2100, no K.
At 2200, or ten o’clock, after three more calls to regimental, I ordered my jeep and started back. At first we just crawled, on account of new stone the engineers had cracked up and put on the road, but I had Hayden, my driver, take the shoulder, and it was a little slippery but we made better time. About a mile from a place called Golleville I picked up the first courier. He said he’d talked to the next man about ten minutes before, and the trucks were stuck, on account of engine trouble. A few hundred yards further on, the next courier said the same thing. In a half hour, maybe, fighting our way back through three lines of trucks, guns, tanks, half tracks, and what had been coming ashore for ten or twelve days, we found my K. All four trucks were jammed in a little side road, where they’d been trying to bull their way into the main parade, but couldn’t as the lead truck was stalled. When I got there the driver had eight GI’s, the whole detail aboard all four trucks, swinging on a crank, trying to get it going by hand. I asked him what the trouble was. “Starter, sir.”
“How do you know?”
“Got to be.”
“Why?”
“... I checked everything else.”
It seemed like a funny answer, but I told the GI’s to rest, raised the hood, and went in there myself — in the dark, of course, as nothing like a flashlight was allowed. I felt at the head of the cylinders, the fuel pump, the carburetor, things like that, and the more I felt the funnier it got. Then I got to the distributor. Right away I found a loose wire. I lifted the top of the box that holds it and a screw was missing, the one that made the connection with the dangling wire. I ran my little finger around, and not only was it gone from the connection, but it wasn’t rolling around in the box. That didn’t make sense. It’s something that never happens, and if it had happened, the screw had to be in the box. I figured on it a minute or two before I said anything. I thought I knew the answer: that screw had been removed. But had it been thrown away? The more I thought the less like it seemed that a driver who had cooked up a trick to duck a trip to the front would leave himself on a limb so he couldn’t take a powder back. And nobody knew, at that time, what was waiting for us. Maybe it was a rear guard, and maybe it was the whole German army. “Driver, where’s that screw?”
“... What screw?”
“From the distributor.”
“Sir, I don’t know nothing about any screw. I... never saw no screw. I—”
It wasn’t a driver that was all crossed up because his truck wouldn’t go. It was a guardhouse cadet at his own court-martial who knew perfectly well what I was talking about, but thought I couldn’t prove it. Then it came to me what had hit me so funny before. It wasn’t cuss-hungry. Think of that, it had to be the starter, the night before a drive, and yet he hadn’t one goddam for it, or a kick, or even spit! I turned to the GI’s. “Men!”
“Yes, sir.”
“This driver has a setscrew in his pocket, a thing no bigger than a potato bug, that I need to make this truck go. Get it, before he throws it away, or swallows it, or—”
I turned my back. What they did to him I don’t know, but from the way he whimpered it wasn’t pretty. “Here it is, sir.”
“O.K. Any of you men drive?”
“I do, sir.”
“Take that wheel. I’ll be in the jeep. Follow me.”
When we got to the first courier, I turned the driver over to him, with orders to take him back and have him held for a court. The next courier, that we reached after another twenty minutes of bulling our way along, said: “Sir, my buddy and I have been out, looking things over in these fields. They’re rough, but they’re solid, with no heavy mud, or walls of any kind. We think they’d be better going, and get you there quicker than the road, with all this traffic.”
“Fine, thanks.”
I led the way into the field, and it was pretty bumpy, but we could move, with the four trucks jamming along behind. Each courier picked us up and passed us on to the next guy, and it wasn’t long before we came to a side road, and the last courier stood at attention. “Straight into your CP, sir, a little more than one kilometer.”
“O.K. — good work.”
We bore left, and in about two minutes, when I figured we’d gone about a kilometer, I stopped Hayden and got out. The sentry’s orders were to have all challenges answered on foot, and by one person only, so it looked like it would save time if I reached him that way. I walked about a hundred yards. Then I went maybe fifty more. Then it came to me it ought not to be that far. I stopped and tried to see. It was so still I could hear my heartbeat. That’s something they don’t tell you about in the books, though sometimes they get it in a song: the death hush of a battlefield, around two o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t hear a thing. I was about to start up again when I happened to look down, and my guts dropped through the seat of my pants. We had trouble coming out, as I’ve said, from loose stone. There was no loose stone here, nothing but Normandy mud. It flashed through my mind what had happened; the couriers, trying to help me out, in the dark picked the wrong road. Then, even while I was thinking, came something like an awful whisper from helclass="underline" “... Nocht nicht... noch nicht...”
I did a belly slide into the ditch, behind some kind of a hay wagon that had been overturned there, and looked through a crack. I could see a little stone house, maybe to cool cream in, that had been built over a little stream that crossed the road, in a culvert, a few steps further on. In a second I saw something above it that was round and dark like a kraut helmet. I kept staring and it went down. Then here it came back up. Then beside it was another, and then another. But how many more there were, whether this was just some outpost or a battalion, I couldn’t tell.