The trucks begun to move at dusk, slowly at first and then with gathering speed, passing between the stark spiked shorn tree trunks, their branches and tops blown away by constant artillery, a land laid waste by war.
They were glad to be leaving it. Ravaged, gashed by shell fire, it was a monument to a battle just ended. In time it would to be called the Wood of the Dead for there were still unburied dead and thousands of mines beneath its wreckage.
Some of them had fought there. They remembered the wet and the cold, the gloom and the misery.
They had survived The Forest, but they had not yet escaped the war. Still in its grip this February night, they hunched forward on the wooden seats of the truck, Foster and his squad, as the convoy groped its way toward the paved road.
They rode silently jostling casually against one another.
They could have been any squad in any division, but they did not think of themselves that way. Instead they were one, a unity, the second squad of the second platoon and this was their home, their only home. When it moved, they moved, when it stopped they stopped. It was their only real identity.
They had camped in the middle of a battery of heavy artillery. As they pulled out the battalion’s guns groaned, their muzzle flashes lit the sky and blasts of sound crashed against their ears.
“Battery one round,“ someone said in the darkness. No one challenged this.
Then except for the truck motors it was silent.
No moon shone, but it was clear enough to see the stars. Although they did not know it, to the north and south hundreds of other units were moving, too, threading their way toward the Roer, still just below flood stage because of the broken dams upstream. The spring offensive had begun.
Foster thought of the stars for awhile, remembering that these same points of light shone above the home in California he had almost forgotten and on Kansas and Pennsylvania and Georgia and New York, the homes of his men.
His men!
For the first time he was in charge of the lives of others. For the first time he was a squad leader. According to the Table of Organization this should have meant he commanded eleven other men, but there were instead only eight. In their stay in the Forest the platoon had not been received enough replacements to raise its ranks to full strength. Instead of four men, he got only two, both just 18, Tracer and Brunning. He did not know much about them. Tracer was short, wore thick glasses, smiled nervously without saying much and had just graduated from high school. Brunning was a head taller and heavier and spoke with a Georgian drawl. He preceded most sentences with “Man.”
Foster did not know either of the new men’s first names. But he knew if he or they lasted long enough he might.
But this was not uppermost in his mind. Instead most of what he thought of was fear. As in every attack the future rushed at him like a dark glass, a murky window. It separated him from death. It was his vision, a vision he shared with no one. Beyond the glass were shapes he sometimes thought he could see, but they were never clear, never clearer than the fear of death. He thought of this and he thought of the terror that came with an attack, of pushing forward into the unknown, of expecting hostile fire, of feeling naked and alone, as if he were required to use his body and nothing else to drive the enemy backward. His stomach contracted.
Green, next to him, mumbled an obscene curse, although Foster knew Green did not view it as such. War was obscene in itself and obscene curses were a part of it. They were embedded in each day. No one heard them any more.
“Can it,” Foster said.
Green grumbled a few sentences more and then was silent... |
