Point of No Return Read online

  Pfc Hammer kicked the bedroll lightly and said, “Wake up, Levy.”

  Jacob Levy did not know where he was and lay on his back on the barn floor, watching dark figures weave before him. Then he remembered. His hands were stiff and fumbling as he laced his boots. He did not taste the breakfast, half eaten, half spilled, under the black dripping trees. Though he could not see the face, he heard the officer’s voice saying, “The ditches are full of schu mines. Don’t dive for them if the artillery starts. It ought to be pretty quiet now, anyhow.”

  Jacob Levy carried a metal ammunition box, an angular sack of C rations, his blanket roll, his carbine, and a belt load of grenades. Ahead of him he saw a shadow, swollen and bowed as he was; he could hear the man behind him, grunting sometimes under his load. His mind was empty. You didn’t need to think; you looked and listened and put one foot in front of the other; with luck you would eventually get where you were going.

  All night men and horses pushed through the mud on this narrow road. The German artillery, harassing other sectors of the forest, camouflaged the noise of the Battalion’s movement. There was also something to be said for the rain and the muffled sky. Somehow, as always, despite the darkness, the men who got separated from their units, the men who misunderstood their orders or couldn’t see what they were doing, the supplies that got dumped in the wrong places, the horses that went crazy because of the artillery, the radios that were wet and wouldn’t work, the Battalion moved up and organized for the attack.

  The trees grew clearer and separate, in the before dawn light; they were like no other trees. Hacked and leaning, blown on to each other, burned, the dead trees rose from the endless, sucking mud. Led by guides, the Companies passed communications dugouts, foxholes, aid shelters, half-submerged tank destroyers and anti-tank guns, and finally filtered into the forward outposts of the unit awaiting relief. Now the two-way movement was finished; the sector was theirs; and they alone had the forest and the emptiness of nothing between you and the enemy.

  At 0700 hours, which was officially daylight, Easy Company crossed the line of departure on schedule. They progressed three hundred yards to a known minefield, blew holes through the wire, captured the German positions inside this enclosure, took no prisoners, fought off two counter attacks, and were ordered to hold. Captain Politis, two non-coms, and fifty-seven men were killed in the course of this action which lasted one hour and forty minutes. Lieutenant Rodney Blackmer, who took command of the company, felt badly about scooping up Nick Politis and shoveling him into a shell hole. In real life, Nick Politis had owned an undertaking establishment in Trenton, N. J. All the way from Normandy, Lieutenant Blackmer had listened to Captain Politis’ conversation about embalmment, caskets, recorded organ music, and suitable floral tokens. It seemed a shame to do such a hurry-up cheap job on Nick.

  Fox Company did not move at all, being pinned down by artillery at the edge of a mined road. Without moving, they lost forty-three men, mostly head wounds from tree bursts, and by nightfall the Company commander had a strange look in his eyes. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers, who had listened all day to voices reporting failure, told Lieutenant Gaylord they would get moving at first light tomorrow; there couldn’t be two days as lousy as this in a whole war. Meanwhile Easy Company needed ammunition, in its wired-in cemetery.

  Thus Jacob Levy became an ammunition bearer. At midnight he joined the snail-like column of men on the mud path, bordered with mine tapes, which led to Easy Company. The bearers were instructed not to stop for wounded; aid men would follow them. “You get the stuff there and get back,” Captain Martinelli said, “and be quiet about it.” It was obvious that the quieter they were, the longer they would live.

  The first man who lost his balance, stumbled and slipped into the minefield beside the path, screamed, but briefly. He was dead before the aid man reached him. The noise attracted machine gun fire but the mortars were more effective. Jacob Levy, swaying from the shock of an explosion, heard a groaning choking sound somewhere in the dark behind him. He walked on, bowed like an old man and dragging his feet. There was no feeling inside him except the hollow coldness of fear.

  Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was mistaken about moving; the front did not change for five days. Jacob Levy knew this time had limits, because he crossed off each day on his calendar when he returned from the minefield. He dropped into the hole he shared with Pfc Hammer, shielded for a moment the forbidden beam of his flashlight, and drew a pencil line through the date. Then he fell into a thick buried sleep.

