The Coldest Night by Robert Olmstead

Author:Robert Olmstead
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2012-03-11T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter 21

AS COLD AS IT was, he still sweated. His arms and back and legs and feet, they sweated for the effort of staying warm and staying alive. He shed his shoepacs and dragged off his socks for dry ones. He wanted to rest. He lay silently in the gritty snow straining to stay awake, because he knew if he fell asleep he would never wake up. He tried to remember something of the past, anything: home, his mother, a horse, but he could not. What he did last night would he be able to do tonight?

He stood and stomped his feet and pounded his arms to his chest and then he lay down on the cold ground and contemplating the dure of this night he closed his eyes and then Lew was nudging him in the ribs with his boot toe.

“Lay on this,” he said, and dropped an armful of straw on the ground beside him.

A flare went up and the sky went blue-white.

It was now thirty below zero and just as he stretched out on the pile of straw, green tracers came over the crest of a hill to the north. They bounced off the slopes and zoomed straight up toward the stars and were followed by the yellowish light of flares on the perimeter.

His turn awake. Isolated mines and trip flares started going off. Their reconnaissance had begun. Dark shadows moved as if wind materialized. Henry stretched forward and peered into the gloom, a mustache of frost growing over his lip. He wondered if only they might pause so he could see them, how fair that would be. He fixed on a shadow and grimly he squeezed the trigger of the BAR and the shadow disappeared as if made invisible by the rifle’s abrupt sound thumping the air.

He had the passing thought he’d gone a little insane.

The first rounds of mortars began coming in. They spluttered in flight and then seemed to pause and then they struck. The mortars required of them a fearsome response and close-in artillery airbursts sent showers of red-hot steel spiking into the valley. Artillery slammed into the forest, dismasting trees. Flames lashed out and from their yellow flags spun swirls of shrapnel as spotters called in the mortar positions.

A man on the line staggered through the snow, his eardrums perforated, stretching his neck and clutching at his head before someone tackled him and dragged him down.

The lunging shadows multiplied. He could not believe it, but they were advancing through their own mortar fire. Searchlights banged the atmosphere, bursting star shells lit the night, tracers and flares and the world were lit with a considerable roar as if the sound of darkness fighting back.

Suddenly before him were the illuminated columns of thousands and thousands of men advancing. Bullets cracked in the air as the spinning fire sped past his ears. He could hear the cry of his own voice caught in his throat, pounding in his eardrums.

“Fire!” Gunny yelled from somewhere on the perimeter.

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