More worrisome for the Germans was the fact that the tank was being followed by a squad of infantry. They carried rifles, machine guns, and a couple of bazookas. Some of the men wore bloody bandages as if they had been wounded in a recent fight. Looking more closely, Messner spotted a GI with a heavily bandaged leg riding on the Sherman tank itself.
If any of the Ami soldiers had looked into the woods, they might have seen the Kübelwagen. That might have aroused their curiosity. But they plodded on, heads down, clearly exhausted, happy to let the tank lead the way.
“Keep going,” Messner urged under his breath.
Slowly, the sound of the tank engine faded. There had been no warning shouts from the infantry squad. They were in the clear.
At least for now.
However, they had lost precious daylight. Even in the last several minutes, the woods around them seemed to have grown darker.
Messner nodded at the two men. Gettinger wore a look of relief plain on his face, while Dietzel appeared disappointed that he hadn’t been able to shoot anyone.
Then Messner looked at the Kübelwagen. Gettinger had driven it until it was nearly wedged between the tree trunks. To the man’s credit, it was quite a feat of driving that he had navigated this far into the woods. However, there was no hope of turning it around. Messner was reluctant to give up their means of transportation, so they would have to back out.
“Dietzel, keep an eye on the road,” Messner ordered. “Gettinger, follow my directions. I will help you reverse the Kübelwagen.”
Painstakingly, that was just what they did. Once again, tree trunks scraped patches of paint off the Kübelwagen. By the time they reached the road again, they had lost even more daylight. The temperature had also dropped, which wasn’t such a bad thing, because the slushy spots in the road had begun to freeze over, giving them a more solid surface for driving.
“Get in,” he said to Dietzel.
The sniper shouldered his rifle and climbed into the back seat next to the Hauptmann. Soon they were on their way again.
At the wheel of the Kübelwagen, Gettinger steered carefully, picking his path through the rutted road, which seemed to alternate between frozen ridges that jolted them down to their bones and slushy mud puddles that threatened to bog them down. He rarely shifted out of second gear, although on a few straightaways the engine revved high enough that he shifted into third gear. It wasn’t long before he downshifted again. At any rate, the Kübelwagen wasn’t exactly a vehicle built for speed.
“Can’t you drive any faster?” Messner complained. The shadows in the woods grew deeper by the minute. Messner had hoped that they might have come across their quarry by now.
“The road is a mess, Herr Hauptmann,” Gettinger responded.
“Here, trade places with me. I will show you how it is done.”
Messner took the wheel, but after a few satisfying bursts of speed, he realized that Gettinger was correct. From the passenger seat, the slippery nature of the slush and mud had been less obvious. In places, Messner swore as he fought to keep control of the Kübelwagen. The ruts threatened to wrench the wheel out of his grip. Some of the puddles were so deep that they would be hard to drive out of again.
He took his eyes off the road long enough to glance over at Gettinger, but the man remained stone-faced. He knew better than to gloat over the fact that the Hauptmann wasn’t doing any better driving the vehicle.
As for Dietzel, all his attention was reserved for the shadowy woods on either side of the road. He kept his rifle at the ready.
Messner drove them around a bend in the road and came to a spot where there had clearly been a skirmish. The still-smoldering remains of an American tank partially blocked the road. A little farther on were the smashed remains of a Kübelwagen. A handful of dead bodies — some American, some German — were scattered alongside the road.
Messner couldn’t know for certain, but he suspected that this was where the American squad they had hidden from had likely fought. There was no sign of where the German forces had gone. They had either struck out cross-country to unite with the forces encircling Bastogne, or they had turned around and gone in the other direction.
He pulled the Kübelwagen to the side of the road and killed the engine.
“We must check the bodies and make certain that Bauer was not killed here,” he said. “We know that he is traveling this road.”
He and Gettinger did that while Dietzel kept watching, walking along the skirmish site in the process. A wooded hill came down sharply toward the road on one side, and on the other, an open space created a wide place in the road. A low stone wall that was little more than a long pile of snow-covered rocks bordered the open space and the woods. Dietzel seemed to be studying the space intently, then began crossing it, moving toward the woods on the other side.
