Faster and faster the shells came as if Satan himself urged the gunners on. Shell fragments, rocks, and clumps of dirt rained down. The air became nothing but acrid, choking dust filled with confusing, terrorizing sound.
I lay there, hugging the ground and holding my steel helmet in an iron grip. At last I spotted a few feet away, a small crease in the earth, a tiny mark of erosion barely three inches lower than the soil I was burying my face in. But three inches looked like the Grand Canyon, and I wormed my way toward the crevice and wriggled into it.
From somewhere came an occasional scream as jagged shell fragments struck a human mark, but I found that strangely I was not frightened. I kept comparing it to the training problems we had run with the 63rd Division back at Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi, and I expected it would end at any moment. A poor comparison, but it occupied my thoughts and spared me the full impact of what was actually happening. The dust choked, and the pungent fumes from exploding powder burned my throat. From a dirty pocket I pulled a package of Charms, the fruit-flavored candy drops that came with some of our rations. Very slowly and deliberately I unwrapped one and popped it into my mouth—it tasted good.
Jerry eventually either tired of plastering us or decided to conserve his ammunition. With the lull, men started to stream back from the head of the column around the farm buildings we were trying to take. I knew they were from Company F, Jack’s company, but for a long time I looked in vain for Jack among those who were fleeing.
It was only after another ear-splitting barrage of nauseating fury had come and gone that I spotted Jack. He saw me at almost the same time, rushed over, and flopped on the ground beside me.
It was more than good to see Jack. I wanted to jump up, say to hell with the Germans, and clap him on the back. We had been apart no more than a week now and not really apart at that, for with a luck uncommon to two friends in a big, cold, impersonal army, we had somehow landed in the same battalion, Jack a rifle platoon leader in Company F, me a machine gun platoon leader in Company H. On the other hand, for the past week we might have been engaged in two different wars for all we had seen of each other. I had watched from a distance that morning as Company F moved out toward the farm buildings and had known that somewhere in that mass of men was Jack, but I couldn’t know which of the incredibly slow-moving brown spots in the big, open field was he. Then my platoon, attached in support of Company G, had begun to advance, and life suddenly became too complex for me to spend time trying to determine which brown spot was my friend.
In a few words Jack told me how not only his platoon but all of Company F had taken a licking from the shelling and machine gun fire. His company commander had ordered withdrawal.
Reluctantly—for we would have liked to stay together—Jack left to round up his platoon. I watched uneasily as he dashed across the field in bounds until at last he disappeared behind a rise in the ground. I wanted to follow, to get the hell off this ex-posed slope, to go some place—any place. But up ahead of me were the men of Company G, and I had to keep close—ready on a moment’s notice to signal my machine gunners to positions from which they could fire in support of the riflemen ahead.
Again the enemy shelling increased in intensity. Shell fragments whined close and I got a strange, uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach which no amount of Charms would dissipate. For the first time in my life I was scared, really scared. I felt naked and alone.
I began to crawl around, looking for better protection than that afforded by the little crevice. The dust choked me. One shell exploded particularly close, filling my mouth, my nose, and my eyes with dirt. I could do nothing but chew harder on the candy and search harder for a protected position. I finally found a partially completed foxhole partly under a fallen tree. With unabashed relief, I threw myself into the bottom of it.
I scarcely had time to examine my new surroundings before I saw a man crawling toward me. He was bleeding from wounds in the thigh and hip. Blood covered his torn uniform. Dragging his legs, he made his way slowly, painfully toward me. I watched him, transfixed.
“Help me, Lieutenant,” he moaned, drawing slowly closer. His voice was frighteningly plaintive. “Help me! Please help me!”
I stared at the man in amazement. The blood seemed to rush from my head to my stomach, and my insides churned in confusion. This man wanted me to leave the hole I had just found and go again into the open to help him! The thought put my brain in a whirl. All I could think was that he wanted me to become as bloody and helpless as he was.
For perhaps half a minute, or maybe it was an eternity, I stared at the man, unblinking, unmoving. My mind was a turmoil of contradictions. I knew I had to help him, but I wanted to hide. I hated him for finding me. Why did he have to find me? It wasn’t a problem at Camp Van Dorn any longer. We never had this kind of realism at Van Dorn, bloody, helpless men struggling on their bellies while the shells rained down—this was for keeps. Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I began to tremble.
The man opened his mouth to speak, and it was a cry from some other world.
“Help me, Lieutenant!”
His words slowly penetrated my senses. I knew what I had to do. I forced myself to begin to climb from the hole. The lead left my feet and I found my heart again.
I dragged the man close to my hole and looked at his wounds. They were bad. I knew I had to get a medic, but a quick glance told me that while I had been occupied with my search for protection, everybody else had left. There was nothing to do but head for the rear and take the man with me.
