PART V

Chapter 20.

DON'T TELL THE CHILDREN

Long after I first read what my father had written for Barrington Leach, one question preoccupied me: Why had Dad said he desperately hoped his kids would never hear this story? Granted the tale ended with what I viewed as an episode of heartbreaking gullibility, not to mention dead-bang criminality. But there were oceans of valor before that. What did Dad want to protect us from? I would have thought he'd learned too much to believe that anybody could be harbored from the everlasting universe of human hurt at human hands. Instead, Dad's decision to suppress everything could be taken only as the product of his shuttered character, and one more occasion for regret. God knows, it would have meant the world to me at a hundred points as I grew up to know even a little of what he had written.

Like every boy my age, soaked during the 1950s in World War II epics on TV and in the movie houses, I had longed to know that my daddy had done his part--best if he were another Audie Murphy, but at least someone who'd brought his rightful share of glory to our household. Instead my questions about the war were perpetually rebuffed by both parents.

The silence was so complete that I didn't even know whether Dad had seen action. I believed he had, because of the profound stillness that gripped him when battle scenes from WWII appeared on The Way It Was, my father's favorite show. It was TV's first video history, hosted by the sage and solemn Eric Sevareid. I would watch the black-andwhite images leap across my father's unmoving eyes. There were always artillery pieces firing with great flashes, their barrels rifling back and mud splattering as the massive armaments recoiled into the ground, while aircraft circled in the distance overhead. The grimy soldiers, caught in the camera's light, managed fleeting smiles. It became an article of faith to me that Dad had been one of them, a claim I often repeated when my male friends matched tales of their fathers' wartime exploits.

Yet all I knew for sure was that both my parents regarded war as a calamity which they often prayed would never be visited on Sarah and me. No one was more determined than my father and mother that I not go to Vietnam when my number came up in 1970. They were ready to hire lawyers, even leave the country, rather than allow me to be drafted. The sight of Richard Nixon on TV inspired Dad to a rare sputtering fury. He seemed to feel a basic deal America had made with him was being broken. Simply put, he had gone to war so that his children would not have to, not so they could take their turn.

But that period might have been less unsettling for me if I'd known a little more about my father's wartime experiences. At the U., among the antiwar types, there were occasional debates about the ethics of avoiding the draft. Logic said that some kid, working class or poor, was going to take my place. Four decades later, I still accept my rationale for wiggling out with a medical exemption due to a deviated septum, a breach between my nasal passages, which, in theory, might have led to breathing problems on the battlefront. My first responsibility was for my own actions. Understanding how misguided Vietnam was, I faced a clear moral imperative against killing--or even dying--there.

But for those of us who didn't go, there was always a lurking question. Granted, we were privileged, moralistic, and often ridiculously rude. But were we also cowards? Certainly we had planted our flag in new ground. Before 'Nam, the idea had been handed down since the Revolution, like some Chippendale heirloom, that braving death in defense of the nation was the ultimate measure of a true-blue American guy. Knowing a few details of how my father had passed this fierce test of patriotism and personal strength might have given me some comfort that I could do it, too, if need be, and made me more certain I was standing up, rather than hiding.

Instead, the only story about my father's war I ever heard came from his father, my grandfather the cobbler. Grandpa was a wonderful raconteur in the Yiddish tradition and, when Dad was not around, he told me more than once the colorful tale of how my father had entered the service. In 1942, after Dad had decided he could no longer wait to do his part, he had gone for his induction physical and been promptly rejected because of the deviated septum I ended up inheriting from him (and which, when I faced the draft, he wisely suggested I ask an ENT to check for).

My father was so upset at being turned down that he finally persuaded my grandfather to go with him to visit Punchy Berg, the local Democratic committeeman, who was able to influence the course of most governmental affairs in Kindle County. Punchy received entreaties in the basement of a local county office, where boxes of records were stacked on steel shelving. There beneath a single lightbulb, Punchy sat among his henchmen at a teacher's desk while he pondered requests. He either said no, or nothing at all. In the face of silence, one of Punchy's sidekicks would step forward and whisper a price--$5 to allow a child to transfer to a better school, $15 to get a driver's license after failing the exam. Favorable verdicts in the Kindle County courts were also available, but at costs beyond the means of workingmen.

My father stood before Punchy and poured his heart out about not being allowed to serve his country. Punchy had expected something else, a request, of which there were a number, that a draft notice be delayed or, better yet, forgotten. My grandfather said that Punchy, a former boxer whose nose was flattened on his face like the blade of a shovel, spent a minute shaking his head.

"I'll tell you, kid. Maybe you want to think about this. I know your old man a long time. Schmuel, how long it's been you fixed my shoes?"

My grandfather could not remember that far back.

"A long time," Punchy said. "You're the firstborn son. That makes you an important guy to your folks.), This remark provided the only encouragement my grandfather needed to let fly with his own opinions about what my father wanted. It was pure craziness to Grandpa's way of thinking. He had come here to America, like his brothers, so that they did not get dragooned for the Tsar's army, as Jews so often were. And now his son wanted to go back across the same ocean and fight, beside the Russians no less?

"Your old man's got a point," Punchy allowed.

My father was adamant.

"Well," said Punchy, "this is hard to figure. How I hear tell, it's costing families twelve hundred to keep their sons out. But gettin in?" Punchy rubbed his chin. "All right, kid," he said. "I gotta tell you. I'm pretty red, white, and blue myself. Half the time I'm cryin that I'm too old to go over there and take a bite out of Hitler's dick. In you want, in you get." And then Punchy proved what a true patriot he was. "Kid," he said, "it's on the house."

Chapter 21.

COMBAT

12/24/44--At the front

Dear Grace--

I am writing to wish you and your family a wonderful Christmas holiday. I imagine all of you together, cozy around a fire, but perhaps that's just to comfort myself, because right now I'm colder than I have ever been in my life. At the moment, I'm convinced we should honeymoon in Florida and I am trying to warm myself up by imagining that.

I assume news of the German offensive has reached you, but the commanders here are encouraging. This is magnificent, scenic country, tremendous hills of trees, deep with snow, and beautiful little towns nestled between, but combat has blown many of them to smithereens. I arrived as part of the investigation I have mentioned now and then, and given the circumstances have actually been pressed into combat as the leader of a rifle company. Finally, a chance to put that training to good use! At last I'll have a little story or two to tell you and our children.

Please give my warm regards to your family. I assume you will be praying tonight. I'm not much of a prayer-sayer myself, so please put in a few extra for me, fortissimo. I want all the help we can get.

Well, that's enough blabbing for tonight. Remember I love you, darling.

David

At 2:00 a. M., we moved out on the route the scout team had traced along the edge of the forest, following their tracks in the snow.

Orders went down the line in a whisper. "Scouts out first in each squad. Patrol discipline. Silence. Move fast and low. Don't lose sight of the man in front of you.

In all, we advanced about four hundred yards to another incline on the eastern side of the road, settling in a small notch in the forest. It was not as good a position as the one we had deserted. We were about thirty yards from the roadside here, and even when we fanned out, we could not really see well to the north. A small creek was east of us, however, a good defensive perimeter. It must have been fed by an underground spring, because it was still running, even in the intense cold.

There had been no prior encampment here, which meant the men had to dig in through the snow and the frozen ground. It was hard work and we agreed we'd assign four soldiers to each hole, and let them sleep in shifts. Bidwell and I were still shoveling with our entrenching tools when Masi came up. He turned his angle-necked flashlight on to show me a German ration can. There was no rust on it, and the streaks of the meat that had clung to the side hadn't frozen yet.

"There was a pile of shit no more than ten yards away from it, Cap. Hot enough to have melted a little hole in the snow, and still soft when I put a stick to lt.

I took the can to Meadows.

"Where are they?" I asked Bill.

"Back there somewhere," he said, pointing to the woods half a mile off "Probably just following up on the scout plane, Captain. Good thing we changed position."

I wasn't as confident. The Krauts were paying a lot of attention to us, if they didn't intend to come down this road. We agreed we'd send out scouts at first light to follow the tracks and get a fix on the German forces. We also doubled tonight's guard. That was better anyway, given our shortage of deluxe accommodations.

Despite my concerns, I was calm. I seemed to have simply worn out my nervous system, subsiding to the resignation true soldiers acquire. If it happens, it happens. I slept for an hour or so, until heavy booms woke me, and I saw the light dancing up from Bastogne. The Germans were bombing there, giving General McAuliffe a Christmas present after the warm greetings he had sent them. The air assault went on about twenty minutes.

I fell off again before Biddy shook me awake for guard duty an hour later. I had been dreaming of home. There, it was the usual chaos. I was knocking at the front door and could not get in. But through the window I had a clear view of my parents and my sister and brother around the kitchen table. My mother, stout, voluble, enveloping, was ladling soup, and through the glass I could somehow enjoy the warmth and fragrance from the bowls she placed on the table. When the image returned to me now, I emitted the minutest moan.

"What?" asked Biddy. He was climbing into his bedroll. There was already some light in the sky, but we'd all been up most of the night. In the distance, the German artillery was pounding already. The Krauts were at work early.

I told him I had been dreaming of home.

"Don't do that," he said. "Best I can, sir, I try to never let my mind go runnin off in that direction. Just makes a body feel badly." That had been Martin's reasoning with Gita.

"You figure you'll go back home, Biddy? I mean afterward. You know. To stay?" I'd been deciding whether to ask this question for the last couple of days.

You mean, am I gonna go back home and be myself? Who I was? Or go any other place and be who I am to you?"

That was what I meant. His big body swelled up and deflated with a long sigh.

"Captain, I been thinking on that so long, I'm just plain sick of it. Truth, Cap, I don't mind this here at all, not being every white man's nigger. It's okay--most of the time. Over there in England, lot of those English girls preferred the colored soldiers, said they was more polite, and I was trying to make time with one and she slapped my cheek when I said I was a Negro. Aside from that, it's been all right.

"But I can't go home and not claim my own. I can't go walking down the street pretending like I don't know the fellas I do, men I played ball with and chased around with, I can't do that. That boy I was having words with last week--that's what it was about, and I wanted to crawl into a hole after you lit into me. I can't hardly do that. And I can't turn tail on the folks who love me neither. I'll go back. That's what I reckon. But no matter what, Captain, it ain't gonna feel right."

"It won't make any difference, Biddy. You go back, get some more schooling for your photography. It won't make any difference."

"Captain, you don't really believe that."

"I do indeed, Biddy. I know what it's been like. But we can't take up the same stupidity now. Here we've had Southerners and Northerners, rich and poor, immigrants from every nation, fighting and dying for this country. People can't go back home and tell themselves we're all different when we're not. You be your own man, Biddy, nobody's ever going to judge you, white or colored."

