Cool Hand Luke - Donn Pearce [51]
The tanks saved him. The leader of the rumbling column opened up with its gun, the Germans falling back, Luke’s own platoon coming out from cover, crossing the bridge and carrying him to the rear. Once again he was hospitalized. And once again he was decorated. But this time it was done during formal ceremonies, the presentation made by a lieutenant general with a band and a color guard. And this time the star was silver.
Again Luke was sent to the front, he himself a sergeant now and the squad leader. He still carried his banjo slung across his pack but he didn’t have as much time for banjo picking. And he drank more and more. Deeper into Germany they went. The war moved faster, the chaos mounting into a climax of lust, confusion and destruction. The concentration camps began to be liberated. The ovens were found. Germans began surrendering by units. Germans began fighting to the last man. German deserters were found hung from lamp posts bearing signs of disgrace on their chests. German boys became Werewolves.
Luke and his men rolled on, moving too fast to wash or shave, too fast to think or feel, demented by their conquest, their immortality. They carried bottles in their packs. They confiscated civilian cars and charged over pastures and fields like a squadron of mad cavalry pursuing the enemy in any direction, they cared not which. Prisoners were fed. Prisoners were shot. Girls were given chocolate bars. Girls were raped. Orphans were given shelter. Homes were broken into and ransacked.
In a castle on a hill over a village by a river that none of them could name, having lost a fourth of their number in a ferocious fight that lasted for three days, Luke’s company was quartered for a temporary rest. But they didn’t want to rest. With the tacit permission of the lieutenant who had taken command the day before when the Captain’s jeep ran over an anti-tank mine that blew off both an arm and a leg, the company of soldiers began to loot the place in an orgy of vandalism. Silver was taken, the contents of closets strewn open and trampled on. They shot down a painting of a high ranking officer, laughing hilariously when one of them urinated on it. They shot down chandeliers. Cabinets were smashed open and liqueurs guzzled. They slit open sofas with bayonets, broke windows, built up a fire in the fireplace and fed it with smashed furniture. An old man came tottering in, yelling his protests until he was smashed in the mouth with a rifle butt. Hysterical children were rounded up and locked in a room with an old nurse. Then the women were rounded up, the servants as well as the Countess and her family, all of them carried off kicking and screaming into various rooms to be stripped and mauled and ravaged over and over again.
Luke followed one of them up the curving stairway as she tried to escape the mob carousing in the hall below, screaming, giving the Nazi salute, cheering, bellowing their drunken laughter as Luke followed behind her, playing a hoe-down melody on his banjo. Trying to cover herself with the torn remains of her clothing she fled from floor to floor, screeching as the haunting strings pursued her with relentless purpose. Reaching the top of the tower she locked herself in a room. But Luke followed, never missing a note, kicking