“But sir, you cannot surrender!” Messner protested.
“I can and I will. It is our best option,” Bauer said matter-of-factly.
“Herr Obersturmbannführer, I forbid you from doing this!”
“You forbid me?” Bauer wondered. He felt anger, then consternation. “May I remind you that I am the commanding officer here.”
But Messner was so furious that spit flew from his mouth as he shouted, “This is a betrayal of the Reich and of the Führer himself!”
Bauer thought, It is the Führer who has betrayed us.
Many of the men nearby were listening to the exchange, some of the wounded slumped in the snow, so Bauer stopped short of speaking his thoughts out loud. The men had suffered enough.
Finally, he sighed in exhaustion. Messner could obey orders, or he could go to hell. “I am going to surrender, Messner. It is the best way to save some of these men.”
“Herr Obersturmbannführer, you must not do this.”
“Look around you, Messner. Do you see all the wounded? Without supplies, we can do almost nothing for them. The ones who aren’t wounded are nearly dead on their feet with exhaustion and the cold.”
“You are a traitor!”
Messner’s hand drifted to the flap of his holster. Next to Messner, he could see Dietzel grow tense, his grip tight on his sniper rifle. So far the barrel hadn’t swung in his direction, but all it would take was a word from Messner.
Bauer ignored them and began walking through the trees toward the field. He half expected to hear a shot — it would be the last thing he ever heard — as Messner moved to stop him. He kept walking, hoping that shooting his commanding officer in the back would be too much, even for a zealot like Messner.
One of the men saw him with the white flag and stopped him with tears in his eyes. It was one of the enlisted men who had been with him for a long time. The man was bleeding heavily from several wounds suffered in the attack across the field, his makeshift bandages seeping blood. “We can still fight them, Herr Obersturmbannführer!” he said.
Bauer squeezed his shoulder. “You have done enough, old friend. We will get you some help soon.”
Before moving on, Bauer looked behind him, half expecting to see Messner or the sharpshooter taking aim.
But Messner was gone, along with his henchmen and several of the more able-bodied soldiers. He caught sight of the last of them disappearing into the trees. Apparently they were not going to surrender.
It was their choice. Some part of him felt proud of them, but this would not be his own path. He would do what he could to save what remained of his men.
Bauer took off his smock to reveal his officer’s uniform, then squared his shoulders and walked out into the open, waving his white flag.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cole and the others did not get much of a break after defeating the German attack toward Bastogne. They were pulled back after the German attack had shattered upon the hillside like waves upon the rocks. The field was littered with German dead, the snow stained red, the corpses of the destroyed panzers still smoking. As terrible as it was, no man present would ever forget the gruesome tableau before them. Decades later, it would be a story to tell their grandchildren. But for now they simply felt numb from the cold and glad to be alive.
Already more snow was falling, as if nature wished to hide humankind’s sins. If you got close enough, you could hear the snowflakes sizzle as they melted on the hot metal. If hell froze over, Cole reckoned that this was what it would look like.
“That’s a lot of dead Krauts,” Vaccaro remarked.
“Dead, stupid Krauts,” Cole emphasized. “They marched across that field like they owned it. What the hell did they expect?”
“They expected us to run, that’s what.”
“The Krauts got that part wrong.”
“Fine by me,” Vaccaro said. “Word is that they’re sending us back to Bastogne. Maybe we can find some more hot grub. A fire would be nice too. I’m not sure that I’ll ever feel my toes again.”
Nearby, young Hank was doing jumping jacks to get his blood moving.
Cole shook his head. Where the hell did the kid get that kind of energy? Cold as it was, now that the fighting was over, Cole was half-tempted to crawl back into his foxhole, pull a blanket over himself, and go to sleep.
To their surprise, several of the Germans had surrendered, including their commanding officer. Many of the new POWs were wounded. The Germans looked battered and broken after the punishing attack and the harsh weather conditions that took a toll on both sides. Given the appearance of the vanquished, it was hard for the surrender to feel like victory. Close up, the enemy simply looked like regular human beings.
But more than a few of the Krauts, along with their remaining panzers, had managed to slip away. Perhaps hoping to put the Americans at ease, the captured officer claimed that the survivors of the attack were on their way back to Germany. At least that was the rumor flying around.
“Too bad we didn’t wipe them all out,” Cole said. “We’ll just have to fight them later.”
They left their foxholes and returned to Bastogne. This time there were no trucks, and they had to walk.
Although the arrival of the Sherman tanks indicated that relief forces were finally about to break through, German troops still ringed the town. The ring was no longer impenetrable, but it was there all the same.
More than a few artillery shells still fell from time to time, indiscriminately killing soldiers and civilians, a reminder that the Germans were not ready to abandon their assault on the town. So far the Luftwaffe had not returned for another bombing run like the cruel Christmas Eve pounding they had delivered. That much was a relief.
Artillery wasn’t the only indicator of the German presence. A sniper had set up on the edges of the town, in an area that US forces did not yet control. From there, the sniper was able to pick off troops seemingly at will. His bullets always seemed to arrive when least expected.
When a fella stood still a moment to light a cigarette. When a tired GI leaned against a wall.
Death reached out and found them from an impossible distance.
The constant sniper fire wasn’t helping morale any. When it came to Bastogne, between the bombs and the bullets, there just didn’t seem to be anywhere that was safe from the reach of the enemy.
For that reason, it shouldn’t have surprised Cole when he was called in to deal with the problem.
He found himself summoned to headquarters with Lieutenant Mulholland. They brought Vaccaro along as a mascot.
Cole followed the lieutenant into a cramped house that had been commandeered as HQ. Outside, a clerk was using a hatchet to break apart a bomb-damaged chifforobe, which he carried in to fuel a huge fire blazing in the fireplace. More pieces of furniture stood nearby, awaiting their fate like cattle at the slaughterhouse. Despite the clerk’s best efforts, the fire couldn’t seem to warm the air.
A harried captain quickly explained the situation.
“Just when we think we’ve got the bastard, he moves on us,” the officer complained.
“That means he knows his business,” Cole replied. “It’s how German snipers are trained, sir. They don’t sit still for long.”
The captain didn’t look impressed. “Look, I don’t give a damn what they trained him to do. Hell, maybe they taught him to play the fiddle and knit socks too. I just want him gone. I understand that you’re the man to do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain opened his mouth, perhaps to express his doubts, but he took a moment to look Cole up and down. His gaze lingered on Cole’s battered sniper’s rifle, then moved to Cole’s gray-blue eyes. Their eyes met briefly, but the captain looked away, unable to hold Cole’s gaze. He wouldn’t have been the first man to detect something chilling in those eyes.