"Captain," he said. He stopped to think, then started again. "Captain, I want you to know something. You're a good man, all right, you truly are. You're as straight and honest an officer as I've met. And you ain't hincty--you don't get up on yourself too much. But Captain, you don't know what the hell you're talking about now. That's the last we-all gonna say on this."

I had no chance to argue further because the first artillery shell came wailing in then. It landed about two hundred feet away, rocking the earth and igniting a plume of flame that irradiated the near darkness. I rose, still without my boots, and hollered for everyone to get down, just in time to witness another detonation that hurled a private at the perimeter into a thick tree, shoulder first. It was Hovler, the Texan who'd worried about his girl stepping out on him. The sheer force threw his arms and legs behind his back so hard that they wrapped around the trunk, before he slithered down in dead collapse.

What followed was twice the intensity of the TOT barrages. This was not random shelling at thirty-yard intervals from converted light AA or mortars. This was fire from bigger German guns, the 88s and even the heavy loads of Nebelwerfers, all precisely targeted and seeming to cover every inch of the forest incline we occupied. On impact, the ordnance spit up flames and snow and soil in the dark like giant Roman candles. Slumping back, tying my boots, listening to the outcry all around me, I realized that the Germans knew exactly where we were, despite our move. The earth rocked and things went flying the way they did in the newsreels of tornadoes--rifles, soldiers, and tree trunks zooming through the air in the orange light of the explosions and the resulting fires. Chunks of steel sizzled as they sank into the trees, from which smoke, like blood, leaked forth. But the noise, as ever, was the worst of it, the whistling metal raining down, the titanic boom of the shells, and the seconds in between when the panicked voices of my men reached me, shrieking in anguish, yelling for medics, begging for help. Peeking out, I saw direct hits on two holes at the far perimeter and the soldiers, already dead, flying toward me. In the uneven light, one of them, Bronko Lukovic, the poker champion, seemed to break apart in descent. He landed twenty yards from me on his back. His arms and legs were spread as if he was floating in a pool in the sun, but his head was gone, a bloody mess sprouting from his neck like the teased ribbon on a gift box.

"Move 'em out," I started screaming. I clambered from the hole, waving my arms, giving orders to Biddy and Masi, and Forrester. Bill Meadows, unaccountably, was nowhere to be found. I located him, blundering around in his hole on his hands and knees.

"Lost my specs, Captain, I'm blind without those specs." I jumped in, groping with him for an instant, then climbed back out, running from hole to hole to get the men in his platoon moving. By now I knew that if we didn't go, most of us would be blown to bits, and the remainder killed in the ground assault that was sure to follow. Even so, a couple of soldiers had lost control of themselves in the relentless bombardment. In one hole, a private named Parnek was on his knees, sobbing hysterically, as he tried to claw a hole in the frozen ground with his fingers. Another man in his squad, Frank Schultz, wouldn't leave because he couldn't find his helmet.

"Where's my hat," he yelled, "where's my hat?" I grabbed him by the shoulders to tell him it was on his head. He touched it and fled.

With the creek behind us, we could only go toward the road, and as we tumbled off the incline, I could hear the roar of tanks approaching. My men dashed forward, including the wounded who were mobile. O'Brien, the wiseacre from Baltimore, was hobbling behind me. His whole lower leg was gone, even the trousers, and he was using his MI as a crutch. As we broke into the clearing, I was following Biddy and his platoon, and his troops were suddenly falling to their bellies in front of me. My instinct was to order them back to their feet until I found myself facing the black mouth of a 75mm tank gun aimed at us from no more than one hundred yards. As I crushed myself against the snow, a rocket went right over our heads, exploding in the midst of the holes we'd just left. Most of Meadows' platoon was still back there and I could hear the shrieking. On our left, a machine gun began barking, joined almost immediately by rifle fire from the foxholes we'd abandoned last night across the way. There were two tanks in the road now, both Mark IVs that had been painted white, their big guns flashing and recoiling as they spit shells into the woods. About fifteen infantrymen were riding on each tank and firing their rifles at us.

It was havoc. Fortunato was on his feet, looking on like a spectator, with the SCR-3oo on his back. Who had given the radio to the man who couldn't speak English? Several of our soldiers were on the ground, doing nothing. "Shoot," I yelled, and raised my Thompson. I was sure no one could hear me, but on one of the tanks, a grenadier was struck and pitched forward into the snow. Ten feet to my left, Rudzicke, who'd wanted to sing Christmas carols, was hit in the back. The bullet left a clean hole that looked like it had been sunk by a drill bit. From the way he jerked forward, I was afraid he'd been shot by one of my troops, but the Germans had fallen upon us from all directions and the men had no idea even where to aim. Behind us, in the woods, grenades exploded, and in the fires burning back there, I recognized Volksgrenadiers, regular infantry who'd been able to sneak close in white snow-combat suits. They were cleaning out those of Meadows' men who'd remained in their foxholes. Amid the machine-gun and small-arms fire, there was a great jumble of voices, buddies crying out directions, but also men screaming in pain and terror. Stocker Collison teetered by, blood-soaked hands over his abdomen. I had the impression that he was holding a cauliflower against his uniform until I realized that the blue-white mass was his intestines.

Biddy had his bazooka team taking aim at the tanks, but they got off no more than one round before a grenade landed in their midst. I wanted Masi to return with his platoon to attack the grenadiers in the trees to our rear, but he went down as soon as I reached him. It was a leg wound, but a bad one. Blue-black blood surged forth with every heartbeat. He cast me a desperate look, but by the time I thought of applying a tourniquet he had fallen backward. There were two final feeble squirts and then it stopped completely.

When the crossfire had started, probably two-thirds of the company had emerged from the woods, strung out over forty yards. At least half had gone down in no more than a minute. Amid the great tumult, I turned full circle. The sun was coming up and in the first hard light the world was etched with a novel clarity, as if everything visible was outlined in black. It was like that moment of impact I'd felt once or twice in a museum, but more intense, for I was beholding the gorgeousness of living.

Somehow, in that instant, I understood our sole option. Algar had told me not to surrender, a point proven by the slaughter behind me in the woods. Instead I dashed and rolled among the men, yelling one command again and again, "Play dead, play dead, play dead." Each of them fell almost at once, and I too tumbled down with my face in the snow. After a few minutes the firing stopped. I could hear the explosive engine roar of Panzers thundering by and orders being shouted in German. Not surprisingly, Algar seemed to have been good to his word. The rocking blast of mortars was nearby. I gathered that Algar had brought his armor up fast and had apparently engaged the Panzers a mile farther down, where machine-gun fire and the boom of the tank rockets was audible. Near us, I could make out different engines, probably armored troop carriers, into which the unit that had killed most of my men seemed to climb to join the battle up the road. Even as the shouts sailed off, two grenades exploded in the broad clearing where we lay, rattling the earth and leaving more men screaming.

That was the principal sound now, men moaning and crying. Stocker Collison was calling out, "Mama, Mama," a lament that had been going on for some time. The wounded were going to die fast in this weather. Soaked in their own blood, they would freeze soon, a process that would accelerate due to their blood loss. When the last German voice disappeared, I hoped to find the radio.

I was about to get up, when a single shot rang out, a parched sound like a breaking stick. The pricks had left a sniper behind, at least one, who'd probably fired when somebody else moved. I thought of calling out a warning, even though it would have given me away, but that would reveal that many of the others lying here were alive. I could only hope the men would understand on their own.

Instead, to betray no sign of life, I worked on slowing my breathing. The smell, now that I was aware of it, was repulsive. No one ever told me there is a stench of battle, of cordite and blood, of human waste, and as time goes on, of death. I had chosen a terrible position--I was lying on the submachine gun and after only a few minutes the stock had begun to sink into my thigh, so that I was being bruised under my own weight. But I would have to bear it. In some ways I welcomed the pain as my just deserts as a failed commander. I wondered how the Germans had found us. Their scouts must have been out in the darkness and followed our tracks through the snow. They may even have seen us cross the road. I reviewed my decisions repeatedly. Should I have recognized there was such a large force out here? Would we have been better off, in the end, staying in the first foxholes and fighting from there? Could we have held the Krauts off longer, inflicted more losses? After days of suffering in the cold, we had not detained the Germans more than a few minutes as they came down the road.

I was freezing, of course. I had been freezing for days, but lying in the snow without moving was worse. My limbs burned as if my skin had been ignited from inside. Near me, someone moaned now and then for water and Collison was still asking for his mother. He went on for at least another hour and then a single sniper's bullet rang out and the calling stopped. I wondered if they'd shot him out of mercy or contempt. But within a second, there were several more bullets and a haunting punctured sound emerging from each man they struck. The snipers--I now thought there were two--seemed to be systematically picking off our wounded. I awaited my turn. I had gone through the entire battle, the few minutes it all had lasted, with no conscious fear, but now that I realized they were killing any man showing signs of life, I felt the full flush of terror. A thought struck through to the center of me like an ax: I was going to find out about God.

But I did not die. After five or six shots, the firing ceased. The wounded, at least those moaning or begging for water or help, had gone still, and there was now a harrowing silence in the clearing. I could hear the noises of the morning, the wind in the trees and crows calling. The submachine gun was still beneath me. From the last shots, I believed the snipers were across the road in the same woods we'd left. I had no idea how many men who lay here were still alive. Ten perhaps. But if we all stood and fired, we'd have a chance to kill the snipers before they killed us. Those would be my orders if the sharp-shooting started again.

With no voices here, the fighting down the road was more audible. The rumbling explosions echoed and reechoed between the hills. Late in the morning, the drone of aircraft joined it and bombs shook the air. I hoped we were dropping on the Panzers, but couldn't be certain.

Several hours along, I opened my eyes briefly. Near me Forrester, who'd been abandoned by his widowed mother, was jackknifed. A ragged bullet hole was ripped in the back of his neck. His carotids had emptied through it, staining his jacket, and he'd messed his trousers as he was dying, an odor I'd smelled for quite some time. But I hadn't looked out to count the dead around me, or even the living. With the planes aloft, I knew the sky was clearing, and I longed for one last sight of that fresh blue, so full of promise. I looked while I dared, then closed my eyes. I missed the world already.

By now, my bladder was aching. Urine, however, would eat through the snow and potentially give me away to the snipers. More important, I was likely to soak myself and freeze to death. For a while, I decided to count, only to know time was passing. Finally, I thought about the people at home. Lying there, I was full of regret about Gita. For weeks, I had been too confused to feel the full measure of shame that visited me now It was the images of my morning dream that haunted me, a tender rebuke. I wanted home. I wanted a warm place that was mine, a woman within it, and children, too. I saw that spot, a neat bungalow, from outside, as clearly as if I were at the picture show. The light, so bright through the broad front window, beckoned. I could feel the warmth of the house, of the fire that burned there, of the life that was lived there.

