| 03, cont. | | | Author: | | | IP: | ACA77FBBXXXX | | Date: | 03/05/04 11:03 | | Game Type: | Other | | Labels: | none | | Report Rating: , # of Ratings: 0, Max: , Min:
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03, cont.
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Meier's experience encompasses a large part of the Battle of Kursk, but is not as intense as previous battles. It serves primarily as a flash-back. History buffs might enjoy Kursk, however, because there's a little more historical and strategic depth than usual.
It's been over a year since I've started, but this shouldn't carry on for much longer. To read from the beginning, click here, or start at the beginning of this chapter.
[Inevitable]
[Russia]
-Kursk
-Breakout
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Inevitable
1. Kompanie tossed their weapons and helmets into a pile beside 1st platoon and then they were gone, with Cook nursing a broken hand and a private waving them forward with his Garand close by. Behind them they left a creekbed littered with the body of fallschirmjager who had chosen to struggle fruitlessly against the unshakeable order of things.
Wayne looked down at the fallschirmjager he'd beaten to death and wondered what made him let the other German officer live.
"We are professionals," the surviving fallschirmjager prisoners spat. They were wounded, heads busted open or nursing shot limbs, and were a pretty bad sight. A Company told them to shut their fucking mouths and rounded them up to send them to the rear after the badly wounded had gotten some first-aid.
The German paratroopers still acted pissed, pissed that they had been taken prisoner and pissed that they hadn't killed enough Americans to force them away from the creek. If they were given a chance they'd probably scramble away across the stream back to their lines so they could pick up a Schmeisser and cross the stream again to start shooting. They were professionals, alright; they took the war and the enemy seriously.
"Fuck you," one paratrooper growled when a GI tried to help him to his feet. "Fuck you, Amerikaner." And he stumbled to his feet for a second before slumping back over.
Wayne had let the other officer live because he hadn't been shaking one of the A Company soldiers from a bayonet when he'd started negotiating.
Artillery was still shelling the ridge to the south, and Wayne knew what 2nd Battalion was having to fight through. The Germans had the entire area in full-view, and they could call in fire support into any corner they wanted. Even so, it was clear that they were writing checks that they couldn't cash. At the rate they were expending their ammunition they wouldn't be able to hold for very much longer. Their defense of St. Lo was at its most violent, but it was a final, desperate thrashing; the fate of the battle seemed inevitable.
2nd platoon radioed that they'd run into an eighty-eight and that they'd taken casualties. Wescott was dead. And Wayne thought that had been inevitable, too.
So A Company was left without a "real soldier," an old sergeant who knew the rules of the game or an officer that was born with tactical genius. They were all reservists and guardsmen; not a single one of them was a professional soldier.
Except at times Wayne wondered if he was a professional. He'd been in the field a while and he'd survived; he'd been watched over and trained by a former 1st Division sergeant and a Ranger. He'd even picked up the coarse lingo that Burkeley and Wescott had shared.
"Second platoon also says that there are new krauts ahead of them. They're not sure of strength, but second platoon leader says that the rest of First Battalion's in a slugging match."
Except the slugs in this case were 7.92mm rounds that would kill any heavyweight contender. It was clear by the end of the morning that II Fallschirmjager Corps had brought the strength of three battalions into the draw, very heavily supported by the artillery that shelled the ridges in concentrated salvos every hour. In the end the regular Wehrmacht troops had been replaced by a regiment of professionals, paratroopers, except the professionals in this case were another bushel of 18 year old kids who had been trained the previous year to believe they were Germany's last great hope.
A Company and the rest of 1st Battalion would continue to attempt to advance westward through the draw for the rest of the day, but wouldn't make much head-way. Shell-bursts apparently made good companions for the replacement paratroopers arriving on the line.
The next day Wayne received orders to hold and consolidate his position until tomorrow's attack, which meant that higher headquarters considered the battalion's strength in comparison with the enemy and position in comparison with the other units of the regiment too weak and too precarious to continue pushing forward. Wayne was thankful for the pause and cursed Division hq and God.
3rd Battalion of the 175th Regiment had also received orders to come through 1st Battalion's position that day, to continue the attack through the draw. They were as battered as A Company, having faced almost constant artillery bombardment while they moved down the draw; 3rd Battalion had had to stop and help 3rd Battalion of the 116th in securing the ridge before continuing towards its objective. It had been ordered to begin its attack at 1130, but by the time they had reached the rear-end of 1st Battalion, 116th Regiment's position, it was well past morning and there would not be enough light to begin an assault.
From many view-points St. Lo was nothing more than an un-assuming city. It was sited on low-ground, so as an artillery post it wasn't that desirable. It was not a major hub for German war production. What decided the guilty city's verdict in the trial of war was the fact that it happened to be the center of several crossroads that linked much of the operational battlefield together. It was not as crucial to the Germans as it was to the Americans, frankly because the Germans didn't have all that much to transport, but to the Americans, St. Lo was a strategic opportunity to lock the Germans in Normandy.
Because the majority, if not all, of the German senior officers were aristocrats, they were all very competent and intelligent commanders, or that is the general impression one perceives upon hearing their impeccable English. In the end - and Normandy would be the end for many of them - all that mattered to many of the officers of the "old school" was that they also wrote English well, because their memoirs would be the basis on which the rest of their military careers would be based. As a result, many of the personal records of German commanders would coincidentally proclaim that they had not been officers of Hitler, they had served as officers of the Wehrmacht, which did not condone many of Hitler's policies. As a purely informational sidenote, they added that it was Hitler's meticulous micromanagement that had been the downfall of the Heer in particular and the Wehrmacht in general, not the failures of its officers and soldiers.
"This defeat, while a great tragedy," a general remarked to a leutnant about Wayne's age, "is also a great opportunity. It's ironic in that the death of something can also bring about the revitalization of something else. If you're smart you'll know how to seize this moment."
"Seizing the moment" generally meant surrendering and making himself and his unit look as good as possible, as though every odd had been stacked up against him while he and his men had fought valiantly for the safety of their homeland.
Outside of those engagements with headquarters groups, however, surrender was routine and full of mutual spite. Tired and unkempt Wehrmacht troops regularly crossed-over the lines to hand their weapons and themselves over, and were then bullied and shoved to the rear by tired and unkempt Americans who took watches or Lugers. It wasn't a fair trade-off to those who had seen their comrades ripped to shreds by German artillery, but it was all they could do.
A day later, while 3rd Battalion, 175th Regiment marched abreast of A Company's line and directly into the sights of German gunners who immediately flooded the draw with HE, a young leutnant crossed-over with his kompanie, maybe forty men altogether, with a white flag and proclaimed surrender.
