The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [163]
"Army beat them good, hah?" the GI responded appreciatively. "Twenty-three to seven, right, sir?"
"Navy never stood a chance against guys who can run the ball like Pilchard and Travis," Ben offered his analysis. Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel during this football talk, Maurice looked over at him with abstract curiosity. Ben breezed on, "I didn't get to hear the game, so I missed out on the details—who got the touchdowns?"
The soldier worked at remembering. "Pilchard and Travis had one each, I think, sir."
Ben reached casually to his side and pulled out the .45 pistol. "It's Blanchard and Davis, kamerad." Then shot the man in the shoulder before he could yank the rifle up into action.
With that one crying out in German as he writhed on the ground, Ben for good measure fired a couple of shots up at the phone-line saboteurs. One hurled the tool bag and hit the hood of the jeep as Maurice jammed into reverse, while the other sought the skinny shelter of the pole as he tried to pull a pistol from the unfamiliar American holster with a flap. The jeep careening backward was well out of range down the road, when Maurice swung it around and tromped on the accelerator.
As the jeep roared its way back to the main road, they could already see a confusion of American and British military traffic ahead, armored vehicles streaming toward the German breakthrough on the Ardennes front and ambulances forcing through in the opposite direction. It was mid-December, and the moving wall of oblivion that Allied troops would call the Battle of the Bulge was set into motion.
21
(TPWP priority dispatch—Antwerp—byline Reinking)
German armored columns pierced the Allied lines in a surprise counterattack today along the Ardennes front. The offensive, spearheaded by tanks, took advantage of a ghostly infiltration by English-speaking Germans in U.S. Army uniforms who cut phone lines and changed road signs, sowing confusion behind the lines from the Ardennes forest to Antwerp.
Royal Air Force Lieutenant Maurice Overby and I witnessed this dark art of sabotage at a place haunted with history's bloody joust of armies, the battlefield of Waterloo. Our jeep was hailed by a rifle-carrying soldier, his GI uniform appropriately grimy and a footslogger's usual complaints ready on his lips....
Apprehensively, Ben watched while Maurice read the piece, as if chewing every word and letting it digest. The wire clerk, bored, took off his glasses, polished them, held them up to the light, polished them some more.
Finally Maurice issued with a polite but firm frown: "Sorry, Ben, but this simply cannot be let pass."
No, no, goddamn it, Maurice, oh please. My biggest story of the war and you're going to sit on it. Why couldn't you tell me that before I busted my butt writing it? Anguished words building in him for what he knew would be a futile protest, he was stopped by the censorious finger significantly tapping the first sheet of copy paper.
"Flattering as it would be to have my name entered in posterity in this fashion," Maurice was holding forth, "you must strike it. Regulations." He handed Ben the full set of pages.
"That's it? That's all?"
"Right." Unmoving as a crate, Maurice stood watching Ben's pencil slash out his name and dab in substitute wording. He nodded in satisfaction and walked off as Ben thrust the pages to the waiting wire clerk.
(New lede—byline Reinking)
Allied forces are trying to regroup along a shattered Ardennes front, where German tank columns shadowed by Wehrmacht foot soldiers