Someone broke through the trees. Had the Germans come to finish us? But the tread was lighter, and too quick. Eventually I concluded an animal was lingering among us, some carrion eater, I feared, meaning I would have to lie here while it gnawed the dead. At last the footfalls reached me. I recognized the heat and smell of the breath on my face instantly, and had to work to hold off a smile as the dog applied his cold snout to my cheek. But my amusement quickly sluiced away in fear. I wondered if the Krauts were using the animal for recon. Could the dog tell the quick from the dead or was he sent to test our reactions? I refused to move although I could feel the mutt circling me. He lowered his muzzle yet again for a breath or two, then suddenly whimpered in that heartbreaking way dogs do. I could hear him padding around, nosing among the men. He cried out one more time, then went off.

Late in the afternoon, the battle appeared to shift toward us. I reasoned it through. We were winning. We had to be winning. There was gunfire only a few hundred yards away, on the western side of the road where we'd been yesterday. That meant Americans were nearby. An hour later, I heard English on the wind and debated whether to cry out. As soon as it was dark, I decided, we'd move.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dusk. Forty minutes later, the light was gone and I began to drag myself on my elbows through the clearing. I wanted to crawl toward the Americans, but the snipers' shots had come from there, and so I crept back to the woods where so many members of G Company had been slaughtered this morning. I was slithering on my belly into a black maze, through the snow and blood and shit and God knows what else, thinking in my brain-stuck way about the serpent in Eden.

I touched each body I passed. It was easy to tell the living, even with a gloved hand that was like lead. In the dark, I could see eyes spring open, and I pointed to the woods. reached a form I recognized as Biddy's and hesitated. Please, I thought. He was alive.

I dragged myself around for nearly an hour, gathering the men who were able to move, and sending them scraping toward the woods, like a nighttime migration of turtles. Covered in sweat now, I'd worn the skin off my elbows and knees. I could make out the trees ahead of me, but stopped when I suddenly heard voices. Germans? After all of this we were crawling back into the arms of the Krauts? But I was too miserable to devise alternatives. Nearing the border of the woods, I realized someone was creeping toward me. I grabbed my gun while the other form continued forward on his belly. Then I saw the Red Cross on his helmet.

"Can you make it?" he whispered.

When I reached the trees, two more medics swept forward to grab me. As I stood up, the urge from my bladder overwhelmed me and I barely made it to a beech where I relieved myself, savoring the warm fog rising in the cold. I had a terrible cramp in one leg, and feared I would fall over and look like a fountain.

The medics explained the situation. The Germans who had passed by here had been routed. McAuliffe had brought up reinforcements and the firelight went on long enough for American bombers to get here and blow all of the Panzers off the road. More than one hundred grenadiers had surrendered, but one band had fallen back into the trees on the other side of the road. Algar was going to call in artillery, but he'd demanded that the medics first try to collect the survivors of G Company. The corpsmen had driven jeeps down the cow path from the west, then walked in nearly a quarter of a mile before they made out the dozen or so of us bellying our way through the snow.

Here, in what remained of the foxholes we'd been in this morning, the medics moved among the dead with gruesome efficiency, checking wrists and throats for the sign of a pulse, and when that was lacking, as it almost always was, pulling the dog tags through the shirtfronts to make work easier for those in the Quartermaster Corps Graves Registration Detail. With the medics, I talked about how to bring in the wounded still out in the open. We had to figure there were Germans in the woods across the road, but the medics understood I couldn't leave without the eight men I'd found in the clearing, still breathing but unable to move. Biddy and I crawled back out with two corpsmen. We formed litters by retying each man's belt under his arms, then peeling his field jacket back over his head and folding his rifle within the fabric. One of the medics gave a signal and I stood up first and began dragging the man I had, O'Brien, toward the trees. I waited to die, yet again, but after even a few yards, it was clear there was no one on the other side now, at least no one willing to give himself away by shooting. As I dragged O'Brien along, the dog followed.

From the woods, the corpsmen radioed for a convoy and ambulances, which met us on the other side of the creek where the cow path joined the woods. In the lights of the vehicles, I caught sight of a C ration cracker in cellophane lying unharmed in the snow. I broke it in pieces and passed it out to the three other men who were waiting with me. We ate this morsel in total silence.

"Damn," one of them, Hank Garns, finally said. We were back at Algar's headquarters in minutes and ushered into the cold barn. There were thirteen of us. Counting the wounded, twenty-two men in G Company had made it, out of the ninety-two we'd had at the start of the day. Meadows and Masi were dead.

"Jesus, that was rough," said a dark man named Jesse Tornillo. "We came in on our chinstraps."

"Yeah," said Garns. "Guess you're right. Hadn't noticed till you mentioned it." Garns was smiling and seemed to take no notice that his entire body was rattling as if he had a mortal chill.

"Captain," said Tornillo, "it might be that mutt of yours saved our lives." I had not registered that the animal had followed me inside but he was looking around the circle as if he could follow the conversation, a black mongrel with a brown star on his chest and one brown paw. "When he started in with that whimpering, maybe he made those snipers think we were all of us dead." Tornillo bent to scratch the dog's ears. "Saved our lives," he said. "How you like that? I was laying there, listenin to him scratch around. Soon as I figured out it was a dog, hombre, I was praying for just one thing. 'Oh, Lord,' I kept sayin, 'if these Krauts gotta shoot me, please don't let this damn pooch piss on my head before that.

We laughed, all of us, huge gusts of laughter, full of the sweet breath of life. As for the dead, there was no mention of them now They were, in a word, gone. I didn't doubt that these men, some of whom had been together for months, mourned. But there was no place in our conversation for that. They were dead. We were alive. It wasn't luck or the order of the universe. It was simply what had happened.

Algar came in then and I gave him my report.

"Good thinking, good thinking," Algar kept saying when I admitted how we'd survived by playing dead.

"It was an ambush, Colonel."

By now we both knew that G Company had been given a suicidal assignment. We did not have enough men or firepower to hold that road, no matter what our position. I didn't say that, but I didn't have to.

"Dubin," Algar said, "I'm sorry. I am the sorriest son of a bitch in the Army."

I went to the battalion aid station to check on the wounded from G, but they were already on the way back to the field hospital by ambulance. There were doctors in Bastogne now, four surgeons who'd landed this morning by glider.

When I returned, Algar had found the cooks and ordered them to reopen the mess to serve us Christmas dinner. We had fried Spam and dehydrated potatoes, with dehydrated apples for dessert. As a treat, there were a few fresh beets. We'd eaten one meal in the last two days, and I felt the full measure of my hunger as the heat and aroma of the food rose up to my face. I count that Christmas meal in that cold mess eaten off a tin plate as one of my life's culinary highlights.

Biddy sat down beside me. We didn't say much while we ate, but he turned to me once he was done.

"No disrespect to the dog, Captain, but it was you that saved our lives."

A couple of the other men murmured agreement. But I wanted no part of being treated as a hero. There were isolated instants when I had actually led my men, scrambling from hole to hole amid the initial artillery barrage, even when I waved them so disastrously into the clearing. In those moments, a tiny voice trapped somewhere in my heart had spoken up in utter amazement. Look at me, it said, I'm commanding. Or more often: Look at me, I didn't get hit. But I held no illusion that was fundamentally me. We can all play a part for a few minutes. But I was not like Martin--and it was he I thought of--able to do it again and again.

The real David Dubin had fallen to the earth and played dead, where he had eventually surrendered to terror. I had given my men saving advice mostly because it was what I had wanted to do, to lie down like a child and hope that the assault--the war--would be over soon. True, it was the wiser course. But I had taken it because at the center of my soul, I was a coward. And for this I was now being saluted. I was grateful only that I did not feel shocked at myself or overwhelmed with shame. I knew who I was.

The men began to talk a little about what had happened, especially the eight or nine hours we had lain in the snow.

"Praise God, man, these are the shortest days of the year."

"Lord, poor fucking Collison, huh? I ain't gonna sleep for three nights hearing that."

But as I sat there, finishing off my dinner, my will, indeed all that remained of my being, was summoned in a single desire: I was going to make sure I never set foot on a battlefield again.

Chapter 22.

THE REMAINS

My wish to avoid combat, like so many other wishes I made, did not come true. There were more battles, but never another day like Christmas. Patton's forces continued pushing on Bastogne from the south, and more and more supplies made it through. Like an eager audience, we cheered the sight of every truck carrying cases of C rations bound in baling wire, the brown-green ammo boxes, or the gray cardboard tubes containing mortar and bazooka rounds.

On December 27, the 110th was re-formed with elements of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. Algar became battalion commander. G Company was now E Company, but I remained in charge. With six days in combat, I was one of the more experienced field officers Algar had. A second lieutenant named Luke Chester, literally a month out of OCS, became my second-in-command. He was a fine young soldier, a serious man, who spent most of his free time reading the Bible. But he was not Bill Meadows.

We pushed farther down the road through Champs, where so many of my men had died, then swung north and east into Longchamps. Although it did not seem possible, the weather was worse, less snow, but the kind of brittle, devastating cold that had seemed liable to snap the ears off my head in high school. However, our assignments allowed us to be quartered indoors for a portion of most nights. Algar protected my company. We were not the forward element on many operations. Instead, we generally followed armored infantry, covering the flanks. We fought brief battles, two or three times a day, knocking back smaller German units, repelling commandos, securing positions other forces had already overrun, and often taking prisoners, whom we'd hold until the MPs arrived.

But it was war. We still entered scenes that, as Biddy had characterized them, seemed to have come from the Inferno: the dead with their faces knotted in anguish, weeping soldiers immobilized by fear, vehicles ablaze with the occupants sometimes still screaming inside, soldiers without limbs lying within 'vast mud-streaked halos of their own blood, and others careening about, blinded by wounds or pain.

Every morning, I awoke to the same sick instant when I realized I was here fighting. I thought the same things so often that they were no longer thoughts at all. The questions simply circulated through my brain with the blood.

Why was I born?

Why do men fight?

Why must I die now, before living my life?

These questions had no answers and that fact often brought pain. It was like running full tilt again and again at a wall. The only comfort--and it was a small one--was that I saw these thoughts passing behind the eyes of every man I knew. They danced, like skinny ballerinas, across the thin membrane that separated everything from a molten surface, which was my constant fear.

I nearly did not make it to 1945. We were throwing the Germans back, inch by inch, but the control of terrain remained extremely confused. The Nazi lines, once drawn so tight around Bastogne, had been shredded, but not always with sufficient force to fully subdue the Krauts. On the maps, the intermingled American and German positions looked like the webbed fingers of joined hands.

