This Light Between Us: A Novel of World War II

Mutt gazes at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Nah,” he says softly. “You’re not, brah. You’re not.”

Sometime after midnight the artillery shells start up in earnest again. A macabre display of rumbling lights that strobe over the cratered, befouled forest. Rain falls heavy in this eternal night.

54

OCTOBER 29, 1944

FORÊT DOMANIALE DE CHAMP, FRANCE

The gray dawn vomits its light over the ravaged forest. Those who are alive stumble out of the trenches. Their drenched clothes and skin are the color of sewage, and where soldier ends and forest begins, there is no telling; sometime during the night they have become congealed into a wet sop.

Some cannot even walk. They crawl out, hoping to stamp some life into their trench feet. Others don’t bother. They begin the long crawl back, two miles over mud and tree roots and fallen trunks through ribbons of fog and down the mountain to the aid station.

Alex stares at his left boot for a long time. Gritting his teeth, he wrenches the boot off. His foot balloons out, a bloated mess. He tenderly peels off the wet sock. The skin is a dark blue, almost black, with a waterline on his shin matching the level of water in his boot. Dotted around his ankle, like eyes, are red blotches of open weeping.

“Damn,” Mutt whispers, looking down. He sticks his hand under his uniform, removes a balled-up pair of socks from his armpit. “Here. Dry and warm, right out of the oven.”

“The fresh scent of BO come free?” Alex says, putting it on gratefully. He balls up his wet socks, stuffs them into the pit of his underarm. His swollen foot is near impossible to cram back into his boot. “There,” he says finally, his eyes damp with pain. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

Minutes later, K Company pushes forward. Reluctantly. What they want is to retreat. Or at least hunker down for the day, wait for reinforcements and supplies to arrive. But they have been ordered to advance. By General John E. Dahlquist himself. Because if they don’t reach the Lost Battalion today, those boys from Texas will perish.

And so K Company pushes forward. Through the grater of German minefields, artillery and mortar strikes, tanks, machine-gun emplacements, six hundred enemy soldiers. They push forward even though they’re armed with only nine-and-a-half-pound rifles, bayonets. Push forward even though as a unit they’ve already suffered massive casualties, been cut down to half their size, even though they are at the end of their physical strength. Yet still they push forward with rifle to shoulder, head tilted to aimer, with fingers pressed against triggers, even though they sense—correctly—that they are cannon fodder. That many will perish today.

* * *

By afternoon, there’s good news and bad news.

The good: they’re only one mile from the Lost Battalion.

The bad: they can’t advance. Before them is a narrow uphill ridge with drop-offs so steep on either side, it might as well be a suspension bridge. The Lost Battalion is on the other side of that razorback ridge.

And the worst news: General Dahlquist has ordered K Company to advance. Across the ridge.

“No way,” Alex shouts back to their squad leader, Sergeant Snap Nakai. They’re flat on their bellies, spread on the cold muddy earth. “That’s a funnel of death. It’s booby-trapped with mines, full of concealed machine-gun nests and snipers behind every tree. We won’t survive a direct frontal assault.”

“We’ve got orders!” Snap yells back. “There’s only one way to reach the Lost Battalion. Through that ridge!”

Mutt grabs Snap by the shoulder. “There’s no way—”

As if overhearing and now mocking them, a spray of German machine-gun fire rips into the ground before them. They press against the bark of the large tree.

Zack tightens his helmet straps. “It’s sure death—”

“It’s a direct order from General Dahlquist! We push through at all costs.”

“Screw Dahlquist!”

Snap Nakai glances at the men of K Company to the right and left of him, sheltering behind trees. “This whole battle comes down to us, men. The dozen of us. Right here. Because we’re the tip of the spear. We decide if the Lost Battalion gets saved or not. Just us.”

A mortar shell strikes nearby. The men duck, their ears ringing.

“We’re not cowards, sir,” Teddy shouts over the bedlam. “But we’re not stupid, either. That ridge is suicide.”

“Listen to me!” Snap Nakai shouts. “Everyone who’s died fighting, died to get us to this point.” He grips and regrips his machine gun. Looks to his men. “Now shut up and be soldiers. On my go.” He stares ahead, swallows hard. “Now!”

They rise as one, sprinting out from the protection of the trees.