Wayne had been observing the battalion's futile struggle to push forward, knowing that they would make very little headway and that what little gains they would make would be at the cost of a lot of dead men. 3rd Battalion, 175th Regiment crept forward at a meticulously slow pace; while 155mm shells rained down in the draw and burst all around the brush, tearing chunks of the grass and earth away, two or three men would sprint across an empty road to cover, then wait for another two or three to go across. Sometimes a small group would time it wrong, and they would disappear in the curtain of smoke of a heavy HE round only to reappear in bits and pieces a few meters down, torn in half or missing vital parts of their bodies required for locomotion.
All the while a machine gun or a sniper would be taking pot-shots at them from a farmhouse or a windmill or a ditch, but the men wouldn't be able to return fire because they didn't know where the fire was coming from, and even if they did, getting into position to take a shot would lead to their immediate annihilation by buzzing shrapnel.
The Germans manning the guns were enjoying a turkey-shoot. When they had shelled the ridge they only had glimpses of the Americans as they lie in cover, but here 3rd Battalion, 175th Regiment had left the topographic cover of the draw and were out on open ground, completely observable from the southern ridge parallel to the highway running to Saint-Lo. They saw clusters of infantry gathering in different areas of the field and brought intensive fire down on them, either letting loose a barrage with heavy mortars or sending a salvo over with their artillery, and a moment later the Americans could be seen scattering and crawling and tumbling through the smoke, and the fire officer would announce, "Good shot!"
But the American sergeants of the assaulting battalion didn't think they were good shots at all. They thought they were the sorriest sons-of-bitches they'd ever had to deal with, only they suspected that the bastards they were shouting at to hold and stay in cover were probably a sorrier lot than the fucking krauts who were slaughtering them for sport.
Wayne, not very far away from 3rd Battalion's position, knew exactly what the sergeants were telling their subordinates to do - spread-out, keep low, keep your cool, though they were probably lavishing a bit more explicit finesse. They were commands that Wayne had repeated endlessly almost everyday. If the men didn't disperse, an artillery shoot would zero-in and would kill them all in a salvo. If they didn't keep low, the gunners would continually have a visual on them and subsequently would continually drop HE on them. And if they didn't keep their cool, they would panic and break and run and die, because if a soldier didn't think he would do something stupid in his fear. They were lessons that Wayne had learned in Normandy.
These were details that made Wayne question whether or not he was what battalion intelligence called an "effective leader," a man like Wescott or Burkeley. He was perpetually building upon his knowledge of combat and improving his tactical skills. He was always seeing the links between staying alive and what it took to stay alive, and drilling his NCOs to see these links as well. It was how A Company had survived six weeks past D-Day, and it was how the men had become an effective combat unit; all because Wayne took his job seriously.
But what differentiated him from the detached, cool Wescott, or the energetic, direct Burkeley, was that Wayne didn't want to be good at what he did. He hated giving orders and he hated studying tactics, because then the men in his company became numbers; tactics was about minimizing casualties, or keeping losses to an acceptable level, because no matter what happened someone was going to become a loss or a casualty, and Wayne had never learned to think of men in terms of acceptably lost. When he thought professionally, death was to be expected and accepted, and the rate at which it occured was to be controlled.
It made Wayne feel alien.
Maybe it was also because he just didn't belong in Normandy. A Company had known he had been some-what soft since he'd taken command of the unit, and before D-Day they referred to him as a pacifist. Even when he'd shown his mettle on the beach, though, they still regarded him with a certain distance; the closest person to a friend he'd met since the war had started was Wescott, and they had talked very rarely, as both of them were too busy doing their jobs. And then that incident at Isigny; A Company saw a change in him and they did't know what had happened to the normally affable 2nd Lieutenant Wayne, only that he had been replaced by a cold, ruthless captain that didn't take any shit.
And standing with this cold, ruthless captain as he watched the young leutnant coming over with a white flag, Truttman wasn't sure if Wayne was going to take this well. Not even half a kilometer away, German artillery slaughtered American troops in the draw, and this bastard German here was crossing-over to surrender himself. Truttman examined him as he drew near; the leutnant even looked like Wayne, tall and gaunt, with a neutral, blank expression blanketed across his face.
The riflemen held their sights against him in their foxholes, and a sergeant rose to take the officer by the arm and led him towards Wayne, who rose out of his cover and wiped ineffectually at the dirt on his pants.
"Can I help you?" Wayne asked.
"My company and I wish to surrender."
"Particular reason why? Your artillery is performing well against our men."
"Tactically," the leutnant had a flat, monotonous voice, "we may have a temporary advantage due to terrain and situation, but from a larger scope it is quite clear that any further resistance against a materially-superior enemy will only lead to certain death."
"So you turn your back on your comrades? Leave them behind to save your own neck?" Wayne seemed disgusted.
"In a situation where defeat is ultimately inevitable, the rational thing to do is to surrender or otherwise ensure the continuity of the lives of my soldiers. If the decision were mine to make, I would surrender the entirety of the German Army, but as that action is not under my control I can only carry-out what I am capable of."
It was clear from the way Wayne seemed ready to swing his rifle from his shoulder and shoot the officer in the heart that he was thoroughly repulsed, but no one except for Truttman and Cook, the college boys standing behind the German, knew quite why.
After a short exchange, the officer agreed to unconditional surrender, and crossed back to his men with an accompanying submachine gunner. A score of field-gray coats materialized from cover, rose from shallow ditches, and marched towards the American line, hands raised high and eyes cast down. And the officer, completely expressionless, walked alongside them, hands folded behind his back in typical aristocratic fashion.
And once his kompanie had handed their weapons over, he produced a black Luger, and again in typical aristocratic fashion, gave a slight bow and offered it to Captain Wayne.
A Luger was a treasure to any soldier. It was a great souvenir, and was a highly sought-after article to just about anyone caught in the business of war. Those who got their hands on one would keep a finely-tuned instrument and an icon of German engineering. To receive one directly from an officer would probably bestow a humbling sense of honor in most men, and those who watched the officer's somewhat ceremonious display thought it pretty nifty.
Wayne shook his head, his disgusted countenance replaced with one that almost resembled fear, and held his hand up to stop him.
"What the fuck is he doing," a newly-promoted corporal nearly exploded as he watched this with Truttman and Cook. "If he doesn't want it, I'll take it for him."
"I don't want this," Wayne told the officer. "I don't want it."
"This has saved my life on a number of occasions," the officer replied. "Since my war is over, I'd feel better if it were to continue being used to serve the purpose for which it was created."
