Chapter 4 Unexpected Ending
The next day, there was some of the same merriment as before, but now there was also a kind of wistful sadness in the voices of the party. The two ladies of the house pressed some bread and cheese into their hands and everyone repeated, "Merci, merci," over and over. Before going out, Saunders picked up the littlest girl, looking once more into her rapt, brown eyes. He smiled again. She laughed, giving him a soft peck on each cheek, and then wriggled out of his grasp. Excepting his mother, never had he hugged someone before who gave him so much joy.
On the walk back, the lowering clouds opened up and rain fell in torrents on the squad of weary men. No one knew where the lines were now, or how dangerous the woods and fields were up ahead, so Lt. Hanley rightly made the call for an overnight stop at the old barn. Piling in, one after the other, each of the men was glad for even a leaky roof that night. The two leaders, both of them suffering from fever, were made to sit down.
While the storm raged outside, with buckets of rain falling by the minute, soaking the trees and grass under a steady, beating wind, the men of 1st Squad swept up the broken, battered straw into piles and hunkered down in the stalls to sleep. In his own stall, closing his eyes, Saunders finally got that sleep he'd missed all day, letting his aching bones forget the explosion of the jeep's gas tank and the bruises of the rocky stream. Lt. Hanley also slept. Sharing the same stall, Littlejohn watched over him and didn't let his own eyes close, at least not for long. Caje had watch for the next couple of hours and sat in the open doorway with his rifle across his knees. It wasn't likely anybody would be paying them a call this late at night and in the rain, but in war, anything could happen.
A bit wound-up from the storm and the long slog that day, Doc, closest to the back of the barn, lay cater-cornered against the busted feeding trough and watched the rain beat down through a barn window. It was a hot, wet night, but at least they were all safe and sound in the old French barn. Of sound construction, it would take another hundred years to knock it off its pins. Kirby, in the closest stall to where Doc lay, snored, giving the inventive medic the idea, which he didn't act on, of stuffing his mouth full of straw in an effort to make it stop.
Listening to the thrum of rain on the roof, he heard Sarge make a kind of low moan in his sleep, probably having a nightmare about the explosion he had told them about. Somehow, though, just hearing him comforted Doc. Lt. Hanley, asleep too, was almost too quiet, but he had a good caretaker in the big Nebraskan. Caje was his ever-vigilant self, sitting on the sill of the crooked double door, the lightning throwing his angular face into relief every now and then, making his dark eyes glow brighter. Doc could hear a soft humming coming from him.
Unknown to the sleeping occupants of the barn, and to Caje, who was watching the front side of the structure, a malevolent force was creeping up to the window Doc was gazing out of at the rain. The force was in the shape of a man, a struggling man, bareheaded, bedraggled by the storm's downpour, and carrying a tool of destruction in his belt. He pulled it out and stood there for a moment before acting.
Again musing about stuffing Kirby full of straw, rubbing his eyes and feeling disoriented for a second, Doc looked out of the window again and saw the shadow of a figure in the framed space, rearing back an arm in whose hand he carried something like a short club. The dark object streaked through the window and landed in the middle of the floor, between all of their sleeping stalls.
Hurtling himself to his knees and yelling throughout the space, he screamed, "Hand grenade!"
Littlejohn heard Doc and rapidly reacted, throwing his arms over the prone body of his lieutenant. Caje's head swung around, but he didn't have time to get on his feet. Kirby popped out of the straw in his stall, and in an instant, hearing Doc's outcry, Saunders too was awake. In a sudden lightning reveal, he glimpsed the grenade on the floor. It lay just outside his stall. Realizing he had a five-second window, at best, he pulled forward and looked around the stall at the door. Grabbing it up and throwing it that way was not an option, not with Caje there. But if he didn't act fast, they would all perish.
Crawling for two seconds out of the straw, staring at the stick grenade the whole time, he got up to his knees and launched himself some two or three feet, landing with a hard thud on top of the 'potato masher.' By this time, Doc and Kirby had come closer, kneeling, watching, side by side. Hanley, coming to, had seen the dark shape land on the bare earth in front of Saunders' stall, and fully awake now, pushed Littlejohn aside.
Saunders, not moving, waited for the blast; they all did. In a dreamful kind of way, Kirby too had seen the grenade hurled through the barn window. He looked outside again, seeing no one there now. Leaping up to go out and catch the slim, helmeted man he saw framed in the window, he had stopped on his knees beside Doc, both pairs of eyes wide as saucers as they saw Sarge leap onto the grenade and clutch it under his chest. Kirby's breath caught in his throat. But nothing happened. No boom!
