...And Justice For All
     But all the Italians were not friendly. A U.S. paratrooper who spoke Italian fluently, while on advance scout for a 20-man patrol, was captured by an Italian outpost of seven Italian officers and one German. An Italian officer questioned him in English, and he replied in Italian. “Traitor!” the officer exclaimed, pulled his automatic, and emptied it into the soldier, who fell to the ground, cursing. Still conscious, the trooper continued to curse the officer in Italian. Enraged, the Fascist officer took a grenade from the trooper’s belt and dropped it between the prostrate man’s thighs. It spread his stomach over the ground.
     Then the 20 paratroopers came up, handed the officers shovels, made them dig eight graves in a row, lined them up by their graves, and shot them.
 

Even the toughest soldiers...
     We were in Germany. The company had moved into a particularly vulnerable position in open fields the day Willie Mullins got a letter from his wife that did  more to erode our morale than could any conceivable amount of shells, rain, or hard luck.
     Willie loved his wife and respected her dignity enough, in spite of the biological urges that belabored him, to stay away from the temptresses who talked love in strange tongues. He was first in line for his mail, read and reread his wife’s letters, and carried them with him until rain, sweat, and mud had made them illegible. He sent every penny he could save to her to put in the bank for the little house they were to buy when the war was over.
     It had never occurred to Willie that the sweet young girl who sat on his knees, ran her fingers through his hair, caressed his closed eyes, and kissed him tenderly on the corners of his mouth could be a two-timer. He was fighting for her and the kind of free life he vaguely associated in his naive thinking with the purposes of the war.
     Willie had just returned from an overnight sojourn in an advanced outpost. It had been a strenuous night, filled with the usual tensions and noises, plus the nerve-scraping detonations of diabolically contrived new rockets we called screaming meemies. Many times during the night Willie’s vision of the little house-to-be faded.
     Berkely handed him a letter. He read it twice, his eyes bulging. First he threw it on the ground and stomped it. Next he shot at it. Then, waving it, he charged, cursing, towards no-man’s land, describing a great arc, and came back to or lines panting and foaming.
     “Having female trouble, Willie?”
     “Arab, read this letter to the boys!”
     The Arab read: “Dear darling Willie: I have bad news in one way, but in another way it’s good news. I am pregnant. Life was so hard without you, sweetheart. You have no idea what all I’ve been through. If you’d really loved me, you’d have found a way to come back from over there. I know you will understand. It will be kinda nice now, won’t it, to have a little one already here when you get back? Do write, Willie boy, and tell me everything is all right. Loads of love from your loving bunny!”
     The Arab’s comment pretty well summarized our feelings: “Willie, don’t answer her! Never see her again!”
     “I can’t forget her, Arab! I love her! I love her!”
     Suddenly Willie grabbed the letter and began to run in wide circles, screaming, “I love her, I love her!”
     Late in the night Willie Mullins went crazy and left the front in a straitjacket.
    The scene filled us with bitterness. Most of us, during the long, hard months of blood, death, and hardship, had set some girl on a symbolic pedestal of purity and devotion. Even the toughest soldiers feel the need for a speck of emotional romanticism. When the Master Termite got sentimental about Angel, and even the Homer-reading Arab about a waitress back home, they unconsciously distilled the perfidious impurities, real or potential, of their Dulcineas into perfumed loyalties and flattering devotions.
     I saw more than one Willie leave in a straitjacket. As long as the boys fought in the belief that their sacrifices and hardships meant at least enough to the women they loved to hold her loyalty, they could generally endure the hell of mechanized battle. When cruel letters jackknifed their faith, their moral fibers crumpled and some of them fell apart.
 