"I'm sorry, Jerry," Wayne replied with a hint of aggravation, "but I'm afraid I can't let you have that satisfaction."
The officer looked Wayne in the eye for a moment, a flicker of what could have been disappointment passing over his own eyes, before bowing slightly again, and then he was gone, marching alongside his kompanie while two Americans strode behind them with rifles pointed at their backs.
Truttman saw Wayne almost exhale as the officer and his kompanie disappeared from sight, as though he had been holding his breath. He'd been nervous, though he'd tried not to show it, and Truttman had to admit that the German's concise, machine-like diction made him edgy, too. He had had an Iron Cross wrapped about his neck, something common among veterans from the Russian front, and everything he did had an attitude of complete control and confidence, or complete fatalism.
Wayne didn't know how long the officer had been in combat, but judging from his unreadable, almost blank composure, it'd been for a while. The German was clearly a professional; aristocratic, well-educated, probably General Staff, OberKommandoWehrmacht material. He didn't look much older than Wayne, he could have maybe even been younger, but there was something inhuman about him, a quality that didn't quite match his age simply because a person would have to be dead to reproduce it. It was the logic and rationality in his reasoning, the completely mathematical approach he took to dealing with human life. That kind of thinking was taught in the idea of tactics, and was further nurtured once an officer found himself in the field; casualties were converted to percentages, company rosters were reduced to fractions of their combat strength.
Wayne was glad he hadn't accepted the Luger. The officer was cold, and though his kompanie seemed to admire him, there was also a sort of fear there, and that dual-attitude, one of fear and respect, reminded Wayne too much of his own standing with A Company. But even though he'd chosen directly to stand against the leutnant's offer, refusing to accept the tool of war that had served him so well, Wayne felt that same sense of futility that made him think Wescott's death was unavoidable.
And about an hour after the officer had surrendered his kompanie, A Company's platoons began to report incoming artillery fire from the ridge. Wayne, back in his foxhole alone, coughing as the dirt and smoke from the shell-bursts showered down on him, never got those reports, but wouldn't have needed them in any case. In Normandy, it was inevitable that any period of quiet inactivity be broken with a sudden, screaming violence.
Russia
Meier was one of the observers spotting the artillery that day. He could see the Americans very clearly and the gunners were doing their jobs well, hitting them as they bunched together seeking guidance or security. The smart ones would isolate themselves from everyone else, knowing that in this case safety lie in sparsity, not numbers. They were the privates and NCOs that the Germans had been shooting since D-Day. The remainder were those soldiers who followed their instincts from home and died; when surprised they would freeze and a submachine gun sprayed them down, and when the world seemed to be falling apart - as it did now because the Germans were intent on making every round count - they sought others for protection and then they would all be blown apart by a mortar bomb.
Meier, of course, had developed another set of instincts that silenced his first nature. They were reflexes and axioms that he'd picked up and worked on slowly over time, and luckily nothing had ever happened in Russia that would test them until they had already been fully-formed and well-practiced. But then again maybe he wasn't so lucky, because in being the benefactor of fortune and chance, he had seen those who weren't so lucky - the people who taught him his second nature - die just as helplessly as the Americans attempting to hide in the draw.
Communication between the forward observers and the gunners was curt and concise. There were affirmations of direct hits - "Good shot!" or "You got him!" - but other than that any sort of random banter was non-existent. Many of them knew what it was like when the roles were reversed, when they were the ones out in the open looking for cover and guns they couldn't see but clearly heard were dropping 50 kg projectiles on them.
For Meier, that experience defined the last of his days in Russia.
The war in Russia was unprecedented in the modern world. There was a universal barbarity and savagery between the combatants that could only be related to war in a different time and place, in the books students read about the Roman Empire or other bloody conquests. But for this uncontrollable violence to re-surface in modern warfare was wholly unexpected.
There were rules, now, conventions and international agreements, and most of all science and technology, meant to end wars as quickly as possible. Instead of bringing conflicts to immediate and clean halts, however, all these laws and guidelines and tools of organization only destroyed any sense of order in the Russian front and perpetuated a brutal bloodshed.
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Historical Note
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22 June, 1941; the Germans opened the Russian front with Operation Barbarossa, a three-pronged advance designed to seize three major objectives - Moscow, the industrial areas in the north, such as Leningrad, and the Caucasus oil fields in the south.
Despite some initial success, none of these objectives would ever be obtained.
There is some speculation as to whether or not Germany could have feasibly defeated the Soviets even if they'd seized Moscow.
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Even outside of combat, death was a major consideration. Russia was a vast, sparsely-populated landscape, and re-supply out on the Russian steppe proved to be difficult. Early in the war, during those initial stages of Barbarossa, great numbers of Red Army troops gave way and surrendered to the advancing panzer spearheads. But as the campaign wore on, and as the panzers and their armored infantry stabbed farther and farther eastward, more Red Army units resisted with stronger determination. Battalions would be cut-off from their lines, and these battalions would dis-band into companies or platoons to fight their way out and harass German supply columns. In other cases, formations had simply advanced too far to be re-supplied with adequate provisions. German transportation relied heavily on horse-drawn wagons, and these draft-animals weren't able to catch-up with the motorized armored spearheads until they had halted, their engines crackling metallically in the cover of a forest while tank commanders analyzed their progress with crisply-folded maps.
In late-summer and early-fall, this generally meant the soldiers would go hungry for a short period. But by the time rasputiza, the muddy rainy season, had come, and temperatures had dropped below zero shortly after, a lack of supply could result in starvation and exposure.
There was surrender, but surrender often meant torture and death, and if one were to somehow live long enough to reach the rear-areas, it would be in work camps to either starve or be beaten into a crippled mass of shattered bone. The indoctrinized hate of Slavic sub-humans had generated a dehumanization of the Red Army, and this was met by equal hate from the Russians. Prisoners-of-war were often tortured, barbed-wire driven through their testicles, or decapited, or dis-membered and dis-embowelled; some were put on display for advancing enemies, crucified in a macabre sacrifice. Eventually surrender became forbidden; there were both official orders and unspoken agreements between soldiers detailing if they saw friends handing themselves over, they would shoot them in the back.
So the war for the common infantryman in Russia was a struggle to survive.
There were those who thought it eventually came down to being completely isolated in a massive army. They were on their own and if they trusted anyone but themselves they would end up dead. Geissler and Marcks were both students of this school of thought.
There were also those who believed that the only way they'd survive would be to work together. They trusted the orders and they trusted the science of things. Those were the men whom Meier would find himself working with in Russia.
