In Sunlight and in Shadow (61 page)

Listening for trains as if it were his profession, he found himself in a combat of endurance with the sun, until in late afternoon the shadows of the hill relieved him of this struggle so he could assume another. A train was in the west. It had chanced Allied strafing and was headed to St. Lô, its flatcars loaded with some of the tanks and assault guns of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen. Without knowing why, Harry stirred, having heard it before he knew he had heard it. And then he did hear it, and before he was sure of what it was, his heart began to pound anyway. As it got closer and louder, he could feel the rumble, and then he heard the sharp exhalations of steam from the pistons as, with their angry, stuttered rhythms, they seemed to curse the countryside.

He looked left, right, and behind. He checked his weapons. Though in the heat-filled hours he had mentally rehearsed many times what he was going to do, he began to tremble slightly with fear. It was the kind of fear, however, that never fails to be transformed into a heavy calm. And he understood that the next few minutes might be his last. At some point, uncontrolled by either will or the prospects of success, something apart from oneself takes over, working alongside and flooding the body with grace, or perhaps failing to do so entirely.

Fear turned to light and heat when Harry saw even puffs of steam scoring a cloud-white line against the sky above the sheds and hedges west of the bridge. Like the charge of a whole brigade, the oncoming train transformed everything into action. He sighted the carbine on one of the two sentries standing on the east side of the bridge. They had moved off the track and were looking into the headlight of the oncoming locomotive as it rounded a slight bend. Harry shot one, and then the other not a second later. Both crumpled forward onto the rails nearest them. The first remained motionless, and would be hit by the train; the other rolled back and fell into the river, where he would drown. By that time, Harry had shot the two on the west abutment, who, deafened by the train, had heard only muted reports or perhaps nothing at all. For the same reason, no one in the guardhouses rushed out.

As the first of tandem locomotives began to cross the bridge, Harry shouldered the bazooka, aimed at the boiler, and, following it in a smooth leftward traverse, pulled the trigger. Though he was close, he was still far enough away so that he had had to elevate for distance when he shot the sentries, but with a rocket no such reckoning was required: it was a point-blank weapon with no ballistic trajectory. It closed upon its unknowing target, passed through the bridge frame, and struck, its detonation followed by the great concussion of a pressurized boiler blowing with explosive assist.

Harry had already reloaded. Bringing up the bazooka, he watched what was left of the lead locomotive turn sideways and tip onto the track, squealing miserably as it ripped against the rails. The second then derailed and went into the river, taking with it three flatcars on which were two StuG IVs and a French tank that had been defaced with an iron cross. There was a terrible noise as the rest of the train derailed, tumbling its heavy vehicles upside down. Soldiers rushed forward, cocking their weapons, shouting, not knowing where to fire. Some looked up, thinking they had been attacked from the air.

Aiming at a boxcar leaning halfway over the water, Harry launched the second rocket. The soldiers running onto the bridge saw it coming and turned back, only to collide with newly dismounted guards from the rear of the train, but it was too late for all of them. The rocket went through the wood walls of the boxcar with a thump like that of an arrow in a straw target, and then it blew. Even Harry was thrown back. He had hit an ammunition carriage, which took down the bridge, all the buildings, and several flatcars behind it loaded with StuG IVs.

