"It's gonna be a long night," he muttered.
Morning broke bitterly cold, a few bands of pink showing between the clouds and mountains at daybreak. Cole was surprised to see Sergeant Weber limping over. Blood-soaked bandages wrapped one arm and one leg. Gray stubble on the sergeant’s face made him look old and haggard.
"Sarge, I figured you was a goner," Cole said. “Didn’t nobody tell you to keep your head down?”
" ’Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated,’ " he said. "One of your American writers said that. Mark Twain. Huckleberry Finn. Besides, it will take more than a couple of Chinamen to kill me. How are you boys holding up?"
Cole ignored the sergeant’s literary references, which he didn’t understand anyway, and took stock. The sleeping bags had done their job, holding in enough warmth to stave off frostbite. Nonetheless, Cole’s eyeballs actually felt like they might have a coating of ice on them. He blinked a few times to get them back to normal. Cole decided that he never had dealt with such intense cold.
"Pomeroy took a chunk of shrapnel across the ribs, but he'll live," Cole said. "Ain't that right, New Jersey?"
At the mention of his name, Pomeroy finally stirred. "Yeah?" he asked groggily.
"We called for a medic, but never saw one."
"Medics are in short supply," the sergeant said. "We lost a couple in the fight last night. I think the damn Chinese are targeting them. There's an aid station set up."
"What, and get out of this nice, warm sleeping bag?" Pomeroy shook his head. "I think I'll stay right here."
"You boys did good," the sergeant said. "We all did. We held our ground."
"As far as I'm concerned, the Chinese and the North Koreans can go ahead and have this forsaken piece of real estate," Pomeroy said.
"I agree," the sergeant said, surprising Cole. "But it's not up to us, is it?"
Once again, Cole wondered what they were doing here. Fighting the Germans had been so different. The objective had been clear: defeat Hitler and capture Berlin. What was their objective here? Who was even their enemy? The Chinese? Cole didn’t know anything about them, other than what he could learn from the bodies all around them.
The sergeant started to walk away, then hesitated, seeming to think something over. "Walk with me, Cole," the sergeant said. "I'm going to check on the rest of the boys, and I might need a runner to take a message to the lieutenant, depending on what I find. My leg isn't much for running."
"All right." Cole was surprised at how reluctant he was to leave the relative warmth of his sleeping bag. He had kidded New Jersey about it, but the man had the right idea.
As Cole shrugged off the warm sleeping bag, the cold air slapped him. Now he knew how a newborn baby felt, forced out into the cold world. He paused to work the action on his rifle, making sure that it still functioned. The bolt snapped shut was a loud click that carried in the morning air. "Kid, look after Pomeroy."
"I don't need anybody to look after me," Pomeroy grumped. "What I do need is for someone to fix me a nice breakfast. Scrambled eggs, toast, bacon, lots of hot coffee."
"Good luck with that," Cole said. "Best you can hope for is a drink of water, if it ain't frozen."
Out of the foxhole now, Cole looked around. Now that it was daylight, the sight of so many dead was shocking. Here and there, he spotted a few American uniforms among the fallen, although a detail was already out, trying to retrieve the bodies. By far, most of the dead were Chinese.
In the cold, the faces of the dead on both sides had frozen to capture their final expressions. Some of the dead men's features showed surprise. Those were the lucky ones who had died instantly. Other faces had frozen into twisted agony. What bothered Cole was that many of the faces of the dead Chinese looked so young. Sure, last night they had been endeavoring to kill Cole and his countrymen, but they were just young men following their orders as soldiers. They were the enemy, but there was now a kind of innocence about them in death. Cole certainly took no pleasure in seeing them by the light of day.
The shock at the number of dead must have shown, even on Cole's face. He could be a hard man, but he had never seen such carnage.
"Pretty awful, isn't it?" the sergeant asked. "No matter how many we killed, they kept on coming. I wouldn't have thought much of the Chinese before last night, but I've got to say, they are determined."
"Never seen anything like it," Cole agreed.
"Come on," the sergeant said.
They made their way to the next foxhole, the one from which the BAR had done its deadly work. Three lumps lay in the bottom, wrapped in their sleeping bags. Cole thought at first that they were dead. Sluggishly, the three men waved up at them. Haggard eyes peered out from under frosty helmets and hoods.
"You all right?" the sergeant asked.
"Need ammo," one of the soldiers stammered.
"I'll see what I can do," the sergeant said.
"Any chance of something hot to drink?"
"I've got to say, coffee is scarcer than bullets out there," the sergeant said. "But maybe the cooks can get a pot going."
"Amen to that."
They moved on. "If we're going to win this fight, we are definitely going to need hot coffee and bullets, in that order," the sergeant said.
Looking around at the frozen landscape, Cole said, "Don’t look promising."
"I was not joking when I said that hot coffee was going to be harder to find than bullets. We've got to worry about the cold as much as we do the Chinese."
"The cold don't run at you with bayonets, though," Cole pointed out.
"Yes, there is that."
He looked sideways at the sergeant, surprised that the man had singled Cole out to accompany him on these rounds. "Sarge, I got to say, I never reckoned that you liked me much."
Sergeant Weber snorted, causing a cloud of frozen breath to hang in the air before it was whisked away by the icy wind. "Back at that ambush on the road, I thought you were some kind of chicken shit. Nutzlos. Never fired a shot at the enemy. But then I got to thinking about it and realized that you weren't a coward. You were just keeping your cool, I guess you'd say. I see how you look out for that kid and even for Pomeroy. Anyhow, I saw you in action last night, Cole. You are no coward. You are a soldier. You never missed a shot."
"Everybody did what they had to do, or we wouldn’t be here today."
"There was some talk, you know, about you being a hot shot sniper back in France and Germany. Any truth to that?"
Cole took a while to answer. "Maybe some. I ain't no hot shot, though."
The sergeant gave him a look. "You sure about that? I seem to recall some stories about a sniper named Lucas Cole. One of the best. Some say he ought to have the Medal of Honor."
"Same name," Cole agreed. "But I ain't necessarily the same man, anymore."
"That might be said about any of us that was in the last war, Cole. Hell, that was five years ago. Half a decade. There were a lot of times back then that I didn't know if I was going to live another half a minute. Hell, I was fighting all of you. Americans. Yet here we are."
"Yep," Cole said, surveying the bleak scene around him. "Can’t say this place was worth the wait."
"Listen, Cole, what I wanted to say was that I told the lieutenant that you should be my replacement if some Chinese son of a bitch gets lucky."
Cole was taken aback. "Me?"
"Well, why not you? I'm half shot to pieces, Cole.” Weber often struggled to hide his accent, but he sounded very German when the word well slipped out with a “v” sound. “The men need someone to lead them if the other half of me gets shot up."