On December 31, Algar sent us out to secure a hill on the other side of Longchamps. Our artillery had rained down already, and the enemy figured to have retreated, but as the first platoon started up, shots snapped in from above. Two men died and two were wounded. I was in the rear, but I scrambled forward to order everyone to dig in. A shot rang off a stone near my feet. I saw the German who had been shooting. He was up the hill, perhaps two hundred yards from me, peeking out from behind an outhouse in his large green coat with its high collar and the helmet that I still thought made every Kraut look half comic, as if he was wearing a coal scuttle. As he watched me through his rifle sight, I could see that killing me was a crisis for him. I had the nerve somehow to nod in his direction, and then scurried off on all fours, leaving the German infantryman little time to think. When I looked back, he was gone. I promised myself that I would spare one of them when the shoe was on the other foot. I tried to work out how fast the phenomenon of troops giving grace to one another would have to spread before the men in combat had made an armistice of their own.

I killed, of course. I remember a machine-gun nest we had surrounded, pouring in fire. A German soldier literally bounced along on the ground every time my bullets struck him, almost as if I was shooting a can. Each of these deaths seemed to enhance the power of the Thompson .45 submachine gun with which I'd parachuted, and which Robert Martin had borrowed, so that I sometimes felt as if I'd lifted a magic wand when I raised the weapon.

By now, I also thought I was developing animal senses. I knew the Germans were nearby even when they could not yet be seen or heard. In that instant before combat began, I passed down a bizarre passageway. Life, which had seemed so settled, so fully within my grasp, had to be renounced. I would now shoot my way across a bridge between existence and nonexistence. That, I realized mournfully, was what war was. Not life-essential, as I'd somehow believed, but a zone of chaos between living and dying. And then the bullets would fly and I would fire back.

On New Year's Day, after we'd turned east toward Recogne, we came upon a few advance scouts, Waffen troops. There were only four of them. They'd been hiding behind a crisscross of felled pines in the forest, and should have let us pass whatever their intentions, whether to ambush us or simply to report our whereabouts. Instead one of them spooked and fired at first sight of our uniforms. The four were no match for a company. Three were dead after less than a minute of fighting, while several of my men saw the fourth scout stumbling off into the brush. Reaching the three corpses, we could see the blood trail the fleeing German had left, and I dispatched Biddy's platoon to find him before the man got back to his unit.

When Bidwell returned half an hour later, he was morose.

"Bled to death, Cap. He was just laid out in the snow, with his blue eyes wide open, lookin at this here in his hand." Biddy showed me a tiny snap the size of the ones he was always taking, but this was of the German soldier's family, his thin wife and his two little boys, whom he'd been staring at as he died.

On January 2, 1945, E. Company received reinforcements, nearly thirty men, all newly arrived replacements. I hated them, with the same intensity my men had hated me only a few days ago. I could barely stand to command these troops. I hated being responsible for them and knowing how much danger they were destined to expose us to. One of them, Teddy Wallace from Chicago, told anybody who'd listen that he had a family at home. Fathers had been the last drafted and he worried aloud about what would become of his sons if something happened to him, as if the rest of us didn't have people who loved us and needed us, too. His first action required his platoon to clean out a German mortar team. Two squads had surrounded the position and then tossed in a grenade. When I arrived, I found Wallace on the ground. After falling on a rock, he had pulled his pants leg up to study the bruise, rubbing it repeatedly, while two men with bullet wounds groaned within feet of him.

He died the next day. We were trapped in the woods, while inching our way north and east toward Noville. The artillery again had devastated the German position, but two snipers had climbed into the trees, trying to shoot down on us as if they were hunting deer. In the process, they made themselves insanely vulnerable, but rather than trying to lob bazooka rounds at them, I radioed for tank support, and ordered my men to dig in on the other side of one of those thick-walled Belgian farmhouses. Suddenly, Wallace stood up, as if it was a new day and he was getting out of bed. I don't know what he figured, that the snipers were disposed of, or perhaps the battlefield had simply gotten to him. In the instant I saw him, he looked as if he had a question in mind, but a shot ripped all the features off his face. A buddy pulled him down. I thought Wallace was now going back to his family, albeit without a nose or mouth, but when I crawled up later, he was gone. I wrote to his wife and sons that night, describing his bravery.

In the wake of battle, one of the principal preoccupations of my company, like every fighting band, was collecting souvenirs. German firearms, Lagers and Mausers, were most prized, and everyone, including me, eventually acquired one. One of the men found a good Zeiss photographic lens and gave it to Biddy. My troops also removed wristwatches, flags, pennants, armbands--and cut off ears, until I put a stop to that. I understood this trophy hunting, the desire to have some tangible gain for what they had been through.

The day that Wallace went down, after two Sherman tanks had arrived and blown up the trees where the German snipers had perched, I watched another replacement soldier, Alvin Liebowitz, approach Wallace's body. I hated Liebowitz most among my new men. He was a lean boy, red-haired, with that New York air of knowing every angle. During several of the brief firefights we'd had, he'd seemed to disappear. Wallace and he had come over together, and I thought Liebowitz was reaching down to pass some kind of blessing. I was shocked when the sun gleamed before his hand disappeared into his pocket.

I came charging up.

"What?" Liebowitz said, with ridiculous feigned innocence.

"I want to see your right pocket, Liebowitz."

"What?" he said again, but pulled out Wallace's watch. He could have told me he was going to send it to Wallace's family, but then he might have had to hand it over. Alvin Liebowitz wasn't the kind to give up that easily.

"What the hell are you doing, Liebowitz?" "Captain, I don't think Wallace here's going to be telling much time."

"Put it back, Liebowitz."

"Shit, Captain, there're guys over in the woods picking over the Krauts' bodies right now. Germans, Americans, what's the difference?"

"They're your dead, Liebowitz. That's all the difference in the world. That watch may be the only thing Wallace's sons ever have of their father's."

"Hell, this is a good watch, Captain. It'll disappear a long time before that body finds its way home.

That was Liebowitz. Smart-ass answers for everything. The Army was full of Liebowitzes, but he got under my skin to a degree unrivaled by any other man I'd commanded, and I felt a sudden fury that did not visit me even in battle. I lunged at him with my bayonet knife, and he barely jumped out of the way as he yelped.

"What the fuck's wrong with you?" he asked, but put the watch down. He went off, looking over his shoulder as if he was the aggrieved party.

Biddy had witnessed the incident. When we were settling in the empty train car where we billeted that night, he said, "That was dang good, Cap. Lot of the men liked seeing you put Liebowitz in his place, but it looked for all the world like you was actually gonna cut him."

"I meant to, Biddy. I just missed."

He gave me a long look. "I guess we all harder on our own, Captain."

By January 8, the battle had turned. Every day we were securing large chunks of the ground the Germans had taken back with their offensive. I woke that morning with a dream I'd had once or twice before, that I was dead. The wound, the weapon, the moment--I felt the bullet invade my chest and then my spirit hovering over my body. I watched the Graves Detail approach and take me. Fully awake, I could only say as everybody else did: Then that is what will happen.

It was Bidwell who had roused me inadvertently. He had my toothbrush sticking out of the corner of his mouth. We were quartered in a church school and Biddy, without apology, had taken a little water from a sacramental font.

"I dreamed I was dead, Biddy. Have you done that?"

"Captain, it ain't any other way to be out there but that." Then he pointed to the doorway, where a young private stood. He'd come to tell me that Lieutenant Colonel Algar wanted to see me on the other side of Noville.

Algar, as ever, was at his desk, looking at maps. He'd acquired a supply of narrow black cheroots and had one in his mouth whenever I saw him these days. He answered my salute, then pointed me to a canvas-back chair.

"David, I got a teletype this morning from a Major Camello. He's General Teedle's adjutant, or assistant adjutant. They were trying to determine your whereabouts. When I answered you were here, he wrote back wanting to know when you could resume your assignment. They're concerned for your welfare."

They were concerned about Martin, at least Teedle was. I asked if he'd told them Martin was dead.

"I thought I'd leave that to you. Besides, you said you needed to see a body. I asked General Teedle for your services for one more week. We're going to be a long way toward kicking Dietrich out of the Ardennes by then. If things go well, I hope to be able to relieve your entire unit."

I found the thought of Teedle, still up in the middle of the night, still incensed as he thought about Martin, richly comic. I would have laughed, except that I knew I was going to get killed in the next seven days. That was a certainty. If I didn't, then it would be Biddy. But I said, "Yes, sir."

"You've done your part. There's a first lieutenant in A who's ready to take over a company. So I'm relieving you, effective January 15. You and Bidwell. You're to follow your prior orders and, when complete, report to General Teedle." The i8th Armored had met the 6th Panzers and contained them, and was now pushing them back. They were south of us in Luxembourg.

Algar said he'd have written orders in the morning. With them, we'd find he had put Bidwell and me in for medals. The Silver Star, he said. For our jump and for volunteering for combat.

"A Section Eight would be more appropriate," I said.

He said he felt a Ditinguished Service Cross was actually in order, but that required an investigation which might reveal the condition of my trousers when I'd hit the ground in Savy.

We laughed and shook hands. I told him what a privilege it had been to serve under him.

"I'm going to look you up, if I get to Kindle County, David."

I promised to do the same when I was in New Jersey, another wish that went unfulfilled. Hamza Algar was killed in July 1945 in Germany, after the surrender, when his jeep ran over a mine. By then, 4,500 soldiers out of the 5,000 men in the 'loth Regiment which had faced the first German assault of the Ardennes campaign along Skyline Drive were dead or wounded. So far as I know, Hamza Algar was the last casualty.

On the morning of January is, Luke Chester assembled E Company and First Lieutenant Mike Como formally took command. It had been a hard week. The Germans seemed to be resisting Patton and the nth Armored Division, behind whom we'd been fighting, with much greater ferocity than the armies of Montgomery and Hodges coming down from the north. I think Dietrich was unwilling to abandon his dream of capturing Bastogne, or perhaps he simply wanted to waste his last fury on the forces that had stopped him. My company lost six more men that week, and suffered thirteen wounded, all but four seriously. But there would be no casualties now for a few days. Most of the infantry elements in the 5o2nd, including E Company, were being relieved by the 75th Infantry Division. My men would head for Theux for a week's R & R, battlefront style, which meant nothing more than warm quarters and running water. Nonetheless, I told them they would have my enduring envy, because each man was guaranteed a bath. It had been a month since any of us had washed, other than what was possible by warming snow in a helmet over a camp stove, which generally meant a fast shave once a week when we were housed indoors. The smoke and grease from our guns had more or less stuck to our skin, turning all of us an oily black. We looked like a minstrel troupe, which made for a few private jokes between Bidwell and me. Now standing next to Como, I told the men that it had been the greatest honor of my life to command them and that I would remember them as long as I lived. I have never spoken words I meant more.

The dog, whom the men had named Hercules, presented a problem. Hercules was deaf, probably as the result of getting caught too close to an explosion. He fled yelping at the first flash of light on the battlefield, and we speculated that that was why whoever owned him had turned him out. Despite his handicap, he had made himself increasingly popular in the last two weeks by proving to be an able hunter. He'd snatch rabbits in the woods which he would deposit at my feet several times a day. We packed them in snow until he had caught enough for the cooks to give a ribbon of meat to each man as a treat with his rations. Hercules would sit at the fire and make a meal of the viscera, and, once he'd finished, the soldiers came by to ruffle his ears and praise him. I regarded him as a company mascot, but because Biddy and I fed him, he jumped into our jeep after I'd transferred command. We pushed him out at least three times, only to have him leap back in, and finally gave up. Half the company came to bid Hercules farewell, exhibiting far more affection than they'd shown Gideon and me.

