Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

“Malmédy,” Jenou says, and shoots him once through the neck.

Heinrich Weber lies dead in the snow. Jenou retrieves his packet of photographs, reassembles them in the envelope. She and Beebee quickly strip the body of useful clothing, leaving him naked but for his shirt and underpants. Jenou stuffs the envelope under his uniform shirt.

“Richlin says we have a couple hours,” Jenou says. “Let’s get to company and see if we can find a hot meal.”

30

FRANGIE MARR—ELSENBORN RIDGE, BELGIUM

Day follows day with deadly routine. The Americans sit in their foxholes freezing. Sometimes they go on patrols to locate the Germans and make sure they’re still where they are supposed to be. Other times the Germans patrol, to make sure the Americans are where they are supposed to be.

Almost daily the Germans launch a probing attack, which is repulsed.

And after each patrol, after each attack, Frangie counts the cost. Bullet wounds. Shrapnel wounds. Splinter wounds. Self-inflicted wounds. Friendly fire wounds. Trench foot. Frostbite.

Her life is snow and blood.

Her life is screams and groans and final, rattling breaths.

But more and more it is the minds of the GIs that are the greater problem. Sergeant Geer is found shivering uncontrollably in the woods surrounded by frozen Germans. As tough as Geer is, no one can take it day after day after day. The cold, the cold, the cold. The fear. The numbing loss of hope, the loss even of memories of what the world once was.

Every few days she takes one or two of the worst off back down to the aid station, where they can sit in a tent with a stove and let warmth torture them with pins and needles. Thawing out has become a vital tool in Frangie’s medical bag: a GI who gets half a day to thaw out is good for more days at the front.

There is one army doctor and a Belgian nun with nurse’s training at the nearest aid station. The nun is in her thirties or forties—it’s impossible to tell in a world where everyone wears any scrap of clothing they can find. The doctor is a gaunt, gray-faced Maine Yankee whose eyes are as hollow as any frontline soldier’s. Every time Frangie comes, he is on duty. Has he ever slept?

“What you got, Marr?”

“Bullet to the right thigh, through and through, but I think it may have clipped the bone. And a combat fatigue.”

The wounded man smokes a cigarette, takes it out of his mouth to yell, “Goddamn that hurts!”

The combat fatigue soldier sits on the dirt floor rocking back and forth chanting, “Ring around the rosy,” over and over.

Is it any surprise that soldiers are going mad? In a mad world what choice did they have?

With a Belgian stretcher bearer Frangie has manhandled the injured man off the jeep and into the tent. The Belgian is originally from Congo, a black African with whom Frangie would love to talk, some other time, in some other universe.

The locals, the Belgian people, have been magnificent. They open their homes. They empty their larders. They bring blankets and coats and socks they can scarcely have afforded to part with. There are Belgian doctors and nurses and volunteers working without break, all up and down the Bulge. Many GIs had complained about the French. None has a word to say against the Belgians.

Everyone knows the Americans can’t hold out much longer.

And everyone tells themselves, “Not today.”

“I need morphine,” Frangie says.

The doctor shakes his head. “I’m using brandy for amputations now.” He is outraged at this, not at Frangie, at the army, at the world. Brandy is not morphine. It’s little better than aspirin.

Frangie has two—just two ampoules of morphine left. They are in her armpit to keep them from freezing. She has a bottle of plasma stuffed down the front of her trousers for the same reason.

The Americans down south in Bastogne, and up here at the Elsenborn Ridge at the northern edge of the Bulge, have run out of almost everything: medicine, food, cigarettes, ammunition. The howitzers and Long Toms still fire rounds toward the Germans, but even Frangie has noticed that the rate of fire is diminishing day by day.

How soon until the big guns fall silent? How soon until the men and women in holes squeeze their triggers and hear nothing but click?

“Gauze?” Frangie asks.

The doctor jerks his head toward a pile of gray rags. Many bear faded bloodstains. Bandages now are whatever rags Belgian housewives boil for them.

Frangie knows better than to ask after sulfa, let alone the new and exciting penicillin. They’ve been out of those forever.