Everybody knew that there were good officers and bad officers. But a good sergeant did his duty regardless. He owed the men that much. A few minutes later, when Norton gave the order, Woodbine got everyone up and moving.
In the dawn light, the unit continued moving east. The unit had been cobbled together and it showed in the way that the men drew invisible lines among themselves. There seemed to be a grudging silence hanging over the men. This came from being a unit that was cobbled together, an end result that was more like hamburger or sausage than steak. Cole and Vaccaro, along with the two men from their original squad, had slept apart from the others and eaten their rations together. The other men did the same.
Normally, soldiers from different units got along well enough, even if they didn't work together with the easy familiarity of men who had fought side by side for weeks. These men lacked cohesion. They were missing that element of trust, a bond of brotherhood, that only came from weeks together in the field.
Soldiers from different units were normally happy to trade anything, especially news and Army gossip. But Captain Norton's actions in taking away Cole's rifle had driven a wedge between the two groups. It was bad enough that there were Germans to worry about without dealing with the whims of bad officers, but that was the Army for you.
Cole pushed his thoughts aside and focused on the countryside around them. No sense letting himself get killed over being distracted by Norton. The grease gun wouldn't be much of a defense until the Germans materialized within spitting distance, but his eyes never stopped searching the roadside fields and woods for any threat.
His eyes felt gritty from lack of sleep. Captain Norton hadn't bothered to post a guard. When Sergeant Woodbine had suggested it, the captain claimed it wasn’t necessary. Cole and Vaccaro had taken turns sleeping during the night. No matter what the captain said, Cole knew that the Germans wouldn't mind cutting their throats during the night, never mind the fact that they were retreating.
The rain had let up, so that was something.
Summer was giving way to fall. They could feel it in the chill mornings and in the way that the shadows stretched long and dark by late afternoon. Fall always had been Cole's favorite time of year in the mountains.
They were heading east toward the Moselle River. Trouble was, so were several thousand Germans. They couldn't exactly complain that they had not run into any Wehrmacht troops, but the thought of entire German divisions on the move made them uneasy. At any moment, they might run into a rearguard unit — or worse, into a panzer.
Signs of the Germans were everywhere. They passed the ruins of several tanks, reduced to blackened hulks of steel thanks to the P47 Thunderbolts constantly hunting for German columns. They also encountered more than a few dead Germans. Some wore the headgear of tank crew members, and their bodies tended to be badly burned. Either their comrades had been in too much of a hurry to bury them, or maybe there hadn't been anyone left alive to see to the task. The lucky ones now lay in fresh graves in the nearby fields, marked by makeshift crosses.
Some of the men in Captain Norton's unit paused to plunder the bodies. The smell was awful, but that didn't keep them from searching for prized SS insignia or possibly a Luger. Cole and the others looked on with disapproval. Norton should have put a stop to it, but he himself couldn't seem to resist doing his share of plundering. While his men scoured the remains of a tank, Norton bent over a body and removed the dead German's Hundemarken—the Wehrmacht's version of dog tags.
"That's pretty low for an officer," Vaccaro muttered.
"I reckon he’s a ninety-day wonder," Cole replied, referring to the three-month training program that turned recent college graduates into officers. “Not much better than a shavetail.”
A shavetail was derogatory slang for a new lieutenant that referred to an old Army term for untrained mules, back when they had pulled supply wagons. Norton was actually worse than a shavetail because he seemed to know just enough to be confident in his own abilities, and thus, all the more dangerous.
As a result of this fascination with collecting souvenirs, their pace through the countryside was slow and Norton's men were paying more attention to the dead Germans than they were to the possibility that live Germans could appear at any moment and turn them into dead Americans.
Norton's sergeant drifted toward Cole and the other snipers. He was a big man, well over six feet tall, and the fact that he stooped constantly to make himself less of a target gave him a lumbering appearance.
"Dumbasses," he said, nodding at the men poking at the German bodies. "One of those Krauts is gonna be booby-trapped, and then that'll be the end of that."
"Captain ought to put a stop to it," Cole said.
"You try telling him," the sergeant said. He spat. "He ain't gonna listen to me."
"Then he sure as hell won't listen to me," Cole said. "I don't reckon we hit it off too good."
The sergeant made a noise that could have been a laugh, if there had been any mirth in it. "The name's Woodbine," he said.
"I'm Cole. That there's Vaccaro."
"I've been in France since Utah beach. How about you boys?"
"Omaha," Cole said.
Sergeant Woodbine gave a low whistle. "Omaha, huh? I understand that was some shit."
"Didn't nobody get a welcome mat put out for them that day, no matter what beach you was on.” Cole thought about Jimmy Turner, just nineteen years old, machine-gunned by the Germans despite Cole’s efforts to keep him alive. “We done lost a lot of good men that day.”
"You'd be right about that," Woodbine said. He lowered his voice. "Listen, that business about the captain taking your rifle away… well, it just isn't right, but there's not a damn thing I can do about it. Norton makes his own rules."
"Ain't your fault," Cole said. "It is what it is."
"Still, it doesn't mean I agree with it. I said something about it, and he told me to go to hell. You said your name was Cole?" His eyes went to the Confederate flag that Jimmy Turner had painted on Cole’s helmet. The sergeant's eyebrows went up in recognition. "Say, you're that sniper, aren’t you? The one that was in the newspaper? I remember the helmet from the picture.”
Cole looked away. ”I don't know what you're talkin' about."
The sergeant snorted. "Ha! Just how many guys named Cole are there walking around with sniper rifles?”
Vaccaro spoke up. "It's him, all right, Sergeant. You won’t find a better shot in the whole damn Army.”
“Which makes it even dumber that Norton took your rifle away,” Woodbine said. With a frown, he reached into his pocket and produced a roll of medical tape. He tore off a couple of strips and gave them to Cole. “Norton wanted you to cover up that flag, so I’d do just that if I were you. If Norton is happy, then we’ll all be happy.”
Cole slapped the tape haphazardly across the front of the helmet. ”Officers always reckon they know better."
"They do now, don't they? He—" Woodbine started to say more, but was cut short when Cole grabbed the sergeant by the shoulder and shoved him toward the ground. Half a second later, a mortar round exploded in the road ahead. The screaming that followed told them that someone had been hit.
"Germans!" Norton shouted.
Vaccaro snorted. "What the hell did he expect? Vikings?"
They scrambled behind the wrecked hulk of a tank. A couple of bullets pinged off the blackened armor. Captain Norton ran to join them, crouching behind the wrecked tank and figuring out what to do next.
After these many months in France, Norton's men were far from being greenhorns. They hadn't frozen in the road but had scattered toward whatever shelter they could find. The trouble was that they were keeping their heads down, not bothering to shoot back. The man who had been hit by mortar shrapnel lay writhing in the road. There was no hope of helping him, not with the Germans shooting at them.