4

  Roetgen Approached

  “I’m serious,” Russo said. “You never woulda figured this guy played shortstop.”

  “Thirty-six years old?” John asked, dizzy from laughing so hard. “I’m trying to imagine a big Italian guy making runs like that after a night of beers.”

  “Fourteen beers, buddy, and however much spaghetti you can fit in your mom’s favorite pot. You know what I mean?” He mimed the shape of a round, large pot with his hands, cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth. “Something like that. The guy ate the whole fucking thing, drank as many beers, went out the next day and bat a point-two-six–seven. Seriously, you’d have thought he was bone dry and ate lettuce and broccoli everyday.”

  John laughed at that, too. He sank down against the fractured bunker wall, squatting into the mud with a Lucky slung from his fingers in one hand. “Yeah, something about those guys can’t be explained. Fuck me if I smell a beer the night before, then you get fellas who can party all night and still play a perfect game.”

  “Yeah,” Russo snickered. “Let us fight Germany with a whole platoon of those guys. Then we’d really be going home.”

  John snorted. He tossed a glance up at the starry sky and wondered about the second-string Yankee pitcher he fought alongside while advancing up the hills in Normandy. Try as he might, John simply could not remember the man’s name. “I think the Cardinals are gonna pull ahead.”

  “Everybody says that,” Russo said. “C’mon, John, don’t give up hope. Yankees are gonna walk all over everyone.”

  “Most of the players are in the service,” John said. “It’s not the same team, man. You gotta be realistic about these things.”

  Russo shrugged. “You gotta be hopeful too.”

  “You’re right.” John dropped his rucksack between his knees and dug through his supplies. “Want some of my Hershey’s?”

  “Sure.”

  John unwrapped a bar of chocolate and offered it over to Eddie Russo. The Corporal broke off a piece and slipped it between his lips, and together they sat quietly under the stars. A distance away, the platoon camped in a clearing, dark green tents arranged neat against the navy blues of the night. “What’s after this?”

  “Bedtime, probably,” Russo said.

  “Naw, after the war, I mean.”

  “No such thing as after.” Russo laid back against his rucksack, one leg folded over the other and draped in a thick woolen blanket he’d found in Belgium. “I’ll think about after when after has come.”

  “Fair enough,” John said. He agreed, even if he still indulged in fantasies regularly of what he’d do when he got out of the service. “I’ve got a big collection of books and comics I want to do something with.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, maybe open a shop or something.” John wasn’t sure, but he knew he wanted to do something that kept him far away from anything too loud or repetitive in sound. “I’m a selfish guy, Ed, I just want a place to sit quietly, smoke, read, and be left the hell alone.”

  “Likewise, friend,” Russo chuckled. “Likewise. What do you read?”

  “All things, I suppose,” John said. “I guess I read a lot of pulpy shit, nothing high-brow at all. Do you know Conan?”

  “I like Conan,” Russo said, smiling. “I like pulp fiction too, don’t worry. I still read the funnies, for chrissakes.” They shared a laugh at that. “I mean, life’s too short to care what people think, anyway. Have you read War of the Worlds?”

  “I did, yeah,” John said. “I thought it was neat, but I suppose I don’t understand it all too well.”

  “What’d you mean?”

  John shrugged. “Well, why’d the Martians come all the way to Earth, anyway?” He broke off a second piece of chocolate and bit into it. “Just to fight a bunch of humans? Aren’t there better things for them to do in outer space?”

  Russo held his hands together in a feigned firing motion. “Can’t remember. You know, it’s probably so they could have a good fight, bucko, that’s why. Because we’re tough motherfuckers and we kick Martian ass.”

  John wasn’t sure if that would be true, either. From all that he had experienced so far, Humans only seemed especially good at kicking each other’s asses. “You know what, Corporal? Fuck it, you’re right. German or Martian, we kick fucking ass.”

  “That’s the spirit, Murphy.” Russo reclined back on his rucksack and peered up at the sky.

  The evening tapered off. John made his way back to his tent, crawled under his blanket and fell asleep quickly. When he awoke, he sipped first from his canteen and checked his watch. As if seemingly on cue, the tank engines sputtered as the 3rd Armored Division began to start their rigs. John packed up, attached his gear to his rucksack and joined the platoon for the day’s march.