  There were days as well as nights, yet they were unreal and dim and only a waiting for darkness. Jacob Levy would wake, in the light that was never daylight, and slowly unbend his body. He slept with his knees drawn against his chest and his head down, and in the morning it seemed that his spine had curved to that position and his legs would not straighten again. With his helmet, he baled water from their hole, then pulled himself over the side and went to cut pine branches for the floor. Towards evening Bert Hammer would do the same; this way they could keep from sitting in a pool of mud as thin as soup. Every morning, Jacob Levy added more dirt and logs to the slanting roof that covered them. Then he crawled back under this shelter and ate C rations without hunger and they tasted like cardboard. He judged the time and the place to empty his bowels, hoping the artillery would not catch him while so engaged.

  He listened, always, with his whole body to the shells that seemed to stop in midflight and explode just above the trees. The German artillery rolled over them in furious cracking waves, and his head felt as big as a balloon, growing high and naked above his shoulders. Then the artillery would stop and the silence was unnatural and threatening. The strange mists of the forest floated in rags through the trees or crept upwards from the ground; the smoke of a phosphorus shell stood fixed in a white plume; branches split and fell; mud-covered figures moved in the shadows; and the silence became as cold as the cold colorless sky. Then the German artillery would start again.

  If an officer or a sergeant saw him, he could be sure of getting extra work. Jacob Levy went wherever he was told to go, watching his feet. He was always wet and always cold and he stopped noticing this. There was no other condition of life, and no other world beyond these twilit trees.

  Captain Martinelli thought Levy was a good steady man and he meant to tell the Colonel so, when he had time. Pfc Hammer decided that Levy certainly wasn’t a sociable fellow but you had to hand it to him, he didn’t beef, you never heard a bitching word out of him. Nothing was real to Jacob Levy except the night’s journey through the minefield because he believed that it was waiting for him there, the third and last one.

  Pfc Hammer was Jacob Levy’s newspaper. “We’re like those hot beds you read about at home,” Bert Hammer said, “the factory workers. One gets in and the other gets out.” During these casual meetings, Pfc Hammer would announce: “Marv Busch picked off a sniper last night.… Corporal Trask got hit in the head. The wire men are certainly catching it.… Some cigarettes came up, I heard from Sergeant Purdy.… Captain Waines said there’d be mail in the morning maybe.… Sergeant Postalozzi says they ought to shoot the replacements at the repple depple and save trouble. He says it just wastes time carrying all them bodies back from the road.” …

  Bert Hammer talked a great deal about Lieutenant Colonel Smithers who was the center of his world. “That man can go anywheres and not get hurt,” Bert Hammer would state as a fact. “The Colonel’s sore because we don’t get moving,” he said, and Jacob Levy found this amazing, it would not have occurred to him to become angry with doom. “He’ll get us out of here allright,” Bert Hammer said, and suddenly Jacob Levy wanted to see the Colonel. He wanted to see a man who could get them out of here, not that he believed it was possible.

  On the fourth morning, Jacob Levy said, “I think I’ll get me some coffee,” and followed Pfc Hammer through the lacerated trees. The coffee, if any, would be in the opposite direction; he had come this way only to look at the Colonel.
Lieutenant Colonel Smithers was standing at the entrance to his dugout, watching a file of walking wounded pass slowly down a path towards the rear. Then he saw Jacob Levy and thought, that man looks bad. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers smiled. His smile was like shaking hands.

  “How you doing, Levy?” He was pleased with Levy; Levy was still alive. Staying alive had become almost a sign of personal loyalty.

  “Allright, sir,” Jacob Levy said, and smiled back.

  The Colonel looks bad, Jacob Levy thought. But it’s not getting him down, he’s just sore, the way Bert says. He watched Lieutenant Colonel Smithers walk, erect and businesslike, towards the OP and Jacob Levy told himself: he acts like it was no worse than a street at home. If he could look sore and walk as if he didn’t give a fart for this forest, maybe Bert Hammer had something. Maybe the Colonel will get us out of here, Jacob Levy thought, handling his new hope with care.

