Читать книгу Letters From Home - Kristina McMorris - Страница 12

Chapter 6

Late August 1944 France

“Charlie! Where are you?” Morgan screamed, pain grinding his throat. He rubbed his eyelids with the back of his hand and strained to focus. The gray smoke of mortar explosions burned his nostrils.

“Charlie!” His voice melted into the bursting of artillery shells and hammering of machine guns. He fought off a cough. The taste of tar coated his tongue. He spat and missed the water, hitting the sleeve of his fatigues. Black, grainy liquid.

Waves were riding him mid-thigh. Ocean waves. But he couldn’t feel the chill. Too numb, too filled with terror. Too confused by how he and Charlie had ended up separated.

He clutched his M1 rifle to his chest and plodded through the bloody sea, the water like a flood of molasses. Leaning every pound of his body forward, he pushed toward the hazy beachhead. German bullets zipped past his ears. He ducked his face away, grasping his net-covered helmet. Behind him, miles of Allied ships, now tattered floating tombs, dappled the ocean. Infantry hung like soiled rags off bow ramps. Uniformed corpses plugged jagged holes in landing craft.

Morgan refocused and resumed his march, until something bumped his knee. He gasped at the sight. A swarm of dead bodies hovered beneath the surface of the water. Their unseeing stares reached for him, pleading for help too late. Boys, all of them, too young to be soldiers. Still, here they were, cut down by machinegun fire. Drowned by the weight of their own field packs.

Staggering from dizziness, he trudged onward. He searched for pillboxes camouflaged in the trees overlooking the shore. Not a bunker in view, but he knew they were there, preserving the merciless rage of Wehrmacht troops awaiting his approach.

Once at water of knee-high depth, he hurdled the waves with his weighted boots. The suction of wet sand suddenly yielded. He stumbled out of the ocean and onto a quilt of fatigues covering every inch of the beach. Was he the only GI left standing?

The question retreated as he plowed through the patchwork of helmets and weapons, of crumpled bodies lying facedown in the gritty sand. A mortician’s waiting room for fallen heroes.

He dropped to his knees in a bucket-sized gap, tossing his rifle aside. He yanked back on jacket collars for a glimpse of their faces. Blood trickled from their gaped mouths. Gashes, bullet holes, missing pieces. The stench of death seared his senses, folded his stomach in quarters. And their eyes, their glassy eyes, shining hollow, like tinted doors entrapping their souls.

“Morgan. . . .” A hoarse whisper seemed to cry out from the heavens.

He flew back on his knees. “Charlie?”

“Morgan. . . .” The voice drew nearer, echoing as if spoken from the base of a well.

“Charlie!” he shrieked, searching, searching. “Where are you?”

A fatigue-clad arm shot up from the pile of bodies. The sandy hand grabbed hold of his shoulder and shook him.

“Morgan, wake up.”

The unexpected words jolted him back to their French campsite. From the milky light of the moon, he could see his brother, wrapped in a blanket an arm’s length away.

“You okay?” Charlie asked groggily.

Yeah, Morgan mouthed without sound. The terror of his dream tapering, he forced a dry swallow and nodded.

Charlie yawned as he rolled onto his other side, adjusted his head on his elbow.

The duty had always been Morgan’s, waking his brother from nightmares. All those months after their mother’s death, he would climb up the bunk-bed ladder to interrupt the kid’s tossing and turning.

When had things become so backward?

Morgan blew out a quiet, shaky exhale, his muscles as taut as tucked Army bedding. He swept a glance over the mounds bivouacked around him: his slumbering squad, spread throughout the pasture like grazing cattle.

He rested the back of his hand on his forehead and inhaled the familiar smell of dewy meadow. He’d find it soothing if not for the distant barrage of artillery fire, or the vengeful explosions of Hitler’s “Buzz Bombs.” Not quite the sounds of summer nights on the farm.

From star to star he drew imaginary lines, struggling to erase the haunting pictures flipping through his mind. Considering how many images there were, it was hard to believe only two months had passed since their troop transport ship left New York. For twelve days they’d sailed in the dank, creaking chamber, zigzagging to avoid wolf packs of German subs. Poor Charlie had rarely been sick a day in his life, but the Atlantic’s unforgiving pitch and roll made up for lost time; his waistline shrank two belt loops before the ship had anchored.

“Good thing we didn’t join the Navy,” Morgan had joked. Charlie hadn’t laughed.

Looking back, Morgan almost laughed himself, remembering how eager they’d all been to reach the living nightmare that waited across the English Channel. His squad had arrived on the Norman shore well after the D-Day invasion, but the gruesome crime scene still invaded his dreams. Even now, the memory of bodies washing ashore sent a chill zipping up his spine.

Then again, the thought of death sometimes offered a strange sense of peace. A morbid notion, perhaps, until you’re at the tail end of another twenty-mile march beneath the hot French sun, with sixty pounds of gear bound to your chafed, raw back, your feet swollen and bleeding, your stomach knotted from K-rations. All elements of an Army conspiracy, Morgan decided, to make battle an appealing prospect.

An effective strategy, as it turned out. At one point, he’d been suckered along with the rest of them. Like a kid awaiting a parade, he too had lined the road to welcome the tarpaulin-covered convoy. No one seemed to mind that the front line was the next scheduled stop.

Over winding roads, their truck had bumped and groaned. They’d snuck through the black of night with taped-over head-lights, getaway cars preparing for a heist. By the time they unloaded in Brezolles, Morgan was certain the torturous hours of marching or waiting for action would surely rival those spent in combat.

The theory didn’t last.

In three-foot-deep foxholes, he and Charlie had dueled trapped members of the German Panzer army, closing the Falaise Pocket like a tube of toothpaste. Though tens of thousands of Kraut soldiers had been captured, a hefty number escaped through the gap. Both a success and a failure. The essence of war.

The battles were far from over, but the amount of bloodshed Morgan had already witnessed could soak the earth to its core. He’d learned there was no limit to how violently men and their machines could deconstruct the human anatomy. How desensitized people could become. How barbaric it all was.

Now, studying the dirt road cutting through the meadow, the road they’d be tackling at daylight, he feared what other lessons war had in store for them.

“Charlie,” Morgan said in a loud whisper. Unable to sleep, he wanted someone to talk to. He tapped his brother’s shoulder. The kid didn’t move. Not even a break in the rhythm of his heavy breaths.

How was it that he rested so peacefully?

Maybe in Charlie’s dreams they were somewhere far away. A safer time, safer place, where the air brimmed with warmth and the lullabies of crickets. They were kids back in their dad’s Iowa fields, dozing out in the open, naming shapes made of stars in the sky. A sky that offered them promises, futures as limitless as the universe.

A sky that lied.