During the winter of 1942-1943, the German Sixth Army was destroyed at Stalingrad. 200,000 or more soldiers and their equipment were lost in a gruesome, see-saw city siege. The Russians had decided to press their advantage, and began aggressive and successive operations in the south. Stalin and Stavka, the Soviet General Staff, hoped to spread this success northward, to encompass the German Army Group Center. General Rokossovsky was tasked with a winter offensive to this end in February that would ultimately fail thanks to a skillful German defense handled by Field-Marshal von Manstein. However, his attack would form a bulge in the German line - the Kursk salient.
Judging from the strength of the Germans, Stavka decided that for a strategic operation to succeed, the Germans would first have to spend their strength in an offensive, and Kursk proved to be an irresistible target for the Germans, fond of double-envelopment maneuvers.
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Historical Note
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It was primarily Colonel-General Heinz Guderian who developed the German doctrine of mobile warfare. He was responsible for the organization of the panzer division, and though the theoretical structure and size of this division was never truly matched, the concepts revealed an unprecedented understanding of the value of armor as an instrument of war.
He would command various different formations for a period, including Second Panzer Army during Barbarossa, but due to frequent disputes with Hitler, Guderian would eventually be dismissed, until he would be summoned again to serve first as the Inspector-General of the Armored Troops, then as the Chief of the General Staff. Hitler rarely acknowledged the competence of his generals, but he was quite aware of Guderian's talents, though not even his expertise would be enough to save Germany at this point.
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Months were spent in preparation for the defense of Kursk. The Red Army had built three main defensive belts within the bulge, designed to slow any armored thrust to a crawl. They had identified the major concentration points of the German attack and assembled their reserves accordingly, using maskirovka deception to shield these reserves from sight. The Germans had assembled fifty divisions and rushed developments - the Panther and Tiger tanks and their variants - into production for their assault. Guderian, now Inspector-General of the Armored Troops, pain-stakingly re-organized the panzer force, but he and many others cautioned that a crucial operational utility, that of surprise, would be impossible to attain. Zitadelle, if it were to commence, would rely entirely on the developments made in armored organization and technology.
Hitler agreed, and noted that the mere thought of Operation Zitadelle made him sick, but also remarked, "There is no political alternative."
And so Hitler's most trusted Field-Marshal, Walther Model, was placed at the head of Ninth Army, which would act as the primary combatant in the offensive, and Hoth's Fourth Panzer Army was reinforced for an armored thrust from the south, and men like Meier were directed to march forward in a revitalization of the blitzkrieg that was doomed from the start.
Soviet reconaissance and intelligence measures had developed considerably during that year of 1943. Just as German assault units were converging at their assembly areas and waiting for the preliminary artillery bombardment to begin pounding at the Russian defenses, a pre-emptive Soviet barrage shattered the morning and brought flame to their cover.
To the south, Hoth's II SS and XXXXVIII Panzer Corps penetrated some 35 kilometers into the third Soviet defense belt in one week, but were halted by 1st Tank Army. As the struggle continued into 12 July, 400 panzers and Tigers of II SS Panzer Corps seized Prokhorovka Station, and would soon face a vicious counter-attack by 5th Guards Tank Army. Reinforced by two tank corps, the Russian armor charged across open ground to meet the Germans; they would face the superior-ranged 88mm guns of the Tigers and effective air support from Stuka dive-bombers equipped with automatic cannon. Of the 800 T-34s that would make the charge, 400 would survive to engage at point-blank range, where any caliber weapon could destroy its target with one shot.
By the end of the day, Prokhorovka Station was deluged with burned-out tank chassis, a graveyard of blackened metal, with radios still hissing in the evening glare and the smoke from the oily fire blanketing the area in a gray, grimy curtain.
Many proud tankers, both German and Russian, would claim victory in one way or another. Prokhorovka Station was one side's tactical victory and the other's operational success, but as far as Meier knew not too many tankers at the station were able to report back-in to confirm this, because they were choking in the smoke and coughing up blackened blood from hemorrhaging and the oily fumes building up in their throat.
Not that Meier had given much thought to Prokhorovka Station. Ninth Army, which he was a soldier of, had been halted by 12 July by Rokossovsky's 2nd Guards Tank Army, which had begun counter-attacking as early as 6 July, a day after the Germans had jumped-off from their start-lines. Russian anti-tank engineers had funnelled movement by way of minefields into tank traps and anti-tank guns. Counter-attacks had begun almost immediately, as reserves were positioned a very short distance away from crisis points. But Meier was away from that, for the most part. While the assaulting divisions found themselves grinding to a complete halt, struggling over Ponyri Station in see-saw battles with Russian tankers and armored infantry, Meier stood watch along the northern flank of the drive, with a stretch of open ground before him pregnant with anti-tank mines and a network of wire-obstacles.
Operation Kutuzov, the main Russian counter-offensive, had begun the day Meier received news of Ponyri Station. He and his comrades had been taken off-guard. None of them had considered it possible that the Russians could mount a major offensive with so much heavy and bloody fighting developing around Kursk. It started with a tremendous artillery bombardment, during which the Russian batteries created a creeping barrage that carpeted the depth of the German line with high-explosive. Meier coughed and choked in the debris while he huddled in his foxhole, expecting a heavy round to burst directly on top of him and obliterate his body from existence. Outside, he could see the "crisis" platoons of the line-companies - units that would rush to the most heavily-assaulted or most crucial strong-points once the shooting had started - staggering away in the open, towards the second line of defense, only to be lost in a curtain of black as the next salvo plummeted into them. The Russians had concentrated a tremendous amount of power to relatively narrow frontages; Meier's regiment would face five or six battalions of Red Army troops backed by what amounted to 200 guns and 18 tanks.
The artillery bombardment lasted for two hours and thirty minutes, then started to creep away, deeper and deeper into the German defenses, leaving Meier's head throbbing; shock-waves had rolled over him again and again until he wasn't sure which way was up or from which direction the Russians were coming from. The infantry across the line started their assault, with heavy machine guns pouring in tracer and mortars dropping their bombs at a rapid pace, five or six rounds a minute. The support tanks roared ahead of them, slow but heavily-armored and carrying heavy-caliber weapons loaded with high-explosive. Meier was told to drop artillery on them and complied, but the the firepower the battery supporting them supplied seemed ineffectual in comparison to the mass of material roaring towards them with seemingly inexorable inertia.