  The replacements arrived three days ago. They were all freshly landed GIs who’d stepped foot in Europe around two weeks ago, maybe more. They were greener than Lenny had been, and John did not like that thought very much. Kevin Topper had been assigned as new pointman after the ambush at Monschau, on account that he was apparently a good shot from a distance and could march long distances at a good pace.

  On the border of the town of Roetgen, their unit formed a perimeter at a sector four hundred yards from the reaches of the city. Flanked at the rear by dense shrubs and bushes, across an open field of barbed wire and steel hedgehogs, the first pastures and houses of the German town were the entranceway through the Westwall. Faraway on the eastern sector, gunfire and artillery thundered in the distance as the other half of the 47th Infantry made their advance to form a pinch around the town’s border.

  John dug deep into the wet, muddy soil just at the forefront of the clearing, where the terrain became flat and walkable, but no less hazardous. The Jerries had placed concrete slabs of dragon’s teeth in rows to blockade the advance in a funneling border between the northwest and west sectors; over in the east, on the path that lay steady into town, there were deep fissures of trenches that rendered any passage of tanks impossible unless a bridge was made. A bridge would be made, John figured, but not while they were under distant fire and artillery. First, they needed to capture the northernmost section of the town, and then secure the path behind them for the vehicles.

  He sank the shovel into the mud and used it to form a shelf in the dirt that tucked him into a him-sized bed in the earth. If anything else, it’d make for a good grave if a sharpshooter managed to ding him in the head. From there, he spied down the range of the clearing. The Germans had shaped this clearing to provide themselves with a perfect firing line, as they had on the road through Monschau. The barbed wire and hedgehogs served only to slow movement, not prevent. The machine gunners and mortar teams that were undoubtedly held up all the way at the end of the clearing, behind the cover of the town’s buildings, were the main means of prevention here.

  It would be possible to advance this clearing. It’d take a lot of fucking work, though. John sighed as he used the flat end of the shovel to smooth the mud over his foxhole. He reached into his rucksack and searched for a pair of wire cutters he’d found a few weeks ago.

  “What’re you doing?” Private Kevin Topper asked, tossing mounds of mud behind him as he shaped an awkward foxhole into the mud.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  “Grabbing my clippers,” John said.

  “Why?”

  “There’s wire. We’re gonna have to cut it.”

  “How do you know?”

  John was annoyed already. “Because there’s fucking wire, man. Didn’t they teach you anything?”

  “I can shoot,” Kevin said.

  John lit a smoke. “That’s real swell, Topper.”

  The rest of the squad joined them in a careful approach from the bordering patch of bush and trees. Sergeant Delaney knelt behind the dirt, carbine poised in his hands. “We’ve gotta clear a path for the tankers, give’em a route to provide fire for the eastern sector. Get that wire down. Gunners,” he directed his hands a few yards west, “on that flank and cover us.”

  “I got clippers,” John said.

  “Let me see’em.” Frank took the wire cutters from John’s hands. “You’re with me.”

  They crawled across the clearing. John stayed a distance at Frank’s right side and they cleared the first stretch of uncovered land that reached the line of wire. In between fenced borders of razor-sharp barbed wire lay great steel stars that nestled deep into the dirt, placed tactfully to break up terrain between fencing and jutting obstruction. On the west flank, Corporal Russo stayed with BAR Gunner Walton Keene and Assistant Gunner Thomas Manning alongside Ammo Bearer Jared Holmes.

  “Dig in here,” Frank said, flattened into the mud. “Give us something to run back to if they light this spot up.”

  John Murphy had already started digging. As he made more space into the dirt, he shaped the mud to his body and used that to measure the distance across. The rest of their rifle squad began to dig in. The newer replacements, Privates Kevin Topper, Jake Schilling and Sterling Goodman seemed to put in the most work for the least result. Their trenches began to fall inward uselessly, and Private Bill Parker stopped entrenching his foxhole to help them.

  “We don’t have all day,” Frank barked. “That doesn’t mean we get hasty and reckless, but that means pick it the fuck up, all of you. Let’s take down this fucking fence already.”

  John joined Frank and Bill. They crawled across the mud, rifles ready, and made their way towards the barbed fence. Frank rolled on his back and reached up with the wire cutters, clamped the iron wire and cranked with both his arms. “Come on, you fucking thing.”

  Several yards ahead, German bullets rippled into the dirt.

  “Yeah, yeah, fuck you. Murphy, grab that.”

