Once an Eagle (16 page)

“Sarge,” he whispered, “—it's Reb! that's Reb! And that's Poletti with him …”

“You're right.”

“And there's Corporal Devlin—”

Damon grunted. “Where?”

“In front. Walking alone. With that rag around his head. See him?”

They were easily recognizable now. They came along the path slowly, stumbling and slipping on the slope, the bushes swinging wildly as they passed. Their faces looked dejected and whipped. Only two of them still had their helmets. Corporal Devlin, then someone Brewster didn't know, then Raebyrne and Poletti and a stranger carrying the wounded man, who looked vaguely familiar. The guard at the rear called something and pushed Raebyrne, who glared back at him, in silence this time.

He started. Sergeant Damon was pulling him back up the path. “Come on, come on …”

“Where?” He followed, glancing back fearfully. They recrossed the ravine to the ridge. Back in the dense woods again Damon turned and said:

“We're going to jump them. Right here.”

“Jump them?”

“I'm going to hit the one in the rear first, and when the man in front turns, you nail him. Got that?”

“I—”

“Don't move till I do. I want to jump the rear man first. We've got to take them before they can fire a shot.”

“—
how,
Sarge?”

“Didn't you hear me? Didn't I tell you not to fire except as a last resort?”

Brewster stared at him. The Sergeant's face looked wrathful and stern, the way it did when he was reading off someone after inspection; only worse. He was serious about this. Completely serious. They were going—they were going to attack these Germans, he was expected to—

“… Couldn't we—couldn't we just—cover them?”

Damon's eyes widened with exasperation. “And have them fire on you, or dive for cover and holler for help? There are Germans
right—over—there,
” he hissed, pointing off through the heavy shadows of the woods.

“But—” he stammered. Fear rolled around inside him like dirty water. “But—I can't, Sarge …”

“You can. You've got to!”

“But—there's only two of us—”

“There's only two of them, too. And that's where they made
their
mistake, the sons of bitches …” He pulled Brewster off the path with him. “Quick, now. Right here. Behind this tree. Remember: don't show yourself until you've heard me make my rush. I'm going to be right there—see? that pine with the burl low on its trunk? You must not
fire—
”

“But Sarge, I'm not—”

“Kill the bastard. Kill him! It's him or you!—and all the rest of us …” Damon was shaking him fiercely, glaring at him. “Brewster, if you let me down now …
stick him!
Run him through!” He gave the Private one final shake, then vanished through the bushes without a sound.

“Oh God,” Brewster breathed. Crouched behind the broad base of the pine he checked his bayonet studs automatically. His face was soaked with sweat; it dripped from his nose and chin, kept streaming into his eyes and made them sting. His stomach growled and whined. From down in the ravine he heard the German guard's voice again, and pressed his hand against his stomach to make it stop growling. Drops of pitch on the black flakes of bark before his eyes were like globules of milky amber; he touched one, and his fingers came away furred and sticky. “We've come to a little conclusion about you, Brewster.” Sohier's voice, lazy and mocking, the ring of faces watching him flatly from cots and desk corners. “It's the consensus of the group that your liver is just a mite on the pale side. In short, that you've got a saffron streak in you a mile wide, which keeps getting in your way. Ours, too. So this is just to let you know we'd appreciate it if you'd go your own erring way from now on and not intrude your company on us. Do we make ourselves clear, Brewster?” Markham, Bullert, Himes, all the others. A coward, they'd told him they wanted no part of him and they'd branded him a coward all the way through school because of that scrimmage, their faces smooth and smug and their eyes glinting with the amused contempt that had filled him with such sick shame—

They were coming up the path: he heard the muffled clinking of equipment, the thud of boots on the hard-baked earth. He saw movement, then the gray uniform, the face broad and square-jawed, well tanned under the flaring black helmet rim. His heart swelled up into his throat and wedged itself there; he had a terrible desire to flee, throw down his rifle and race away through the woods and hide forever—who would know? who would care?—replaced on the instant by Sergeant Damon's wrathful, importunate eyes, the memory of that moment in the common room at St. Andrew's. A flood of sheer rage coursed through him, and a swift tensing of his muscles over which he had no control.