They get about ten yards. A barrage of machine-gun fire mows them down. They fall, all of them, most ducking behind trees for shelter, a few facedown in the mud, dead. Zack’s fallen, but he’s not dead. He’s on his back, twenty yards away, clutching the side of his stomach. Blood pouring out of an open wound, blackening the mud. Writhing in pain out there in the open, trying, vainly, to lie still. To not catch the attention of snipers.

Mutt leaps out from behind the tree.

“No, Mutt!” Alex grabs his shoulder. But he’s too late.

Before Mutt can even get into the open, German guns open up on him. He retreats behind the tree, cursing.

A sniper shoots, striking Zack’s thigh. He curls in agony, drawing up his leg. A moment later, another shot. This time the other leg. In the ankle, shattering it. The boot—always too large for Zack—goes flying off. Zack howls even louder, a lonely, pain-filled sound. They’re toying with him, a cat with a maimed mouse.

“Gotta get him, gotta get him,” Mutt says, his face flushed with anger, his body tense and ready to spring. But even he knows there’s nothing that can be done.

Another sniper shot. Into Zack’s shoulder.

Silence. They think Zack is dead now, mercifully. But then he starts wailing, a terrible pain-drenched howl, “Okaasan. Okaasan.” He’s crying for his mother.

Then a single crack of the sniper.

Zack’s head explodes.

And with that, the mortar shells once again fall from the skies, and the fusillade of bullets rip the ground and trees apart. There’s no choice now. Under such a barrage, they need to retreat.

Except.

A soldier in the next tree over. Teddy. Lazy Teddy. Incompetent Teddy. Homesick Teddy who was always last in the drills, last in the forced marches, who always just wanted to be with his family, even if it was back in a tar-papered barrack in an internment camp. He’s unsheathing his M1 bayonet, attaching it to his rifle. An obsessed, almost manic fire burning through the prism of tears in his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at the other soldiers. But something is coming over the others as they watch him; and in the next moment they, too, are unsheathing their M1 bayonets, attaching them to their rifles.

Teddy rises and, with a scream, charges. He is yelling, in Japanese, in English, it doesn’t matter, not now. With tears in his eyes, with blood pouring down his face, with lice in his hair, venereal disease in his groin, fatigue in his bones, grief and anger in his heart, this boy who always sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” the loudest, who loved nothing more than fishing rainbow trout in the Fryingpan River of

Colorado with his pals on a hot summer day, who dreamed of one day marrying the pretty Jenny Anderson, now charges up the ridge, shooting a Tommy from the hip, spraying bullets.

“GO FOR BROKE!” he yells. “GO FOR BROKE!”

And with that cry, the others rise as one behind him, and charge up the ridge as the earth explodes around them. Alex’s painful trench foot forgotten in this hot mix of adrenaline and fear and violence.

Teddy goes down in a hail of bullets. But he rises in the next moment like a miracle, his legs wobblier, his eyes more fanatical even as life gushes out of him. He throws a grenade, and this boy who couldn’t hit the ocean from a yard above it somehow lands it right in the machine-gun nest. It explodes, sending up German soldiers and metal fragments. And still he charges up, his company right behind him, still he is yelling and screaming, his expended Tommy tossed away, firing his bayoneted rifle.

“Banzai!” he shouts. “Banz—”

The bullet catches him in the neck. This time, he stays down. Blood spurting out from his neck, the artery severed. By the time Alex and Mutt reach him, he’s dead. Alex grabs Teddy’s rifle, charges up the hill, only he is faster now, and more accurate. Anger sharpens focus.

Next to him, Mutt. Armed now with a BAR weapon that he picked up from one of the dead. Aiming at a machine-gun nest, he unleashes a torrent of gunfire. As he does, Alex runs around the side of the nest, certain that at any moment he’s going to be seen and shot.

But he isn’t. He leaps over the lip of the nest, spraying his machine gun into the backs of the four Germans until the clip is expended.

“Maki!” Mutt shouts, reaching the nest. “Okay?”

“Okay,” Alex shouts back, throwing away the machine gun and grabbing a German one. “Cover my back!”

Mutt finishes reloading his BAR. “You cover my back.” And he is leaping over the edge of the nest, charging uphill for the next.