  John, still flat, climbed over Frank’s legs and gripped the handles of the wire cutters near Frank’s fists and gave it a shove. The barbed iron wire snapped and flung wildly into the mud. John peeled the wire away so it didn’t catch on their gear, while Frank seized the clipper head to the next rope of spiked iron.

  “One down,” Frank muttered.

  “Yep,” John said.

  Another line of thick barbed wire later, and the first fence came down in a great heap of razor sharp rope. John slid on a pair of thick-palmed gardening gloves that a kind old Belgian lady had given him a month back, and he started yanking the fencing and stripping it down. On the other side, Bill Parker had climbed from the half-trench to spool the wire on that side as well while Frank kicked down the wooden post that framed and surveyed the clearing beyond.

  After forty minutes of inch by inch crawling and cutting, the ground exploded several yards away, too many yards too close. Frank ordered a withdrawal. In their quick flight back across the clearing, the mortars continued their descent, blasting off the muddy clearing, and their withdrawal became mad a dash back towards the end of the clearing.

  All the while, the BAR team beamed fire down across the clearing to a farmhouse at the first reaches of Roetgen. Once the withdrawal was completed, Frank ordered cover fire for the BAR team, and they fired in the direction of the farmhouse as Corporal Russo and the BAR Team sprinted back from their position on the western flank. It didn’t seem to matter. A single shell moved through the clear blue sky like a bird and blasted off the ground in a thunderous clap, close enough to splash the BAR Team with mud. They continued firing upon the farmhouse until the BAR Team reunited with the rest of the squad.

  “Fucking mortars,” Frank said.

  “Yeah,” Russo wheezed, face red from his sprinting, rifle slung around his chest. “They’ve got a machine gunner behind some bags, too, the son of a bitch.”

  “Everyone alright?” Frank asked.

  There were a series of grunts. One of the guys from the demo team left the gathering of men beside the Sherman tank and walked up to them holding an aluminum kettle. “Coffee, fellas?”

  John unscrewed the cap of his canteen. “Sure.”

  “What are we gonna do, then?” Kevin asked, rifle dangling in his right hand.

  Frank sipped from the cap of his canteen. “Have a smoke.” He rolled his wrist over and glanced at his watch. “It’s lunchtime, anyway.” He drank down the rest of his coffee. “We’re gonna take down that farmhouse, then we gotta finish up this goddamn field.” He set his hands at his lower back and stretched deeply, popping the muscles up and down his spine. “Holy shit, today is a pain in the ass.”

  After lunch, which came and went much too quickly, the squad convened with the tank crew parked behind the ridge, on a slope of ground between the trees.

  “Think you can get through there?” Frank asked the tank captain, gesturing to the ground they cleared of wire early that morning. “Line up a shot on that house in the pasture across that clearing. We’re stuck halfway through, getting fucking bombed to shit.”

  “Is that all the space you’ve got?” The tank captain asked.

  “That’s all we can get,” Frank said. “They’ve got an MG team and a spotting team for a line of mortars we can’t see. I just need one good shot on that house so my boys can finish clearing the way.”

  “I dunno about that, buster,” the tank captain said. “We’ll try to line it up, sure, but if they start shelling shit I’m backing my guys out.”

  “Fair enough,” Frank said.

  The tank crew rumbled down the clearing, caved in the half-trenches John’s squad dug on their way through the path. They followed the Sherman through the brush and across the muddy earth, forming a spaced perimeter around the tank crew as they made their approach. The shriek and hiss burned in the sky and shells exploded off the ground, and all at once the Sherman reversed treads back across the clearing. John’s squad scattered and regrouped several yards behind the barbed line, all of them drenched in mud and sweat.

  The hatch at the head of the tank reeled open and the oil-stained tank captain sat up on the edge of the rim. “Yeah, buster, that’s no-go. We ain’t got the range to hit it from here, either.”

  “How much more do you need?” Frank asked. “You can’t land a shot from where we were?”

  “I need more space than you’ve got,” the tank captain said. “Let me know when I can get quarter of the way into Germany, and I’ll light the fucking thing up for you any day of the week. How about that, Sergeant?”

  Sergeant Delaney had already started walking away. “Yeah, thanks anyway, buster.”

  As they walked away from the tank crew that parked behind the ridgeline, John walked close alongside the Sergeant.

  “It is what it is,” John said. “Sometimes you gotta give a little to get a little.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Frank muttered. “We’re getting more than a little today.”