Lightning struck again outside, a bright flash, making every man in the barn jump, except Saunders. He was unable to move, just waiting for the blast that would rip his heart out and destroy him. The barn lit up time and again with the power of the storm, thunder booming very close by.
"It's a dud," murmured Hanley, his glowing eyes staring at the floor where his sergeant lay, just under him a deadly grenade. He'd prayed this wasn't the end of his friend.
Suddenly a loud voice yelled out. Kirby's. "It's a dud! Damn thing's a dud!" He and Doc rushed forward, along with Caje from the doorway. Littlejohn sat back against the wall and breathed out, chuckling with nerves all of a sudden and shielding his eyes with his hand. Tears were rolling down his cheeks, but he didn't want to stop them.
Saunders rolled off the grenade and lay back, throwing his arms out. As Kirby and Doc approached, he breathed out, "Get rid of it." He said it again, hypnotized by the fact that he was still here on earth, and not watching the activity in the barn from some place higher up.
Caje gingerly picked up the grenade by its handle and slowly walked to the door with it. Once there, he tossed it out as far as he could throw, never minding the rain lashing his face. The grenade exploded. They all heard it—a loud boom off in the grass where Caje had tossed it. Or had it only been a peel of thunder?
Boisterous backslapping broke out, the squad showering Sarge with words of astonishment that he was still with them. He almost fainted from the outpouring of their gratitude.
"Alright," Hanley said. "Get off him, let him breathe. Saunders, you okay?"
"I will be, Lieutenant," he said, "once my heart slows down and I can see again." His heart beat like a snare drum in a marching band and a black aura enveloped his eyes. Even lightning didn't make him blink. Sitting up against Hanley's stall, he asked of no one in particular, "Did it go off?"
"Caje?" asked Hanley.
"I threw it, sir, and I think it did. Right out there in the grass. We can see if it did once it's light out."
"It might've been thunder," said Doc, the only man permitted in Saunders' orbit at the moment. He checked him over thoroughly, his only light the lightning outside. "Maybe it was a dud, after all."
"How is he?" asked Hanley, his own breathing coming in short, sharp gasps, partly from fever, partly from total astonishment that the grenade hadn't made hamburger of a certain squad leader in King Company's 2nd Platoon.
"I think he's okay, but he's had quite a shock."
"Too right!" Kirby said, laughing. "We all have tonight."
"We need to see if that Kraut is still lurking around." Hanley looked up from the straw. "Volunteers?"
"I'll go," said Littlejohn, wiping his face and lumbering onto his feet. Retrieving his rifle from the straw, he stepped by Hanley, who was sitting up now, and patted Saunders on the back, nearly knocking him to the floor again. "It's good to have you in one piece, Sarge," he said, or something to that effect. His voice was husky with emotion and hard to understand.
Kirby fetched the BAR from his stall, and he and Caje, who was armed like Littlejohn with an M1, followed, first checking the area near the window. Once outside, all three were wet instantly and the blinding, white-hot lightning didn't make them any more comfortable. The downpour had thoroughly washed out any tracks, so the men split up and entered the woods behind the barn in three separate ways.
Inside the barn, rallying but still in a state of shock, Saunders muttered, "I can't believe I did that." Hanley laid a firm hand on his shoulder and Doc smiled in a troubled way, glad about the dud but fervently hoping that no more shocks awaited the squad that night.
"It's all over, Saunders," said the lieutenant. "Caje and the others will find him or die in the attempt."
"Like I almost did," said Saunders, laughing a bit. "This is one to tell the grandchildren."
"I might as well change that bandage of yours again, Sarge," said Doc, getting up to fetch his medical bag at the rear of the barn.
When they were now alone, Hanley said, "You did good, Saunders. I'm putting you up for a medal."
But Saunders had closed his eyes and was drifting off. Leaning back on the boards of Hanley's stall, he preferred not to go into his own stall just then. He didn't want to be alone, not for a while. Too many thoughts of an unsettling nature filled his brain.
In the morning, scrounging around outside, Caje found the potato masher in the tall grass, intact. It had been a dud after all. Of the German from last night, they had found no sign. Caje, Kirby and Littlejohn had returned with heavy hearts over the fact that they hadn't caught the man who had almost killed Sarge.
"He was a right mess," said Doc, speaking of the soldier. "All ragged-looking."
"Maybe the same man I fought with yesterday," said Saunders, eating some of the food prepared for the squad by the Jouberts. "But since he's still out there, there's no way to be sure."