  That night, as every night, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers studied the casualty list in his dugout CP. Head wounds, trench feet, pneumonia, the punctured, the dismembered, and the plain dead: dead getting nowhere, he thought, dead for nothing. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers’ eyes were dull with fatigue. He signed for the damaged or lifeless bodies and handed the paper to his executive who was sitting wedged against his left side. If they didn’t move pretty soon there’d be no one left in the Battalion. Except Levy, Lieutenant Colonel Smithers thought, and instantly this became a fine private joke against the Germans. Levy wouldn’t get killed; they’d show those krauts. Kill everybody and not get Levy, our only Jew, when he’s what they got their real grudge on. It was like spitting in the krauts’ faces, for Levy to survive. Lieutenant Colonel Smithers gave a grunt of laughter and fell asleep.

  Lieutenant Gaylord turned his head and saw that Johnny was sleeping. Johnny was lucky to dream something funny anyhow; it was the only way to get a laugh nowadays.

  “Our little home smells like those outdoor gents’ rooms in Paris,” Lieutenant Gaylord observed to Captain Martinelli.

  Captain Martinelli, using his mapboard as a table on which to write the daily S-3 report, was too tired, busy and depressed to answer.

  You wouldn’t believe, Lieutenant Gaylord thought, that people had different smells the way they have different eyes. How many smells did that make in the world? There were eight good stinks in here at the minute, and his own was right at the head of the line. Also, in weather cold enough to freeze your balls off, why did your clothes stick to you with a sort of greasy sweat? This place was enough to make you homesick for Harrisburg.

  “Can you move your feet, pal?” he said to Captain Waines. “I thank you.”

  You couldn’t even stretch your legs without kicking someone in the crotch.

  No one wanted to talk, that was clear, and he had nothing to do until his patrol got back. He could of course sit here and keep busy all night, listening to his stomach rumble over a mess of dog biscuits and pork and apple paste. Only the army would dream up food like that. It made you feel like puking just to think of it. I wish I had a book and a place to read it, Lieutenant Gaylord thought.

  He wanted to escape into his favorite paperbound world: dope peddlers, gamblers, blackmail, murder; frightened platinum blondes, draped with rubies, escorted everywhere by ominous hard-faced men; the innocent girl enthralled by a crafty rich old woman who kept Siamese cats, smiled terribly, and drank port; the clues of the bloodstained glove, the trace of perfume in a dark room, a mirror scratched by a diamond; and that infallible man, the private detective, with his mocking smile and cold wit, his chivalry, his magic appeal to women, all women, his Charvet ties, and the client’s grateful gift of twenty grand that closed the case.… Sergeant Black will call me when the patrol gets in, Lieutenant Gaylord decided; and slept.

  On the seventh day, the Battalion had advanced one mile and a quarter, to occupy a hill which looked exactly like any other tree-covered lump in this hopeless forest. They were dug-in and had nothing to fear except artillery and counterattacks.

  Over their heads a pointed, incoming, gnashing, colliding roar repeated itself until it became a ceiling of sound. The overhead metal crashes diminished. There was the shock of silence; and again the screaming wide deep explosions. Jacob Levy sat against the far side of the burrow he had helped to dig.

  “I can’t wait no more,” Pfc Hammer said.

  Without answering, Jacob Levy turned his head so that Bert Hammer could be alone. Presently Pfc Hammer was busy with his entrenching tool. He said, to no one, “Like dogs. Just like dogs.”

  “Can’t help it,” Jacob Levy said. “I wonder why the Colonel doesn’t get hit.” He had been thinking about this a great deal.

  “What’s the matter with you? Why should he?”

  “The way he walks around. With anybody else, you’d think he was asking for it.”

  “Oh that. He’s always like that. He’s lucky.”

  “You ever been hit, Bert?”

  “No.” Pfc Hammer knocked the butt of his Garand three times.

