"When Kakaru orders Vegas to "SAT", Johnny's response is "can't." Whether this is due to a broken "s" key or his reluctance to reveal his standardized test scores I still do not know."
-WilliamWC3
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| 03, cont. | | | Author: | | | IP: | cache-dtXXXX | | Date: | 06/23/04 06:06 | | Game Type: | Other | | Labels: | Great Writing(1), Long(1), Text Only(1), Series(1) | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 1, Max: 8, Min: 8
Lifetime Rating for SupeRc0pKr: 8.2353 |  |
After an extended hiatus I've managed to start work again on the current project. For a while I was going back and re-writing some of the initial pages and chapters, but for now I'm putting my efforts into getting things done before I start to edit.
I'm looking at my outline and I am completely certain that I'll be done with two more installments, so for those of you with a less-than-favorable attitude towards fiction I can assure you there's not much more to bear.
[Cover of Darkness]
[Advance]
cover of darkness
By evening, Martinville Ridge had become a dark hole rising above the thick and tangled hedgerow and foliage, and artillery fire had slowly ebbed off as weather conditions went gray. There was little to no visibility, and, to the disappointment of the gunnery officers, no targets were able to be identified in the cloudy black of a summer Norman night.
The 1st Battalion Commander found Wayne re-organizing his men and helping the aidmen tend to the many casualties taken that day. 13 July had almost killed them all, Wayne said.
"I keep assigning new men as team- and squad-leaders and it seems like they don't last longer than a day. All I've got left as far NCOs go is a couple of college kids and a sergeant or two."
Wayne was not exagerrating, and 1st Battalion Commander knew it. That's what happened when a company went up against tanks and artillery. And yet A Company, as exhausted and decimated as it was, had made gains. It had taken ground and it had held it, and it had done so at the cost of many, many men.
"You're doing a good job, captain," the old major said.
Truttman judged by the battalion commander's vaguely helpless expression that it wasn't necessary to note that a good job had a very bullshit price.
29th Division Headquarters had decided that the advance along the axis of the St. Lo-Bayeux highway had not produced adequate results. Operations officers had tracked the progress of the battalions and regiments on staff maps, and too often an empty field 100 meters in length occupied by a few dead cows was gained in return for the lives of a hundred men. 175th Regiment's difficulties in the past few days had given cause for a change in targets.
The Germans on Martinville Ridge had never fully been pushed off the slopes. They'd always held a foothold somewhere, and because of this they'd always had strong observation points against the flanks of the American advance. This was partly why the 29th had so much difficulty in gaining ground. Division Headquarters had re-organized the regiments that day, lining up all three units along Martinville Ridge.
The next morning, 116th Regiment, Wayne's regiment, was to begin the assault on the ridge that would force the Germans off the ridge and open the approaches to the southeast edge of St.-Lo.
"Tonight," 1st Battalion Commander told him, "you'll move-up and relieve Second Battalion's positions. Third Battalion's going to lead the assault tomorrow morning. We'll be advancing in column of battalions, but you probably know we've been running up against some tougher opposition, parachute troops and engineer detachments, so your company'll get its fair share of action before the day's over. Keep the men ready, Captain."
Wayne took the company up the ridge under cover of darkness, and for the first time in a long while A Company found itself immersed in relative silence. No machine-gun fire, no artillery dropping from the sky, no men screaming in the dark for an aidman. And in this silence, the men were allowed to think.
At the head of the company, Wayne led the point-squad up the trail and then paused, crouched low and looking and listening in the dark. In this cover artillery observers would have trouble spotting them, but the movement of the entire company at once might give away their positions, and this weather was exactly what some German hauptmann would want to cover a night-attack.
Captain Wayne had become quite a soldier, the men realized. Truttman saw that in some ways the man had retained his gentle nature. He still spoke in a low, quiet monotone, and even when roused to anger he would not raise his voice. But there was a chill in that controlled voice, there was no warmth in his words. Wayne was all business, if he spoke it was to give a directive or to give information.
Wayne had stopped being the pacifist and had become an officer, a true leader of men.
Behind the point group, Truttman tapped a private forward. "Come on, get moving." It was not polite, but it was not meant to be rude - coming from Truttman, it was the smart thing to do.
He was the college kid. He was the guy working on a degree with a genuine interest in academics. Truttman had taken an English composition course, studied some classical languages, and had a working knowledge of macroeconomics, and yet he had as much difficulty learning to fight a war as anybody else, probably more than some of the country boys who'd lived on a farm their entire lives. But he'd survived, and the A Company regulars saw a real corporal in him, the beginnings of a leader.
