To the Last Man - Jeff Shaara [373]
FOR THREE NIGHTS, THE SILENT ATTACKS CONTINUED, THE MARINES capturing men in their tents, soldiers sleeping in blankets, camps of entire platoons. Most of the captives were taken without a shot being fired, no alerting the units who might have come to their aid. As the night began to give way to the sunrise, the German artillery began their predawn routine, firing into the American positions along their front. But the gunners had no idea that even as the big guns did their work, squads of American soldiers were surrounding them, the gunners suddenly gobbled up by the quick strike, their gun now silent.
With the sunrise, the Americans would be pulled back, their prisoners in tow, more than two thousand men swept right out of the German defenses. When the daylight attacks began, the morale of the German defenders had been devastated by the surprise raids and the sudden depletion of so many front-line units. By November 7, the American offensive had driven the Germans up and out of their final major entrenchment. To avoid the complete destruction of the last units who could still mount an effective defense, the German High Command ordered them to pull back again, to regroup and strengthen their lines, putting the natural barrier of the Meuse River between themselves and the pursuing Americans.
In front of the Second Division, the river was narrow and deep, and the far bank was a high bluff, the perfect kind of ground for a defense. All along the west bank of the river, the Americans pressed closer, and several miles to the south, the Fifth Division had already established a crossing. The area of the river confronted by the Second consisted of two sharp S curves that combined to form a W. At this particular sector of the line, the engineers who attempted to float their bridges across the twisting river could be caught in a perfect cross fire. The only possible way to push anyone across would be, of course, at night.
NEAR LETANNE—NOVEMBER 10, 1918
The faces were unfamiliar, but even among strangers, Temple could pick out the veterans from the men who had not yet lost a friend. The veterans were mostly quiet, mostly alone, hard men who stared into coffee cups, who ate the corned beef and gnawed at the dry bread without complaints. Even as they gathered to hear the instructions from the lieutenant, their thoughts were somewhere else, manic and restless behind silent eyes. Temple had felt it himself, sitting among squads of men he didn’t know, gathering to learn their new mission. But the lieutenant’s words simply drifted past him, and unlike the new men, he had learned that no matter the mission, the job would be the same. The officers always spoke of maps, and Temple knew that a man crawling through brush under the muzzles of the Maxim guns had no need for maps. The whole world was what you could see in your gun sight, and no matter how closely the replacements listened to the officer’s instructions, Temple’s mind pulled him back to those other missions, crawling through brush, sliding up beside concrete, the sound of Maxim guns and screaming men and the deafening punch of grenades.
If there was humor in the camps now, it came only from the replacements, the men who were still ignorant of the horror. They tormented each other with the same teasing insults, laughing at the men who slipped and fell into hidden