Slowly, laboriously, I helped him move. I could hear the shelling start again, but I couldn’t take time to look where they were landing. A burst of machine gun fire tore into the ground up ahead of us. I wanted to hit the dirt, but dared not stop. Another burst sounded, but the bullets hit well off to our right.
It was a long, slow, arduous journey until at last we came to a religious shrine, a cross which stood by the side of the road that had served as our line of departure that morning. I eased my burden into a ditch and called out for medics. Other men passed my call along to the rear.
When the medics came, I watched them place the man on a stretcher. I never did find out his name or his company or where he came from, but that wasn’t important. What was important was that he didn’t know the tremendous turmoil his sudden appearance had caused in my life.
I hoped he might never know.
In some respects it seemed like weeks had passed since I had left my platoon at seven that morning, yet in other ways I had been so occupied that it hardly seemed any time at all. I found most of my men just where I left them, but my platoon sergeant was missing. One section leader, a soft-spoken Georgian, T/Sgt. Arthur M. Clarke, explained his absence.
“Lieutenant,” Clarke said slowly, “Jim left. The first time that machine gun fired he handed me his tommy gun and said he couldn’t take it any more. He took off.”
I listened—stunned.
“He said for me to take charge of the platoon,” Clarke continued. “That crazy Indian left with him.”
I could hardly believe it. The platoon sergeant was the same man who, less than a week before when I had first joined the platoon, had stepped forward, his eyes shifting a bit, and regaled the replacements who had arrived with me.
“Listen, you guys,” he had barked harshly, “I don’t want any of you guys to turn yella, see? A yella belly sonofabitch is worse than a damn Jerry! If you see a man turn yella and run, shoot him in the back like a dirty damn dog!”
I had been shocked and could see by the faces of the new men that they too could hardly believe what they had heard. Yet I too was new, a replacement officer; the sergeant had been with the outfit a long time. Perhaps he knew his business.
“Well, Sergeant,” I had said, not really to him but to those men he had threatened without cause, “anyone can see we don’t have any of that kind in our group. I’m sure we’re going to have the best platoon in the regiment.”
Those few words had appeared to ease the situation, but I hadn’t forgotten. Now, as Sergeant Clarke told me what happened, Jim’s words to the new men came rushing back, mocking. I swore at myself, angry that I had not told him off with the harsh words that had welled up within me that first day.
“This,” I thought, “was the man who was going to shoot the first ‘yella belly’ in the back.”
I knew that Jim had incurred a touch of battle fatigue in the engagement the company had been through just before I arrived, but he also had been to the medics for rest and treatment and had been returned as fit for duty. There was no denying that to leave the platoon this way was plain desertion, and the penalty for desertion in the face of the enemy could be death!
Looking along the column of men lying in the ditch, I wondered how Jim’s leaving had affected their spirits.
“Hey, Lootenant,” one of the men shouted, “is that the guy who was going to shoot us in the back?”
A chorus of similar remarks reassured me. These men would hang on with their teeth, if for no other reason than to prove they had more guts than their spineless Platoon Sergeant.
“Perhaps,” I reflected to Sergeant Clarke, “it’ll be for the best. I hate to do it, but I’m going to have to court-martial him. You can’t let a man get away with something like that.”
I hardly had time to designate Clarke as the new platoon sergeant when Jerry started throwing more artillery at us. As the fire grew heavier, men from the rifle companies began to stream past us toward the rear. Word had been passed along, they said, to pull back, but no one had stopped to verify the source. What began as a sudden withdrawal suddenly turned into a full-scale rout. In unbridled panic they fled down the road toward a woods about two hundred yards behind us.
Their fear threatened to spread like a disease to my platoon. Eyeing the running troops, the men turned to me with restless anxiety. One of the squad leaders came to me.
“Lieutenant, my men think we ought to get out of here too.”
“Our orders,” I replied, making sure my voice reflected no uncertainty, “were to follow G Company, sergeant. G Company is still up there, and we stay with them. If they pull back, then we’ll follow, but not before.”
Another sergeant joined us and said his men were worried too.
“Just where do they want to go?” I asked.
Both sergeants pointed toward the woods behind us where the riflemen were fleeing.
“No,” I said. “We’re doing O.K. here. Not a man hit. We’ll mount the machine guns to cover their pull-back and stay where we are. I promise you, if G Company comes back, we’ll go too.”
With reluctance, they passed along my orders, but as the shelling continued and even increased, the urge to join the dash for better protection grew visibly stronger. With every shell the men were becoming more and more dissatisfied and I was beginning to weaken a bit in my own resolve when at last the fire lifted. But it did not stop. It shifted to the woods behind us just as the bulk of the fleeing riflemen got there.
Then all hell broke loose. It was the heaviest, most concentrated firing of the day. Though the woods was too far away for us to see the terrible damage of the shelling, we could hear the screams of those caught in the deadly combination of flying splinters and shrapnel,
The men in my platoon looked back at the woods and then at each other.
“Is that where you fellows wanted to go?” I shouted.
No one answered.