Russian infantry were moving rapidly into Meier's line. They were supporting sappers, engineers equipped with demolition charges, to destroy the anti-tank barriers and strongpoints Ninth Army had created prior to Operation Zitadelle. Their fire-tactics were impeccable, developed after two years of continuous battle against a once-invincible foe. The Russians had gained a sort of artistic creativity in combat, a finesse that they'd lacked or hadn't fully utilized earlier in the war, when the Red Army soldier was a shepherd. But now, he was a real soldier, a professional; he understood war. This was exhibited clearly in Operation Kutuzov, in their artillery bombardment and the pains they'd taken to prepare a counter-offensive designed to begin before the Germans' own offensive had ended.
And Meier, calling down artillery fire into the advancing infantry - who dispersed rapidly into two fire-groups to cover each other's movement - realized with sickening clarity that everything the Russians had learned from the Germans had been improved upon or perfected in the two years the shepherds of the Red Army had turned themselves into combat infantry.
Around him, his comrades were folding or huddling in their cover, allowing enemy maneuver elements to stream through the cracks in minefields. They weren't cowering, however; this was a carefully-rehearsed combat tactic. Infantry spearhead assaults were designed to create a penetration in the enemy line. Once this penetration was made, the armor behind them could file through at full-throttle, seizing key cross-roads in the enemy's rear-areas and fanning out to destroy communication centers and supply lines. In these break-through assaults, threats to the flank and rear were ignored, all that mattered was that the armor widened the gap and kept moving through. Eventually, resistance points would be surrounded and disabled by follow-up elements.
Meier could hear the Russian infantry shouting as they pushed ahead, charging into the German lines and shooting at those who fled. They were re-grouping for the next assault. The infantry support armor covered their movement with a barrage of fire, directed at visible strong-points in the second line of defense. Once the Russians had started their assault, the Germans in the second line opened fire, forcing them to occupy abandoned positions in the defense belt. But behind them, those Germans that had survived the initial assault rose from their cover to engage the engineers moving forward for the next sapper assault, trapping the rifle infantry in a net.
Even so, this didn't take care of the Russian fire superiority. They were surrounded, but fought back with equal tenacity and determination, forming small fire-teams to deal with the pockets of resistance remaining in the shattered first line.
Meier's comrades realized they were in a tight situation but continued to fight as though they expected complete and total victory. They were completely suppressed from one side, and would soon be engaged in a knife-fight coupled with grenade assaults, but they simply directed their own fire into another direction, to assist other resistance points. Soon, the Russians had started their grenade assault, and the German position de-materialized in the smoke, while the war cries of the Red Army soldiers closed-in on them from every direction.
They had drawn their trench spades while the grenades burst around them, as they'd already used up their own munitions, and waited for the Russians to come for them. They did, and in the smoke Meier wasn't sure how many there were, but he brought the sharp edge of his spade down with as much force as he could on the skull of a man and shattered his cranium, and kicked his spasming body against the side of the trench to break the arm of another man. He cried-out, but Meier hadn't gotten his knife-hand, and he lunged forward with all his weight, sticking him in the gut. Meier had twisted with the arc of the lunge, but it'd gotten him pretty solidly; he swung his spade down, but with the Russian leaning into him he couldn't generate enough force, so he was only stunned, but his hand remained on the knife. Meier swung two more times, and he finally went limp, eyes bulging and bleeding because the last blow had taken him in the temple.
Russians and Germans were dropping heavily into the dirt. They were losing control of their bowels and emptying themselves into the earth, and the line, already stinking of black smoke and iron-copper blood, was filled with the odor of waste. Most of them died slowly, due to strangling or repeated hits to the skull - after the first few minutes the initial strike never killed, because all of their arms were aching with the effort of breaking through the flesh and bone, of killing, so those unfortunate enough to survive past that time frame died knowing exactly what hit them because after being knocked to their knees by an elbow or boot, they saw the knife or the spade coming for them. After that blow they were blinded, because either it'd caught them in the face or their eyes were squeezed tight because of the pain, but they felt the next dozen or so until they faded out of consciousness from blood loss or shock.
Their officers weren't quite sure what to order. They'd set-up their best tactics, but now the battle was an isolated struggle to kill. Bands of five or ten soldiers broke-off to fight five or ten other soldiers, and once all of them were dead the survivors would come back to form another group. Units of organization no longer served any purpose, as platoons and companies inter-mixed in the chaos, while a sergeant would tell them to do one thing as another sergeant would order them to do another.
"What are your coordinates," their radios would hiss.
"We don't know," they would reply.
"You must know," Meier remembered his own radio crackling while he watched the last Russian die, the hands around his neck also dying because the Russian's knife was buried deep in the heart of the strangler. "We have to send artillery over. You might get caught by a few rounds if we don't know your coordinates."
"Just send the damn artillery over," Meier breathed, and saw that the mouth-piece had been destroyed and he was only talking to himself and the men dying next to him.
The artillery came over, but not because the gunners had heard Meier; it was because the officers knew that they needed it, even if a few of their own men would be caught in the area-of-effect.
Meier could only sit and watch the incoming shells nose-dive in from the sky. Fire blossomed from the trenches, and the soldiers still shooting at each other from point-blank turned to seek cover. Russians and Germans crawled or ran, and fell forward as rounds exploded among them, legs flying away while they slid face-first into the smoke, not aware that they were crippled for life and trying to stagger away on bloody stumps. Meier knew the gunners knew that Germans would unavoidably be caught by a few shorts. It wasn't entirely their fault but they were the ones who had pulled the triggers; they probably wouldn't be very happy about it. Meier envied them, that they had the luxury to worry about lives other than their own while they sent HE into the map coordinates they'd been given. The bombardment reached him soon after, and he sat tight and waited, while the men he'd spoken with that day lobbed a salvo of munitions after him.
The second line collapsed anyway. The Russians had destroyed much of the German anti-tank capability, and their support armor and self-propelled guns were exacting a heavy toll on the German infantry fighting in the smoke. Anti-tank gunners in the line staggered away from ruined guns, blood pouring from their faces in rivulets, as though they'd been crying crimson tears, and died a moment later as the Russians who'd grenaded the guns grenaded the crews to finish the job.
Men in Meier's section of the line continued to resist, though in greatly reduced number. What had once been a small battalion was now reduced to perhaps three dozen men, isolated in twos and threes but holding their ground from their foxholes with a furious determination that characterized such fighting in Russia. Behind them, the surviving positions of the second line silenced themselves, allowing themselves to be rolled-over by the Russian advance in the same tactic of envelopment Meier's kompanie had exercised. The sappers, under heavy fire from all quarters, rushed forward with their equipment, cutting through wire obstacles and setting up demolition charges where ever such measures were needed, in pillboxes, gun emplacements, tank obstacles.