Over the past few weeks Truttman had started to lose his rough edge, he'd stopped being an asshole about things. Before, the kid had hated the fact that he'd been called to fight a war; everything was a chore to him. "Silence that machine-gun," a platoon leader would tell him, and he would reply with a characteristic, "Fucking Jesus Christ, that's bullshit, Sarge." He resented being pulled out of college - he wanted to get on with his life.
Out in Normandy, though, he'd seen that his college education meant nothing. He'd hoped to succeed out in the world with it, but the classics were worthless to him, not in a war where everybody was on equal terms. In a war, it didn't matter if he was a college student from Texas or some thug from New York, he was a soldier in his comrades' eyes and he was a soldier in the eyes of the Germans. Student or street-punk he was still subject to getting shot if he didn't watch out for himself. That's what he'd been told during basic.
"Out in society, you are considered lower, middle, or upper-class. Here in the real-world," the drill-instructor said in a steel-bunked barracks, "you are all individually worth zero."
Sixty men had spent the next six months training from zero. They all toiled in the same dirt with the same meager tools and carried-out the same basic tasks of soldering. Hughe Truttman had become a corporal because he had learned to get his individual job as a follower done well and efficiently.
A year later, Truttman's position in the company bordered between team-player and team-leader; he was good to have as a second hand for squad-leaders. He could take a fire-team on a flanking mission but he didn't have the experience to orchestrate the squad into fire-teams.
Truttman knew what it took to be a leader at the company-level: one, he had to know how to stay alive, and two, he had to know how to keep the men he was responsible for alive. He had to be a good soldier and he had to have some tactical understanding.
A couple weeks ago, when they'd first landed ashore on France, Truttman hadn't given a shit about being a corporal. All it meant to him was that he had a little bit more responsibility, he had to assist the sergeants in keeping the boys in-line. Fuck learning how to lead, he was never going to take responsibility for a squad. He just wanted the boat-ride home, back to his college dorm with his books and lectures and mid-exams, getting ready for the real-world. A month in Normandy had taught him that the real-world back at home didn't mean anything; studying Latin and Greek made him a respectable person there, while here, where it was hard enough to shout in English over a machine-gun going-off a couple feet away, dead-languages weren't worth much.
Shit like that meant something in college and in his academic career because there were rules there. In war, rules didn't apply, they were jokes. Truttman wasn't a college student, the replacements from New York weren't thugs, and the officers, while possessing higher rank and authority, did not ultimately receive differential treatment. They were all simply men in the sights of enemy rifles - the drill-instructor had been right.
That's how Truttman, the college kid, had essentially taken-up the same job that Brown, the enthusiastic farmer, and Dunn, the kid out of high school, had been working a couple weeks ago.
All that study in college had given him in the end, Truttman swore, was a disgusting poetic insight that he would be a better man without.
Past the top of the ridge, in a line of foxholes expertly-camouflaged and positioned, the Germans, too, had the leisure to think.
Meier, who had been a soldier at war for quite some time, could not remember what his plans for adulthood had been before he'd gone into the service. He could not remember thinking of a life outside of the military, outside of the war. Over the years he'd lost his civilian purpose, and now he saw no point to going to school or working on a farm. He did not perceive that he could ever return to civilian life; finding a job and raising a family, that seemed like such an empty and purposeless dream to him now.
"I've got to get home," Kast had told Meier before he and his crew been allocated somewhere else on Martinville Ridge. "I don't want to stay out here and operate the gun anymore. I have to see my family."
Meier had laughed at him and asked, "So what will you do?"
"I'll stay out here and I'll operate the gun," Kast had replied at length, because as an enlisted man that was all he could do.
"What about your family?"
"They'll have to wait." Kast said this as though his role as an assault-gunner was more important than being a father - some officer up at headquarters might admire Kast for his sense of duty, but Meier thought that a sense of duty was exactly what Kast lacked.
That night, Kast had taken his assault gun out and covered the patrol of a half-track carrying two or three riflemen. The fallschirmjager had been enjoying an influx of motor transport as of late, and they were putting this mobility to good use, taking the vehicles out on aggressive machine-gun raids.
