Ordinary Heroes (2005) by Turow Scott

Author:Turow, Scott [Scott, Turow,]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-12-26T00:41:54.967000+00:00

Chapter 18.

COLD TRUTH

Bill Meadows shook me awake a little after Too a. M., as the faintest light was leaking into the sky. He wanted to go over orders for the day. To conceal our position, we couldn't risk contact with the men on point or relieve them once the sun was up. Meadows wanted to replace the crews who'd been out there freezing all night and I told him to proceed.

Before he left, we took a moment to inspect the terrain. The open, rolling hills--hayfields or grasslands grazed by beef cattle--were now deep in snow with no animals in sight. Most, I imagined, had been killed or eaten long ago. North of us, beyond the railroad tracks and the drifts mounded here and there on the road, several fields undulated, separated only by stone markers. With my field glasses, I saw that the land had already seen combat. The Germans who had once occupied our holes had been hit hard before retreating. The blackened form of a Panzer was out there, with snow heaped on the tracks and the turret, and I also could make out the axle and fenders of a truck. My guess was that there had been more wreckage, which our engineers had towed off to assemble the crude roadblock that stood a couple hundred yards from us. It was comprised of commandeered tractors and two burned-out tanks, one ours, one German.

To the west, in the distance, lay dense green woods of tall pines, where the German grenadiers were probably hiding. Even in daylight the forest appeared black and impenetrable. I thought of the Brothers Grimm, and their goblins and spooks stealing from the trees to snatch souls and visit curses.

The last thing Meadows pointed out was the stand we occupied, a mixture of the same skinny, thick-branched pines that were across the way and deciduous trees, most of them beeches still wearing some of their coppery leaves. The Germans were delivering daily artillery barrages across a broad sector, wherever they figured Americans might be positioned to protect the roads, often utilizing their 20MM antiaircraft guns, which had proven effective as offensive weapons, or the dual-purpose 88s. Fixed on quad mounts and half-tracks, the guns were tilted forward and fired into the treetops. The result was a little like a bomb exploding in midair, raining shrapnel down on everyone below. Algar had sent us north of E's holes in hopes that the Germans might not have been aiming here, but up high the trees were ragged, as if they had been eaten away by moths. Several of the beeches had most of their boughs blown away, the remaining trunks standing like solitary amputees, blackened by the shell bursts. In other words, we were going to get it. The Germans had been firing in the hour after dawn and just before sunset, periods when they could be certain that our planes, which could navigate only by daylight in this weather, would never be in the air.

"I want to tell the boys to stay low when that starts," said Meadows.

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