Then we drove south and west, beyond Monty, to find out what had happened to Robert Martin and his team. The hill where they'd fallen had been retaken only in the last thirty-six hours and the bodies of the men who had died there were yet to be removed. Graves Registration Detail had arrived, but most of the GR troops were at work on a hillock to the west. In their gloves, they rooted for dog tags in the shirtfronts of the dead, bagging any possessions they found on a body and tying it to the man's ankle. Then they sorted the corpses by size, so that the cordon they were going to assemble would be stable. Quartermaster Salvage was with them, picking over the inanimate remains. During the stillborn portion of the war in September, Salvage went over some battlefields so closely you couldn't find a piece of barbed wire or a shell casing afterward. But right now they were interested in weapons; ammunition, and unused medical supplies. Even before GR got to most of the corpses, I noticed they had been stripped of their jackets and boots. It was probably the Germans who'd done that, but it could have been our troops, or even locals. I didn't begrudge any of them whatever it had taken to survive the cold.

Biddy and I walked up the hill. Most of the men in the team Martin had led here had been mowed down as they fled by the machine guns mounted on the Panzers. The corpses were frozen solid like statues. One man, on his knees in an attitude of prayer, had probably died begging for his life. I walked among the dead, using my helmet to clear off enough of the snow that had drifted over them to make out their features, giving each man a moment of respect. By now, their flesh had taken on a yellowish color, although I uncovered one soldier whose head had been blown off. The frozen gray brain matter, looking like what curdles from overcooked meat, was all around him. Somehow the back of his cranium was still intact, resembling a porcelain bowl, through which the stump of his spinal cord protruded.

Biddy and I passed several minutes looking for Martin. Four weeks ago I had seen nothing like this. Now it remained awful, but routine. And still, as I often did, I found myself in conversation with God. Why am I alive? When will it be my turn? And then as ever: And why would you want any of your creatures treated this way?

The lodge which had been Martin's observation post was about fifty yards west. According to Barnes and Edgeworthy, it had gone down like a house of cards. Everything had fallen in, except the lower half of the rear wall. The crater from the tank shells reached nearly to the brick footings and was filled with the burned remains of the building--cinders and glass and larger chunks of the timbers, and the blackened stones of the outer walls. We could see the view Martin had as he looked west where the American tanks had emerged like ghosts from the morning blizzard. He had died in a beautiful spot, with a magnificent rolling vista of the hills, plump with snow.

I summoned the GR officer and he brought over a steam shovel to dig through the stony rubble, but after an hour they were unable to find a whole corpse. In the movies, the dead die so conveniently--they stiffen and fall aside. Here men had been blown apart. The flesh and bone, the shit and blood of buddies had showered over one another. Men in my company had died like that on Christmas Day, and among the burdens I carried, along with the troubled memory of the gratitude I'd experienced that it had been them and not me, was the lesser shame of feeling revolted as the final bits of good men splattered on me. Here, of course, if anything remained of Robert Martin, it probably had been incinerated in the burning debris. Biddy motioned toward a tree about twenty yards off. A ribbon of human entrails hung there, ice-rimed, but literally turning on the wind like a kite tail.

Edgeworthy and Barnes had placed Martin at the second-floor window, surveying the retreating Germans, when the first tank shell had rocketed in. Working from the foundation, it was not hard to figure the spot, but his remains could have blown anywhere within two hundred yards. The sergeant had his men dig in the area of the west wall for close to an hour. A pair of dog tags turned up, neither Martin's.

"They don't usually burn up," the sergeant said, meaning the tags. He expected eventually to identify Martin somehow. Dental records, fingerprints, laundry marks, school rings. But it would take weeks. As we were getting ready to leave, a hand and arm were discovered, but there was a wedding ring on the third finger. It wasn't Martin.

"Panzers didn't take many prisoners," said the sergeant, "but the Krauts are the Krauts. They'd have treated an officer better, if they found him alive. Only thing is, anybody who made it through this didn't live by much. Have to be in a POW hospital, wouldn't you think? And the Krauts don't have medicine for their own. I wouldn't think your man would be doing too well."

I sent a signal to Camello reporting on our findings and asking for the Third Army to contact the Red Cross, which reported on POWs. At this stage, it could take a month at least to be sure the Germans didn't have Martin, and even that wouldn't be definitive. General Teedle had another suggestion on how to fully investigate Martin's fate. The idea had occurred to me, but I had been unwilling. Lying in that snowy field on Christmas Day seemed to have put an end to my curiosity. Now I had a direct order, a three-word telegraphic response.

Find the girl

Chapter 23.

REUNION

I gave no credence to what Martin had told me in Savy about Gita's whereabouts, even though it had been vaguely corroborated by the little private, Barnes, and his memory of the girl with the farm family Martin contacted near Skyline Drive. Instead, we decided to retrace the initial intelligence which had placed Gita near Houffalize. After several signals, we were advised to see the leader there of the Belgian resistance, the Geheim Leger, the Secret Army, a woman named Marthe Trausch.

Traveling took two days, because Houffalize was not fully liberated until January 16, when the First Army's 84th Infantry and Patton's 11th Armored met at the town and began driving east. Like so much of the Ardennes, Houffalize sat handsomely in a snowy forest valley carved by the Ourthe River, a narrow tributary of the Meuse, but the town itself was now all but obliterated. The American bombers had leveled every structure large enough to be used by the Germans as a command center, killing hundreds of Nazis, but dozens of Houffalize residents as well. We rode in to indifferent greetings. For these people, when it came to war and warriors, the sides were less and less consequential.

Madame Trausch proved to be a seventy-year-old tavern keeper, a fleshy widow with a bright skirt scraping the floor. She had taken over her husband's role in the resistance when he died, her saloon providing an excellent site both for eavesdropping on the Nazis and for passing information. About half of the old stone inn had survived and I found her calmly clearing debris with two of her grandchildren. Her native tongue was Luxembourgian, a kind of Low German, and her accent made her French hard for me to follow, but she responded promptly when I mentioned Martin and Gita.

For once, Robert Martin appeared to have told the truth. Madame Trausch said Martin had been intent on getting into southern Germany, and asked for help setting up Gita in Luxembourg near the German border. The Luxembourgers had not put up the same fight against the Nazis as the Belgians, but a loose network existed there of residents who assisted the Geheim Leger when they could. More than a month ago, Gita had been placed with one of these families on a small farm in sight of the Ourthe River, on the steep hills beneath Marnach. Gita posed as a milkmaid, taking the family cows to pasture and back each day. These rambles allowed her to watch the movement of the German troops from the heights over the river, leading to her unheeded warnings about tank activity near the German town of Dasburg.

In war, it is all noise, no one listens," said Madame Trausch. She had no idea whether Gita or the farmer or their house had survived the battles. No one had yet been heard from, but it was unclear whether the Germans had even been pushed back there. We started east, were roadblocked by combat, and did not get to the hamlet of Roder until the afternoon of January 19. By then the fighting was about two miles east.

Here, as in Belgium, the ocher farmhouses and barns, rather than being scattered over the landscape, were arranged in the feudal manner around a common courtyard with each family's land stretching behind their abode. The medieval notion was common protection, but now this clustering had made all the structures equally vulnerable to modern explosives. Every house was damaged, and one had fallen in entirely, with only two walls of jointed stone partially standing in broken shapes like dragon's teeth. The round crosshatched rafters of the roof lay camelbacked between them, beside a heap of timber and stone over which a family and several of their neighbors were climbing. Apparently searching for any useful remains, they proceeded in a determined and utterly stoic manner. At the top of the hill of rubble a man picked up scraps of paper, sorting them in a fashion, some in his trouser pockets, others in his coat. Another fellow was already at work with a hammer, knocking loose pieces of mortar from the stones, probably quarried a century ago, and stacking them so that they could be used to rebuild.

But I sensed this was the place I was looking for, due not so much to Madame Trausch's information as to what I'd heard from Private Barnes. He'd described the lady of the house as "a round old doll," and there would never be better words for the woman wobbling along near the top of the pile.

I had started toward her, when I heard my name. On the far side of the heap, Gita held a hand to her eye. She was dressed in a makeshift outfit--a headscarf, a cloth overcoat with fur trim on the sleeves, and torn work pants.

"Doo-bean?" She seemed only mildly surprised to see me, as if she presumed I'd been searching for her for weeks. She climbed up grinning and struck me on the shoulder, speaking English. It was only my physical appearance that seemed to inspire her wonder.

"You soldier!" she cried.

Despite all the vows I had made on the battlefield, I found myself enjoying her admiration. I offered her a cigarette. She shrieked when she saw the pack and dragged on the smoke so hungrily that I thought she would consume the butt in one breath. I told her to keep the package, which she literally crushed to her heart in gratitude.

We reverted to French. I said I was looking for Martin.

"Pourquoi? Still all this with Teedle?"

"There are questions. Have you seen him?"

"Moir She laughed in surprise. The round old doll teetered over to see about me. Soon, the whole family was describing the last month. In Marnach, like everywhere else, collaborators with the Germans had been severely punished when the Allies took control, and thus, once the Germans returned, those known to have aided the Americans were endangered, less by the SS than by their vengeful neighbors. Gita and the Hurles had endured many close calls. For several days, they had scurried like wood mice through the forest, eventually stealing back here and remaining in the woodshed of family friends. No one had food, and there was little way to know which side would bomb or shoot them first. The Hurles still had no idea who had destroyed their house, nor did it matter. All was lost, except two of their twelve cows. But the father, the mother, and their two married daughters were safe, and they all continued to hold out hope for their sons, who like most of the young men in Luxembourg had been forced into the German Army and sent to the eastern front. Madame Hurle remained on the Americans' side, but wished they would hurry up and win the war.

"Qu'est-ce gulls nous ont mis!" The Germans, she said, had beaten the hell out of them.

"But no sign of Martin?" I asked Gita. She had not really answered the question.

"Quelle mouche ea pique?" she answered. What's eating you? You are angry with Martin, no? Because he played a trick. And me, too, I suppose."

"I received your postcard," I answered.

"Robert was very put out when I told him I wrote. But I owed you a word. I was afraid you would be hurt when you woke."

"And so I was."

"It was a moment, Dubin. An impulse. War is not a time when impulse is contained."

"I have had the very same thoughts in the days since.''

"Ah," she said. "So between us, peace is declared."

"Of course," I said. We were both smiling, if still somewhat shyly. "But I must know about Martin. Tell me when you last saw him."