There was a thump like a batten struck against a blanketed log, and a low, tremulous cry. He leaped out from behind the tree. The German—not six feet away—had turned back toward the brief commotion; Brewster paused, staring at his back. Beyond the German the other faces gazed back at him in a blurred frieze of amazement: white blank faces. The man's back was broad, with sweat stains in large green loops above the wide black-leather belt. He started to lunge and could not—stood there staring, frozen, indecisive, at the shiny black bullet pouch, the cylindrical gas-mask holder, a tear in the tunic pleat for one endless, horrible instant and then the German spun back again, his eyes wide and very clear, his lips in a thin, cruel line, and his bayoneted rifle described a long, high arc through the level sunlight. Brewster had the swift thought,
He's trying to hurt me
—and lunged down and in, the movement automatic and defined, a deep thrust, as Damon had taught him. There was a shock and the bayonet went into the man's body just above the metal belt buckle, which looked like the head of a snarling jaguar. The man stiffened, his body arching toward his assailant, as though trying to push the blade in still farther. Something struck Brewster a blinding blow on the bridge of the nose; his sight darkened, blurred, he saw as if through streaming glass the man's eyes rolling whitely. A hand danced in the air, clawing and clawing at his face. They were bound together by the bayonet, conjoined for an eternity of clawing, gasping, writhing intimacy. Then all at once Devlin had snapped his arm around the German's neck from behind and snatched his trench knife out of its scabbard, was driving it into his back, once, twice, the blows like fists pounding sand bags. The man sank to the path without a sound. Brewster kept wrenching at the blade, which would not come loose; then without warning it did, and a greasy tongue of blood leaped after the bright steel, gliding back along the blood channel. Lowering the weapon, he looked up—at Devlin, at Raebyrne and Poletti and the others, who watched him as if he were possessed of some magical and terrible powers. It was over. He had done it. He had done what Sergeant Damon had ordered him to do.

Then he was bent over retching dryly, foolishly, brushing the branches away in sudden petulance. He felt ashamed, then he didn't care. Someone had a hand around his shoulders, was saying something to him quietly; but the words meant nothing.

“I'm all right,” he heard his voice say. He passed his hand over his face, noticed with faint surprise that his palm was smeared with blood. His nose felt astonishingly thick and furry. “I just need a minute. Or two …”

But no one was listening to him, they were all doing something now: stealthy, quick movements in the dense ripples of light and shadow. Damon had signaled to the others that the enemy was not a hundred yards away, on their right; Raebyrne and Devlin were stripping the dead Germans of their cartridge belts. Everyone seemed to have something to do, and only he stood there, musing, dazed, bound in timelessness.

“What took you so long, Sam?” Corporal Devlin was saying to Damon, his eyes bright and beady. “I've had that call in for five hours now.”

The Sergeant slowly grinned. “You know these French telephone operators, they never get the numbers right.” He was still peering calmly toward the woods beyond the ridge. “Planning a little trip to Germany, Dev?”

“Why sure—it's just the time to lay in a stock of Bernkasteler Riesling before it's all gone—” Then he gave it up, his jaw dropped. “I guess so,” he muttered. “Jesus, I guess so.”

“What happened?”

“Hell, I don't know. Lieutenant yelled to fall back, I didn't think we were supposed to but it seemed like a hell of a good idea right then. I got back over the embankment with several of the boys, and the Heinies were swarming all over us, I didn't know who was what. I'd just drilled one who was all set to skewer Turner and was taking aim at another one, and something got me on the side of the head. And when I came to I was lying flat on my back with a head like New Year's morning and these two heroes and no weapons, and a thousand and one Heinies all around, pointing bayonets at my belly.”

“All right, Corp,” Raebyrne rejoined, “I know I ain't no hell-fire hero, all I know is I'd a been five counties away by now if I hadn't stopped to try and pick you up …”

“Lot of good that did you,” Devlin murmured, though he grinned wearily.

Raebyrne shrugged. “Well, it come out all right in the end…”

Brewster watched them all strangely. His eyes strayed to the dead German, the square, tanned face and heavy body—then he looked away quickly. He had done it. They had called him a coward and wouldn't let him eat at their table or use the common room, but he wasn't a coward; he wasn't any more of a coward or a hero than anyone else. And he had made his body do what it had to … It was odd: he could not feel his hands, or his feet, or his nose, even when he put his fingers to it and pressed it gently. It looked huge, his sight was curiously affected. Damon's face seemed to come at him over a thick purple promontory.