There would be no Christmas! Instead, we got the Battle of the Bulge
     After looking at our watches scores of times, the appointed time to move forward finally ticked. The 33 men in our platoon, spearheading the two platoons following us, began to advance through the forest. Soon we were at the edge of the field, crisscrossed at intervals by barbed wire.
     Troops in skirmish formation advancing across such a terrain are a machine-gunner’s dream. I heard Duquesne whisper to Gruening: “This is it!”
     Now we were in the open field.  Strung out unevenly because of difficulty in getting under and through the barbed wire, we had nearly reached midfield when it happened.
     Suddenly thousands of tracer bullets, uncannily beautiful despite their lethal purpose, arched and crisscrossed above us. The flickering flames turned the night into day and men into targets. The air was filled with the yellow glow of hissing 20-mm. cannon shells, the sputter of machine guns, and the roar of exploding mortar shells dumped on our comrades just behind us.
     I was halfway over a fence when little Finkelstein, a few feet in front of it, was struck by a 20-mm. shell that set him afire.
     Stunned by the burst of enemy fire, our line faltered. Dimly, I heard the bull voice of Berkely: “Go forward! Kill the bastards who killed Finkelstein!”
     I continued forward in a daze. About five feet to my left a steady stream of tracers felt for me. A field piece methodically shelled the center of our advance. Mortar shells kept chewing up the second and third platoon behind us. Machine guns warped and woofed their stitches across and through the zone ahead. I walked forward, firing my rifle, but unable to hear it’s detonation.
     “I’ve got it good.” It was the feeble voice of the Arab, who lay in a pool of blood almost in my path. I fell to my knees beside the old warrior and started to give him first aid. “It ain’t no use,” he said. “Tell the boys, if any of them are left, that I wanted to give a better account of myself.” As I started to go, I stepped on his volume of Homer, which was blood-spattered and shot nearly in half. I put it on his chest and felt his heart. It was still. I folded the hero’s arms across his beloved book and moved on.
     Cursing insanely, I continued firing until my rifle burned in my hands. I was getting closer and closer to the starting point of the bullets that had killed Finkelstein, the Arab, and, I supposed, most of my other buddies. Ahead three forms skulked in the darkness by a machine gun. I reloaded and charged. A burst of slugs smoked past me. When I was within a few feet of the forms they started to run. I put one knee on the ground and leveled off eight slugs. Then I rolled on the ground to escape a machine-pistol blast.
     I found Casey, riddled by MG-42’s, lying a few yards in front of a machine-gun nest. In it there were four dead SS troopers. I roared in rage and started toward the right, where I found a tech sergeant of B Company trying to reorganize his platoon in the face of deadly fire from the flak wagons forming  the road block. He was yelling: “Let’s go, men! We got to take that town!”
     Together we rushed toward a monstrous shape spurting flame into the darkness, off whose metallic sides our bullets sparked and whined in feeble ineffectualness. Diving into a ditch, I spotted six similar monsters sitting in a circle spewing machine gun bullets and small cannon shells.
     Ten feet away, on the other side of the road, was an armored vehicle whose 20-mm., I observed, was no longer firing. I figured it must have jammed. A pair of hands pushed out of the turret hatch and emptied a machine pistol. I readied a grenade, thinking to myself, “I’ll stop your clock when you stick that gun out again!” crawled over to its side and crouched. I felt without hearing a sound that the hatch was being opened, and rose halfway to toss in my grenade. Before I made a move, however, an egg grenade thumped me between the shoulder blades and bounced off. I dived back across the road and sprawled into a barbed-wire fence. When the missile exploded, something numbed my shoulder and back.
     I was panic stricken as the armored car backed up and stopped, facing me. Now, I thought, he will lower the boom on me, because he must have seen me, or he wouldn’t have tossed out the grenade. Just when I thought the jig was up, the motor stopped, the hatch cover opened, and three men hurtled out. Wrenching partly free of the wire, I leveled my gun and fired until they fell.
     As I stood up to take a better look, the horrible, thudding growl of a machine cannon erupted behind me. I felt a red-hot rip tear through my right arm, and a stream of blood as big as my thumb cascaded down. I began to call frantically for first aid. Violet and red flashes flickered before my eyes.
     When I regained consciousness, Ciconte of our platoon was kneeling beside me. He took off my jacket and coat, slipped loose my belt, and put it on my arm as a tourniquet. Suddenly he picked up his gun and threw a fast shot. “That Kraut won’t try to slip up on anybody else!” Then he knelt gently by me again and gave me a shot of morphine.
     I think I must have fainted about every 50 yards on the way to the aid station. While I was conscious, I asked about the others. Of the old boys, only Berkely, Winters and I remained-- and I might bleed to death. My mind backflashed to the original platoon; a gentle weariness overcame me. The will to live that had put in motion my wobbly legs seemed to dissolve into nostalgic longings. I sank to the ground. Why should I live when better men lay dead?
     As I lay without energy or will to move, I had an hallucination of extraordinary vividness. I was lying by the side of a trail the Legion had once marched along somewhere in Italy. From around a bend in the distance I saw a column of soldiers marching steadily toward me. As they came closer I could see that they were neatly dressed as if for inspection or leave, but, curiously, their shoes made no noise on the gravel path. I strained to see if I could identify any of them, but their faces seemed hidden in a hood of fog. Then just as the lead man passed directly in front of me the vapor dissolved, and I saw it was Hastings, the first man in our platoon to have died. He smiled at me without slowing his step. Then came Olsen, the Master Termite, and so on. One by one-- the old boys filed by, each smiling  and all giving the impression of being in a great hurry to reach some destination.
     The Arab, marching near the rear, smiled and said, “Ross, if you hurry you can overtake us.”  When I regained my consciousness, I was struggling to get to my feet. I wondered if in my delirium I had got up to try to follow our phantoms.
     A few steps farther on I collapsed again. As I blacked out, I realized dimly that it was beginning to snow.

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