  Then maybe the luck is catching, Jacob Levy thought. Maybe whoever worked for the Colonel or was near him got some of it too. He was alive himself, wasn’t he, and he’d never have made it in the old days. And the Colonel had taken them out of where they were, anyhow; you could honestly say this hill was an improvement; so in the end maybe he’d get them out of the whole forest. There were lucky and unlucky people, nobody could argue about that, you only had to use your eyes to see it. But maybe some men, who were so lucky that they were different from plain people, could spread their luck around them. You couldn’t explain everything that happened. You couldn’t say a man was smart, so nothing hit him. Jacob Levy, who had no admiration for bravery, regarding it as an inescapable duty, revered luck. He began to think of Lieutenant Colonel Smithers with respectful gratitude: he would believe in the Colonel’s luck and be saved by contamination.

  No one could tell how many houses had once stood in Wipfel. It seemed a place where, for unknown reasons, truck-loads of broken brick, cement, stone and burned pieces of wood had been dumped without plan. Underneath this rubble were some good cellars, and in any case Wipfel was better than the forest. It was human and would not start creeping and crawling on you, after dark. Since something, if not too much, could be said for Wipfel, they were ordered to leave it at once.

  At 0655 hours, Fox and George Companies were ready to advance from the edge of the flattened village. It did not look too bad; a long open slope of meadow and field lay ahead, and tanks would spray the forest, preventively, on both flanks of the attack. At least you could see where you were going. At 0658 hours the Division artillery opened up exactly on time. The shells were plentiful and concentrated; they were also short. The men crouched in their scant temporary shelters and the shells landed on them and around them. The whole thing was a regrettable mistake.

  The two Companies withdrew to the rubble and the cellars of Wipfel, while Lieutenant Colonel Smithers, with a stony face, discussed the matter with Regiment on the radio. Jacob Levy was pressed into service as a litter bearer: the casualties were heavy, the Germans could not have done better. Doc Weber, working in his dirty sweat-stained undershirt, gave orders that another cellar was to be cleared for the wounded as any fool could see he was falling over bodies in here. The floor of Doc Weber’s cellar was slippery with blood, and the smell produced the bitter-tasting saliva of nausea in Jacob Levy’s mouth. The patient bewildered look on the faces of the wounded hurt him, as if he were one of them again.

  At 1455 hours, the remaining members of Fox and George Companies were again ready to go. The rain had stopped and in the watery afternoon light the open meadow looked, if not attractive, a reasonable piece of ground. The Battalion ought to reach its objective, the Grundheim-Berghof road, in an hour. At 1500 hours exactly, the artillery hit them in the moment when the men were stepping out from cover. This time the shells came from the front and were therefore legitimate. They did an equal amount of damage. The attack was called
off for the day.

  Doc Weber’s two cellars, having been cleared of the morning’s wounded, were refilled by three-thirty in the afternoon. Except for Doc Weber, giving orders to the technicians, and the occasional groan or mumble of a man who did not hear the sound he was making, the cellar was silent. Jacob Levy had helped carry in the last of the wounded and stopped near the door to give a cigarette to a soldier who asked for one. He saw there were others, who looked hopefully at the cigarette. He supposed it was allright to hand them out because no one told him not to. There were times, he remembered, when he’d have been glad for a smoke. He wanted to do what he could to help the poor guys and then get out of this place.

  He had given a cigarette to a man who seemed to have no knee, but only a sodden red bandage in the middle of his leg, when he saw the boy with the sad face. The boy was staring at the wall opposite him, and he held himself so still that he appeared not to be breathing.

  “Cigarette, Mac?” Jacob Levy said. You felt you ought to whisper down here. This guy must be hurt bad, someplace you couldn’t see. Maybe the kid was going to die pretty soon and that was why he had those eyes.

  “I’m dirty,” the boy said in a queer flat voice, “I’m dirty all over. I can’t get clean.”

  Jacob Levy stood with the lighted cigarette in his hand and began to feel a coldness at the back of his neck.

  “Look at my hands,” the boy said without moving. “Dirty. I’m dirty like that everywhere. I can’t get clean.”

  His eyes were still focused in the painful stare. “I’m dirty,” the boy went on. He did not see Jacob Levy’s cigarette.

  “Take this, Mac,” Jacob Levy whispered. “Or I’ll get you some water?”