my varicocele isn’t happy. That doctor should be out here in the mud pushing and slipping with me.

  In the end we need to contact a tank battalion in our sector to have them come over to pull the jeeps out. It’s all very humiliating, as well as tiring. I wake up the next morning so stiff I can hardly move. It sounds like out of the frying pan into the fire, but we’re all glad when the weather turns cold and the mud freezes. At least we can walk along reasonably well and there’s no more trench foot. Also, the jeeps manage to buck their way over the frozen bumps.

  MIKE HENNESSY

  Not long after this, we go to relieve the Twenty-Eighth Division, The Yankee Division. They’ve just finished trying to charge up a hill on the old Maginot Line, now turned around to face the French. They had a really bad time, trying to retake the French forts in and around Metz. The Germans had turned the forts around against the French and improved the basically inept French design in many ways. One regiment of the Twenty-Eighth tried getting up the hill, which is, in reality, an underground fort. They slogged and crept through mine fields and past dug-in bunkers. It must have been frightening. Practically the whole regiment is wiped out. It’s like the charge of the Light Brigade in some kind of a stupid old time war.

  Most people in our outfit are not too happy about charging up any hills. But I have a personal relationship with one member of this division.

  When I was in elementary school, there was a young Irish boy named Mike Hennessy. He’d been left back a few times; he wasn’t much of a student. That’s putting it mildly, he was a Neanderthal. He had blue eyes, heavy black brows and black hair, he was somewhat stunted in growth, about the size all of us in the sixth grade were, when he should have been in the eighth. I was tenth, because I’d been double promoted once. He was fourteen and had to shave. The joy in his life seemed to be taking the joy out of my life. He was a real bully. I spent all of my recesses running around the school building trying to escape Mike Hennessy. One ti
me he caught me, turned me upside down, pushed my head into the toilet and flushed it. I’ve never felt comfortable being in water since.

  I hadn’t thought much about Mike Hennessy in almost ten years. He left that school or I moved away, I don’t know which. I didn’t care too much as long as he was gone. They might have thrown him out of school, or he ran away; maybe they put him in reform school, he was always stealing things, letting air out of tyres, breaking windows, general mischief. He definitely needed reforming. But just by accident, while I was in Fort Jackson, South Carolina, I met Mike Hennessy in the PX. He was easy for me to recognise. I’ll never forget that brutal low-browed, long lipped, Irish face. He was in the Twenty-Eighth Division.

  We shook hands, and here we are, both grown up, more or less, and he’s two or three inches shorter than I am, and he actually even weighs less than I do. It doesn’t seem possible. Even though the relationship of elementary school is gone, we could never be friends because he’s as vulgar and stupid a man as he was a boy. He’s almost drunk when I meet him, on three point two beer, yet. He’s very definitely not the kind of person I can relate to. But we have a beer together for old times’ sake. I realise he couldn’t have been in a reform school or the army would never have drafted him, but he still looks like someone somebody ought to reform.

  When we come up to relieve the Twenty-Eighth, on that steep hill near Metz, we all know what’s happened and are scared. Luckily, someone has finally gotten smart, checked with the French and found how, for this particular fort, the one we’re going to attack, Fort Drion, there are only two water sources, or wells. The sources fill great reservoirs dug inside the hill. These forts are really underground warrens. There’s even an underground railway for moving guns and equipment. We find that out later. There are holes dug out in the sides of the hill to concrete bunkers. The sight of it is enough to scare anybody.

  All of us in I&R are convinced they’re going to send some of us up that hill to snoop around, find out where the bunkers are. We don’t sleep much.

  But the French tell us where the hidden springs are, so we poison them. Just like that. The glories of war. I don’t know how, but somehow the Germans find out, maybe because people are dropping dead all around them and somebody guesses.

  As soon as we arrive, the first thing I do is go see if Mike Hennessy has survived the ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’. I go asking around the busy grave registrars on the Twenty-Eighth. Finally I find someone who knew him and is pretty sure he’d been hit. They’ve pulled most of the bodies down from the hill, I believe they even arrange a sort of truce for doing this.

  Sure enough, there’s Mike Hennessy stretched on the ground, his head sticking out of a body bag. It’s a terrible shock to see someone who’s been such a menace in your childhood, such a symbol of violence, unfairness and fear, who took so much of the joy away from your life, lying there empty, bloody, spattered with dirt particles and shrapnel pitted into his skin. He’s white and blue, his whole shoulder blown off and his arm more or less tucked back in beside his body. The body bag is, in reality, a fartsack. He’s still wearing his wool knit cap over his dark curly hair. One of his dog tags has been jammed in his mouth between his teeth. I’m not even nineteen years old yet, and Mike Hennessy is dead. Some things are hard to live past.

  CAPTURE

  Half of us are dug in on the hill, checking that the Germans don’t come out of the fort. When they do sneak down, we shoot or capture them. Meanwhile, the other half of us are sleeping in a wooden barracks which had been the housing for the French soldiers when they manned the fort. It’s a rather comfortable arrangement because there are bunks. Compared to what we’ve been having up till now, it’s an incredibly safe, clean situation. We spend our time trying to scrape or wring the mud and water out of everything we own. We’re all relaxed and enjoying ourselves; playing cards, shooting craps, reading, sleeping.

