A freezing blast of air struck the scrawny ginger-colored squirrel just as he emerged from the hole in the top of the large spruce tree. The cold wind caused the little animal to close his eyes, but a fierce hunger drove him out of his warm lair into the frigid air. He scrambled out of the hole, clung to a limb that extended laterally, and for a moment searched the surrounding areas. Something had happened to his world, but he did not know what it was, and fear had kept him inside his nest for days. He did not understand the tremendous blasts that sometimes shook his tree, and now that he was out everything seemed changed. Many trees were down, others were stripped of their foliage, and the forest that had been his lifetime home was gone.
Hunger gnawing at his belly, he scrambled down the tree and began searching frantically for something to fill it. Finally he found an acorn, somewhat moldy, but still food. Grasping it firmly in his tiny paws, he hoisted himself into a sitting position, his tail twitching feverishly.
The squirrel had almost finished the acorn when suddenly that inner sense animals have set off an alarm. He froze, aware that an enemy was near, swiveled his head about, and then for an instant stood as still as any stone statue. Not twenty feet away from him a creature was watching, and he was so frightened that he could not move. He sat there with his paws together, looking a little like a monk at prayer.
Sergeant William Raines had the tiny squirrel exactly in the sight of his M1. All he had to do was pull the trigger, and the creature would be blasted into bits. Willie hesitated, thinking of the first squirrel he’d ever killed. It had been on his tenth birthday at his grandfather’s farm in Ohio. The two of them had gone out into the tall pine woods, and Willie had managed to kill three squirrels with his single-shot twenty-two. His grandfather had killed several with his ten-gauge shotgun, and the two of them had come back with their coarse feed sacks filled. As Willie held the bead on the squirrel that stared at him with bright, fear-filled eyes, he remembered how they had skinned the squirrels, dressed them, and then taken them in for his grandmother to cook.
From far away came the rapid stutter of machine-gun fire, but Willie was so accustomed to this he did not move his eyes from the prey in front of him. He was thinking of how delicious the squirrel stew was and how his grandfather had taught him that the best part of a squirrel was the brains mixed up with scrambled eggs.
The memory did something to Willie, and suddenly he laughed and lowered the M1. “Merry Christmas, Mister Squirrel.” He grinned as the squirrel raced frantically across the ground, flew up the tree, and popped back into his hole. Willie brought the rifle back over the lip of the foxhole and sat down, leaning his helmet back against the edge. “You wouldn’t have made a mouthful anyway. It would take ten like you to make a good stew.”
A German shell shrieked like a wild thing overhead, and Willie ducked his head and closed his eyes. He gripped the rifle until his fingers were white. Finally the explosion came, rocking the earth, but it was not in Willie’s foxhole, so he expelled his breath and opened his eyes. Pulling his helmet off, he rubbed his reddish hair, then jammed the helmet back on.
The temperature had dropped far below freezing, making simple existence a struggle. The wind made a constant moan as it drove the tiny flakes of snow across the crust that covered the ground.
Willie desperately wanted to sleep but knew he must not. After seventy-two days of savage fighting in Holland in Operation Market Garden, he and his buddies in the 101st and 82nd Airborne had expected to be sent back to England for R and R.
Instead, they had been crowded into trucks and rushed to meet the might of the German Wehrmacht. Hitler had decided to hit the American army that was driving toward Berlin with everything the German army had left. General McAuliffe was given a simple order: “Hold Bastogne.” The Germans threw everything they had at the American force: tanks, Stuka dive-bombers, artillery, and waves of crack SS infantry.
The American forces had no winter clothing, little food, almost no medical supplies, and worst of all, little ammo to face the onslaught. The Germans had surrounded Bastogne, and there was no relief in sight for the 101st and the 82nd.
As Willie Raines sat in his foxhole, his eyes shut against the bitter wind, he wished desperately that he were back home. He tried to think of where he would rather be: at a Cubs baseball game in the hot sun, eating a hot dog and drinking a big Coke. All of that seemed a million miles away, farther than the stars that winked faintly at night over the landscape.