Kast was an intelligent operator. He'd direct mortar fire behind the cover of American foxholes to force them forward, allowing the half-track to spray-down an open target on full-automatic. Kast understood the mechanics behind human reaction, and he used this insight to the advantage of the machine-gun sights waiting for a brown assault jacket to shuffle through the cover of the hedgerow. Four shots from the 88, then the half-track would drive past with its MG-42s flickering, and Kast would pump a few more rounds into the brush to cover the vehicle's retreat and kill any Americans waiting for a chance to grab the bodies of their comrades.
Meier had fought across Europe and he had seen the true nature of man. He had fought with Frenchmen, Russians, and Americans, had tried to kill them as they had tried to kill him, and in all this bloodshed, elicited by orders from detached and unfeeling officers, he had come to understand them.
Combat was violent, almost unthinkably savage. Men were given tools to kill each other and they did so willingly, even went so far as to develop a science of strategy and tactics based on that act. They mutilated each other in the name of ideologies like democracy, for the titles of countries, and to support patriotic ideals. Essentially, men went into the service, were indoctrinated with the highest social ideals, and then killed each other in open fields for the greater good and economic welfare and protection of a republic or dictatorship.
Meier had done this and he had not flinched at what he had seen. Insane images flickered before him throughout the war; corpses rotting in a field while tanks roared past them, their crews indifferent and uncaring; soldiers so tense that they shot into a file of opposing troops, unaware that their hands were up and they'd thrown their weapons down; bodies shattered and shredded by artillery and crawling desperately about, without direction or purpose, taken-over by some primal instinct to survive. And to Meier these were simple facts of life. Men were to die in war. Men were to die.
When Kast had returned from the machine-gun raid, the first thing he said to Meier was, "I have to see my son." He was thinking of the Americans that'd crawled from the hedgerow, cut and raked by shrapnel; they'd tried to fight back against the vehicle-mounted machine-guns but they'd been pinned the moment they came from cover, and they hadn't gotten to their grenades in time. A half-dozen Americans were dead in the span of a minute, rendered unidentifiable by the criss-crossing automatic fire, and Kast, though disgusted by the excess the gunners exhibited, had sighted the bazooka team moving-in from the left and dispatched them.
"I have to see my wife," Kast said, and Meier could see the assault-gunner shaking the blood-ribboned scene from his eyes.
He was one of the most professional killers Meier had seen, and all he could think about was getting home to take care of his family, to make-up for all the lost birthdays and Christmas Eves and lonely nights.
Meier had no family, and after Kursk he'd lost touch with his friends. For him, combat was a little easier, he could detach himself from it all because there was nothing to anchor his existence. No one called on him to talk about the greater things; he'd become introverted over the past few months and the men he operated with thought him a nice, quiet guy with an occasionally risible sense of humor. They confided in him, and in a way Meier had become the unit's father-figure. He was one of the oldest enlisted men, he'd soldiered the longest, he had a girlfriend before - he, at twenty-six, had lived the fullest life and so had the best understanding of the world.
The officers, the men who were supposed to have all the answers, were generally regarded to be full of shit. In them the men found culture, education, devotion to entities they called their people and their country - most of the enlisted, the soldiers, found them difficult to relate with.
"Everyone loses friends in war," Meier heard a young leutnant counseling some of the new-comers. "But that is part of the sacrifice of serving your homeland, protecting your people. Your comrades are gone, that fact is inescapable, but know that they did not die without purpose. Keep that purpose in mind, soldiers. It's the only thing that matters now."
Rhetoric like that sounded nice, made things seem as though everything fit together, but Meier had come to hate it. It was ridiculous, full of a blind, star-struck patriotism; men had cast their lives away for the mere name of a country and the leutnants could only praise it.
Meier had never referred to that particular officer by his name. He did not recognize the clean-shaven leutnant as a man.
"Have you ever had a girl, old Meier?" one of the enlisted men asked him in the dark.
Meier couldn't see his face, and couldn't judge who it was by the voice. The boys all sounded the same. "Once or twice," he replied. "The last one was an Italian girl, from the south, a delectable drop of honey who smelled as sweet and fragrant as flowers blossoming in the Carpathians."
"You're lying," the enlisted man accused jokingly.
"I am," Meier lied.
"I haven't had a girl since I left home, a neighborhood girl. She was nice, a sweetheart." The soldier grimaced. "If I ever get out of France alive I'm going to get back to her and fuck the shit out of her."