Hanley offered his two cents. "Perhaps it was another soldier, wandering about."
That other soldier, a tall, but very slight individual, wandering out of yesterday's battle to the east of the old farm, had used his last means to try to destroy the enemy. He almost had.
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On the way back, heading northeast, 1st Squad had to duck for cover more times than they could count. Gunfire and artillery fire kept them on a short leash as they tried to penetrate German lines to get back to American lines. Then, about 1000 hours, they ran across a firefight in progress between Americans and Krauts, but they were still trapped behind the Germans, running from cover to cover in the smoke of battle.
At first trying to find a position of strength, as they were outnumbered at least two to one, Hanley drove the squad into a wooded area where they could use the cover of trees to fire into one of the German positions. It didn't take long for the enemy, numbering about twenty, to realize that they were surrounded by a highly trained, highly mobile ghost squad to their rear, as well as the two or three squads they had been facing that morning.
Eliminating the enemy became easier as individual Germans fell one after another, the last two or three suffering a grenade blast when Kirby and Caje flanked them. The other two squads suffered casualties, but having a very secure position in the brush, 1st Squad came out of the fight unscathed. When the shooting was well and truly over, one man stood up amid the bodies of the slain Germans, raising his hands and waiting to be taken prisoner. Hanley, who was suffering less now from his wound, energized by the taste of combat again, led the squad out of the trees into the midst of the carnage.
Saunders, kicking dead men over to make sure they were really dead, looked up at hearing Kirby's comment on the one remaining soldier, a soldier who they all instantly recognized.
"Well, look what we've got here, Lieutenant. It's that boy soldier again."
Indeed, it was, though his face was muddy and streaked by tears. His whole frame trembled, including his hands which at Hanley's nod, he put down. That's when he collapsed next to one of the bodies of the slain men, turning it over. His eyes continued to well up.
"I wanted to take him home," he said in a low voice. "That soldier, over there," he nodded with his chin at an older soldier lying face down in the leaves, "he brought us back. I'm glad he's dead now."
Saunders looked down at the man, walked up to him, knelt and turned him over. It was the same soldier he'd fought with at the river, and here was the tall, older boy mourning the loss of his younger comrade. A good five minutes passed, while the squad went about the grim duty of checking the fallen Germans, looking for wounded, of either side, and taking one of the dog tags off the neck of each of the American dead.
Capt. Jampel himself appeared next in the woods, followed by remnants of two of the squads from Item Company. Some of Item Company's men also lay unmoving on the killing ground. He looked at Hanley, smiled slightly at seeing that he was on his feet, and said, rather briskly, "Anyone ready to go home? We're finished for the day here."
No one said a word, still regarding the weeping boy on the ground next to his dead friend. Doc kept staring at the youth, wondering if he had been the thin soldier he had seen framed in the barn window the night before. But Littlejohn had tossed that boy's potato masher into the stream. It couldn't have been the same one, could it? Doc snapped back to the present, as Littlejohn, looking over at Sarge, said, "We don't know which one of us killed him."
Since none of the Americans were going to make the effort to haul the younger boy's body back to the CP for an autopsy, the men of 1st Squad would never know whose bullet had ended the youngster's life.
"Any one of us could have been responsible," offered Caje. "Even Capt. Jampel's men."
Older and more philosophical than the rest of the squad, Hanley said, "None of us created this war, it's not our fault if he died fighting on the wrong side."
Still, the death of such a young life was too real, and silence closed down over them all. From his jacket, Saunders took out the loose bundle of bandages that the boy had given him and placed it beside him. Helping the older boy—Elias—to his feet, he turned and walked with him out of the woods into the blazing August sun. There were only a few miles left to go to the American CP. Getting there in one piece was the squad's priority now. No more German patrols were met with on the way, which in itself was a kind of miracle.
Once back at the tents, Saunders and Hanley, along with the new prisoner of war, Elias Vogel, were trucked to the rear, Elias to HQ and the two men to the field hospital where they had to undergo a rigorous examination of their wounds. Hanley's was healing very well, but Saunders' cut was still red, swollen and sore. A warm, whirlpool hand bath helped clean out infection. With a couple of stitches and a new bandage, he felt quite comfortable about it. Tetanus was not on tap. A shot of penicillin for each man didn't hurt his feelings any, either.
Moved back to the front before the end of the day, both men were whole-heartedly welcomed by the squad and treated to a warm, if rowdy meal at the mess tent. Jampel found Hanley and brought him up to date on the coming week's patrols, and for everyone, including a much-relieved sergeant, he ordered a good night's sleep.
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