Chapter XXVIII
XXVIII
and the fantasies put a real spring in the old step, a spring that gets springier when Bagger hears the mechanized chug and brook babble of a battalion, he tries to speed up, but the woman’s limbs start catching on every branch, bush, and bramble out there, which forces him to slow down, whoever this lady is, Bagger can’t deliver her to Reis covered in nasty red scratches,
and while he’s mincing through thorns, he picks up unfamiliarities in the noises, the gears of machines hoarser, the mutters of men a pile-up of consonants, and Bagger’s forced to accept the truth, these aren’t doughboys up ahead, this is Jerry, and Bagger gives the woman in his arms a careful study, for it was her meddlesome limbs that prevented him from prancing right out in front of the Reichstag Army,
and Bagger slithers to the burnt relics of the forest edge and hunches behind the squat metal silo of a toppled Fahrpanzer, a stationary German tank, and the woman sighs, the way a mother sighs at a child who insists on playing in mud, and Bagger peeks out at a terrible sight, a hundred stormtroopers moving across a field sludged by a demolished drainage system and lumped with American and German bodies,
and, sure, it’s disquieting seeing so many Sturmtruppen, for once not candlelit by machine guns or leaping like demons in a minenwerfer scarlet, but more than that it’s eerie, these Germans don’t look particularly alive, they are wights who hold their Mausers at the lowest point of their straps like slack jaws, while their boots drop and scrape like pistons and gears,
and moving just as painfully are the machines grinding through the morass alongside them, steel-wheeled due to Germany’s rubber deficiency, munitions carriages snagged in peaty bogs, Morser howitzers cleaving through black mucilage like dinosaurs, mounted Maxims coming apart with every bounce, antiaircraft guns so mired in winter’s resin that stormtroopers beat it to put it out of its misery,
and galumphing among them like a processional elephant is an A7V, tumid with clay, sickly with chemical corrosion, its ten-thousand rivets the excrescence of a terminal disease, the tank’s seen too fucking much, it trembles like Ben Veck and cries a petrol storm, this advance the last it will ever make,
and Bagger’s got no choice but to sit and wait, and wait, and probably wait some more, it’s going to take all damn day for this company to pass through a battlefield so fresh it still coughs phlegm of flame, they aren’t even collecting the German dead, only the dog tags, or at least that’s what it looks like from the dead men’s collars, all of them ripped wide open,
and some of the dead must be Bagger’s fallen brethren, caught in enfilading fire, which means the 43rd is on the run, but also means it is nearby, Bagger has almost caught up, and as soon as this frangible stream of overextended Huns dries up, he’ll be able to cut behind them, refreshed and rested, and all the food and water he wants for will be waiting, along with the accolades, the acceptance, the everything,
and so he ducks behind the Fahrpanzer, covers himself and the woman with his overcoat, and crooks his neck to fill the makeshift sleeping bag with warming breath, he even closes his eyes, why not, these stormtroopers lack the energy for a single step outside their chosen drudge, he’ll be safe here till he wakes up, how about that, the first time he’s felt safe in France and it’s fifty yards from the German elite,
and the last thing Bagger hears before descending another hill, this time the hill of sleep, is another of the woman’s sighs, this one a tut-tut at a birdbrained decision, as if to say, Cyril Bagger, now there’s a real dummy, but one she can’t help but like,