It wasn't love, but there was a simple honesty to the soldier's desire that offered proof of his humanity, even if his rifle had killed as many as the gunners' howitzers farther back. This simple soldier, Meier thought, this simple, un-educated suburban child was more of a man than the proverb-spouting officer.
Meier once thought that the war had changed men. Farmers, simple people who had cultivated bread and animals, were carrying rifles now and shooting-up other simple people who'd grown the same bread and raised the same animals. They'd left behind their beasts of burden for boots and tank-treads, had traded a simple life of agriculture for a world of scientific development and ideological conflict.
City-workers, bankers, lawyers, they'd traded pens and paper for howitzers and mortars. Men who had once contributed dutifully to their communities and to their society now marched-off past the horizon to serve their communities and society in a foreign land.
But the strange fact was they all eventually became good at it, as though they'd always been capable of over-coming class-barriers and working together as a cohesive unit united under a common cause. They served together so well in war, but out in society they were enemies, interested in opposing social policies.
War had genuinely united men, perhaps not as a nation but as simple soldiers. They were changed not because they were out-of-place in war, but because it seemed as though they'd always been professionals at heart, men capable of casting the rules of society off like chains and living by the laws of war and nature.
In the cover of darkness, Truttman could barely see Wayne and the point-group creeping forward up the ridge. It seemed as though he were always staring at the captain's back, now; he rarely spoke with the men, and they only saw him come to life from his usual mellow and dispassionate nature once the shooting started, once someone was hit by a mortar and the Germans were moving forward from cover to kill them. He was an excellent officer, an intelligent tactician always alert to combat details, but the men were almost afraid of him. Wayne held the men to high-standards, expected them to soldier as hard as they could, to disregard their limits and ignore their suffering to accomplish their objectives.
The men did not know their limits. They had never thought at any point in their lives that they would ever be thrust into such a situation, into operating as part of a greater whole in one of the great historical events of American history. So they trusted men like Wayne to command them. And men like Wayne eventually became calloused, after losing so many men under their responsibility. Loss of life came to be an accepted fact.
And because it was to be expected, Wayne grew detached from the men he commanded. They were replaceable, in the end, every rifleman, every member of a mortar crew, one would die and within days a fresh replacement would arrive on the line. They were all soldiers; they all followed orders to the same capacity. Wayne knew this, that essentially a soldier was a machine, only a soldier was based on a biological design - any limits could be pushed a little harder. Fatigue, hunger, and sleep-deprivation could be ignored for a certain time. Exhaustion was a condition that could be overcome for short periods. Captain Wayne was aware of this and he based his leadership on it. The war had to be ended. The participation of soldiers would end the war. A soldier can be pushed beyond his limits.
"That's a damn good captain," the senior commanders of the 116th would comment on Wayne upon observing his performance in the field.
"He's the best I've got," 1st Battalion Commander would agree.
advance
There he stood, hand pointed at a German position, eyes squinting in the smoke but possessing a clear vision of what was happening through the hedgerow. Wayne, A Company commander, up with his lead platoon, rifle in hand and smoking in the sun, was taking the men straight down a cattle-grazing road.
Truttman in the follow-up platoon saw him directing a squad forward while the lead platoon filtered through into the field. Beyond the hedgerow he could hear the chatter of machine-gun fire and the tracers whistling back and forth and the distant thonks of a mortar salvo.
"Move up!" came the call, and Truttman rose with the platoon and filed ahead, nearing the cross-fire ripping ahead of them. The field was screaming with sound, but it was empty; to the casual observer it was vacant save for the faint flicker of a machine-gun muzzle somewhere in the corner. Intermittently a brown form, an American, would rise from cover and fire a rapid volley and then disappear in the hedgerow as tracers arced towards him while a fireteam on the other side of the field would lope forward, the assistant machine-gunner of the .30 Browning chained-down by belts of ammunition and the team-leader wrapped in a webbed sash heavy with grenades.
The fertile, still expanse of grass and grove appeared empty because if someone were to be seen they were dead. If a soldier were visible for longer than a second he would be hit by a Garand or a Mauser. In the follow-up platoon things looked frozen, motionless, save for the lazy streams of tracer.
But for the soldiers in the field, events were far more disconcerting. Here the tracers were one round out of six, the other five were invisible and their paths were indiscernible. The earth would cough and sputter underneath those streaks of yellow and red and then there would be a wet thwock, the sound of a rounded sliver of lead drilling into flesh and muscle and bone.