“You all right, kid?”

“I can't seem to see too well,” he mumbled.

“He must have caught you with the trigger guard, or maybe his fist. He broke your nose.”

“Broke my nose?”

“Yep. It'll improve your looks. Give you more character.”

“Everybody's nose has got to be broken once before he's a grown man,” Devlin said. “Didn't you know that, Brewster? And then it's got to be rebroke.”

“Shoot, all he needs is to slap a pulse of suet and ashes in a red flannel sock and hold it on for two days and two nights to draw the poison, and it'll cure it right smart …”

He smiled sheepishly. They were ragging him again, but it was different now. They were crowding around him almost eagerly, they all wanted to say something to him. He had come up to it; that was all he knew. Through tearing, blurry eyes he sought out Damon. “We did it,” he said.

“You see?” The Sergeant was grinning at him. “You see what two men can do, Tim? You see? Now there's eight of us …”

He nodded. They were going to be all right; he knew it with a hard, fierce certainty alien to him till this moment. They were going to make it back to their own lines and nobody, not even the whole German Seventh Army lined up shoulder to shoulder, was going to stop them.

4

“I still say
they're in there.”

“Sure they're in there. Wouldn't you be?”

“I don't know what I'd be.”

“Well. There's only one way to find out …”

The woods had ended in a little crescent-shaped horn, snipped off neatly at the edge of the wheatfield. The land, rolling south like some exquisite golden fur in the sunlight, rose to a little hill they couldn't see over. And in the middle of the long field, about a hundred yards from where they lay, in a cluster of fruit trees, stood the farm.

Damon studied it calmly, wishing he had field glasses. There were two buildings of gray stone with fine slate roofs. The main structure, which was nearer them, had a large open doorway for wagons and was capped with a curious sort of cupola with louvered shutters; it would be a fair-sized room, and it would command the entire stretch of fields between the two strips of woods—it could probably see over the rise to the south. Brigny Farm. He remembered the two little dots on the Major's map. There was no sound, no movement, but he was certain the Germans were in there. Not many, but some. A machine gun, up in that tower room. That's what it would be. It was too important for them to have left it unoccupied, even if it was well behind the lines now. What would he do if he were directing this drive to Barrecourt and the river? He would drop off a machine-gun team to cover a possible counterattack, and move on. Well, he would also detach a squad or two to dig in around the well among the fruit trees, and man the other building. Of course, if he needed every available rifleman—

“Come on, Sarge,” Poletti was saying in a thin, troubled voice.

Damon looked at him. “Come on where?”

“I don't know—out of here, somewhere out of here, anyway …”

“If they've got a gun up in that tower you wouldn't make it halfway to that crest.”

“I don't know …”

“Well, I do.” He jerked his head toward Jason, the wounded man, who was from C Company and had somehow got rounded up with the others. “And how you going to take care of
him?
” Poletti dropped his eyes. Yes, sure, you'd leave him here and take off, Damon thought; but he kept it to himself. “Am I right or not, Dev?” he asked.

Devlin nodded. Blood had caked on the side of his head behind his ear, and matted in his tousled red hair. “Not a chance. They'd squash us like flies against a window pane.”

Jason, who had been hit in the groin, twisted his head and said feebly: “You got to get me to a doctor, fellas, you just got to. I'm going to bleed to death, I can feel it …”

“You're not going to bleed to death,” Damon told him.

No one else said anything. It had been a bad morning. They had progressed slowly southward, with Damon and Devlin alternating as point, working their way through the forest. After an hour of this they had run onto two privates from A Company hiding under a fallen tree; one was badly wounded in the foot and the other almost incoherent with fear, but miraculously they both had their rifles and cartridge belts. Damon cut saplings for a full-length stretcher for Jason, which released two more Springfields, and he made crutches for the other wounded man; but this slowed their progress still further. It was hard to move quietly. Devlin and Raebyrne were fine, but Poletti and Brewster and Lujak, one of the new men, were city boys; and it was impossible to carry a man on a stretcher without a certain amount of stumbling and slithering. They had been very nearly surprised by a mounted German machine-gun section hurrying south behind them on a narrow road that paralleled the path, and they had had to hide twice from runners. They were hungry, and even more thirsty, and their nerves were on edge from this creeping, furtive procession.