Many of them were jerked as though by some invisible string around the neck, rifle rounds, and they dropped to the dirt with a clatter, their equipment scattering around them, useless now that the hands carrying them were dead. But there were always enough wire-cutters who managed to make a breach in the obstacles, who lived long enough to call "clear!" before a machine gunner in the trenches ahead let loose a stream of tracer and sent everyone around the breach to the earth.
The Russians would crawl through despite the incoming fire, though it was apparent they weren't making good headway and that the assaulting infantry would all be dead before they'd broken through.
It wasn't part of the Russian "deep operation" doctrine to commit the main armored force to the actual penetration, but at the moment there was no other choice. Meier heard tank treads and it became clear that within a very short time he and his regiment would be cut off from their lines, and there was nothing they could do to stop it because bullets, grenades, and trench spades weren't of much use against tanks.
Evening had settled like a red curtain on the line and the shooting hadn't stopped, though remarkably any other sign of real resistance had. There were a few snipers left, but they weren't fooling anyone; there were Russian armored infantry riding-in on tanks, laughing and cheering the tankers forward over the corpses of German defenders who'd been caught in the open and shot. There were regular rifle infantry who were in the trenches, rooting out resistors and taking prisoners in with a cursory procedure of confiscating their watch and any bread they had on them.
Meier and three men huddled in their burned-out position, knowing they were completely isolated. There were a lot of bodies around their position. They would probably be shot once the Russians found them. Over the edge of their cover, they could see the main road and the silhouettes of Russian armor driving down it against a red sky, though with the infantry mounted on them they appeared to be over-loaded trucks laden with wounded and dying.
Within the span of a day, Meier's regiment had been destroyed. There were pockets of resistance here and there holding out, but most of the men had been killed or taken prisoner. At most, there were two hundred men remaining, and with no motor transport. They could attempt a break-out at night-fall, but they didn't have too much communication with each other since the communication lines to the rear had already been cut and any radios the Russians found they destroyed. One-by-one, each of the three men volunteered to head-out to contact another group somewhere on the broken line, and disappeared in the smoke. They must have all been captured by the advancing armored infantry, because none of them returned.
But Meier set-out at night-fall anyway, crawling away from the main road and away from the burning trenches and wire-obstacles from which hung the ragged bodies of Russian sappers and German infantry who had tried to break and run. He could still hear snipers shooting at the Russians and the Russians beating the ones they found with their rifles and fists and the endless line of tanks squealing and rumbling westward, their tank commanders shouting and bellowing with each other. Some of the T-34s had broken-down, either damaged by mines or suffering from mechanical failure, and these were rammed off the road without care, by tanks whose treads were stained with flesh grinded off of the corpses in the dirt.
Meier looked down at his knife wound, clutching the sloppy, bunched-up bandage against it, and wondered how bad it was. He felt weak and light-headed; he'd lost some blood, hopefully not too much. In the dark he couldn't tell.
In the two years he'd fought in Russia, he'd never felt isolated. He'd never been completely cut-off from friendly contact, always had atleast a few comrades with him, and Meier knew that in all probability he was going to die. Some Russian patrol would eventually find him wandering westward and they'd shoot him on sight and there was not much Meier could do to stop that.
One thing kept Meier going; if he were ever separated from his unit, his duty as a soldier was to try to return to that unit and assume his post. It was a robotic function that he carried-out without purpose or design, a routine procedure that came to him and sent motion into his weary legs. He'd given up on any chance of living but chose to adhere to his duty as his last act in life.
He had some bread and a cantine of water, nothing that would last him long. If he were lucky he would die before anyone found him.
When a column of vehicles drove by him two days later, loaded down with tense-looking soldiers in field-gray, Meier thought that he was very lucky. The sight brought a sudden vitality into him and he waved his arms and shouted, after walking westward in a dull, almost unconscious silence. The officer in charge, an old major, had organized a break-out attempt after rounding-up the remnants of his regiment. He'd gathered a few tanks and as many trucks as he could, and spent twelve hours fighting out of reach of the road. The major told Meier that he was now a part of his kampfgruppe, and Meier nodded and climbed aboard the panzer.
He looked at the men around him, who greeted him with a handful of ammunition, and noted that there were quite a few junior-officers, men of loyalty to the Heer. They cleaned-up his wound, tied a neat bandage around him, and explained that Ninth Army's assault units had been forced to withdraw; the Russian counter-offensive hadn't been contained.
"Ivan's not much more than a kilometer behind us. We haven't got much gas left, either, so we're going to have to finish on foot. But I can assure you I can get you back to our lines. The important thing is you don't give up on me, don't start thinking everything's lost and that we're all going to die. That's only going to hurt us. If everyone puts in their best effort we'll make it back."
Meier nodded and told the major he'd soldier to the best of his ability. This wasn't the first time he'd been encircled. Many German formations had been surrounded both during advances and withdrawals all through-out the war; most of them had emerged more or less intact. It was notoriously difficult for a second-echelon armored force to completely seal-off any gaps in the line once the spearhead had penetrated past.
Later that day, as the tanks started to die one at a time and those troops riding on it dis-mounted to crowd onto the hand-rails aboard the trucks and half-tracks, one enlisted man corrected the major's claim.
"We started this mission with twice this many men. We'd been losing vehicles and soldiers to tank-fire. They sit on a hill and just start shooting, shooting, shooting - Ivan's never been a good shot, but he's hit us a few times pretty well."
"You left the wounded behind?" Meier asked.
The soldier shrugged. "We had to." He'd fought long enough to know that there were situations were morals were no longer valid. "Many or most of us are going to die before we make it back to our lines. But like the major said, if we all try to complete the mission, the mission will succeed. We'll have to make sacrifices, most of us will just get shit luck. That's just how it goes."
The men in the convoy all seemed stoic and collected. They seemed to have a sense of purpose, an understanding of what had to be done and what would be required to make it happen.
So when the Russians caught-up with them during the night, and the T-34s brought fire down on their convoy, Meier didn't see anyone lose their nerve. They shouted, but it wasn't out of fear or some overwhelming emotion. They shouted to be heard over the boiling earth. When one of the last panzers took a hit and many of the men riding onboard it were raked off by the impact, the tank commander had leaned out of his turret and called, "That got us in the engine. We're done for."
He had turned the panzer around and swivelled the gun towards the T-34, and the surviving men behind him scrambled onto the nearest vehicle. The panzer blossomed into a luminescent flash of billowing fire, casting a red glare on the road, and silhouetting the rest of the convoy against the night.