A crunching sound brought Willie upright. Quickly he grasped his rifle, thrust it over the edge of the foxhole, and blinked against the icy particles that bit into his eyes. He kept his M1 off safety and raised it to his shoulder, following a vague movement coming out of the woods to his right. He saw two soldiers and watched as they took a detour around a huge fallen tree that had been uprooted by heavy artillery fire two days ago. Recognizing them, he expelled his breath and called out, “Hey, you two, what are you—”
But his words were cut off when a shell exploded twenty yards from where the two soldiers were located. Both men made a mad dash. Willie had no chance to do more than holler, “Hey?!” when Billy Bob Watkins and Charlie Delaughter landed on him. He was crushed to the bottom of the foxhole, lost his grip on his rifle, and one of the soldiers’ feet caught him on the neck and the side of his head. If he hadn’t had a helmet on, his head would have been crushed.
“Get off of me, you idiots!”
Billy Bob Watkins, a gangling eighteen-year-old from Bald Knob, Arkansas, rearranged himself, folding his lanky body into the foxhole. His face was lined with fatigue, and his mouth was a straight line. Ordinarily he was a cheerful young man, but the incessant attacks of the German Wehrmacht had drained him as it had the rest of the 101st Airborne who had come to hold the line at Bastogne. Shoving his helmet back, he grinned tightly. “You got anything to eat, Sarge?”
“No!”
“Shucks! I’d shore know what to do with some collards and grits.” He slumped down and heaved a weary sigh. “I’m so tard you could scrape it off with a stick.”
“What have you got to be tired about? All you’ve done is fight off the whole German army.” Charlie Delaughter shoved Billy Bob away, making room for himself in the foxhole. His Boston accent contrasted violently with Billy Bob’s southern drawl. Carefully he lifted his head over the edge of the foxhole, then drew it back quickly as a shot punctuated the cold air. A tiny branch cut by the passing bullet fluttered down landing on Charlie’s head.
Billy Bob reached over and plucked the small branch from Delaughter’s helmet. “Them Krauts is a mite touchy, ain’t they, now?”
“I thought the fight was out of them, but it’s not,” Charlie observed.
“Why, them Krauts is just mean, is what they are,” Billy Bob nodded sagely, “mean as a junkyard dog. They’re born that way.”
Delaughter winked at Willie. “I thought you rebels could whip anybody. All you’ve done is brag about how we’d already be in Berlin if we were tough as the Confederate army.”
“Why, shoot, Charlie, if we had some real soldiers like them boys who fought under Marse Robert—and some real generals like Stonewall Jackson—we’d have nailed that ol’ Hitler’s hide to the smokehouse wall long ’fore now!”
Willie listened with half his mind to the argument between Billy Bob and Charlie over the Civil War. Each of them had family who’d fought in that earlier war (on opposite sides, of course!), but strangely enough the two had become fast friends. They were almost exactly the same age, but Delaughter, who was only three days older, drove Billy Bob to distraction by referring to himself as “the old man,” and to Billy Bob as “Junior.”
Charlie Delaughter asked suddenly, “What’s the date, Sarge?”
“What difference does it make?” Willie demanded, staring at him. “You got an appointment at the dentist?”
“It’s December the twenty-fifth, 1944,” Billy Bob grinned. He reached over and punched Willie on the arm hard. “Merry Christmas. What time do we eat the turkey, Sarge?”
“We won’t be eatin’ turkey,” Willie said, finding it hard to speak through his stiff lips. “What were you two walkin’ around for like you was in a park?”
“Wanted to find out what the Krauts was a-doin’,” Billy Bob complained. “I figured we had ’em on the run. That’s whut the radio said. They’re supposed to be whupped.”
Charlie Delaughter suddenly grinned. Billy Bob could never understand strategy. “I guess they don’t read the papers,” he said. Charlie was the scholar of the 101st. He had been snatched out of a secure niche at Georgia Tech, studying to be an engineer, and thrust into the war. He had chosen the Airborne as being more romantic than a slogging foot soldier. Now he was having second thoughts about that. He shook his head sadly. “This is probably the last big push the Germans are going to make, Junior, and they can’t win it.”