“Maybe nobody's in there,” Brewster said after a silence.

“Maybe.” It just might be unoccupied, of course. Even the Germans made mistakes once in a while.

“Let me mosey on over there, Sarge,” Raebyrne offered. “A little old scouting and patrolling. I'm a curly wolf on the prowl. How about it?”

Damon made no reply. He couldn't say why, but it felt wrong; it felt all wrong. Still, they had to do something. “All right.” He drew his .45 out of its holster. “Leave your rifle and take this. It'll be handier. Now if the place is empty—”

He stopped. As though awaiting a cue a figure stepped out of the broad, dark aperture into the sunlight, then another, and moved to the corner of the building. They were both big men, bareheaded and without their weapons. For a long moment they gazed around them at the fields of wheat. The taller of the two pointed to one of the apple trees and said something and his companion laughed and nodded; then together they relieved themselves, turned and vanished into the shadowed doorway. And the little group of fugitives in the woods relaxed and glanced at one another uneasily.

“Well, now we know,” Damon said quietly.

“That's for sure,” Devlin muttered, and sighed.

Damon chewed at the inside of his cheek, watching the farm. The sight of the two Germans standing there by the wall, so blithely unconcerned, had made him angry all over again. The events of the past night seethed in him, reawakened. With the staggering discovery, just after midnight, that there was to be no counterbarrage, that there
were
no French on their right flank, that there were nothing but Germans over there streaming past them or pouring down on them like doom itself, that they would be swept away without even the bitter satisfaction of having delayed the enemy assault, he had moved from shock to dismay and finally to choking rage. He had fought well. Unable to reach Lieutenant Harris after the first onset he had obeyed orders, had covered Johansen and Turner and Krazewski, pausing and firing and running again—and finally had found himself all alone and gasping for wind in a thicket where the railroad embankment entered the woods.

His rage and his sense of responsibility had driven him back. It was all wrong: they had been deployed badly; the French had packed up and run; artillery had failed them; the battalion was clearly a sacrificial lamb offered up on the altar of desperation—and Harris probably had disobeyed orders in calling for a withdrawal; but he, Damon, owed a debt to the men he had lived with and trained for battle. He mastered his fear and made himself go back, still unable to believe two hundred and fifty men could have melted away before his eyes. Creeping from shell hole to shell hole, some of them littered with splinters of iron still hot from the bombardment, playing dead under the flares, his heart pounding so mightily that he felt it must be visible to any casual eye, he worked his way back. Twice he was almost stepped on by little bands of German infantry.

But when he had got to the line he knew it was all over. He found Davis and Hoffenstedt—or what he believed to be Davis and Hoffenstedt—as well as Starkie, though he hadn't told Brewster; the kid was obviously shaky enough. Where all the rest of them were he had no idea. Some must have made it back to the reserve lines. The others—killed or captured, or hiding in thickets and bits of woodland. Like animals. His eyes had filled with rage. Oh, the bastards, the bastards!

Well: there had been Brewster. You worked with what you had. And the little guy knew German: why hadn't he found that out before—why hadn't anyone in the company found it out?

“I'm going to take off and look for water,” Lujak was saying. A stocky man with beady black eyes and overlong arms, he appeared to be looking for an easy chance to run off and give himself up—or perhaps hide out in some thicket for the duration. “My buddy here needs some water, okay?”

“Stick around,” Damon said briefly.

“Well, if we ain't going to do anything—”

“We've got something to do.”

“Yes? What? I've got to have some water, I ain't kidding.”

“There's water,” Damon said, pointing his index finger like a miniature howitzer toward the open maw of the barn. “Right there.” Several of them turned and stared at him. “What do you say we go get it?”

There was a little silence, prolonged by the distant rumble and thump of guns. Damon glared at the farm—he felt he could pierce its ocher stone walls if he looked hard enough. He thought of the German soldiers standing by the wall so casually, pointing at the trees and laughing.

“Look at them,” he said aloud, holding down his rage, his voice thick with contempt. “Didn't even have their weapons with them, think they're back in Munich drinking beer …” Then, cursing softly, gazing up at the squat-roofed tower, listening to the martellato thunder of divisional artillery, he had it: he saw what they had to do.

