The cries of the wounded GI and of the boy seemed to grow louder.
Rohde let the earth hug his belly, and he settled down to wait for whatever target showed itself next.
Chapter Twenty-Five
High above the French countryside, a raven soared on outstretched wings, surveying the landscape.
Since ancient times, ravens had gathered in the skies above the battlefields of Europe. They were scavengers by nature, and instinct had long since taught them that where men clashed with weapons, the ravens would find rich rewards.
What seemed so gruesome to the survivors of battle was simply natural instinct to a raven.
If someone could have seen the French countryside with a raven's eye and cleared away all of the trees and hedgerows, all of the tall summer grass and stone walls, then the scene might resemble one of those miniature villages and landscapes in a train garden that sometimes appeared during the holidays.
But this was no peaceful holiday scene. In August 1944, the French countryside was a tableau of violence.
First, the eye would be captured by entire units on the move. It was rather an awesome sight. Masses of American troops crept forward, tiny figures in olive drab, while in the distance were English, Canadian, and even Polish troops.
Blue-gray uniforms on the tableau showed the German forces, forming well-demarcated defensive lines. Here and there, pockets of soldiers in olive drab and blue-gray uniforms faced each other across fields and woodlands.
These forces included the British 2nd Army, Canadian 1st Army, Polish troops, and the German 7th Army and 5th Panzer Division.
By early August, the Germans were boxed into an area 20 miles long and five miles deep. Allied forces were squeezing in on them from three sides. This was the beginning of what would come to be known as the Falaise Gap or Pocket. The French and British pronounced it as poh-ket.
Not particularly notable for any strategic value, it was simply one of those turns of fate that all these troops seemed fated to clash here at Falaise and Argentan. This was where the German 7th Army had found itself herded by circumstance as Allied forces pushed in. Like water finding its level, the German troops had filed into a wide valley ringed by low hills. The Allies wasted no time getting artillery position on those hills, and then opened fire.
It was not unlike the situation that had brought Union and Confederate troops to clash at the town of Gettysburg in the Pennsylvania countryside eighty years before. No one had set out to fight a battle there. The names of commanders then had been Lee and Longstreet and Meade. Now it was Patton and Von Kluge and Montgomery.
Not even the Germans were sure how many troops were caught in this gap, but it was anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 men — a vast number of German soldiers whose destruction seemed near.
On August 12, however, General Omar Bradley ordered Patton to halt his steamrolling advance. His 3rd Army had been surging across Germany, sometimes moving faster than the Germans could retreat. At these orders, Patton was almost apoplectic, considering that the total annihilation of German forces seemed within his grasp.
At least, that was how Patton saw it. Bradley's view was that Patton's lines were stretched too thin as it was, to the point that the Germans might break through, with disastrous results. In typical Bradley fashion, he later explained that he'd rather have Patton offer a strong shoulder to prop up the Allied advance than to suffer a broken neck.
Having been on Ike's naughty list for most of the previous year, Patton decided to obey orders. With the advance stopped, it left a gap just two miles wide in the Allied lines. Still, thousands of German troops managed to escape toward Germany through that gap.
The noose around German forces at Falaise and Argentan kept tightening.
The Germans were not helped by the fact that their commander, Von Kluge, had been ordered back to Germany on August 18. He was a suspected conspirator in the attempt on Hitler's life. Rather than face punishment, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide.
Walter Modell replaced Von Kluge. Though late to the game, Modell was an adept and capable general. He threw himself into the chaos of this last stand, hoping to keep much of the army intact to fight another day, in Germany itself.
If the raven overhead had good weather for flying, so did the Allied planes.
The weather in early August was all blue skies and sunshine, made to order for air operations. The Luftwaffe was virtually gone, either destroyed on the ground in Operation Cobra and subsequent bombing, or simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of Allied fighters. The German airmen were mostly inexperienced and poorly trained at this point.
Goring had proven to be a poor choice to head up the Luftwaffe throughout the war. One could only imagine the different outcome of the air war if an Admiral Donitz had been in charge. Unlike the Luftwaffe, the Kriegsmarine remained a dangerous adversary.
The British Hawker Typhoons and P-47 Thunderbolts flew their sorties, mostly unchallenged, unleashing their bombs, rockets, and machine guns on German targets. And it was a target-rich environment, with trains, tanks, and convoys ripe for the taking.
Despite the Allied planes, German tanks roamed the tableau like iron wolves, looking to pick off prey.
All in all, it was battle on a massive, sprawling scale. The movement of men and machines appeared impersonal and remote. But each of those tiny figures below represented a life filled with hopes and desires and fears. The cold eye of the raven was indifferent to their fates.
Here and there stood a quiet stone farmhouse, surrounded on all sides by troops and tanks. Seeing the violence to come, one hoped that the occupants had fled.
One such farmstead was Lisette's. This morning, the raven's eye would have picked out the figure of Lisette, running frantically from the house to the barn to the fields, searching for her nephew, who was nowhere to be found.
If the raven squinted, he might even have seen the small figures of American soldiers moving across the landscape, toward a skirmish being fought across a small field not far from Argentan.
Far below, one of those snipers looked up, put his rifle to his shoulder, and shot the raven from the sky.
Chapter Twenty-Six
"Show off," Vaccaro said. "Nobody else I know can hit a bird flying."
"I don't much like ravens," Cole responded. "Devil birds, if you ask me. Shot that one through the eye."
Vaccaro snorted.
Cole moved down the dirt road, eyes scanning to the horizon. Maybe Vaccaro was right and shooting the bird was showing off, but he'd had an itchy trigger finger all morning. Short of any available Germans, he'd had to shoot something, goddammit.
The morning light was still growing, promising more sunny weather. After the clouds and gloom of early summer, this was a welcome change. It was as if the sun knew that there was a war going on, and showed its disapproval by withholding its warmth. He had longed for a single summer day from back home, with the sky bright blue against the mountains and a warm breeze scented with woods and wildflowers.
They had started off crossing grass, leaving their boots wet with dew, and now the dust from the road clung to them. He remembered all that spit and polish bullshit from boot camp. Cole hadn't seen the point. Hell, he was just glad to have boots. There had been plenty of times, as a boy, when he'd simply gone barefoot.
With growing wariness, he saw the countryside close in around them as they walked. For a mountain boy, it was a claustrophobic feeling. The countryside here was too flat. Cole longed for a hill to climb so that he could get the lay of the land. So far, he was not enamored of France. He thought that the whole landscape looked too tame from centuries of farming.