The explosion was so powerful that Harry was deafened and stunned. Nauseated and shaken, he picked up the carbine and waited for others to appear. None did. So he stood up. As his ears slowly cleared, he saw that what he had wrought was far beyond his expectations—although nothing more than what might have come from the single pass of a fighter plane. As he stared at the ruins he had made, some Germans who were doing the same walked into view as if from stage right. He saw them first, and could have dropped down, but he remembered what he was supposed to accomplish. He lifted the carbine and took aim, but waited until they would look in his direction. What seemed like a long time passed, but when they did, they saw him clearly enough in the instant before he started shooting to know that they were now fighting Americans. He hit at least two of them, and then both parties took cover and, to little avail, began firing. For Harry it was a question of emptying his magazines fast enough so they would think they faced at least a squad. He shot left and right, at the remains of the locomotive to make a series of pings from the east, at the one window left in a shack on the hillside, so as to smash it dramatically, and in a line across the entire front, as if the fire were coming from different angles. With half a magazine left, he stopped. His hands steady, he lit the twisted fuses. Then he put the two empty magazines in his right pocket, fired fifteen more rounds very quickly, reloaded with the full magazine, pocketed the empty third, buttoned the pockets, pushed himself backward down the slope, turned, and ran. In boots, steel helmet, and a heavy tunic, carrying a loaded carbine and three empty magazines, he ran faster than he had ever run in his life. The more speed he developed, the more he sought. Halfway to the bend where he would cross back, he heard the first explosion of plastique, but did not turn around. Then he heard another sound, another thump like an arrow, and he tumbled down and forward, having been pushed there by a bullet striking just above his left shoulder blade.

He gasped as he tumbled, still gripping the carbine with his right hand while the left seemed no longer to exist. When the second explosion came, he turned as best he could to fight, but saw no one. Surprised to see that the fields were empty, he resumed his flight, with pain at each step and blood running warmly down his front. Struggling for breath, he slowed to a walk, and while still walking removed a pressure bandage from a pocket, opened it, kept the wrapping balled up in his right hand for fear of leaving a trace, and, carbine slung against his back, applied the bandage as best he could. In a minute or two he reached the place where he had ferried the river, and threw himself violently into the water both from urgency and because he had lost his balance. He sank all the way and swallowed some of the muddy Terrette, but then began to swim with his right arm and kicks. He tried not to choke on the water that was choking him, to keep the carbine, to retain the bandage, to get to the other side. He thought that when he would reach the east bank his pursuers would take careful aim and he would die. But with no time to look back he fought through foam and bubbles, swallowing river water mixed with his own blood.

When he got to shore he pulled himself up on a flat rock and turned to see what was behind him. Nothing but the slight chime of the river. He half dragged himself, half scrambled on his knees to the thicket in which he had hidden the rest of his things, and there burrowed into the vegetation as deeply as he could. He tried to catch his breath. Using his good hand, he wrung out the bandage and began alternating applications to the entry and exit wounds.

Then, allowing the wound to bleed, he readied the carbine and peered through branches and young grass at the opposite bank. Six soldiers were coming up from the south, cautiously in fear of an ambush. They may have felt outnumbered. Though occasionally they would glance across the river, the ground there seemed empty, and they were focused north, where the invasion was in progress and where the train they had lucklessly been escorting had been rushing. Harry watched as they came level with him, and prepared to fight as best he could. But they moved on. Perhaps they didn’t want to find him.

Before dark, he went east two hedgerows, south a field or two, and concealed himself in a thicket that long before had smothered a stone wall. Until it was pitch black, he stayed here and concentrated upon stopping the flow of blood, which he did after having torn the bandage in his teeth and applied half to the entrance and half to the exit wounds. At first the gauze was as soaked with blood as it had been in the river, but then the open air took away enough moisture from the surface to harden it, and the clotting worked its way down. He sat upright so as not to increase blood flow at his shoulder. Every minute that passed without bleeding was a victory. Rather than elation, what he experienced was both deeper and quieter.

It took most of the night to move six or seven kilometers. The roads were far more alive than they had been, with military convoys’ red blackout lights strung like coals sometimes for half a mile. He neither saw nor heard any patrols, and what he feared most, tracking dogs, did not appear. Nor did their distant barks that, when heard by their quarry, would cause the unconscious and unavoidable production of a scent that for them made pursuit both easier and more exciting.

Though afraid to follow the river directly back to his hiding place in the Bois de Soulles, he was too weak not to. When he arrived, an hour before dawn, he threw down the pack and the carbine, sank to his knees, ate and drank methodically and for strength, wrapped the blanket around his upper body, lowered himself onto his right side, and slept. Were they to find him they would find him asleep, but sleep would be worth the trade. In the minute before he found his rest, the whole world spun before his eyes: trains moving, metal flying in slow motion, sounds deafening, men falling, water rising in white, saplings slapping him in the face, darkness, concussions, running, rocket trails, smoke.

