“Just remember,” Brodie said as he brushed through the burlap doorway, “once it starts you’ll have ten minutes. And not one minute more.”
Rusty Danzig huddled against a battered sandbag in a shallow trench forty or fifty yards in front of the machine-gun line. His eyes were closed and his legs were curled up beside him. His rifle was resting against his legs. He could have been mistaken for dead or asleep, but he was neither; he was listening.
He had his ear pressed against a piece of burlap to keep it dry, and he had been listening for two hours in the darkness. Not for sounds he knew. Not for the sound rats make skittering across a board or chewing on a corpse, or the thunk of a shell as it splattered deep into the mud before exploding, or the sound barbed wire makes when the wind rattles it. Danzig was listening for the unusual. The sound of boots slogging through the mud, or a metal canteen accidentally scraping against an ammunition belt, or someone trying to muffle a cough. The sounds of life in a field of death.
Danzig was a South Boston tough guy who did not take well to orders. He would nod, say “Yes, sir,” and then do it his own way. He was a short, burly, black-haired man who had great ears. He claimed he could hear a fly clear its throat from a hundred yards away. He was fifty yards in front of Culhane’s foxhole, in a trench that was mined on both sides of him. The second most dangerous position in the planned ambush.
The most dangerous spot was reserved for Big Redd, whose father was a Chiricahua Apache, his mother a white schoolteacher from Minnesota. The big Indian was the forward sniper. Redd had once told Culhane that he had joined the Marines just to get off the reservation, where his father was a drunk and his mother the schoolmarm. The Marines got the best of that deal, Culhane had thought. We got a great tracker and hunter, with the instincts of a mountain lion. Eyes, ears, and nose were part of the combination. The tall, muscular man could smell a horse half a mile away with the wind at his back. His job: listen for the sounds of an advance and, as soon as possible, shoot the lead horse pulling the caissons with a clean front-on shot, two inches to the left of its foreleg and a little higher. A heart shot that would drop the horse in its tracks. Then pick off drivers, officers, whoever he felt was worthy of an old frontier Sharps. 30-caliber shot to the head. Delay the line, cause chaos, and when it got too hot, run like hell. Culhane once asked why it was Redd’s favorite assignment even though it was the most dangerous. Redd’s answer: Because it was the most dangerous.
The number-three suicide spot was reserved for Lenny Holtz, from Bend, Oregon. Son of a crippled lumberjack and his bitter wife. A born sharpshooter who, like Culhane, had lied himself into the Marines at fifteen. He was a sapper along with Danzig-first planting mines in the three trenches between the Marines and the Germans and, if he didn’t blow himself up, then acting as Redd’s backup. Anybody that got past the Indian’s Sharps rifle was meat for Holtz. His shooting eye was as flawless as Danzig’s ears.
The three best men Culhane had were in the most vulnerable positions. The ten machine gunners were spread across a fifty-yard-wide perimeter. Max Brady was his lead gunner. Their job, once the charging Germans reached the farthest trench, was to lay down a deadly. 30-caliber barrage, force the survivors of the gunfire to jump into the mined trenches, and create panic in the German front lines until Merrill charged with the rifle company. Newsmen had nicknamed the Marines “Hell Hounds” because they screamed like wounded dogs when they engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. Throw in mud, fog, and barbed-wire fences, and in the red glow of sunrise it became a howling, bloody ballet of death. The American Marines aimed not only to kill the Germans but to break what fighting spirit was left in the war-weary German infantrymen. Culhane thought it would work, but, he knew, not without taking its toll…
Max Brady orders the machine-gun barrage. The Germans fire back. In the first exchange, a sniper bullet rips through the bridge of Brady’s nose and takes out his eye. He stuffs a handkerchief in it and keeps firing.
Red dawn. The fog turns pink in the sun’s early rays. Danzig hears it first. A hundred and fifty yards away, a horse snorts. At almost the same instant, Redd smells horse flesh. But before either can fire a flare, the German. 88-millimeter howitzer barrage begins. Merrill was right. The Germans are shelling the no-man’s-land between the two enemies, gambling that the major has moved his forces into the trenches to await an attack. Danzig is caught in the middle of the deadly onslaught from the sky.
“Rusty, get outta there now. Run for it. Come in, come in!” Culhane yells. The beefy Bostonian jumps from the trench and zig-zags toward them, a chunky silhouette in the pink mist. He is yelling, “A hunnert-fifty yards, a hunnert-fifty yards,” as the howitzer barrage rains down around him. Ten yards from Culhane’s position, a bomb explodes. It is a few feet away from Rusty. He is knocked to his knees, clutching his throat. Blood spurts between his fingers.
Culhane fires a red flare, signaling Merrill to attack, and then jumps out of the foxhole, runs to Danzig, and pulls him to his feet. He shoves Danzig into the foxhole a moment before another. 88 goes off.
At their posts, Redd and Lenny peer into the mist. They can hear the horses snorting and the wheels on the caissons squealing. They are getting too close for comfort. To their left, the whole trench area is being bombarded.
And then a miracle. The wind comes.
The mist swirls and blows away.
The road is bound on both sides by four-foot-deep ditches. In the morning’s glare, Redd sees the first horses. Four of them, pulling a heavy gun. He aims, finds his mark, and fires. The Sharps kicks into his shoulder, then the lead horse’s head flips up, and the animal falls straightaway to the ground. A moment later, Lenny Holtz drops the other horse in the lead team. The remaining pair panic; eyes scared, nostrils flared, they bolt. Redd’s next shot takes the driver. He topples forward into the crazed horses. Lenny drops the third horse and the fourth breaks loose and gallops past them. The second horse team goes crazy. A commander, obviously an officer, is screaming at the second driver to get his horses under control. Redd waits a moment until he gets the officer’s profile in his sights, aims just in front of his ear, but before he can fire, the side of the German’s head erupts. Lenny has beaten him to it.
“Redd, come on, the shelling’s stopped!” Lenny yells. “We gotta get out of here!”
But Redd sees something else. Behind the second caisson is a tank. A stubby little box topped by a tin can of a turret, with a cannon swinging back and forth. Below it is a window with a machine gunner, both looking for targets.
Behind him, he can hear Merrill’s troopers yowling.
“Go on,” Redd yells back. “I’m going to get me a tank.”
“You’re nuts.”
“Sure am.” And Redd runs up the gully toward the Germans.
“Well, shit,” Lenny snarls, and follows him up the opposite side of the road. Behind him, he can hear Merrill’s yowling “hounds” as they wallow through the mud toward the advancing lines. Ahead of him, Lenny sees another German officer ordering several men to shoot the four horses in the second team and push the caissons into the ditch so the tank can get by. Lenny kills him and begins picking off the men who had been ordered to shoot the horses.
Redd doesn’t shoot anything. He just keeps running up the gully toward the tank.
With the firing of Culhane’s flare, Merrill blows his whistle, a shrill signal that the attack is on. The company, in staggered lines, races toward the enemy as the morning wind sweeps across the battlefield and the fog swirls away. A hundred yards in front of him, the front element of the German line is mowed down as the machine-gun trap opens up on them. The Hell Hounds charge forward through the mud and the battle becomes even more surreal.