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The Domain of the Erl King
And yes, there was no mistake about the location.
We ate a hot supper-at least as hot as a supper can be when served outdoors in
zero weather. Then we mounted our nine vehicles [see Chapt 4, Hill 122] and took off,
allowing nearly twelve hours for the trip. And a good thing we did, for as soon as we
started west, toward the rear, where we could pick up the highway going north, we found
the roads jammed with traffic moving east, toward the front. All kinds and sizes of
military vehicles. It was another Division, coming to relieve the 90th, so we could go
north.
My first thought was Why? Why not do it the simple way, and have these
newcomers go to the Ardennes Forest instead of us, saving a lot of time and gasoline?
And then I realized why. This division looked, even in the dark, like a division was
supposed to look, not like a gypsy caravan. Their men were neatly dressed in GI
overcoats or wrapped in OD issue blankets for warmth, not in a hodge-podge of stolen
featherbeds and sheepskin coats. Their equipment was all issue stuff, properly stowed.
They carried no smuggled civilian stoves with coal for fuel. In brief, they were a green
outfit. They were probably good, if inexperienced, troops. However, what General Patton
wanted to counter-attack the German breakthrough in the Ardennes Forest were good
experienced troops. Including us.
I have spent some time trying to think of a word to describe that night's trip.
Enchanted came to mind, but enchanted suggests a pleasant, benign experience, not a
cold, miserable, apprehensive one. Spectral is a little closer, but not quite right. Haunted
doesn't quite get it either, for I didn't actually feel a presence, although I was reminded of
the Erl King, the malevolent spirit in the Schubert song who freezes to death the child
whose father is trying to carry him through a blizzard to safety.
We weren't in a blizzard, but snow started falling before we got into the Forest of
the Ardennes, and fell, not fast but continuously, the rest of the way. During much of the
way we were behind the "Light Line," the boundary between the combat zone and the
rear echelon, so that we could use headlights, but all they illuminated was an hypnotic
swirl of snowflakes ahead. Even more unnerving was the vision of the limbs of trees
alongside the road. They were pine trees, and the snow-laden branches curved down, the
tips almost touching the command car. But the trunks were invisible, lost in the dark
between the snowflakes. Maybe they weren't there at all, and the branches floated without
support.
Eerie. That's the word, although it isn't strong enough to give the total effect. And
the total effect, I am sure, was augmented by drowsiness. I drifted between trancelike
sleep and trance-like consciousness. My feet also went from painfully cold to numb and
back again.
I'm not sure whether we were told to cover the bumper markings on our vehicles
before we left or after we got to the rendezvous, but somewhere or other we did. [These
bumper markings indicated what unit the vehicle belonged to, right down to company or
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