第 51 页

'I have started preparing the food for your battalion as requested in overnight orders, sir. What ... ?'

'You needn't bother with the food for now, Colonel. At first light this morning Lieutenant Burrows of the Ninth discovered an undamaged railroad bridge north of Remagen, and I gave orders that it should be crossed immediately and every effort made to establish a bridge head on the efst bank of the river. Up to now, the Germans have been successful in blowing up every bridge across the Rhine long before we reached it so we can't hang around waiting for lunch before they demolish this one.'

'Did the Ninth succeed in getting across?' asked a puffing Abel.

'Sure did,' replied the general, 'but they encountered heavy resistance when they reached the forest on the far side of the river. The first platoons were ambushed and God knows how many men we lost. So you had better eat the food yourself, Colonel, because my only interest is getting as many of my men back alive as possible!

'Is there anything I can do?' asked Abel.

The fighting commander stopped running for a moment and studied the fat colonel. 'How many men have you under your direct command?'

'One lieutenant, one sergeant, two corporals, and twenty-eight privates; thirty-three in all including myself, sir.'

'Good. Report to the field hospital with your men and make yourself useful out there by bringing back as many dead and wounded as you can find.'

'Yes, sir,' said Abel and ran all the way back to the field kitchen where he found his own men sitting in a corner smoking. None of them noticed when he entered the tent.

'Get up, you bunch of lazy bastards. We've got real work to do for a change.'

Thirty-two men snapped to attention.

'Follow me,' shouted Abel, 'on the double!'

He turned and started running again, this time towards the field hospital. A young doctor was briefing sixteen medical corpsmen when Abel and his out of breath, unfit men appeared at the entrance to the tent.

'Can I help you, sir?' asked the doctor.

'No, I hope I can help you,' replied Abel. 'I have thirty-two men here who have been detailed by General Leonard to -join your group' - it was the first time they had heard of it.

The doctor stared in amazement at the colonel. 'Yes, sir.'

'Don't call me sir,' said Abel. 'We're here to find out how we can assist you.'

'Yes, sir,' the doctor said again.

He handed Abel a carton of Red Cross armbands which the chefs, kitchen orderlies and potato peeler proceeded to put on as they listened to the doctor continue his briefing, giving details of the action in the forest on the far side of the Ludendorff bridge.

'The Ninth has sustained ' heavy casualties,' he continued. Those soldiers with medical-expertise will remain in the battle zone, while the rest of you will bring back as many of the wounded as possible to this field hospital.'

Abel was delighted at the opportunity to do something positive for a change. The doctor, now in command of a team of forty-nine men, passed out eighteen stretchers, and each soldier received a full medical pack. He then led his motley band towards the Ludendorff bridge. Abel was only a yard behind him. They started singing as they marched through the mud and rain; they stopped singing when they reached the bridge and were greeted by stretcher after stretcher showing clearly the outline of a body covered only in blankets. They marched silently across the bridge in single file by the side of the railroad track where they could see the results of the German explosion that had failed to destroy its foundations. On up towards the forest and the sound of fire, Abel found he was excited by the thought of being so near the enemy, and horrified by the realisation of what that enemy was capable of inflicting on his fellow countrymen. Everywhere he turned he saw, or worse, hearxi cries of anguish coming from his comrades. Comrades who until that day had wistfully thought the end of the war was near - but not that near.

He watched the young doctor stop again and again and do the best he could for each man. Sometimes he would mercifully kill a man quickly when there was not the slightest hope of trying to patch him up. Abel ran from soldier to soldier organising the stretchers of those unable to help themselves and guiding the wounded who could still walk back towards the Ludendorff bridge. By the time their group reached the edge of the forest only the doctor, one of the potato peelers and himself were left of the original party; all the others were carrying the dead and woundedback to the camp.