German mortars were ranged and they were dropping into the field; soon it would be impossible to move forward and the Germans would hold their ground for another day. Wayne examined the line and figured he had another minute before their reserves would arrive to reinforce. They were short of men and spread thin, but given enough time they could plug-up gaps if they weren't pushed back quick enough.
The follow-up platoon saw Wayne motion them forward and they went through, up-and-over the hedgerow and into the grass. MG-42s paused for a slight moment, re-adjusted, and then the tracers fluttered forth, buzzing and whining and cutting through the lead elements with alarming ferocity.
Wayne was losing riflemen, but it was an expected cost. They were acceptable as long as he took the field; and the more men he lost the greater the need it was for him to take the field, if he didn't it'd be a waste of life.
In a way there was a similarity to poker - some players felt that they'd put too much in the middle to fold, and their only chance was to buy their way out. This was the attitude that dominated battalion missions; the more men that died for the success of an mission, the more important it became for the mission to succeed.
A fireteam had made it within grenade-range of the German positions, and they were in the midst of a furious barrage of carbine fire. Bullets chopped the stalks of grass stalks away from the heads of the five men lying tight against the dirt, and they knew that they were going to have to make their move or they'd be dead.
In the field, Truttman and his squad had sprinted a good thirty meters before being stopped short by machine-gun fire. It hit them with a single, sweeping burst, perhaps a second long, and at twelve-hundred rounds-per-minute the MG-42 put enough lead into the air to cut down two men in a cloud of red. Instinctively, without pausing to think what happened to the two soldiers still crumpling into the grass, Truttman and the squad dropped to cover, the next burst weaving in and around them but with no precision.
Wayne watched the squad drop into the grass, all but disappearing in the smoke. He had two platoons in the field, dispersed throughout the grass and hedgerow. A third lie in wait behind him, but he couldn't let them forward without penetrating the German line, otherwise they'd crowd the hedgerow and the company would soon be purged of their worldly troubles.
"Mortars on the machine-gun there," Wayne relayed to his radio operator. "Ten rounds, rapid-fire, the last round is smoke."
Even with the machine-guns and the 8.0cm incendiaries tearing into the grass, Truttman could hear the hollow report of the company mortars.
Mortars lobbed their munitions in an arced-trajectory; their crews aimed the weapons based on factors such as elevation, windage, and angle-of-flight. Essentially, the mortarmen calculated the projectile's time in the air and estimated retarding forces such as air resistance. But even the best mortar crews could produce only limited accuracy; at a plus or minus fifty-meter radius of error, an HE "short" could potentially fall on friendly positions.
Most of the soldiers saw the out-going mortar bomb nosedive into a cauldron of dying grass and pressed as low as they would have under an enemy mortar attack. They thought that Wayne was crazy for calling in mortar-fire, that he was putting their lives at an unnecessary risk.
But the professionals, such as Truttman and Cook, knew what Wayne was thinking, understood his tactics, and snapped-up to shoot a testing salvo of rifle-fire, to rouse the enemy positions. As soon as they had, three distinct machine-guns lit-up in the hedgerow, and through the mortars detonating in the grass Wayne could see a fireteam here and there engaging them.
Behind them, the company Brownings had zeroed on the machine-gun positions, and the final smoke round broke open across the hedgerow ahead. Smoky white streamed around the infantry bobbing forward, wrapping around them in loose ribbons before engulfing them completely and fading their silhouettes from view. Wayne knew that after the smoke had spread to stretch over the field they'd be angling towards the MG-42s, circling-in with grenades.
The professionals in charge of those fireteams, men who had served under Wayne for longer than a week or two, were quite aware of the danger of close mortar fire. They had been in Normandy too long to live in ignorance of the power of a shard of shrapnel. But over the course of their combat experience in Normandy they had come to know Wayne's tactical mind.
Wayne had become fatalistic with regards to combat casualties. He had had the dubious distinction of losing over a hundred men in total under his command, too many names to list on the slip of paper that he had characteristically kept in his breast pocket. A platoon out past their hedgerow cover was generally already in a bad situation; some MG-42 ahead of them basically had a completely clear shot at every single man, as there was no cover in a field of grass. From the moment they moved forward, an advancing platoon could be cut to ribbons before they could reach the German line. Since the lives of these men's lives were already at risk, Wayne was willing to take responsibility for combat action that could potentially endanger the lives of his own men. He was willing to order and lead platoon movements so bold that they bordered suicidal. He was willing to order the company machine-guns or mortars to fire even when A Company troops were so close that they would be caught by friendly rounds.