“Why in the cat hair are they doin’ it for, then?”
“Who knows? Hitler’s got some kind of a wild notion, I think. Anyway, they’re throwing everything they got against us. They won’t win, but it makes it tough on us.”
“I wisht they’d go pester somebody else,” Billy Bob grumbled. He started to get up, but Willie reached out and dragged him back. “Keep your head down if you want to hang onto it.” He got to his feet and crawled out of the hole, dragging his rifle out after him.
“Where are you going, Sarge?” Billy Bob asked.
“Lieutenant Stone came by. Said for our squad to move out.”
“Move out where?”
“Over by that open field we held day before yesterday,”
“Well, dang!” Billy Bob exclaimed. “Why’d they tell us to leave there if we was goin’ back?”
“Ours not to reason why, ours but to do or die.” Charlie Delaughter had a bad habit of quoting poetry that grated on Billy Bob’s nerves. He grinned now and said, “That’s in a poem I read at college.”
“I bet it was wrote by some dang-fool Yankee!”
“All poetry is written by Yankees, Junior. You rebels are too busy eating sowbelly and carrying on feuds.”
“Come on, you two,” Willie ordered. Heaving himself out of the foxhole and stumbling from tree to tree Willie made his way through what was left of the forest. He glanced back from time to time, making sure that Billy Bob and Charlie didn’t get lost. He finally found Pete Maxwell standing behind a tree, eating a can of C rations.
“How can you eat that stuff, Pete?”
Pete was a slight young man from Los Angeles. His only interest had been surfing until he had been caught up in the machinery of war. He was the only soldier that Willie Raines had ever met who liked C rations. “I don’t see how you do it, Pete.”
“Why, it’s good. Here. How about havin’ some with me?”
“No, thanks. Come on, we’re changing the line.” He paused to listen to distant rifle fire, then asked, “Where are Rog and Chief?”
“Over there behind that ridge.”
Willie looked in the direction that Pete indicated and frowned. “They’re out in the open? They should know better than that.”
“Well, it was Roger’s idea,” Pete shrugged. “He said he was tired of hiding behind trees.” He grinned. “Chief told him that’s why his ancestors whipped up on General Custer. Said if the fool had found some trees to hide behind he wouldn’t have got all his men killed at Little Big Horn.”
“Chief’s right about that,” Willie snapped. “Come on, let’s find ’em.”
As Willie led the three men through the trees, he was worried. Only five men were left in his squad, and Willie was determined not to lose another man. They had gone through training in the States together, had jumped behind German lines together on D-day, and had fought their way across Holland and France together. Willie had never had a brother, and these men were like brothers to him now. He’d never cared for poetry, but he liked the poem Charlie Delaughter had quoted once. Charlie said it was from one of Shakespeare’s plays. He had explained that it was the speech that King Henry V gave to his small army before going into battle at a place called Crispin Crispan.
As they passed out of the forest into the open ground, Willie whispered the words of the poem that he knew, not speaking aloud, for he was somehow embarrassed about quoting poetry. He didn’t know all the speech, but part of it seemed to have burned itself into his brain:
Crispin Crispan shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother.
Somehow the words gave Willie Raines a fierce determination to bring the five surviving members of his squad safely through the war, no matter what it took!
Willie continued moving to his left. He heard the sound of someone singing and knew it had to be Roger Saunders. Saunders had a beautiful singing voice and seemed to know the words to all the latest songs from the States. This one was a ditty called “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” and the nonsense song sounded strange in the midst of the forest with death behind every tree—and overhead as well when the Stukas flew over.
Willie spotted the two soldiers standing in the open field as if they were in the middle of Central Park. He opened his mouth to call out to Roger when suddenly both soldiers whirled and threw their M1s to their shoulders. Willie was looking right down the barrels and managed to call out, “Don’t shoot, you clowns—it’s me!”
