Little of what I recorded in my notebook could be considered memorable or historically insightful, even after Normandy, where we waded ashore in the second wave, the surf a frothy red from the initial assault. War is always a dirty and unglamorous business. Most of it has to do with head colds and body odor and crab lice and trench foot and sleeping in the rain and sometimes throwing your own feces out of a foxhole with your e-tool. But I never hated the army or dwelled on the unnecessary cruelties of my fellow man (Sherman tank crews knocking down farmhouses just for fun). Many of the Southerners in my regiment could hardly read and write. The Northerners believed a factory job in a unionized plant was the fulfillment of the American dream. I admired them and thought most of them were far braver and more resourceful than I. If I had to go off to war with anyone, I could not have picked a better bunch. They were always better than they thought they we
re, no matter how bad it got, and never realized how extraordinarily courageous and resilient they were.
I settled in for the duration and wrote in my notebook more as a reminder of the city where I had bought it than as a process of self-discovery. I’d return to New York, I told myself. I’d have lunch with a beautiful girl in an outdoor café, under an awning, on a cool afternoon in spring, perhaps by a park blooming with flowers. I’d take her dancing, maybe in a ballroom where Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra were playing. And in the morning, I would attend classes at Columbia University, armed with the confidence that I, like Stephen Crane, had faced the Great Death and hence never had to speak of it again. Little did I know that the next few decades of my life would be altered as a result of events that began in an innocuous fashion at the bottom of a hill in the Ardennes Forest, at a time when we believed the Third Reich was done and the lights were about to go on again all over the world.
IN THE FADING grayness of the day, at the bottom of my foxhole, I opened my notebook on my knee and began writing. My field jacket felt as stiff and cold as canvas in subfreezing weather. I heard a pistol flare pop overhead, but inside the gloom it seemed to give off neither heat nor light and, like most day-to-day events in the army, seemed to signify absolutely nothing.
The fog in the trees is ghostly, I wrote, so dense and smokelike and pervasive I cannot see more than thirty yards into the forest. The majority of trees are fir and larch and spruce. In the soil, where there are no snowdrifts, I can see stones that are smooth and elongated like loaves of bread, the kind used to make Roman roads or build a peasant’s cottage. Around me are apple and pear and plum and nut trees that are not indigenous to this forest, and I wonder if an early-medieval farmer and his wife and children swinked in the fields close by, living out their lives to ensure the well-being of the man who lived in a castle atop a hill not far away.
The evening is so quiet I can hear a bough bend and the snow sifting through the branches to the ground. There are rumors that Waffen SS made a probe on our perimeter, within one thousand yards of us. I don’t believe the rumor. SS initiatives are usually accompanied by a large panzer presence. Major Fincher agrees with me. Unfortunately, Major Fincher is widely regarded as a dangerous idiot. At Kasserine Pass he ordered an entire regiment to dig slit trenches instead of foxholes. Tiger tanks overran their position and turned in half circles on top of the trenches and ground sixty men into pulp with their tracks.
Our regiment is made up of National Guardsmen, draftees, and regular army. The officers and enlisted men get along fine. It’s a good outfit. Except for Major Fincher. Someone said the German army has been trying to find him for years in order to award him the Iron Cross. When the joke was reported to Fincher, a corporal had to explain its meaning.
I didn’t get to complete my entry. Sergeant Hershel Pine stuck his head over the pile of frozen snow and dirt by the edge of my foxhole and stared down at me. His narrow face was red with windburn, his whiskers reddish-blond on his cheeks, his helmet fitted down tightly on the scarf tied over his ears. “We got a problem, Lieutenant,” he said.
“What is it?” I replied, placing my pencil between the pages of my notebook, closing the cover.
He slid down into the hole. His breath was fogging, his field jacket flecked with ice crystals. He was carrying a Thompson, three magazines taped together, one of them inserted in the frame. Before he spoke, he rubbed his nose with his mitten to clear the mucus frozen in his nostrils. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger. “Steinberg is coming unglued,” he said.
“About what?”
“Waffen SS don’t take Jewish or wounded prisoners.”
“Send him to me.”
“I say use him on point or get him out of here, sir.”
“On point?” I said.
“If somebody’s got to step on an antipersonnel mine, I say better deadweight than a good soldier, sir.”
“Steinberg is a good soldier, Sergeant.”
He was crouched down on one knee. He dropped his eyes. I knew what was coming. I didn’t hold it against him, but I didn’t want to hear it, either. It was the curse of his kind, in this case a man who was raised on a cotton farm in one of the Red River parishes of central Louisiana, an area notable only for the fact that a mass execution of Negro soldiers by the White League took place there during Reconstruction. “I say better one of them than one of us, Lieutenant,” he said.
“Who are ‘them’?”
“I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say.”
“I’m very interested in what you have to say. Take the crackers out of your mouth, Sergeant.”
“They own the banks. They’re the ones who lent Hitler the money to finance his war machine, sir. Actually, the Krupp family are Jews, aren’t they?”
“Lose the rhetoric, and lose it now. Are we clear about that?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied. He didn’t look up. His eyelashes were as long as a girl’s, his cheeks as bright as apples under his whiskers. I could hear him breathing, trying to hide his anger and distrust of those he would call people of privilege.
“What do your folks do on Christmas Day, Pine?”
His eyes met mine, uncertain. “Pick pecans out on the gallery.”
“What else?”
“My mother usually bakes a fruitcake, and my daddy fixes a big bowl of eggnog and puts red whiskey in it, not moonshine. Me and my little brother and a colored man who works for us go squirrel hunting. The weather is almost always mild on Christmas.”
“That sounds like a fine way to spend the occasion,” I said.
“I need to tell you something, sir.”