As the three of them marched into the forest they could hear the enemy guns close by. Abel could see the outline of a big gun, hidden in undergrowth and still pointing towards the bridge, but now damaged beyond repair. Then he heard a volley of bullets that sounded so loud that he realised for the first time that the enemy were only a few hundred yards ahead of him. He quickly crouched down on one knee, expectant, his senses heightened to screaming pitch. Suddenly there was another burst of fire in front of him.

He jumped up and ran forward, reluctantly followed by the doctor and the potato peeler. They ran on for another hundred yards, when they came across a beautiful stretch of lush green grass in a hollow covered in a bed of white crocuses, littered with the bodies of American soldiers. Abel and the doctor ran from corpse to corpse. 'It must have been a massacre,' screamed Abel in anger, as he heard the retreating fire. The doctor made no comment: he had screamed three years before.

'Don't worry about the dead,' was all he said. 'Just see if you can find anyone who is still alive.'

'Over here,' shouted Abel as he kneeled down beside a sergeant lying in the German mud. Both his eyes were missing.

'He's dead, Colonel,' said the doctor, not giving the man a second glance. Abel ran to the next body and then the next but it was always the same and only the sight of a severed head placed upright in the mud stopped Abel in his tracks. He kept having to look back at it, like the bust of some Greek god that could no longer move. Abel recited like a child words he had learned at the feet of the Baron: ' "Blood and destruction shall be so in use and dreadful objects so familiar that mothers shall but smile when they behold their infants quarter'd with the hands of war." Does nothing change?' said Abel outraged.

'Only the battlefield,' replied the doctor.

When Abel had checked thirty - or was it forty men? - he once again returned to the doctor who was trying to save the life of a captain who but for a closed eye and his mouth was already swathed in blood-soaked bandages. Abel stood over the doctor watching helplessly, studying the captain's shouldefpatch - the Ninth Armoured - and remembered General Leonard's words, 'God knows how many men we lost today.'

'Fucking Germans,'said Abel.

'Yes, sir,' said the doctor.

'Is he dead?' asked Abel.

'Might as well be,' replied the doctor mechanically. 'He's losing so much blood it can only be a matter of time.' He looked up. 'There's nothing left for you to do here, Colonel, so why don't you try and get the one survivor back to the field hospital before he dies and let the base commander know that I intend to go forward and need every man he can spaW 'Right,' said Abel as he helped the doctor carefully lift the captain on to a stretcher. Abel and the potato peeler tramped slowly back towards the camp, the doctor having warned him that any sudden movement to the stretcher could only result in an even greater loss of blood. Abel didn't let the potato peeler rest for one moment during the entire two-mile trek to the base camp. He wanted to give the man a chance to live and then return to the doctor in the forest.

For over an hour they trudged through the mud and the rain, and Abel felt certain the captain had died. When they finally reached the field hospital both men were exhausted, and Abel handed the stretcher over to a medical team.

As the captain was wheeled slowly away he opened his unbandaged eye which focused on Abel. He tried to raise his arm. Abel saluted and could have leapt with joy at the sight of the open eye and the moving hand. How he prayed that man would live.

He ran out of the hospital, eager to return to the forest with his little band of men when he was stopped by the duty officer.

'Colonel,' he said, 'I have been looking for you everywhere. There are over three hundred men who need feeding. Christ, man, where have you been?'

'Doing something worthwhile for a change.'

Abel thought about the young captain as he headed slowly back to the field kitchen.

For both men the war was over.

25

The stretcher bearers took the captain into a tent and laid him gently on an operating table. Captain William Kane could see a nurse looking sadly down at him, but he was unable to hear anything she was saying. He wasn't sure if it was because his head was swathed in bandages or because he was now deaf He watched her lips move, but learned nothing. He shut his eye and thought. He thought a lot about the past; he thought a little about the future; he thought quickly in case he died. He knew if he lived, there would be a long tirne for thinking his mind turned to Kate in New York. She had refused to accept his determination to enlist. He knew she would never understand, and that he would not be able to justify his reasons to her so he had stopped trying.

