littered the landscape, in the haze of smoke, heavy and lazy, that adhered to everything, and beneath it another odor that infiltrated the nostrils.
Leets sniffed.
“Ever been in a combat zone, Captain?” asked Ryan.
“Nothing stable like this. I did some running around behind the lines last summer.”
“I recognize the odor,” said Tony. “Bodies out there. Beyond the wire.”
“Yeah,” confirmed Major Ryan. “Theirs. Just let ’em try and come out and bury ’em.”
“My father,” said Outhwaithe, “mentioned it in his letters. The Somme, all that, ’14 to ’18. I read them later.”
They began to encounter the infantrymen here, just behind the line, relaxing around cooking fires, or simply dozing in the shadows of half-tracks and Jeeps. The still landscape actually teemed with men, though if there was a principle of organization behind all this casual cluster, Leets missed it. Who was in charge? Nobody. Who knew what they were doing? Everybody. But Leets did not feel himself the object of curiosity as he scurried along, self- consciously clean and unaccustomed to the crack of bullets aimed his way. Nobody cared. He was not German; he was not an officer who could send anybody out on patrol or launch an attack; therefore he was not significant. A couple of tired-looking teen-agers with BAR’s twice their size looked at him stupidly. It did not occur to them to salute, or to him to require it. Farther on, some wise man cautioned, “Keep your asses low.”
A final hundred yards had to be covered belly-down, without dignity, across a bare ridge, through a farmyard, to a low stone wall.
Here, settled in cozy domesticity, had gathered still more GI’s. Weapons poked through holes punched in the wall or rested on sandbags in the gaps of the wall, and a scroll of barbed wire, jagged and surreal, unreeled across the stones; yet for all these symbols of the soldier’s trade, Leets still felt more as if he’d crashed a hobo’s convention. Unshaven men, grousing and farting, clothes fetid, toes popping hugely out of blackish OD socks, lay sprawled about in assorted poses of languor. A few peered intently out through gaps in the wall or Y-shaped periscopes at what lay beyond; but most just loafed, cheerful and uncomplicated, enjoying the bright moment for what it was.
The platoon leader, a young lieutenant who looked tireder than Ryan, crawled over, and a meeting convened in the lee of the wall.
“Tom,” said Ryan, “these fine gents flew in special from London; they’re after a big story.” Newspaper lingo seemed to be Ryan’s stock in trade. “Not their usual beat at all, but here they are. And the story, in time for the late editions, is Third Squad.”
“Never knew who turned the lights out on ’em,” said Tom.
More precisely, thought Leets, who turned the lights
A sergeant was soon summoned who’d been at the wall the night of the patrol, evidently pulled from sleep, for the flecks of crud still clotted in his eyes. He affected the winter-issue wool-helmet cap, called a beanie and useless except for decoration in this warm weather, and he yanked hard on a dead cigar. All these men who lived in the very smile of extinction insisted on being characters, vivid and astonishing, rather than mere soldiers. They looked alike only for the second it took to categorize their eccentricities.
“Not much to tell, sir,” he said, not knowing which of the four officers to address. “You can see if you’re careful.” He gestured.
Leets took off his borrowed helmet, and eased a dangerous half a head up over the wall. Germany, tidy and ripening in the spring, spilled away.
“Just to the left of those trees, sir.”
Leets saw a stand of poplars.
“We sent ’em out looking for iron,” explained Ryan, not bothering to explain that in the patois, iron meant armor. “‘Hitlerjugend’ is technically a Panzer division, though we’re not sure if they’ve got any operational stuff. We didn’t run into it on our trips over there, but who had time to look? I just didn’t want any Bulge-type surprises coming into the middle of my sector.”
“Sir,” the young sergeant continued. “Lieutenant Uckley, new guy, he took ’em down that hill, then across the field, long way to crawl. They were okay there, we found chewing gum wrappers. When they got to those trees, they went up that little draw.”
Leets could see a fold in the earth, a kind of gully between two vaguely rising landforms.
“But you didn’t hear anything? Or see anything?”
“No, sir. Nothing. They just didn’t come back.”
“Did you recover Third Squad’s bodies?” asked Outhwaithe.
“Yes, sir,” piped the lieutenant. “Next day. We called in smoke and heavy Willie Peter. Went out myself with another patrol. They’d been dropped in their tracks. Right in the ticker, every last one. Even the last guy. He didn’t have time to run, that’s how fast it was.”
Leets turned to Ryan. “The bodies. They’d be at Graves Registration?”
Ryan nodded. “If they haven’t been shipped out to cemeteries yet.”
“I think we ought to check it out.”
“Fine.”
“Sir,” asked the sergeant.
Leets turned. “Yeah.”
“What did he hit ’em with?”
“Some kind of night vision gear. It was broad daylight for him.”
“You’re looking for this guy, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well,” said the sergeant, “I went looking for him too.” A tough kid, made his stripes at what, eighteen, nineteen? Good man in a fire fight, natural talent for it. “Had me a BAR and twenty clips.”
“But no luck,” said Leets.
“Nah, uh-uh.”
You did have luck, kid: you didn’t run into Repp; you’re still alive.
“I had friends in that squad, good people. When you catch this guy, burn him. Huh? Burn him.”
The Graves Registration section took the form of a forty-cot hospital tent some miles behind the front lines, and into this tent sane men seldom ventured. Leets, Outhwaithe, Major Ryan and an Army doctor stood in the dank space with the dead, rank on rank of them, in proper order, awaiting shipment, neatly pine-boxed. Everything possible had been done to make the location pleasant, yet everything had failed and the odor that had paused at Leets’s nostrils on the line hung here pungent and tangible, though one adjusted to it quickly.
“Thank God it’s still coolish,” said Outhwaithe.
The first boy was no good to them. Repp had hit him squarely in the sternum, that cup of bone shielding, however ineffectively, the heart, shattering it, heart behind and assorted other items, but also shattering, most probably, the bullet.
“Nah,” said the doc, “I’m not cracking this guy. You won’t find a thing in there except tiny flakes cutting every which way. Tell ’em to look some more.”
And so the Graves Registration clerks prowled again through the stacked corridors of the dead, hunting, by name off the list 45th Division HQ had provided, another candidate.
The second boy too disappointed. Repp was less precise in his placement, but the physician, looking into the opened body bag in the coffin, judged it no go.
“Nicked a rib; that’ll skew the thing off. No telling where it’ll end up — foot or hip. We don’t have time to play hide-and-seek.”
A success was finally achieved on a third try. The doctor, a stocky, blunt Dartmouth grad with thick clean hands and the mannerisms of an irritated bear, announced, “Jackpot — between the third and fourth ribs. This guy’s worth the effort.”
The box was dollied into the mortuary tent.
The doctor said, “Okay, now. We’re gonna take him out of the bag and cut him open. I can get an orderly over here in an hour or so. Or I can do it now, this minute. The catch is, if I do it now, somebody here’ll have to help. You’ve seen battle casualties before? You’ve seen nothing. This kid’s been in the bag a week. You won’t