He put down his rifle and studied the men around him quietly. Poletti was still terrified, half-stunned from his capture. Brewster's nose had swollen to the size of a turnip—he could barely see around it. One of the men from A Company, Henderson, was dangerously morose and spoke only when spoken to; the other, a squat little Pennsylvania German named Schilz, responded quickly but looked unstable. Of the two refugees from C Company they had picked up last, Burgess was groaning softly from his leg wound, and Lujak had meant nothing but trouble. Raebyrne looked ready for anything; and of course there was Dev—he knew he could count on Dev right down to the wire.

Ten men. Eight effectives—two of them mighty reluctant—one walking wounded, one stretcher case. Six Springfields, two Mausers, one Colt .45. Roughly twenty rounds per man. No food, no water. He thought of Major Caldwell in the narrow room without a ceiling, the clear, unhurried voice. “Above all encourage the greatest possible use of individual initiative.” He smiled humorlessly. They'd be a trifle lean on initiative.

And yet he knew he was right. He felt it deep in his bones—with the same harsh intensity he'd felt when his eyes had lighted on those two small black squares on the Major's map the evening before. Even as he squatted there crouched on his hams the first shells began to fall in the far woods to the west of the farm; branches and bits of débris boiled up and subsided. The slowly ranging shellfire, the long, curving meadow of wheat between its islands of wood, those two Germans who had left their weapons to step outside, all added up to something important. These two massive old buildings could be the key to the whole pattern—if only because they were where they were, and because the Germans did not value them enough …

“Well, I don't know about the rest of you, but I've had about enough of this,” he said with terse finality. “It's about time
they
bought themselves a little trouble.” He leaned forward and said quietly: “We're going to go over and take that farm.”

They gazed at him in slow amazement.

“What for, Sarge?” Raebyrne said after a moment.

“Because we've got to. That's what for. We're going to take it and hold it until the outfit counterattacks and comes up and relieves us.”

They all looked at the farm again. Devlin said: “How many of them do you think are in there, Sam?”

“Not many. And they won't be looking for us, if we work it right.” Damon studied the farm again, measuring himself against it. There was a little trench, possibly for drainage, possibly a wintertime brook, that ran diagonally through the field to within twenty yards of the main building. The wheat continued right up to the edge of a stone-and-plaster wall, crumbling in several places. Then it looked like twenty feet to the broad loading doorway facing them. It was possible. They could do it.

“Look,” he said sharply, “we'll never make it back across that field. They've got a perfect field of fire from that tower. They'll kill every last one of us.” They stared at him in silence. “Now the regiment is going to counterattack—that's the preliminary bombardment you're watching right now—and it's going to come right through here, right over that rise.”

“Well, why can't we just wait right here?” Poletti asked. “Especially if the regiment is going to counterattack …”

“Because the machine gun up in that tower is going to cut them down by the platoon before they ever get here, that's why. And that's what we're not going to let happen.”

“How in hell do you know all this?” Lujak demanded.

“Because I was at the battalion briefing last night, that's how. And I saw the map.”

“I still don't see why we can't just sit tight here,” Poletti went on.

Damon whirled on him. “And get picked up all over again as soon as a Jerry patrol comes through, cleaning house? I'd think you'd have had enough of that for a while … We've got no choice. We get in there, dig in, and hold it for the regiment when they come through.”

“Well, I got a choice,” Lujak retorted.

“Not only that,” Damon ignored him, “but there's water in there. Food and water. And a real place to crap out.”

Their eyes flickered at this. All right. Whatever inducements worked. Besides, he believed it himself; he believed it utterly. They would be killed if they tried to crawl south through that field, they would be killed or captured if they stayed where they were. To go back through the woods was unthinkable. And there
was
safety inside those walls. If they could get to them.

“Sarge, you've brought me into camp,” Raebyrne proclaimed. “I'm hungry enough to eat a sick snake.”

Damon grinned at him. “Didn't you put those eggs away?”

Raebyrne cast his eyes dolefully heavenward. “Sarge, they was all rotten, every one.”

The high, thin whistle came again; there was a bright flash and roar, a geyser of earth beyond the farm, then another still farther off. The shelling ranged back and forth fitfully, most of it falling far back in the direction of the embankment. When it let up again the sound of small-arms fire rose crisply.

“Come on,” he said tersely, and got to his feet. “Come on, now. Are you going to lie around on your asses and get rounded up all over again?”