The Russian tankers were frantic in their fusillade of fire; they were low on fuel, as well, and were jerking the triggers, desperate in their attempts to destroy the German convoy. Their radio communication was broken and barely comprehendable; "Sighted, to the left, to the left - no, shoot him - to the left - shoot him, shoot him!" The gunners shot him and saw the flash in their gunsights, lighting shadows up in nightmarish proportions and the recoil of the gun still rocking their vehicles wildly.
AP shot flared among the convoy and pounded the flanks of the trucks with debris, but the men with Meier only noted, "We're taking fire." The major nodded at them in the scarlet glow and pointed the driver directly west, off the road.
Fire slackened as the Russian tankers hung back on the road, and eventually ceased, and in the dark the chaos quieted to the monotonous, repetitious cough of dying diesel motors.
The major had his map out once one of the last remaining trucks stuttered to a halt. He told the convoy to a stop.
"Everybody off the vehicles," he shouted. "Everybody out, come on."
If they lost another truck, there wouldn't be enough space on the other tracks to take them along, and the major didn't like the idea of leaving able-bodied or lightly-wounded soldiers behind. They were the ones with the best chance to survive, the enlisted man explained, anything worse and they'd die before they could reach medical attention. That, and they complicated matters once things got hot.
"We go on foot from here," the major said. "We're not far from our lines, but this is where the patrol groups are going to be at, close to the edge of the pocket. From now on, noise and light discipline, we don't want to be caught this far in the game."
Some of the men asked about a rest, a break, and the major shook his gray head vehemently. "We're at the tip of the Russian spear and you want to sit down and take a damn break? Don't be a goddamn fool. Don't be a bunch of goddamn fools. This is the most crucial point, there's no time for rest. Get the equipment from the trucks, take only weapons and ammunition, destroy everything else."
There was no gasoline to burn the vehicles, but they had grenades and mortar rounds that they could fuse. Travelling on foot would be difficult, though for most of the troops, the farm boys, the ones who had not benefitted from the sudden, disruptive explosion of science of automobiles and diesel engines, it was a pleasant return to the quiet trample of boots.
Meier and the others trudged behind the major, tired but deliberate in their movements, the shattered vehicles smoking behind them.
It was morning by the time they'd broken through the forest. It'd been rough travelling, a little slow-going, but to stay around any sort of road would be inviting a quick and violent end. Armored spearheads frequently sought alternate routes for tactical or traffic purposes. Infantry meandering in the general area would be pinned down and then run-over for sport.
None of the men were happy to see daylight. Daylight meant that reconaissance elements would be able to see them; it meant that the cover of darkness wouldn't protect them if they had to move around the Russian armor. Back at home on the farm daylight marked the beginning of working in the field, setting about to various tasks that they more or less enjoyed doing. Out in Russia, it more or less marked their death.
And by noon, death did come for them. It came for them in the form of artillery. Someone had spotted them out on the empty steppe, even away from routes of transportation. They were on open-ground, rolling hills everywhere, and the best cover they could find were the sloping banks of these hills, though it was clear that if a round came from the wrong angle or over-shot its mark a little that this cover would prove to be very useless.
As the men lay down in the tall grass, clutching handfuls of the earth while it vomitted around them, Meier wondered if they would really make it back to their lines. Soon infantry or armor would be dispatched to mop-up, and the Germans had no heavy-weaponry. The junior-officers were shouting for everyone to stay down, don't get up, don't get up, they won't be able to see you in the grass. But they couldn't wait here for an extended period, as the Russians had the advantage of time.
He heard men shouting to each other in the field, not anxiously, but with the composure of machines carrying-out their everyday function. They were relaying a message from the major; infantry on half-tracks had been spotted. There was a creek perhaps half a kilometer away, northward. They were to sneak to that creek by way of irrigation ditches, then make west for their lines. If they stuck together, they would be sighted, so it would be be best for them to move in small groups.
The grass was waving wildly, the earth bleeding smoke to the sky, and Meier saw half-tracks crest a hill to the left. There were three of them, mounted with fire-teams of infantry and supported by a column of troops on foot. They probably could not see the Germans in the field, due to the smoke and the tall grass, but the artillery had ceased to allow this patrol to scour the area for any signs of life.
A last artillery shell screeched into a hill, the detonation solitary and lonely against the cloudless sky that seemed to blanket the world in a blank expanse, and again, the chaos died to the rumble of diesel engines.
Meier saw the Russians pointing and waving, shooting into the field. They were shooting at anything suspicious, and at limp bodies lying in blackened dirt in case some bastard was playing possum. He continued to crawl away, aiming north, a little unsure if he had his bearings straight, but he saw a body and a gray head inching ahead of him and was reassured. If the major was headed this way, they were pointed in the right direction.
But rapid-fire opened behind them and Meier turned to see some of the field-gray Germans standing up and firing back at the Russian patrol. Maybe ten men against twenty. Submachine guns sprayed, the Germans scattered less two dead men, and the Russians went forward, some staying to take pot-shots. Grenades burst to their flank, the grass disappeared in a black shower, and so did the Russians, replaced by three or four field-gray figures sprinting forward with another volley of grenades. They tried to hit the half-tracks, failed with all of their munitions, which exploded and spattered shrapnel against the vehicles, and a moment later Russian machine guns swept over them, followed by rifle shots as they rolled and writhed in the grass. A few dozen shots too many, and they were dead, wrapped in a blanket of yellow and powdered with black.
Meier felt a hand on his shoulder.
"Keep moving," the major told him.
"But some of the men are fighting," he protested.
"Once they've been sighted, they're already dead. You can't try to help dead men. Get moving. I'm not a hero and neither are you."
Some of the Germans were sprinting, hoping to out-run the patrol, but they couldn't out-run bullets, and all of them ended up rolling back into the tall grass, their legs kicking but already dying.
The major pulled him forward, and Meier began to crawl northward faster.
When they'd tumbled into an irrigation ditch, he scrambled to his feet and sprinted ahead, bent-double, while tracers flashed ahead and behind him after missing those soldiers who'd stayed behind to fight after they'd been caught. By the time he'd reached the creek, Meier was breathless, panting, throat dry. Other men had found the creek, as well, but they didn't call him out loud, even as the automatic fire continued to tear away in the distance. The major climbed out of the dirt a moment later and pointed ahead, giving the men a direction again.
"What about the others?" Meier asked in a hushed whisper.
"You keep thinking of everyone else but yourself," the major spat. "This isn't the type of situation where you do that. If you keep trying to be hero you are going to get everyone else here killed. Follow my fucking orders."
He glared at Meier, angry with him and angry at himself, and then stalked-off, splashing across the creek.
A hundred men were in the field once the artillery had started shooting. Something like forty were crossing the creek, the others dead or rounded-up as prisoners.