“Oh, is that you, Sarge?” Roger lowered the M1 and nodded. “I almost potted you that time.”
“What a disgrace that would be, gettin’ shot by a songbird. Who do you think you are, that singer all the girls are goin’ crazy over?”
“Frank Sinatra? Well, he’s good, too,” Roger grinned. He was twenty-three years old, the oldest man in the squad, two years older than Willie himself. He was a New Yorker and a fierce fan of the Yankees baseball team. He was the only married man in the squad, and missed his wife Irene terribly. He wrote her every day, even knowing that there was no way to mail the letters from the spearhead of the army.
“What’s up, Sarge?”
“Moving over to our left, Chief.” Willie hated to reprimand any of his men publicly, but he was upset. “What are you doing out in the open, Chief?”
“Why, this paleface here got tired of trees.” Lonnie Shoulders was a full-blooded Sioux and was never called anything but “Chief.”
“You should know better than to listen to him.”
“Oh, I know better,” Chief grinned. He was a tall, strong figure with dark eyes and a coppery skin. “I just don’t do better.” He began stamping his feet on the ground and asked, “What’s goin’ on down the line?”
“The same thing that’s goin’ on here.”
“Hey, I got a new one for you, Sarge,” Roger Saunders said.
“A new what?”
“A new song. See how you like this one.”
Roger began singing a song “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth.”
Raines could not help but grin at the soldier. “Don’t you ever worry about gettin’ killed, Rog?”
“Nope. No time for that. Do you?”
“Well, it’s crossed my mind,” Willie said sharply. “Let’s get moving.”
Chief said, “Hey, Sarge, Roger and me liberated some grub. What say we build a fire and have some hot chow?”
Willie hesitated, then said, “OK, but first we dig in.”
“Right!” Chief grinned. “I’ll be in charge and be sure you guys do the digging right!”
“No need for anyone to dig,” Billy Bob said. “We can use that there crater.”
Willie turned to see the crater, and it looked good. He walked over to the large hole and stared at it. “It’s big enough, but it’s out in the open.”
“Get loose, Sarge!” Pete Maxwell urged. “The Krauts ain’t awake. I think they take siestas.”
“That’s Mexicans who do that,” Charlie laughed. “But it’s been pretty quiet, Willie. I think we’ll have time to heat up some chow before we move on.”
Against his better judgment, Willie nodded. “OK, but hurry it up. I don’t like this spot.” He moved out, his eyes darting over the terrain as the squad began gathering sticks for a fire. Climbing to the top of the low ridge, he stared at the wooded hills that rose in the west. Somehow they looked sinister, and he shook his head. “A bad place to get caught,” he muttered. He turned and looked back at the squad, and almost called them to move on. But their voices were happy, and he forced himself to wait. “They need a hot meal, and we can move on when they’ve eaten.”
* * *
“This is good stew,” Roger nodded. “You can get a job as a chef in Boston after the war, Chief.”
The six men were sitting on the edge of the crater, eating the hot stew out of their mess kits. A pot of coffee was boiling in Pete Maxwell’s helmet, sending a sharp fragrance to the soldiers. They were all laughing and prophesying when the Germans would draw back.
“I heard Patton is on his way with his tanks to relieve us,” Pete Maxwell said, gulping down the hot coffee so fast he could hardly talk.
“Old Blood and Guts,” Billy Bob said. “I wish he was here.”
“Think he’s as good as Stonewall Jackson was, Junior?”
“No Yankee is as good as Stonewall—and stop callin’ me ‘Junior.’”
Chief Shoulders nudged Willie with his elbow. “How about we get a leave when we whip these guys? Maybe in Paris.”
“You’d scare them to death, Chief,” Pete Maxwell said. “They’re afraid of Indians.”
