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Upstarts
Several soldiers, whom I judged to be members of the lieutenant's platoon,
offered freely and profanely to stick a bayonet through the prisoner and put him out of his
misery. Lt Drake stopped them. "Leafe him alone," he ordered. "I vant to ask him some
qvestions. "
An aid man was called to give medical attention first to the lieutenant, then to the
prisoner. While he was being bandaged and prepared for evacuation, the lieutenant was
giving instructions to his platoon sergeant for things he wanted done in the platoon and
commending certain of his men. He was a good officer.
I looked curiously at the prisoner, who was the first live German soldier I had
seen. He looked pathetically young, with blond down on his face and extremely long,
straight blond hair falling in his eyes. He was hurt, and frightened sick. He was Czech, he
said, not a German; he had been forced into the army. He was seventeen years old, was
one of a crew of three on a machine gun. There were some five or six machine guns in
the vicinity, but he did not know exactly where the others were. He was not German, and
the Germans did not trust him or tell him anything. Yes, it was his machine gun which
had wounded the lieutenant, but he had not fired it himself. He had come in to surrender
when the lieutenant called to them, and had been wounded by one of his own comrades
for trying to surrender. He was sobbing by the time he was through, and they gave him a
shot of morphine when they bandaged him. I think his elbow was broken.
The battalion commander ordered the leading company commander to get his
company across the road and form a line about two hedgerows further on. The company
commander led the way across himself, then stood in the ditch on the other side, sheltered
by a hedgerow, and directed the rest of the company across. He would beckon and two or
three would rush across at a dead run and jump into the ditch on the other side. There
would be a burst of enemy machine gun fire. When it was over, they would get up, crawl
through a break in the hedge, and continue up along another hedgerow perpendicular to
the road. The company commander would motion another group across. They kept well
dispersed and I saw no casualties.
It was about this time that the artillery started shelling us. It was only one gun, of
rather small caliber, probably 75mm (about 3 inch), and it was firing somewhere on our
right. You could hear it coming quite easily. I sat there and listened to it for a while
before I realized that they seemed to be landing in the field on the other side of the road,
where the company was going. I went and told the battalion commander and asked him if
he wanted me to go find out. He fooled me by saying "Yes," so I darted across the road
and through a break in the hedge that the doughboys* were using. Just then I heard
another round coming. I don't know how much warning it gave, probably about a second.
It is amazing how much you can do in a second. Right beside me, in the corner of
the field, was a sort of water hole into which the ditches along the hedgerows drained. I
think the cattle use these tanks for drinking. Anyhow I was into it, but fast. After the
burst, I stuck my head up. Sure enough, it had landed in the same field with the troops.
Someone was observing and adjusting it. I jumped back through the hedge and told the
company commander. "Hell," he said, "it's too late to change the route now. Here comes
the last squad."
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