The memory of her desperate face now haunted him. He never really considered death - no man does - and now he wanted only to live and return to his old life.

William had left Lester's under the joint control of Ted Leach and Tony Simmons until he returned ... until he returned. He had given no instructions for them to follow if he did not return. Both of them had begged him not to go. Two more men who couldn't understand. When he signed up a few days later, he couldn't face the children. Richard, aged ten, had found his own way to the station; he had held back the tears until his father told him he could not go along with him to fight the Germans.

They sent him first to an Officeril Candidate School in Vermont. Last time he had seen Vermont, he had been siding with Matthew, slowly up the hills and quickly down. Now the journey was slow both ways. The course lasted for three months and made him fit again for the first time since he had left Harvard.

His first assignment was in a London full of Yanks, where he acted as a liaison officer between the Americans and the British. He was billeted at the Dorchester, which the British War Office had taken over and seconded for use by the American army. William had read somewhere that Abel Rosnovski had done the same thing with the Baron in New York and he had thoroughly approved at the time. The blackouts, the doodle-bugs, and the air raid warnings all made him believe that he was involved in a war, but he felt strangely detached from what was going on only a few hundred miles from Hyde Park Corner. Throughout his life he had taken the initiative, and had never been an onlooker. Moving between Eisenhawers staff headquarters in St. James and Churchill's War Operations room in Storey's Gate wasn't William's idea of initiative. It didn't look as if he was going to meet a German face-to-face for the entire duration of the war unless ffitler invaded Trafalgar Square.

When part of the First Army was posted to Scotland for training exercises with the Black Watch, William was sent along as an observer and told to report back with his findings. The long, slow journey to Scotland and back in a train that never stopped stopping made him realise that he was fast becoming a glorified messenger boy and he was beginning to wonder why he had ever signed up. Scotland, William found, was different. There at least they had the air of preparing for war and when he returned to London, he put in a request for an immediate transfer to join the First Army. His colonel, who never believed in keeping a man who wanted to see action behind a desk, released him.

Three days later William returned to Scotland to join his new regiment and begin his training with the American troops at Inveraray for the invasion they all knew had to Come soon. Training was hard and intense.

Nights spent in the Scottish hills fighting mock battles with the Black Watch made more than a slight contrast to evenings at the Dorchester writing reports.

Three months later they were parachuted into northern France to join Omar N. Bradley's army, moving across Europe. The scent of victory was in the air and William wanted to be the first soldier in Berlin.

The First Army advanced towards the Rhine, determined to cross any bridge they could find. Captain Kane received orders that morning that his division was to advance over the Ludendorff bridge and engage the enemy a mile northeast of Remagen in a forest on the far side of the river. He stood on the crest of a hill and watched the Ninth Division cross the bridge, expecting it to be blown sky high at any moment.

His colonel led his own division in behind them. He followed with the hundred and twenty men under his command, most of them, like William, going into action for the first time. No more exercises with wily Scots pretending to kill him, with blank cartridges and then a meal together afterwards. Germans, with real bullets, death and perhaps no afterwards.

When William reached the edge of the forest, he and his men met with no resistance, so they decided to press further on into the woods. The going was slow and dull and William was beginning to think the Ninth must have done such a thorough job that his division would only have to follow them through, when from nowhere they were suddenly ambushed by a hail of bullets and mortars. Everything seemed to be coming at them at once.

William's men went down, trying to protect themselves among the trees, but he lost over half of the platoon in a matter of seconds. The battle, if that's what it could be called, had lasted for less than a minute, and he hadn't even seen a German. William crouched in the wet undergrowth for a few more seconds and then saw, to his horror, the next Division coming through the, forest. He ran from his shelter behind a tree to warn them of the ambush. The first bullet hit him in the head, and, as he sank to his knees in the German mud and continued to wave a fraatic warning to his advancing comrades, the second hit him in the neck and a third in the chest. He lay still in the mud and waited to die, not having even seen the enemy a dirty, unheroic death.