"A month, I would say. More. Since I am with the Hurles. When the battle is done, he will find me here. He always does." She was blithe, even childish in her conviction. Assaying her reactions, the question I had been sent here to pose seemed answered. Martin had made no miraculous escape, had sent no secret emissaries.

"Then I am afraid Martin is dead," I said. "Qu'est-ce que to dis?"

I repeated it. A tremor passed through her small face, briefly erasing the indomitable look that was always there. Then she gave a resolute shake to her short curls and addressed me in English to make her meaning clear.

"Is said before. Many times. Is not dead."

"The men in his company saw him fall, Gita. Tank shells struck the building where he was. He died bravely.), "Non!" she said, in the French way, through the nose.

I had watched myself, as it were, throughout this exchange. Even now, I could not completely fight off the fragment in me that was dashed that she took Martin so much to heart. But I felt for her as well. When I wondered where she would go next, I recognized much of the motive for her attachment to him. She was again a Polish orphan in a broken country. Even her time as warrior was over without Martin.

"I had very faint hopes, Gita. Hope against hope, we say. That is why I came. If he survived, I knew he would have contacted you."

She agreed with that in a murmur. I had toyed with the truth in my role of interrogator, and she might well have shaded her answers to me. After all, she wanted to be Bernhardt. But her grief looked genuine. She wandered down the mound by herself. She was not crying, though. Then again, I wondered if Gita ever wept. She stood alone, looking out at a field where a dead cow was frozen in the snow.

I asked Biddy how she appeared to him.

"Bad off," he answered. "I don't take her for foolin."

In a few minutes, I skirted the rubble heap to find her.

"You should come with us," I told her. She had nowhere else to go. "Even the cows you herded are gone. And my superiors may have questions for you. Best to deal with them now." I suspected OSS would want to glean what they could from her about Martin.

She nodded. "I am another mouth to them," she said looking back to the Hurle family.

We headed for Bastogne. Biddy drove and Gita and I sat in the back of the jeep, smoking cigarettes and chatting while she stroked Hercules, who took to her quickly. We all agreed his prior master must have been a woman.

For the most part, we talked about what we had been through in the last few weeks. I described our airborne arrival in Savy, including the condition of my trousers. Every story with a happy ending is a comedy, one of my professors had said in college, and our tale of parachuting without training into a pitched battle had all three of us rolling by the time we'd finished.

"But why so desperate to reach Bastogne?" she asked. I had given away more than I wanted to, but had no way out except the truth. " Arrest Martin'!" she responded then. "These are foolish orders, Dubin. Martin played a trick. That is not a terrible crime. He has done nothing to harm the American Army."

I told her Teedle thought otherwise.

"Merde. Teedle est fou. Martin est un patriote." Teedle is nuts. Martin is a patriot.

"It does not matter now," I said somberly.

With that her eyes were glued closed a moment. I offered her another cigarette. I'd acquired a Zippo along the way and lit hers before mine. She pointed to me smoking.

"This is how I know for sure you are a soldier now.,, I showed her the callus I'd worn on the side of my thumb in the last month with the flint wheel of the lighter.

"You see, in the end, Martin was good for you, Dubin. You should be grateful to him. No? To fight is what you craved."

I was startled I had been so transparent. But that illusion was all in the past. I had not yet found a way to write to Grace or my parents about Christmas Day, but I told Gita the story now, quietly. Biddy stopped and got out of the jeep. He said he needed directions to Bastogne, but I suspected he wanted no part of the memories. I told her about lying in the snow in that clearing waiting to die, while the men nearby preceded me, and about feeling so shamed by my desperation to live.

"I thought all my last thoughts," I told her. "Including, I must say, about you."

Her full eyebrows shot up and I hurried to clarify. "Not with longing,". I said.

"Oh? What, then? Regret?" She was teasing, but remained attentive.

"I would say, with clarity," I said finally. "Our moment together had given me clarity. I longed for home and hearth. A normal life. To gather my family around a fire. To have children."

She had taken the Zippo and held its flame to the tip of a new cigarette for a long time. Through the blue scrim, she settled a drilling look on me, so intense my heart felt like it skipped.

"And I am what, Dubin? A vagabond? You think I care nothing for those things? The fire, the warm meal, the children underfoot?"

"Do you?" I answered stupidly.

"You think I do not wish to have a place in the world, as other persons have a place? To want what you or any other person wants? To have a life and not merely to survive? You think I have no right to be as weary of this as everyone else?"

"I hardly meant that."

"No," she said. "I heard. I am not fit for a decent life."

She suddenly could not stand to look at me. She released the car door and jumped outside, where I felt I had no choice but to pursue her. Her dark eyes were liquid when I caught up, but her look was savage. She swore at me in French, and then, as an astonishing exclamation point, hurled the pack of cigarettes at me.

I was flabbergasted. Men always are when they sacrifice a woman's feelings, I suppose. But I had known better. I had glimpsed the fundamental truth of Gita in the instant she had raised her skirt in that barn. She would always be the spurned offspring of the town pariah. Everything about her character was built over an abyss of hurt.

I followed her farther out into the snow. She was already attracting attention from some of the soldiers on their guard post nearby. Her face was crushed on her glove and I touched her shoulder.

"I mourn Martin," she said. "Do not think your chatter about yourself has upset me.

"I had no such thought." I knew better than to tell her she wept for herself. "But I am sorry. I should not have said that. About what I thought. That I felt no longing. I am sorry."

"No longing?" She pivoted. If possible, she was even more furious. "You think I care about that? You think that damaged my pride?" She smashed the last of her cigarette underfoot and stepped toward me, lowering her voice. "It is your poor opinion of me I revile, not your desires. You know nothing, Dubin. You are a fool. No longing," she huffed. "I do not even believe it, Dubin." Then she lifted her face to me, so that there was only a hairbreadth between us. "Nor do you," she whispered.

She was an iceberg, of course, on the remainder of the ride, tomb-silent except to the dog, to whom she spoke in whispers he could not hear. I sat in front with Biddy, but he could tell there had been a personal eruption and said little. As we approached Bastogne, Gita announced that she wanted to be taken to the military hospital, where she would find work as a nurse. Trained assistance was never spurned in a war zone. In so many words, she was saying she needed no help from me.

Arriving in Bastogne, I was startled by its size. It was hard to believe thousands of men had died for the sake of such a small place. The town had only one main street, rue Sablon, although the avenue sported several good-size buildings, whose fancy stone facades were now frequently broken or scarred by shrapnel and gunfire. Iron grates framed tiny balconies under windows which, for the most part, had been left as empty black holes. Here and there one of the steep peaked roofs characteristic of the region lay in complete collapse as a result of an artillery strike, but in general the poor weather had kept Bastogne from more severe destruction by air. The cathedral had been bombed as part of the Germans' Christmas Eve present, a crude gesture meant to deprive Bastogne's citizens of even the meager comfort of a holiday prayer, but the debris from the buildings that had been hit had already been shoveled into piles in the streets, and was being removed by locals in horse-drawn carts. Last night there had been yet another heavy snowfall, and soldiers on foot slogged along while the jeeps and convoys thick on rue Sablon slid slowly down the steep avenue.

I had no way to temporize with Gita. Instead we simply asked directions to the American field hospital, which occupied one of the largest structures of the town, a four-story convent, L'Etablissement des Soeurs de Notre Dame de Bastogne. Despite the fact that the roof was gone, the first two floors remained habitable, and the Sisters had given up their large redbrick school and the rear building of their compound to the care of the sick and wounded. The snow from the street had been pushed onto the walks and sat in frozen drifts, some the height of a man. Between them, several ambulances were parked, the same Ford trucks that served as paddy wagons at home, here emblazoned with huge red crosses. Gita snatched up the small parcel she had gathered from the remains of the Hurles' home and marched inside. I followed in case she needed someone to vouch for her.

At the front desk sat a nun whose face, amid a huge starched angel-wing habit, looked like a ripe peach in a white bowl. She made an oddly serene figure in the entryway, which had been strafed. There were bullet holes in the walls and in the somewhat grand wooden rococo balustrades leading to the upper stories, while some kind of ordnance had blown a small crater in the inlaid floor, leaving a hole all the way to the cellar. After only a few moments of conversation, Gita and the nun appeared to be reaching an agreement.

Watching from a distance, I was surprised to hear my name from behind.

"David?" A doctor in a green surgical gown and cap had both arms raised toward me, a short dark man who looked a little like Algar. Once he removed the headgear I recognized Cal Echols, who had been my sister's boyfriend during his first two years in med school. Everyone in my family had loved Cal, who was smart and sociable, but he'd lost his mother as a four-year-old, and Dorothy said his clinging ultimately drove her insane. We'd never seen that side of him, of course. Now Cal and I fell on each other like brothers.

"Jeepers creepers," he said, when he pushed me back to look me over, "talk about the tempest tossed. I thought you lawyers knew how to worm your way out of things."

"Bad timing," I said.

He figured I had come to the hospital to visit a soldier, and I was immediately embarrassed that my preoccupation with Gita had kept me from realizing that several of the wounded men from my company were probably here. Cal had finished his surgical shift and offered to help me find them. When I turned to the front desk to attempt some awkward goodbye with Gita, she was gone.

Once Biddy had found a place for the jeep, he and I went over the hospital roster with Cal. Four of our men were still on hand. A corporal named Jim Harzer had been wounded by a mortar round during a hill fight near Noville. He was another of the replacement troops, the father of two little girls, and when I'd last seen him he was on the ground, with the corpsmen attending him. They had a tourniquet above his knee; down where his boot had been it was primarily a bloody pulp. In spite of that, Harzer had beamed. 'I'm done, Cap,' he said. 'I'm going home. I'm gonna be kissing my girls.' I found him in a similarly buoyant mood today. He'd lost his right foot, but he said he'd met several fellas missing their lefts and they planned to stay in touch so they could save money on shoes.

In the convent, all the class space had been converted to hospital wards. The long wooden desks at which students once sat facing the blackboards were being used as beds, with more cots placed in between. The valuable classroom equipment, bird exhibits for science, chem lab beakers, and microscopes, had been preserved in the closets.

Almost every patient had had surgery of some kind, the best-off only to remove shrapnel from nonmortal wounds. But on the wards were also the limbless, the faceless, the gut-shot, who too often were only days from death. The cellar that ran the length of the building now served as a morgue.

At the far end of the second floor, an MP stood outside a full ward of German POWs here as patients.

"We give them better than our boys get, that's for sure," said Cal. Indeed, several of the Germans waved when they recognized Cal in the doorway. "Nice kid, from Munich," said Cal about one of them. "Speaks good English, but both parents are Nazi Party members."

"Does he know you're Jewish?"

"That was the first thing I told him. Of course, all of his best friends at home were Jewish. All. He gave me a whole list." He smiled a little.

