“Sarge, you think I should go down and tell the Bon-nards?”
“Tell them what?”
“About Sonny,” Farrel said. “It seems to me one of us should tell Felice about it.”
“All right, tell Felice. If there’s anything of his she’d like, a snapshot—” He let out his breath. “Make it fast, we still got a gun section here.”
Corporal Schmitzer had wrapped the bodies of Jackson Baird and Sonny Laurel in tarpaulins and taken them to the high ground in the woods and laid them down alongside Gelnick. They had found no radio in the VIII Corps jeep, only maps of the area, GI binoculars, a thermos of cold coffee, a pack of Camel cigarettes... and stenciled under the lining of the driver’s seat — WAFFEN SS CAPTAIN WALTER BRECHT.
On Docker’s orders Linari parked the jeep behind a stand of shrapnel-torn bushes and joined Solvis and Kohler in repositioning and reloading the guns.
After the bodies of Captain Walter Brecht and Colonel Karl Jaeger had been covered, Trankic and Docker walked to the shelf in front of the revetment and looked out over the valley. Trankic uncapped his canteen and offered it to Docker. “Only thing. Bull, there’s nothing fucking much to drink to.”
“What about Christmas?”
“Sure,” Trankic said. “I forgot about that.”
The German officer had said something to Docker before he died, something about war being the trade of kings. Docker wasn’t sure he understood that, and anyway, it all depended where you were when the war was going on.
“So Merry Christmas,” he said.
The two soldiers drank from their canteen cups, the cold metal rims burning their lips, and looked down the slopes of Mont Reynard, where the falling snow turned blue on the smoke rising from the wreckage of the German tank.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
February 14, 1945. Liège, Belgium. Wednesday, 0830 Hours.
Liège, capital of the Belgian province of the same name — on the Meuse in the heart of Walloon country — is an industrial center of several hundred thousand inhabitants.
The city (with Antwerp) had been a top priority target for German V-1 and V-2 rockets during the Battle of the Bulge. When that offensive was finally checked and contained, Liège remained a functioning city, although many of its boulevards and buildings had been shattered by months of rocket and artillery fire.
A number of main streets were blocked off to traffic, and the walls of most hotels and office buildings had been shored up with wooden scaffoldings and stacked rows of sandbags. A nighttime blackout was in effect, but the essential activities of Liège continued to flourish; shops and markets opened at dawn and the city’s avenues funneled traffic from the Channel ports toward First Army’s supply depots. The Army’s administrative offices were now being transferred closer to the increasingly stable front but ranking officers were still quartered in a complex of buildings on the outskirts of the city in an area known as Brabant Park.
On a cold, sunny morning, Buell Docker drove into Liège and parked on a crowded street near the Hotel Leopold, a massive gray stone building which had been requisitioned by First Army as a billet and mess for transient officers. The hotel straddled an intersection of avenues near the railway station and central flower markets.
At the reception desk an elderly clerk looked at his orders and directed Docker to a room on the third floor, where a wrought-iron balcony crusted with soot-grained snow gave him a view of river bridges and church steeples.
The room was warm, but the water in the bathroom taps was as cold as if it had been piped over open ground from a freezing river. He showered quickly, standing next to a sputtering radiator to towel himself down, then opened his duffel bag to change into a clean uniform and an Eisenhower jacket with the faded outline of his sergeant’s stripes on the sleeves. The gold bars on the shoulders had been lent by Captain Grant when Docker was commissioned in the field to replace Lieutenant Longworth...
Gun Section Eight was relieved from its position on Mont Reynard in the last week of December and posted to a temporary staging area west of Namur. In the last six weeks, Docker and Trankic (now sergeant) were occupied writing reports on their losses in personnel and equipment, answering interrogatories from Graves Registration and supervising the instruction of recruits assigned to the section and platoon from redeployment depots.
Each member of Section Eight (except Schmitzer) had been queried by Air Force Intelligence to collate their impressions about the speed, tactics, performance and silhouette patterns of the ME-262 jet aircraft the section had shot down over Mont Reynard on the afternoon of December 20th.
Docker was asked by Captain Joe Grant to prepare a report on the movements of his section (casualties, actions engaged in, exact route of march) during the thirteen days the unit had been out of communication with Battery and Battalion headquarters.
Three weeks later Captain Richard Travolta from First Army’s Judge Advocate’s staff visited Dog Battery at the staging area west of Namur to take depositions from the section regarding the action and casualties on Mont Reynard, the specific thrust of his inquiry focusing on the deaths of privates Samuel Gelnick and Jackson Baird.
As a result of these interviews and statements — despite them or because of some lack in them, Docker wasn’t sure which — Docker had been ordered to report to Liège on this date, February 14th, 1945, to give additional testimony at a board of special inquiry convened by First Army...
A knock sounded now and a woman’s voice called something in French that he couldn’t make out. He opened the door and a thin maid looked inquiringly at him and made exaggerated gestures of using a scrubbing board. Docker pointed to his duffel bag and told her he’d appreciate it if she’d take care of his laundry.
A male voice hailed him from the end of the corridor. “Lieutenant Docker? We’ve been expecting you.”
An officer with captain’s bars on his jacket stood in the open door of the elevator. “I’m Captain Walton. Traffic here’s a pain in the ass, so let’s get moving.”
“Be right with you, sir.” Docker picked up his overcoat and joined the captain. They rode to the first floor in silence and walked out to the curving driveway where a PFC waited for them beside a covered jeep.
When they pulled away from the curb, the captain said, “Major Karsh runs a shop so tight your asshole will be squeaking. I hope you had breakfast.”
“I’m fine, sir,” Docker said.
“Good, real good. You field soldiers never stand short, I guess.”
Captain Walton was in his early thirties, slender and tidily put together with a thin, blond mustache that drooped like wilted feathers at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were round and blue behind steel-rimmed glasses, which lent an old-fashioned look to his narrow, youthful face.
“Hey, isn’t it about time for the goddamn spurs and bat?”
Docker glanced at him in surprise but saw that Walton was speaking to his driver, who was leaning on the horn as he maneuvered the jeep through columns of big army trucks.
The driver laughed. “Bat and spurs ain’t half of it. I’m giving every damn horse I got his head this morning.”
“My driver’s a rowdy old boy from Tennessee,” Walton said. “Unbroken, uncivilized, un-everything you can think of, but still the best goddamn jeep jockey in the whole First Army...” Walton stroked his mustache. “I’m sure, lieutenant, you’re curious about these hearings, but Major Karsh will spell that out for you. He runs a tight ship, like I said. Nobody at the wheel but the skipper. You get the idea?”