Splayed out, hardly able to move, throbbing with pain and sweating with fever even in the morning, he awakened not with soldierly caution before dawn but carelessly late and facing a white-hot sun. It seemed strange not to be able to turn his head or rise, to be dizzy and weak and as vulnerable as a baby. As he lay there undiscovered, he was of a delirious two minds. One was almost pridefully appreciative of the hiding place that shielded him from the Wehrmacht and the SS. The other was aware of the soldiers missing in action as the armies passed on to further objectives. So many little clearings, tangles of brush, ditches, trenches, and canals were the quiet resting places of bodies that would never be buried, their graves as painfully open as the hearts of those who grieved until they would follow.

After half an hour of effort, he managed to roll fully onto his back. Some time later, breathing hard, he was able to turn his head and look at the exit wound. It was difficult to see exactly what was going on because blood, gauze, flesh, cloth, and dirt were combined in an unintelligible mass that was so hot he could feel it on the left side of his face. “God,” he said to himself, dismayed that infection could gallop so fast.

He could neither move, nor defend himself, nor hope to be found. Were the Germans to find him, they would kill him. Were the farmer to find and shelter him, they would kill the farmer as well. There was little danger that anyone would happen upon him where he was, unless like the Germans they had dogs, and he wondered how long he could last, and, if he could last, how he would be able to make his way out. Very much unlike him, he thought he couldn’t. Shock, exhaustion, and the pathogens liberally applied to his wound at the riverside as he crawled over open soil combined to make him less than optimistic. Because he had been deathly ill not a few times in childhood, he knew how sickness smoothes the way. It wasn’t just a question of weakening the will, but of opening to the sick a vision of things they cannot see when life runs strongly—of rhythms, signs, signals, lights, and mercies that one can apprehend only as one falls.

Though it seemed to make no sense given what he knew of his injury, he was so intensely stricken that he would fall asleep and awaken without knowing how much time had passed, and then stay awake for how much time he could not tell. But somewhere in the in-and-out he reasoned with himself, inquiring if in fact he had another wound. To investigate, first he moved his legs, which seemed all right, and then he inspected his arms, which were all right, too. He unbuttoned his tunic and felt under his shirt. His chest was unbroken. These movements made him slightly more supple and freed him to prospect over a wider range. Doing so, he managed to get his right hand around his back, where he immediately felt a hole in the cloth. Following this with his finger, he discovered that it was only the preface to a small hole in his lower back that, though it seemed not to bleed, was still open. This, then, was why he was so sick. One bullet had passed through him, but another remained within.

Although he couldn’t tell where it had lodged and what processes it had interrupted, he believed that it might kill him—which in those momentous years and that momentous week would have been no great distinction. It was so easy for the power of life simply to drain away. With the opening of an interior channel that must remain closed, or the closing of one that must remain open, strength once admirable and extraordinary would become weakness. And in a man, although his strength would never grow beyond a very small capacity—he would never lift a hill, run thirty miles in an hour, or swim the ocean—it was certain that one day his weakness would become infinite. All the soldiers Harry had seen stopped dead by a bullet or shell were instantly thrown back to the eternity whence they had come, and were just gone. This was the essential condition, the truth of the world, all life only a short liberty away from it.

As he couldn’t move from where he was, couldn’t treat himself, and couldn’t know the full facts of his condition, and as night approached and he wanted rest, he did what he had hoped never to do. Not so much to alleviate the pain but rather to take himself away from the fight, he took out the box with the morphine, uncapped the syringe, and plunged it into his thigh as once he had been instructed. Even before it took effect, everything changed. He had willfully and at great risk removed himself from the battle. This was because he knew that were strength to flood back it would be only if every door were opened wide, every chance embraced, and his every trust made absolute. As the morphia began to stream through his system and carry him away, he looked at his hands, and when they seemed to become bodiless before the rest of him and to rise without weight, he knew he was almost gone.