They found themselves out on rolling hills again, pointed west. Artillery found them again, and so did the Russian patrol; it was evening by the time the major's break-out force had made it to German lines, and by that time a dozen men found themselves covered in smoke and blood. They'd fought their way the last few kilometers, setting-up ill-fated ambushes for the half-tracks that killed half the forty, and then struggling meter-by-meter while the dis-mounted infantry flanked them again and again, pouring automatic fire in the grass and cutting the stalks to nothing. But the men never panicked, and the major always gave them orders, even when their ammunition was spent and they were still a kilometer away from their lines. Men were dying every minute, the steppe was falling apart as artillery crashed from the sky, and the Russians could be heard shouting from every unexpected angle before they shot, but in all this Meier saw only stoicism and order in the men breaking-out.
And when a German patrol had found them crouched in cover, while a Russian machine gun tried to kill them, they'd disengaged in an organized leap-frog of fire-and-maneuver, and then walked single-file back to the patrol's company.
"What unit are you from?" a German leutnant asked them. "Where are the others?"
"This is all that made it," the major replied. "The real soldiers."
3rd Battalion soldiers wondered how the Germans could shell the positions of their own men. Given the time to think about things they would have thought the Jerries shooting at them from a few meters away had balls, they were tough.
At the moment, however, they were busy shooting back, and trying to find cover from the rain of HE drenching the air with shrapnel.
A sergeant saw one of his men lose half his body-weight in flesh and blood after a machine gun burst caught him. He tossed a grenade for cover, and sprinted out into the road, his men just behind him, and the MG-42 spat into the smoke, at the shaded silhouettes of the Americans which jerked as the rounds caught them in the arms and sides. The sergeant found the machine gun, shot at the field-gray coats behind it, emptied his Garand.
"Clear," he called, and when he looked back he saw six bundles of brown lying in the dirt and one kid with a blank expression on his face looking back at him.
The next squad trotted past them, their platoon filing forward in a line of fire-teams, and as 155mm rammed into the road ahead of them, the shooting started again and the sergeant in front looked back and notified them, "Machine gun!"
Watching the methodical American advance into black and the check-list procedure the German gunnery crews executed with an inhuman precision, Meier saw the same resulting disorder that he'd witnessed in Russia, when the major had brought him to safety with a meticulous sense of leadership. The major had controlled everything, had demanded the men control themselves, while around them the Russian steppe plunged into entropy.
The major had invited him into his tent barracks the evening they'd made it back. Apparently, an officer of the battalion they'd stumbled upon had died that day, and the unit had allowed the major to use it as his quarters for a period. Meier's unit had been destroyed. A trickle of survivors had been streaming back since Operation Kutuzov ripped through the German line, and Meier was one of a few hundred survivors of his division. They would be re-constituted into existing units or sent west.
"You headed out into the steppe alone?" the major asked him, almost smiling.
"That's right, sir," Meier told him.
"'Sir,'" the major laughed, "'Sir?' I didn't ask for that kind of ceremony out there and I don't expect it here. But you went out on your own. That's good, Meier, very good."
He was surprised the gray officer knew his name.
"You followed your training, then, your sense of duty? Good. You're a good soldier, Meier." He offered him a glass of cognac and a cigarette, and in his reading-glasses Meier thought the old officer was better-suited to serving as a grandfather than as a leader in the Wehrmacht. Outside of combat the old man was much softer, almost paternal. "Your training is all you have in Russia. Your training and instincts. You headed-out alone, knowing you had no choice. That's good. And you operate well under pressure, that's good, too. But this heroic business, this good heart - that's going to be your downfall, Meier," and the major gave him another smile.
"My good heart?" Meier drank his cognac and smoked his cigarette, enjoying the leisure and the first real talk he'd had in months.
"That's right. You see a friend in trouble and you want to help him out. That's what you've been taught at home, to care for others, but back at home things were different. It was okay to believe in that because others believed in it, but out here you are the only one. You can't have that luxury, Meier, not if you want to survive. Because that's what this is. That's what Russia's become. This war has turned the Russians into killers, and I'm afraid some of our own are breaking with them." The major's smile had faded as he said this, though he kept his soft tone.
Meier nodded, understanding the major's words. Men had changed in these last two years. In Poland, in France, things had been different. They had been happy soldiers, revelling in the Wehrmacht's victories. They'd gone into Russia and after months of fighting the victories started to change. They were becoming more and more aware of what they were losing in exchange for victories, and after they'd failed to seize Moscow, every victory killed them. No one wanted to fight anymore. They were scared.
"Did you hear about the last flights out of Stalingrad?" the major asked him. "The pilots said they would only take the wounded out, the severely-wounded who needed help. But everyone within reach of the airfields had crowded around them and tried to get aboard, to escape the city. They trampled over men on stretchers, tried to bribe the pilots - one of my sons had to draw his pistol and threaten them off. He told me a friend of his had to cut the fingers off of the hands of a dozen men because they'd grabbed ahold of their plane once it'd taken off, they were weighing it down." The major gulped the last of his drink and muttered, with more pity than disgust, "Like a bunch of animals."
"But I've also heard of some lucky ones that made it out. They're the ones who forgot all about friends, Meier, who worried only about themselves. It's hard to think like this but you have to realize that things have changed. There is no golden rule here; there are no rules out here, only the rules that have governed nature since the beginning of life. Don't play the hero, Meier; always think of yourself first, atleast until you get home."
The smile had returned to the major's face, wrinkling his eyes in that grandfatherly way, and Meier was amazed at how kind this man seemed and how cold his advice was. "If you believe that, why did you lead a break-out attempt with as many men as you could find?"
"I couldn't do it alone," the major told him, and looking at this smiling man, knowing that a hundred men had died so he could live, Meier was not sure if he'd heard him right.
But watching the Americans die for every meter they took in the draw while the gunners dropped artillery on them, Meier knew the major had been right. What he and the gunners were doing was shit, he admitted that, but if he didn't shell them they would shoot him, and that wasn't a very fair trade-off for Meier. He didn't care about the Americans. And when the Americans at the base of the ridge finally forced their way up, Meier wouldn't care about the gunners; he would pull back on his own, as long as it wouldn't get him killed by an officer.
Captain Wayne, looking up the ridge, wondered how many gun crews would resist once A Company started to pressure them. Assaulting the guns would be difficult, especially uphill, and his half-empty roster did not ease his fears. Replacements had come-in that morning, and they were huddled low in their foxholes, afraid of the thumps and booms of the artillery. Wayne and the others looked at them and knew looking out for them would get men killed, so they treated them with distance, thinking if they were lucky they'd die quick.
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