"A Company boys are right on top of that position, Captain," a mortar crew had once replied to Wayne's clipped direction.
And Wayne had revealed a side of himself that the men had not known existed any where in the collective human psyche. "There are also A Company boys around that position that will be dead unless that position is suppressed." With those caullously-detached words Wayne had personally chosen who would and would not die within the next few instants. With those words Wayne had announced himself as the man who actively decided the fates of those under him.
A moment later four A Company privates found themselves twirling weightlessly in the wake of a salvo of 81mm incendiaries, while their comrades were still blinking through the debris as they chased after a fleeing German fireteam.
Like a card game. Wayne knew what his men were and were not capable of, and he had an idea of what the Germans were and were not capable of. Taking what he knew into account, Captain Wayne gambled with a tactical decision and as his bet put the lives of a half-dozen men onto the table.
A Company thought the odds were ruthlessly calculated, but all too often one of the lives in danger would be Wayne's own. It was an attitude that the men respected, that their company leader was willing to take the same risks that they were told to take.
"He's the captain," they would say after receiving his orders, and then they'd follow his orders to the letter.
In the smoke, the fireteams could see perhaps twenty or thirty feet ahead of them. Tracers would whine as they shot through the blanket, but the infantry knew that the rounds weren't pointed at them. The Germans were as blind as they were, as isolated as they were in the hedgerow, though they were all working in unison with a hundred other men.
Of the five men closest to the German line, two were dead, caught in the shrapnel of hand grenades lobbed frantically back-and-forth. The other three crept forward while a machine-gun fired almost in their faces; its report thundered from less than a stone's throw away. They could see the source of the tracers, the flicker of a muzzle just barely visible ahead, and they fired through the smoke, a quick volley before they sprinted into the hedgerow.
Fifty meters on the left, Truttman's squad had forced their way forward against the blind shooting of a second machine-gun, shooting just as blindly back in the direction of the metallic roar. The gunfire rapidly degenerated into a high-pitched whine in Truttman's ears, he was so close; then he saw the smoke and steam rising from a squared-off barrel, off to his left. He could have tripped and he would have fallen into the machine-gun position. A magazine later, the emplacement was silenced, and four Americans were occupying a German foxhole, firing into neighboring rifle positions.
A radio message came through; Truttman had made a penetration. Wayne watched for the fireteam along the hedgerow to achieve a similar result, but he wouldn't have been so expectant had he realized that the fireteam had been reduced to a single man, who nonetheless made the sprint into the machine-gun position and proceeded to liquidate the team and occupy their sand-bagged nest. He knelt down against the bags as rifle rounds punched them and whined past, reloading his rifle. When he went back up he saw flickers of tracers streaking from isolated positions throughout the next field. Normally there was more depth to the German defense; today it seemed as though they'd put all their guns up front.
"Move up!" came the call, and the men in the reserve platoon rose and filed out into the field.
Second and third platoon now poured as much small-arms fire into the German line as possible, while the reserve platoon filtered through between their fire positions in the field. The Brownings were coughing behind them, and while the tracers whipped ahead they caught sight of the other fireteams in the grass, shooting from low kneeling positions.
The Germans in the hedgerow saw a rush of American soldiers sprinting towards them, somehow both chaotic and methodical in their advance. Suppressing fire from the men in the field allowed those behind them to move forward, but their movements were almost frantic and desperate, understandably so because at the moment their lives were on the threshold of great danger - moving forward across an open field invited quick and numerous deaths regardless of any coordination.
Wayne, however, now with the advancing men, saw the platoon moving forward in columns of squads, breaking off into smaller units of organization, into fireteams, to deal with independently-chosen targets-of-opportunity. They moved in such a way as to be indiscernible from calculated or clumsy, because hunched over low and zig-zagging a haphazard path through the grass one was not sure if they were following a coordinated plan or randomly moving about as individual entities.
Earlier that morning 3rd Battalion had attempted a similar maneuver. They'd passed through 1st Battalion, and by the end of the attack it seemed as though every German battery in the sector had been concentrated on them; they were the only unit taking offensive action that morning. Seven tanks of the supporting 747th Tank Battalion had been destroyed, as well.
To take pressure off of the 3rd's position, 1st Battalion had been told to break column and execute a diversionary strike further south on the left flank in the afternoon, and they'd pushed forward a grand total of one field.