Cal had been here since the day after Christmas, and I began asking about the other men from my company who'd left the front in ambulances. He remembered a number. Too many had died, but there was some good news. Cal himself had operated on Mike O'Brien--the joker who'd enjoyed giving it to Stocker Collison--whom I'd dragged from the clearing on Christmas Day. He had lived. So had Massimo Fortunato, from whose thigh Cal had removed a shrapnel piece the size of a softball. He had been transferred to a general hospital in Luxembourg City, but Massimo had done so well that Cal thought he would be sent back to my former unit in a month or two.

Cal offered us billets in the convent, which we eagerly accepted, since it saved me from a problematic reconnaissance in the overcrowded town. The enlisted men, medical corpsmen for the most part, were housed in a large schoolroom converted to a dormitory. Their quarters were close, but the men weren't complaining, Cal said. The building had electricity from a field generator and central heat, coal-fired, although there was not yet running water in the tiled baths and shower rooms. Better still, the enlisted men were right next to the mess hall and on the same floor as the nuns and nurses, a few of whom were rumored to have dispensed healing treatments of a nonmedical variety. True or not, the mere idea had revived the men.

The docs were boarded on the second floor in the nuns' former rooms, which the Sisters had insisted on surrendering. These were barren cubicles, six feet by ten, each containing a feather mattress, a small table, and a crucifix on the wall, but it would be the first privacy I'd had for a month. Cal's room was two doors down. He had received a package from home only a day ago and he offered me a chocolate, laughing out loud at my expression after the first bite.

"Careful," he said. "You look close to cardiac arrest.

Afterward, in officers' mess where we had dinner, I again recounted Christmas Day. Despite all the fighting I'd seen following that, my stories never seemed to get any farther.

"This war," said Cal. "I mean, being a doc--it's a paradox, I'll tell you, David. You try like hell to save them, and doing a really great job just means they get another chance to die. We had a young medic who came in here yesterday. It was the third time in a month. Minor wounds the first couple of times, but yesterday just about his whole right side was blown away. What a kid. Even in delirium, he would reply to all of my questions with a 'Yes, sir' or 'No, sir.' I stayed up all day with him, just trying to coax him to live, and he died not ten minutes after I finally went off." Cal peered at nothing, reabsorbing the loss. "A lot of these boys end up hating us when they realize they're going back. You know the saying. The only thing a doctor can give you is a pill and a pat on the back and an Army doc skips the pat on the back."

It was nearly 8:00 p. M. now, and Cal's surgical shift was about to begin. He would operate until 4:00 a. M. The surgical theater was never empty. Before he went back to work, he brought a bottle of Pernod to my room. After two drinks, I passed out with my boots still on.

I woke in the middle of the night when my door cracked open. At first, I thought it was the wind, but then a silhouette appeared, backlit by the brightness from the hall.

"Ton Chien to cherche," Gita said. She slid through the door and closed it and flicked on the light. She had hold of Hercules by the woven belt that one of the men in my company had given him as a collar. Her hair had been pinned up under a white nurse's bonnet and she was dressed in a baggy gray uniform. The dog, which Biddy had left outside in the convent's one-car garage, had been found trotting through the wards. Harzer and a couple of others recognized him and swore that Hercules had come to pay his respects before moving on in his apparent search for Biddy or me. When she let him go, the dog bounded to my side. I scratched his ears, before I faced her.

Cal's stories about nurses scurrying through the halls at night had briefly sparked the thought that Gita might arrive here. It seemed unlikely given her mood when we parted, but before falling off I'd had a vision so clear I had actually deliberated for an instant about whether I would tell her to stay or to go. Yet in the moment there was no choice. As always, she presented herself as a challenge. But I doubted her boldness was only to prove her point about my longing. Her need was as plain as my craving for her, which just like my paralyzing fears in the air over Savy was not subject to the control of preparation or reason. I beckoned with my hand, the lights went off, and she was beside me.

As I embraced her, I apologized for my grime and the odor, but we met with all the gentleness our first time together had lacked, softened by what each of us had endured in the interval. Even as I savored the remarkable smoothness of her stomach and back, the thrill of touching a human so graceful and compact, something within me continued to wonder if this romance was a fraud, merely the overheated grappling of the battlefront. Perhaps it was just as Teedle had told me. When a human is reduced to the brute minimum, desire turns out to be at the core. But that did not matter now as we lay together in the tiny convent room. In the tumult of emotion Gita consistently provoked in me, there was a new element tonight. I had been fascinated from the start by her intelligence and her daring; and my physical yearning for her was greater than I'd felt for any woman. But tonight, my heart swelled also with abounding gratitude. I pressed her so close that I seemed to hope to squeeze her inside my skin. I kissed her again and again, wishing my appreciation could pour out of me, as I, David Dubin, recovered, if only for a fragment of time, the fundamental joy of being David Dubin.

Chapter 24.

ALIVE

We remained in Bastogne two more days.

I had signaled Teedle that Gita was here if OSS wished to interview her, and awaited his order to formally abandon the effort to arrest Martin. Pending a response, I worked on a long report about the past month for Colonel Maples, who had moved to the new Third Army Headquarters in Luxembourg City. I also spent a couple of hours both days with the men from my former command who were hospitalized here. But every minute was only a long aching interval, waiting for dark and the end of Gita's shift, when she would slip into my room.

"You are an unusual woman," I had told her again that first night after she had come to me, as we lay whispering in the narrow bed.

"You notice only now?" She was laughing. "But I do not think you mean to praise me, Dubin. What do you find so uncommon?"

That you mourn Martin and are with me."

She thought a moment. "No soldier in Europe more eagerly sought death, Dubin. I knew that, no matter how often I tried to say otherwise. Besides, if my father died or my brother, would it be unusual, as you say, to find comfort in life?"

"Martin was not your father or your brother."

"No," she said and fell silent again. "He was both. And my salvation. He rescued me, Dubin. When I met him I was on the boil, furious at all moments except those when I simply wanted to die. He said, If you are angry, fight. And if you wish to die, then wait until tomorrow. Today you may do some good for someone else.' He knew the right things to say. Because he had said them to himself."

"But you do not mourn him as your lover?"

"Qu'est-ce qui to prend?" She raised her head from my chest. "Why does that matter so much to you--me with Martin? Do you fear that I liked Martin better this way than I like you?"

You think that is the issue?"

"It is the issue with every man at times. And it is stupid. With each person it is different, Dubin. Not better or worse. It is like a voice, yes? No voice is the same. But there is always conversation. Does one prefer a person for the voice, or the words? It is what is being said that matters far more. No?"

I agreed, but pondered in the dark.

"Doo-bean," she finally said, more emphatically than usual, "I have told you. With Martin and me that aspect was long over. It became impossible."

"Because?"

"Because this is no longer an activity for him."

I finally understood. "Was he wounded?"

"In the mind. He has not been good that way for some time. He punishes himself perhaps, because he likes the killing too much. He has clung to me, but only because he believes there will not be another woman after me. Comprends-tu?"

Surprisingly, something remained unsettled. I looked into the dark seeking the words, as if attempting to lay hold of a nerve running through my chest.

"When I think of Martin," I said then, "I wonder what interest I could have to you. I am so dull. My life is small and yours with him has been so large."

"Tu ne me comprends pas bien." You do not understand me well.

"Well'? You are the most mysterious person I have ever met."

"I am a simple girl, with little education. You are learned, Dubin. Occasionally humorous. Brave enough. You are a solid type, Dubin. Would you drink and beat your wife?"

Not at the same time."

"Tu m'as fait craquer." I cracked, meaning, I couldn't resist. "Besides, you are a rich American." "My father is a cobbler."

"Evidemment! Les cordonniers sont toujours les plus mal chausses." The shoemaker's son always goes barefoot. "I have miscalculated." Once we had laughed for some time, she added, "You have a conscience, Dubin. It is an attractive quality in a fellow in a time of war."

"A conscience? Lying here with you when I have promised myself to someone else?"

"Eh," she answered again. "If you and she were destined for each other, you would have married before you departed. What woman loves a man and allows him to leave for war without having him to her bed?"

"It was not solely her choice."

"More the point, then. You are not so scrupulous here, when there are no expectations." She laid her fingertip directly on the end of my penis to make her point. "You chose to be free, Dubin. No? Qui se marie a la hate se repent a loisir." Marry in haste, repent at leisure.

Gita's observation, made in her customary declarative fashion, seemed too stark to be true, but there was no avoiding it. I yearned for the aura that surrounded Grace like a cloud--her gentility, her blonde hair and soft sweaters, the way she glided through life, her pristine American beauty. But not enough to separate myself from my parents in the irrevocable way our marriage had called for. My sudden decision to enlist, rather than wait out my fortunes with the draft, seemed highly suspect from the distance of a convent bed in Belgium. But so did the balm these conclusions gave to my conscience.

"At any rate, Dubin, you are here with me now. Even though you felt no longing." She stroked now where she had left her finger, and I responded. quickly. "Aha," she said. "Again, Dubin, you are betrayed."

"No, no, that is merely to save your feelings." "Then, perhaps I shall stop," she said.

"No, no, I am much too concerned for you to allow that."

Afterward, we slept, but in time I was awakened by growling. I had heard it in my dreams for a while, but it grew insistent and I stirred, ready to scold. Hercules. Instead, I found Gita snoring. Her constant smoking had apparently done its work on her sinuses. From an elbow, I studied her in the light borrowed from the hall. Lying there, she seemed, as we all do in slumber, childlike, her small sharp face mobile in sleep. She suckled briefly; an arm stirred protectively, and her eyes jumped beneath her lids. I was impressed by how small she appeared when the current, as it were, was turned off on her imposing personality. I watched several minutes. As she had been trying to tell me, she was, at heart, a far simpler person than I supposed.

After Gita had snuck back downstairs the first night we'd arrived in Bastogne, I met Cal for breakfast at the officers' mess, as planned. He had been in surgery until 4:00 a. M., then had made rounds to see his patients. He was still in a bloody gown, gobbling up something before he grabbed a few hours' sleep. Apparently, it was he who had directed Gita and the dog to my room, and he let me know promptly that he'd guessed the score.

"So how did your quarters work out? Bed a little tight?"

I could feel myself flush, and then, like a switchboard operator plugging in the lines, I made a series of connections which, when complete, brought me up short. Cal would write home that he had seen me. He would say I had a woman here. Grace, in time, would hear.

"Oh, don't worry," he said, when he saw my expression. He made that zipper motion across his lips.