  One night, I’m on guard at the barracks. It’s only a two hour guard. We have six hours off and two on; very light duty. I’m leaning against a wall. There’s a great grilled gate and I’m supposed to stop anyone from coming in. I’ve been told not to lean against the grille. I don’t know why. The instructions are, I’m supposed to snap to and stand up with my rifle at ‘ready’ when any officer comes by; also keep anyone else without a special pass from going in. It feels something like toy soldiers, but I’m still shaking inside from Mike Hennessy.

  I’m standing guard, half asleep, when someone taps me on the shoulder. I turn around and there’s a German soldier with his hand out holding a canteen cup! I back off, unslinging my rifle from my shoulder. He seems unarmed and gets across to me by putting the canteen cup to his lips that all he wants is water. He’s pale and his lips are dry and puckered. He’s apparently snuck down from the fort somehow.

  I push my rifle at him. He puts his hands on his head, still holding the canteen cup. I take him prisoner and start to bring him in. It turns out he has three buddies with him, they’d snuck down the hill, too, because they’re dying of thirst. These guys join us and I march them back to the MPs. I give them all water from my canteen before handing them over. The next day the massive surrender occurs, and I keep thinking about how easily I could be as dead as Mike Hennessy. I had a canteen full of water hanging on my belt. That German soldier could have just killed me and taken the canteen, but he didn’t.

  FRANKLIN

  After Metz, we have a new member come into the platoon. We need replacements and there’s a constant changing of personnel as the normal death and wounded become more a part of our lives, and deaths. I’m getting more nervous all the time.

  This replacement is quartered in my tent although he’s already a T4, that is, the equivalent of a buck sergeant.

  His name is Kurt Franklin and he’s small, not more than five feet seven and wears glasses, not military metal rimmed glasses, but rimless. They make him look like a bank clerk or at least a company clerk. He has curly, short black hair. I can’t figure why they put him in with me. Maybe they think I need some supervision after all the craziness with the forts, the gathering of the weapons, and most of all, the capture of all those prisoners. Also, I think they’re beginning to catch on that I’m so scared.

  The two of us are at about the same level of sloppiness, so as soldiers we don’t get on each other’s nerves. With us, it’s sort of ‘live and let live’ as much as our situation has room for such an easygoing lifestyle.

  My first impression is that he isn’t just an ordinary soldier. For one thing, he’s smarter and quieter. This is reinforced when they don’t assign him to any particular squad position in the platoon. He isn’t made Assistant Platoon Sergeant, either, although his rank would fit that job, and the assistant is in the hospital with measles.

  He isn’t assigned to any other company duties, either. And being assigned to Regimental Headquarters, with no duties, is about as close as one can get to being a civilian.

  So, Kurt is a mystery to me and everyone else. I have a mystery tent mate. The whole squad keeps making guesses about who and what he is, but nobody comes up with anything.

  We know he’s called into the Regimental Headquarters tent often enough, even more than Anderson the I&R platoon leader. Twice, our main platoon rumour-monger, Miodoser, approaches Anderson and asks about Kurt, but Anderson only ignores him. How could anybody ignore Miodoser? He can be such a pest. So, after that, we leave well enough alone.

  Then the first of the new two-man night patrols is assigned. It turns out I’m to go out with Franklin and try to find just where the German Regimental Headquarters has been established. It’s not an I&R patrol, this is obviously a Tiger patrol, not our job. Somebody got mixed up. But, we go out just as it’s getting dark. Kurt insists we leave in single file with me about a hundred yards behind him. This is not a normal patrol formation. Nothing is the way it should be. He waits till we’re about two hundred yards out, going the wrong direction, as far as I’m concerned. I can hardly even see him, but I
realise he’s stopped after we’ve passed what was supposed to be the frontier outpost. He sits down beside a fallen tree and pulls a map out from under his shirt.

  This, too, is something new. Sure, on patrols we sometimes have maps, but rarely do we actually take an official S2 generated map out with us. It’s considered a serious security error. So, I sit with Kurt, sharing a security error beside a fallen tree.

  He spreads the map out in front of us, holding down the corners with a few rocks. He looks over at me and smiles.

  ‘Well, Will, what do you think of all this?’

  What do I say to a question like that? I decide to just tell the truth.

  ‘I think this might be the dumbest patrol I’ve ever been on and we could be killed any minute now just sitting here out in plain sight.’

  He smiles again.

  ‘You could be right. But I’ll explain it all to you. You’ve been chosen as my special assistant in field interrogation. I work with the CIC, Civilian Interrogation Corps, and I’m really a First Lieutenant. You’ll be getting a promotion to tech sergeant in a few days, but you’re not to sew any stripes on or tell anybody until I give the word. Have you got that?’

  I did not ‘have’ it and didn’t want to, but he explains it all again and in detail.

  ‘As you’ve probably guessed, we’re coming to the end of this miserable war. There are many prisoners being taken all across the front. My family comes from Germany. I was born there and didn’t leave until I was nine years old. In other words, I speak accentless German. My father and two little sisters didn’t get out. I was brought out by my mother and grew up in New Jersey. We’ve never heard from the rest of my family. As far as we can tell, they were probably killed by the Nazis, and just because my father was Jewish.’