Captain Tom Beverley just looked at Milo and Milo looked back at him. No words were necessary between them, not on this matter. For the sake of bare survival of the men who depended upon them, this officer could not ever be allowed in a combat-command position, and for just such a position he was currently in direct line.
Leaving the tent, the three officers paced across the CP area, passed the perimeter and walked on several scores of yards beyond it before Tom Beverley halted.
Pointing to the blackened, rusting hulk of a Mark III panzer squatting some fifty yards away just beyond a flat field with knee-high grass growing around shell craters, the captain said, “Brettmann, your ticket back Stateside is in the turret of that tank. Go over there and climb up on it and open the hatch and fetch me back the musette bag that’s hanging in it, heah? And be damned careful with it, too, boy. You break airy one of those bottles and ah’ll have your guts for garters.”
Brettmann paced rapidly across the field, clambered clumsily onto the hull of the gutted tank, then jerked at the flaking handle of the central hatch until it came open with a shrill protest from rust-eaten hinges. After a moment, he shouted back, “Captain, there’s nothing in here that even looks like a musette bag.”
Beverley cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “A’rant, then, just come on back here, on the double!”
Second Lieutenant John Brettmann had trotted about halfway back in their direction when, with a flash and an ear-shattering explosion, his body was flung a good ten feet into the air to flop down sprawling, unmoving and incomplete.
“Do you think he’s dead, Tom?” asked Milo coolly.
The captain shrugged. “Looks to be from here, and ah’m not about to send any of mah men into a minefield to find out one way or the-othuh. Whenevuh regiment or division gets around to clearing that field, they can take his tag and bury him. Let’s us get back—the othuhs ought to be there by now, and ah need to hash out some things with the bunch of you.”
Reinforced with replacements to only about twelve percent under their D-Day strength, the battalion took part in the attack on and capture of the German city of Aachen, just behind the broken Siegfried Line. But it did not prove a bloodless victory. Quite a few of the ill-trained new men were lost in it, along with irreplaceable men like Sergeants Gardner and Cooper and Captain Tom Beverley. Major John Saxon was wounded, but before he would let them take him back to the division hospital, he ordered the necessary promotions and transfers to keep his battalion running as smoothly as possible under the circumstances.
At battalion headquarters, where he had been ordered to report, Milo dropped off a handful of dog tags with the clerk assigned to handle KIAs, then sought out the harried adjutant, Captain Davies.
Looking up but fleetingly to see who stood before his cluttered field desk, the cadaverous-looking man muttered, “Moray, you’re bumped up two notches by order of Major Saxon and some single-star at division. Take over Charlie Company and get ready for another push … soon. You’ll be needing a first sergeant, since yours was killed along with Captain Beverley, but, no, I cannot supply you a noncom, or any other warm bodies, for that matter. Maybe soon, but not now. If you can beg, borrow or steal a truck and dragoon a driver for it, I can authorize you to pick up ammo and rations, and that’s it. Questions?”
But despite Captain Davies’ assurances of new actions, there was no fresh push, not for either battalion or regiment. All had just been too badly chewed up for anything until once more up to at least near strength. They were moved back to their original areas south of the Meuse River.
Slowly, in dribbles and drabs, the decimated units were resupplied and reinforced with replacements, mostly green, partially trained men fresh out of basic training Stateside, with a sprinkling of veterans just released from various medical facilities and dumped into the replacement depots or “repple-depples.” When one of these somehow wound up in the unit that had been his before his wounding, the scenes could be heartwarming. This was exactly how Sergeant Bernie Cohen came back to Charlie Company, to be immediately grabbed by Milo and made first sergeant. Chamberlin had declined that job and had also declined an offered commission; he still was running the second platoon, but as a master sergeant.
In November, the other two battalions, the mortar company, the tank company and most of the medical company were sent off to join in the push through the Hurtgenwald, their objective Cologne. But the drive quickly bogged down in the face of the stiff resistance offered by the troops of General Walther Model.
On the banks of the Meuse, the battalion camped, licking its wounds, integrating the trickles of replacements for the men and equipment and weapons lost and serving as perimeter guards for the regimental headquarters complex. They ate class-A rations and loved it, not often having had access to fresh, hot food since leaving England months before, though they still bitched and groused about it as soldiers always have and always will. They were issued winter clothing and, as the weather worsened, devised ways to supplement their bedding and windproof their shelters. Old John Saxon, now a lieutenant colonel, came back with some facial scarring and a slight limp to take over his command, and still the battalion just sat in place. But it was, for them, the calm before the storm of death that awaited too many of them.
In early December, First Sergeant Bernie Cohen and a detail had gone into the regimental complex and there scrounged or “liberated” enough material to construct of wood and corrugated metal a smallish, airtight building centered by a wide firepit filled with coarse gravel and small boulders which would retain heat well. The resulting steam baths had become very popular, and that was where Milo and Bernie were when the CQ runner found them to say that battalion was on the wire for Milo.
John Saxon was clearly agitated when he spoke with the officers gathered in his heavily guarded headquarters tent. “Gentlemen, the fuckin’ Krauts have done broke through in the Ardennes. Division is damn near as short-handed as we are, what with all them men tied down up to Hurtgenwald, and the word is to send them ever’ swingin’ dick can be scraped up here, and that means us, thishere battalion. So git back to yore comp’nies and saddle up, fast. And I mean ever’ fucker you got on the mornin’ report, too—clerks, cooks and all, ever’body that can shoot a rifle. Full packs, all the clothes they can wear and still fight, three days’ worth of C-rations and weapons. Two hunnert rounds for each MI, and ammo in proportion for all the other weapons. Send your tents and records and all up here on the trucks you send to pick up ammo and rations and gas and all. Okay? Git!”
The drive down into the Ardennes was pure hell, as Milo recalled it. A snowstorm of near-blizzard proportions started up soon after the convoy took to the so-called road. Visibility quickly became bare feet, and this meant that each vehicle had to drive close enough to see the vehicle ahead with the narrow, dim “cat’s-eye” head beams that were all that regiment would for some reason allow. The inability to see meant that the lead vehicles were plotting direction with map and compass, and this kept the advance painfully slow while the men huddled together for warmth in the backs of the trucks, forbidden to smoke and thoroughly miserable.
When at long last the trucks ground to a skidding halt, the men were all instructed to leave on the trucks everything save their weapons, ammo, rations, entrenching tools and ponchos. Thus stripped for immediate action, they were marched, single-file, past a long line of GI cans fitted with immersion heaters. Each man had his canteen cup filled with hot coffee and was allowed to hurriedly fish a can of C-ration out of the boiling water.