But somehow I was caught up in a vision of Grace reacting to this news. Would she rely on some bromide about how men will be men? Or take comfort from the extremities of war? My mind continued tumbling down the staircase, descending into various images of what might occur when word reached Grace, until I finally crashed and came to rest at the bottom. In a figurative heap, I checked myself and was shocked to find myself frightened but unhurt--no bruises, no broken bones--and thus I knew at that moment, absolutely and irrevocably, that I was not going to marry Grace Morton. I cared intensely about Grace. I still could not imagine being the brutal assassin of her feelings. But she was not a vital part of me. Gita's role in this seemed incidental. It was not a matter of choosing one woman over the other, because even now I continued to doubt that Gita's interest would last. But, in the light of day, what I'd recognized lying beside Gita remained. Grace was an idol. A dream. But not my destiny.

With some bemusement, Cal had watched all this work its way through my features.

"Who is this girl, anyway, David? I asked the nuns about her. They say she knows her bananas, bright, works hard. Bit of a looker," said Cal, "if you'll forgive me. Every man in this hospital will be pea green with envy, even the ones cold down in the morgue."

I smiled and told him a little about Gita. Runaway. Exile. Commando.

"Is it serious?" he asked.

I shook my head as if I didn't know, but within a distinct voice told me that the correct answer was yes. It was gravely serious. Not as Cal meant. Instead it was serious in the way combat was serious, because it was impossible to tell if I would survive.

Gita's nursing duties included washing bedridden patients. Imagining her at it made me nearly delirious with envy, although I admitted to her that I was uncertain if I was jealous of her touch or of the chance to bathe. When she arrived on the second night, she swung through the door with a heavy metal pail full of hot water. It had been boiled on the kitchen stove, the only means available in the absence of working plumbing.

You are an angel.

"A wet one." The sleeves of her shapeless uniform were black.

"So you can no longer tolerate the smell of me?"

"You smell like someone who has lived, Dubin. It is the complaining about it I cannot stand. Get up, please. I will not bathe you in your bed like an invalid."

She had brought a cloth, a towel, and another bowl. I removed my clothes and stood before her, as she scrubbed and dried me bit by bit. My calf, my thigh. There was a magnificent intermezzo before she went higher to my stomach.

"Tell me about America," she said, once she continued.

"You want to know if the streets are lined with gold? Or if King Kong is hanging from the Empire State Building?"

"No, but tell me the truth. Do you love America?"

"Yes, very much. The land. The people. And most of all the idea of it. Of each man equal. And free." "That is the idea in France, too. But is it true in America?"

"True? In America there was never royalty. Never Napoleon. Yet it is still far better to be rich than poor. But it is true, I think, that most Americans cherish the ideals. My father and mother came from a town very much like Pilzkoba. Now they live free from the fears they grew up with. They may speak their minds. They may vote. They may own property. They sent their children to public schools. And now they may hope, with good reason, that my sister and brother and I will find an even better life than theirs."

"But do Americans not hate the Jews?"

"Yes. But not as much as the colored." It was a dour joke and she was less amused than I by the bitter humor. "It is not like Hitler," I said. "Every American is from somewhere else. Each is hated for what he brings that is different from the rest. We live in uneasy peace. But it is peace, for the most part."

"And is America beautiful?"

"Magnifique." I told her about the West as I had glimpsed it from the train on my way to Fort Barkley.

"And your city?"

"We have built our own landscape. There are giant buildings."

"Like King Kong?"

"Almost as tall."

"Yes," she said. "I want to go to America. Europe is old. America is still new. The Americans are smart to fight on others' soil. Europe will require a century to recover from all of this. And there may be another war soon. Apres la guerre I will go to America, Dubin. You must help me."

"Of course," I said. Of course.

By the next morning, it seemed as if every person in Bastogne knew what was occurring in my quarters at night. Gita had made a clanging commotion dragging her pails up the stairs. I worried that the nuns would evict both of us, but they maintained a dignified silence. It was the soldiers who could not contain themselves, greeting me in whispers as "lover boy" whenever I passed.

Third Army had established a command center in Bastogne, and Biddy and I walked over there every few hours to see if Teedle's orders had come through.

For two days now, no shells had fallen on the city, and the civilians were in the streets, briskly going about their business. They were polite but busy, unwilling to repeat their prior mistake of believing this lull was actually peace.

As we hiked up the hilly streets, I said, "I find I'm the talk of the town, Gideon."

He didn't answer at first. "Well, sir," he finally said, "it's just a whole lot of things seem to be moving around in the middle of the night."

We shared a long laugh.

"She's a remarkable person, Biddy."

"Yes, sir. This thing got a future, Captain?"

I stopped dead on the pavement. My awareness of myself had been growing since my conversation with Cal at breakfast yesterday, but trusting Biddy more than anyone else, things were a good deal clearer in his company. I took hold of his arm.

"Biddy, how crazy would it sound if I said I love this woman?"

"Well, good for you, Captain."

"No," I said, instantly, because I had a clear view of the complications, "it's not good. It's not good for a thousand reasons. It probably conflicts with my duty. And it will not end well." I had maintained an absolute conviction about this. I knew my heart would be crushed.

"Cap," he said, "ain't no point going on like that. They-all can do better telling you the weather tomorrow than what's gonna happen with love. Ain't nothing else to do but hang on for the ride."

But my thoughts were very much the same when Gita came to my bed that night.

"Your phrase has haunted me all day," I told her. "Laquelle?"

"Apres la guerre.' I have thought all day about what will happen after the war."

If war is over, then there must be peace, no? At least for a while."

"No, I refer to you. And to me. I have spent the day wondering what will become of us. Does that surprise you or take you aback?"

"I know who you are, Dubin. It would surprise me if your thoughts were different. I would care for you much less."

I took a moment. "So you do care for me?" suis la." I am here.

"And in the future?"

"When the war began," she said, "no one thought of the future. It would be too awful to imagine the Nazis here for long. Everyone in the underground lived solely for the present. To fight now. The only future was the next action and the hope you and your comrades would survive. But since Normandy, it is different. Among the maquisards, there is but one phrase on their lips: Apres la guerre. I hear those words in my mind, too. You are not alone.), "And what do you foresee?"

"It is still war, Dubin. One creeps to the top of a wall and peeks over, I understand, but we remain here. If one looks only ahead, he may miss the perils that are near. But I have seen many good souls die. I have promised myself to live for them. And now, truly, I think I wish to live for myself as well."

"This is good."

"But you told me what you see, no? The hearth, the home. Yes?"

"Yes." That remained definitive. "Et toi?"

"Je sais pas. But if I live through this war, I will be luckier than most. I have learned what perhaps I most needed to."

"Which is?"

"To value the ordinary, Doo-bean. In war, one feels its loss acutely. The humdrum. The routine. Even I, who could never abide it, find myself longing for a settled life."

"And will that content you? Is it to be the same for you as me? The house, the home, being a respectable wife with children swarming at your knees beneath your skirt? Or will you be like Martin, who told me he would soon look for another war?"

"There will never be another war. Not for me. You said once that a woman has that choice, and that is the choice I will make. 'A respectable wife'? I cannot say. Tell me, Dubin"--she smiled cutely--"are you asking?"

Lightly as this was said, I knew enough about her to recognize the stakes. She would chuckle at a proposal, but would be furious if I was as quick to reject her. And at the same time, being who she was, she would chop me to bits for anything insincere. But having left one fiancee behind for little more than a day, I was not ready yet for new promises, even in banter.

"Well, let me say only that I intend to pay very careful attention to your answer."

"You sound like a lawyer."

We laughed.

"Martin once said you will never be content with just one man.''

"Eh, he was consoling himself. Believe me, Dubin, I know what I need to know about men. And myself with them. But one person forever? For many years that sounded to me like a prison sentence."

"May I ask? Was that perhaps your mother's influence?"

"I think not. My mother, if she had any influence, would have told me to find a fellow like you, decent and stable, and to stand by him. 'One craves peace,' she said always." She sat up into the borrowed light. Gita was more physically shy than I might have expected and I enjoyed the sight of her, her small breasts rising perfectly to their dark peaks.

"But she did not succeed herself."

"She had tried, Dubin. When she was seventeen, her looks attracted the son of a merchant, a wool seller from the city. She thought he was rich and handsome and a sophisticate and married him on impulse."

"This was Lodzka?" I tried to pronounce it correctly.

"Lodzki, yes. He was a cad, of course. He drank, he had other women, he was stingy with her. They fought like minks, even battled with their fists, and naturally she took the worst of it. One day she left him. She returned to Pilzkoba and announced that her husband was dead of influenza. Soon she had suitors. She had been married again for a month, when it was discovered that Lodzki was still alive. It was a terrible scandal. She was lucky they did not hang her. She always said she would have left, but it would have given everyone in Pilzkoba too much satisfaction." Gita stopped with a wistful smile. "So," she said.

"So," I answered, and drew her close again. One craves peace.

The next day, late in the afternoon while I was on the wards visiting, a private from the signal office found me with a telegram. Teedle had finally replied.

Seventh Armored Division captured Oflag XII-D outside Saint-Vith yesterday a. M. STOP Confirms Major Martin alive in prison hospital STOP Proceed at once STOP Arrest

I had been with Corporal Harzer, the soldier who had lost his foot, when the messenger put the yellow envelope in my hand.

"Captain, you don't look good," he said.

"No, Harzer. I've seen the proverbial ghost."

I located Bidwell. We'd head out first thing tomorrow. Then I walked around Bastogne, up and down the snowy streets and passageways. I knew I would tell Gita. How could I not? But I wanted to contend with myself beforehand. I had no doubt about her loyalties. She would desert me. If she did, she did, I told myself again and again, but I was already reeling at the prospect. I concentrated for some time on how to put this to her, but in the event, I found I had worked myself into one of those anxious states in which my only goal was to get it over with. I waited for her to emerge from the ward on which she was working and simply showed her the telegram.

I watched her study it. She had left the ward smoking, and as the hand that held the cigarette threshed again and again through her curls, I wondered briefly if she would set fire to the nurse's bonnet on her head. Her lips moved as she struggled with the English. But she understood enough. Those coffee-dark eyes of hers, when they found me, held a hint of alarm.

"II est vivant?"

I nodded.

"These are your orders?"

I nodded again.

"We talk tonight," she whispered.

And I nodded once more.

It was well past midnight before I realized she was not coming, and then I lay there with the light on overhead, trying to cope. My hurt was immeasurable. With Martin alive, she could not bring herself to be with me. That was transparent. Their bond, whatever the truth of their relationship, was more powerful than ours.

In the morning, as Bidwell packed the jeep, I sought her out to say goodbye. I had no idea whether I could contain my bitterness, or if I would break down and beg her to take me instead.

"Gita?" asked Soeur Marie, the nun in charge, when I inquired of her whereabouts. "Elle est partie."

How long had she been gone, I asked. Since dark yesterday, the Sister told me.

It took nine hours to reach Saint-Vith and I realized well in advance what we would find. The MP at Oflag XII-D said that a Red Cross nurse, accompanied by two French attendants, had come hours ago to transport Major Martin to a local hospital. We followed his directions there, where, as I had anticipated, no one knew a thing about the nurse, the attendants, or Robert Martin.