Willie Raines sat back enjoying his stew. He had no idea what was in it, and he didn’t want to ask the cook. It was hot, and that was all that mattered. But he was more pleased with the obvious pleasure the squad was taking in the break. These men had become his whole life, and as his glance moved from face to face, he thought again of the poem and the lines “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” It pleased him, but he was nervous. He finished his stew and was about to order the men to finish so they could move into their new position when the quiet suddenly was split wide open by explosions on their left.
“Mortars!” Willie yelled. “Everybody keep down!”
Another explosion came from their left and then another from the right.
“They got us straddled!” Pete Maxwell yelled. “Run for it!”
But Willie had heard the sound of automatic weapons and knew that if they got up and ran, they’d be cut down. “Get in the foxhole!” he yelled, and the men fell into it headlong.
Willie tried to think, but he knew that Maxwell was right. The mortar squads had spotted them, and they were straddled.
To “straddle” a position meant that the Germans knew where they were. They were dropping shells to the left and to the right, with each mortar shell moving the mortar so that the shells fell inexorably closer to the target.
Willie knew that there was no way out, for each round was closer than the last.
“You guys keep clear.” Willie grabbed the automatic rifle that Maxwell usually carried and got out of the hole.
“Where are you goin’, Sarge?” Chief asked.
“Somebody’s got to knock out that mortar squad.” Willie leaped up and began running. He heard several voices calling on him to stop, but he ran full speed, but not in a straight line. Sudden shots rang out, and he saw a branch not five feet from his head clipped by a bullet and fall to the ground.
Infantry with covering fire, Willie thought and fell into one of the smaller craters. He huddled there enduring the cold but his mind working rapidly. I’ve got to get that mortar! But how? I can’t run straight forward against infantry fire. There are probably snipers there.
While Willie stayed in the hole trying to think, the mortar continued to drop shells, and bullets were zipping all around.
Suddenly Willie was aware of a shape that had appeared to his left. He threw his rifle up, but a voice came, “Don’t shoot, soldier. I’m with you.”
The soldier who joined Willie in the crater was a lieutenant. There was nothing special about him except that he seemed very calm. He did not even bother to stoop down inside the hole but sat down on the lip of it. “It looks bad, doesn’t it, Willie?”
“Do I know you, sir?”
The officer did not answer. He turned and looked over his shoulder. “The mortars are right over the ridge behind a small mound. You can’t see ’em, but they’re there. If you’d cut to your left, you can follow that line of trees and come up over the ridge. That way you can get to them.”
Willie heard a singing of bullets and the explosions of the mortar shells and knew he had to do something.
“Are you ordering me to go, Lieutenant?”
“No. It’s up to you, but your men back there won’t make it unless somebody gets that mortar crew.”
Willie Raines was a very ordinary individual. He was a good sergeant, but he had never been in a position like this. He had heard of suicide charges, and this seemed like one to him.
“What . . . what should I do, Lieutenant?”
The lieutenant turned toward him. His eyes had a strange glow, and he seemed calm—so calm that it was unnatural. He said quietly, “Save your men, Willie.”
Willie Raines did not hesitate. Leaving his automatic weapon on the ground, he pulled one of the grenades from his belt and jumped up. He ran to his left where the officer said there was no covering fire, but still he heard bullets whistling by. There were plenty of trees to take cover behind, and the noise of the mortar shells exploding seemed dim and far away. All the same, however, he knew he had little time to save his squad.
Emerging from the trees, he ran up a slight hill, and when he got to the top and glanced to his left he saw the mortar squad. They were dropping mortar shells into the steel tube and shifting it after every fire to straddle the target.
Willie started running again. He pulled the pin from the grenade. Bullets were whistling around him, but he ignored them. He knew he had to get close, and as he did, he saw the mortar squad turn. One of the men was scrambling for a rifle, and Willie knew he had little time. He heaved the grenade with all of his might and with the same motion pulled the pin on the second one and threw it. Just as he did, something seemed to explode. It seemed to be inside his head, and he was aware of a blinding display of sparks much like holiday fireworks. His last conscious thought before the sparks and the fire display faded was, I sure do hate to die on Christmas!