Silver Stars (Front Lines 2)

“The Krauts will counterattack, try to push us out,” he says. “So we don’t let ’em. Castain, check that Kraut MG.”

“Barrel’s bent,” Jenou reports. “And the ammo’s mostly cooked off from the phosphorous.”

“Okay, Cat, get the BAR set up here.” Cat has inherited the BAR. He points to the crawl hole that forms the entry to the bunker. “Get as far up as you can without exposing yourself.” Then, to Rio, “Richlin, up on the roof, take Geer with you. The rest of you, dig in on both flanks.”

Rio climbs atop the bunker, up onto logs covered with mud held together by straw that had been crushed down into the seams between logs. It’s not a comfortable firing position, prone on those logs, but it gives her a good field of fire. Without needing to discuss it, Rio takes the left, Geer the right. Twenty yards away, Jenou digs a hole with Pang, and on the other side, Geer’s side, Beebee digs in with Jack. Stick stays in the bunker to help feed Cat and watch the firing hole, which now points back toward their own forces, but which might be turned by determined Germans.

It is not much of a position, Rio reflects, but farther away on both flanks the Americans are making similar preparations for the counterattack, which is not long in coming.

This time it’s the Germans who favor smoke to cover their assault. They appear like creatures from a nightmare, emerging from smoke and fog, their Schmeissers chattering, their Mausers pop-pop-popping, tossing their twirling, baton-like grenades.

Cat’s BAR erupts first, followed instantly by the rifles and carbines of the rest of the squad.

Mortar teams start dropping their bombs on the advancing Germans with decent marksmanship that blows holes in the smoke and produces screams of pain.

Rio aims and fires, aims and fires, aims and fires, and for every two rounds she fires, a German soldier falls dead or wounded. Geer beside her is, as usual, cursing as he shoots, but shoot he does and with some accuracy.

Days of mud. Days of rain and cold. Days of cold canned food. And above all, days of helplessly marching into prepared positions to be gunned down. It all forms a burning core in Rio’s heart, and at last, at long last, the boot is on the other foot. Now she is the one with some cover. She is the one with altitude. She is the one who can lie there taking aim and taking a life with a twitch of her right index finger.

They keep coming, even as a welcome breeze wafts the smoke away and multiplies Rio’s targets.

She kills and laughs, kills and yells, “Hah!” She kills and yes, yes it is pleasurable, yes, she is enjoying it. Yes, each time one of the gray-uniformed Kraut bastards drops she exults, she gloats, and aims and fires, curses when she misses and bares her teeth each time her bullet finds German flesh.

A chant has started off to the right somewhere, voices yelling, Die! Die! Die! and for a while the squad takes it up, yelling, “Die!”

Rio hears Jenou’s voice, her husky alto yelling “Die! Die!” as Jenou stands in her thigh-high hole, stands foolishly exposed but heedless, her carbine level, muzzle blazing, brass flying away, magazines dropped, and new ones popped in.

It is pure and clean: infantry against infantry, rifle against rifle, and Rio pops in a new clip and fires again and again, a chest here, a head there, a scream, a gurgle, a wounded man flinging down his rifle to run away and taking Rio’s round in his spine, a coward’s wound.

Now the German advance wavers. They are tripping over the bodies of their own dead. Someone, somewhere, maybe the captain, maybe just some keyed-up GI, yells, “Advance!”

Up come the Americans, up out of foxholes, out of their appropriated German bunkers, up from the slick banks of the river behind, men and women in dirty green, walking forward firing from hip and shoulder, and the Germans break.

A fell roar goes up, an animal sound, a brutal, murderous noise that tears from hundreds of throats, from hundreds of GIs tired of taking it and lusting to dish it out.

Cat Preeling, looking like some comic book illustration, her helmet gone somewhere, her BAR at her hip, walks forward like the messenger of doom, firing and yelling something wordless.

It can’t last long, they all know it in their hearts, all except the green kids. This is the Wehrmacht on the run, but the Wehrmacht never runs except to reach yet another prepared defensive position.

They push the Germans back a quarter mile before reaching the next line of bunkers and firing positions, and there the disciplined German fire forces them back down into the mud.

34

RIO RICHLIN—MONTE CASSINO, ITALY

They take the next German position, and the one after that. Day after day the rain falls and the mud slides and the artillery drops out of the sky and maims and kills.

Day after day, night after night, one firefight after another, they move along the ridges that lead to Monte Cassino, to the taking of that great and terrible massif with its gloomy, ethereal monastery.

Three times Stick has asked Lieutenant Stone, who has reappeared after treating a minor wound, to demand they be taken off the line. Three times Stone has told him that the captain isn’t having it, because the colonel isn’t having it and the general isn’t having it.

The squad moves like zombies, no longer capable of conversation, no longer really capable of thought. They fire and throw grenades and they fall in the mud and lie there, so gone, so destroyed they might as well be dead. And yet, they rise when Stick calls them or shoves them or kicks them, and they advance.

Everyone is sick. Some have picked up malaria, others have dysentery, there are cases of pneumonia and frostbite. Men and women alike find their feet have gone numb, the flesh a puffy, disintegrating white. They urinate and defecate in their fighting holes rather than risk a sniper’s bullet and sleep in their own filth. They are no longer men and women, they are beasts, unshaven, dirty, stinking, grunting beasts.

Sometimes a soldier has had enough and simply throws down his or her weapon and walks toward the rear. Some keep walking until they get back to Naples, where many hide or join in black market activities. But most who walk away come back after a day or two. It upsets the officers, but the GIs understand—they all know it could be them in a week, or a day, or an hour.

Rio no longer has any sense of how many days have passed, no clear notion of how far they’ve advanced, and very little hope of something that could be called victory. Sometimes, from some positions, she can look up and see the monastery through the rain, and it never seems any less far away. The more they push toward it, the farther away it seems, for after each hill, there is another hill; after each German position, there’s another. On and on, and endless repetition, always moving forward and somehow never getting anywhere.