Being a nurse was dangerous work, not to mention exhausting. Just two days before, her friend and fellow nurse had been killed — along with several helpless American wounded — when a stray German bomb struck a house where the men were being cared for.
Instant death was a constant threat they all lived under. She could just as easily have been sheltering with her family in a cellar like so many civilians in Bastogne, but she had volunteered to do what she could for the men fighting the German invaders. Perhaps peace would return to Bastogne, but it seemed hard to believe with the occasional artillery bursts as a reminder.
Meanwhile, it was clear that no help would be coming from the orderly. Brock shook his head in disgust and kept going. Inside the dark reaches of the hospital, Brock asked around until he’d tracked down his old friend.
He found Charlie stretched out on blankets on the stone floor, which could not have been comfortable. Brock had seen his share of wounded, but he was still shocked by the sight of his old friend from home. Charlie Knuth had always been handsome and athletic, but now he looked emaciated, his good looks marred by ugly frostbitten patches. One side of his head was wrapped in bandages that looked suspiciously as if they had been strips torn from bedsheets, now hardened with dried blood. More bandages covered his torso. The skin of his hands was blistered and cracked from frostbite, revealing raw meat inside the cracks. Brock looked away, keeping his eyes on Charlie’s, because they were the only part of him that seemed unscathed.
It turned out that Charlie was in a distressed state, but not only because of his wounds. After expressing his initial delight at setting eyes on a familiar face from home, he struggled up out of his blankets and grabbed hold of Brock with his blistered hands.
“You won’t believe it, Brock. I just saw him in here. That goddamn Nazi!”
“Who?”
“The bastard who tried to kill me, that’s who!”
Obviously distraught by his experiences, Brock’s old hometown friend quickly shared an upsetting story of how his own unit had been captured and then gunned down somewhere on the road to Bastogne. He couldn’t even say where, exactly, on the snowy road that the massacre had taken place. He just knew that he’d been the only survivor among the prisoners.
“It sounds to me like you’re lucky to be alive.”
“They shot me, but I faked being dead.”
Brock listened with something close to disbelief. He had heard rumors about these sorts of things — the execution of prisoners — but it had always been a “I knew a guy who knew somebody who” type of situation. This time was different. Bastogne was still isolated, but they had heard about the Malmedy massacre perpetrated by Kampfgruppe Pieper. More than eighty Americans had been gunned down. There wasn’t a GI who wasn’t outraged about it.
In a separate incident, his buddy had seen another slaughter of POWs and still carried the wounds of the encounter. Maybe the Germans hadn’t massacred as many as they had at Malmedy, but it was a massacre all the same. Already, in the aftermath of Malmedy, angry Americans had retaliated by refusing to take prisoners. All the rules of war seemed to have gone out the window where the Battle of the Bulge was concerned.
To make matters worse, Charlie had spotted the Nazi officer who’d been in charge, visiting wounded Germans in the hospital.
“What did they do with the son of a bitch?” Brock asked.
“When I told him, the surgeon raised hell about the German being a war criminal, and they hauled his ass off to HQ.”
“Is that so? They should have taken him outside and shot that Kraut.”
Knuth grabbed Sumner’s sleeve. “He killed them all! Every last one of our guys! You’ve got to make sure justice is done, Brock. Promise me you’ll do that.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Brock said. He clenched and unclenched his fists, as if aching to hit something. He couldn’t think of anything worse than being a helpless prisoner and having the enemy gun you down. They were sons of bitches, every last one of them.
Deep down Brock recognized that he hadn’t always been the best person, having used his brawn to bully people all his life. Just a few minutes ago he had stolen a bottle of booze from another GI. He knew that was wrong, but during a war, what was the point of doing what was right? Also, he knew that he was small potatoes compared to the likes of Adolf Hitler, the biggest damn bully the world had ever seen, along with all his Nazi minions.
Thinking about helpless Americans being gunned down by the Krauts made his blood boil.
“Promise me!” Charlie repeated. It was clear his strength was fading after his sudden desperate burst of anger. Brock’s sleeve slipped from his grasp, and he suddenly faded back into his sweaty blanket, his eyes still bright in his hollow, frostbitten face.