Now it was late evening, and the constant day's fighting had finally put a crack in the German defenses. On the left half of the ridge, 1st Battalion had pushed the Germans out of their hedgerow cover and had begun to fight its way forward against weak opposition. There was little depth to the German resistance; Wayne's platoons, moving in bounding leap-frogs, were steadily shoving disintegrating rifle detachments further and further west. German rifle squads would either dig a scrape behind a hedgerow or use the brush as cover to put up a short fight before A Company, spread-out into squads and fireteams, would shuffle forward while firing from the standing position, simply pushing the Germans back with fire-and-maneuver. Their ranks had broken and 1st Battalion was in pursuit. On the right, 2nd Battalion had broken into a dash, with runners stringing wire behind them as the riflemen ahead sprinted through the hedgerow, following the cattle trails on which the Germans would amount short, shoot-and-scoot counter-attacks before fleeing again in the face of mounting rifle-fire.
The men behind Captain Wayne now saw the life that had burst within him. He was active now, in-movement. They were sprinting forward, and Wayne seemed to be moving with limitless energy, his legs striding without visible fatigue and his breathing heavy but controlled. They reached the cover of a hedgerow and a platoon dropped down with him, on their knees and their helmets down.
"They're planning on setting-up on our flank," the men heard him say, but even this was detached, he said it as though he had more on his mind. He was peering through the hedgerow, making note of where the Germans moving were moving and what weapons they were carrying - that was the action that the men saw life in, what Wayne truly cared about. "They want to catch us with machine-guns in a cross-fire. But at this point it's too late, they wouldn't have the staying-power to keep us in it. Radio first platoon, tell them to ignore all threats to their flanks, we'll keep two squads here to hold them for now. If they're going to stay and fight then they're just going to get rounded-up in the end."
The men knew they were being led by a competent man, and they did exactly what they were told. Third platoon rushed out into the field, two squads of eight dispersing in a skirmish-line on the flanks to deal with the machine-gun teams still positioning to fire. The cattle trails were soon drawing fire from the Germans, but Wayne kept the men moving, driving them to the next hedgerow and grenading the few enemy riflemen on the other side. First platoon approached the cattle trail behind Wayne's advance and saw the tracers threading through the field, pelting the dirt in such quantity that it seemed as though the Germans had established another line-of-resistance. But orders were orders.
"He's the captain," first platoon muttered, and then they went through, taking casualties as they sprinted forward but not enough to stop them. Not enough to make Wayne worry.
Within a relatively short period of time they'd advanced five hundred meters beyond their start-line. In comparison with earlier events, when it'd taken a day or more to seize a single 100-meter stretch of empty grass, this was a great gain. Wayne the infantry captain was undoubtedly in his element, after weeks of body-blows he was finally in pursuit and it was a liberating sensation for him, to be in movement after a bleeding enemy.
And it was in this moment of great success, in this instant when American soldiers were shooting into the backs of German soldiers as they fled their lines, that the major of 1st Battalion had reached Wayne's rear platoon with orders to halt. His voice came through from the set on the radio-man next to Wayne, and while he let every word register in what may have been the best few minutes of his life since entering Normandy, the men saw him visibly frustrated.
"Division's afraid we're pushing too far ahead. A lot of parachute troops have been reinforcing the Germans, as you know, and they think if we don't keep our run controlled we'll be cut-off and forced into a knife-fight. I've got orders to halt for the day and consolidate your positions. I say again, halt and consolidate your ground."
Watching a handful of field-gray coats flapping in the wind, retreating into the grass and into the shadow of the hedgerow fading in the sunset, Wayne lost the life in him and he threw his hands up. "Goddamn it," he whispered to himself, as though he didn't care about risking the battalion. "Goddamn it."
Wayne gave the order and the men began the first step to consolidating a position, digging foxholes. The 29th Infantry Division had learned this lesson well in the earlier days of Normandy, when, after pushing the Germans back, they would take a breather in the open. The Germans would sneak men forward and call-in artillery, and within a few minutes, an American rifle company would lose a dozen men and the ground they had gained.
Truttman, still moving up with second platoon, hated digging foxholes. He could see the men in the fading sunlight ahead shovelling with their trench spades with weapons slung around their necks like crucifixes.
"Should we start digging?" one of his squad asked.
"Yeah," Truttman said, "But dig deep."
"You think they'll try a counter-attack?"
"No. No, we've got to bury our dead."
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