Point of No Return by Gellhorn Martha;

Author:Gellhorn, Martha;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2016-09-05T04:00:00+00:00

At daylight, shrunken into themselves with cold, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers and Jacob Levy and Dave Penny, a radio operator, got into the jeep and set out for F Company. F Company had reported it was having a fire fight but the account came in, excited and garbled over the radio, and they seemed in a bad way, so Lieutenant Colonel Smithers decided to go and check for himself. The rutted mud road curved around a small hill and straightened out, flanked on one side by a frozen field and on the other by a tight diamond-shaped wood. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was thinking about F Company, far understrength, and strung out above the base of a hill where two roads intersected; Jacob Levy was thinking that to drive the jeep over this cowpath was like riding a bronco and they’d sure as hell knock off the oil pan before they got through; and Dave Penny was thinking that it was a funny feeling to have your nose full of icicles, and maybe that was because snot froze on all those little hairs. The road was ominously empty and still. They did not notice this, being deceived by the quietness that falling snow lays on the earth.

From the diamond-shaped wood, a machine gun cracked out three short bursts and snow rose in puffs from the road and the bank of the field, ahead of them. Jacob Levy skidded the jeep to a stop, tilted over the side of the ditch away from the wood. They were out of the jeep and in the ditch, as fast as breathing. They waited and nothing happened. Snow fell; the wood appeared to be harmless and deserted; there were no tire tracks or footprints on the fresh snow of the road.

Lieutenant Colonel Smithers focussed his binoculars on the wood and could see nothing except the thickly planted black trunks of the pine trees. There was also a screen of underbrush and second growth; behind this any number of krauts could be lying comfortably, waiting for them to move from their ditch. They had better get away from the jeep. He turned, using the binoculars on the road, and thought he saw a disturbance in the snow some forty yards ahead. The light was poor and this downward whirl of snowflakes marred his vision.

“Follow me,” Lieutenant Colonel Smithers whispered. “Keep down and quiet.”

They crawled along the bottom of the ditch until they were safely distant from the jeep; then Lieutenant Colonel Smithers kneeled and stared again at that unsmooth portion of the road. It showed up clearly in the lenses now: tank tracks, with snow settling in them and hiding them. So the krauts had moved into that wood, sometime during the night, and there they were, hidden and happy, with a tank to keep them company.

From deep inside the wood, they heard the cough of a mortar and after the interval of silence, they heard the shell landing behind them in the direction of the Battalion CP.

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