A Man Called Milo Morai

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Expertly feathering the trigger so as to loose off only three rounds per firing until he knew himself to be dead on target, Milo cruelly shocked the understrength squad of Wehrmacht as they were preparing their deadly surprise for the two small units of attacking Americans.

As the bursts of .30 caliber bullets struck the fire-blackened stones and ricocheted around and about the area of the ruined house, the Gefreite reared up high enough from where he lay to use his missing Zugsfuhrer’s fine binoculars to sweep the area from which the fire seemed to be coming. It did not take the twenty-year-old veteran long to spot the flashes of the BAR, and as the present danger to his squad superseded in his experienced mind the planned ambush, he pointed out the location of the automatic weapon that now had them under its well-aimed fire to the Maschinengetoehrmann and ordered return fire.

When he had caught the glint of sun on glass, Milo had anticipated counterbattery fire and had scooted his body off to one side, behind the larger and longer of the two boulders, pressing himself tightly against it and the hard, pebbly ground, so he only had to wait until the German machine gun ceased firing, brush off stone shards and bits of moss, then get back into firing position. As he dropped the partially emptied magazine into a waiting hand, then slipped and hooked in a fresh one, he smiled coldly. Now he knew he had the range.

As Chamberlin later stated it, “Well, when I beard that damn fuckin’ tearing-linoleum sound, I knew fuckin’ well it was more up there ahead than just some friggin’ Jerry sniper in that place, so I just stayed down myself, and I hoped old Gardner would have the fuckin’ good sense to do the same thing, and of course he did.

“Then, when the BAR cut in on full—for some reason, I hadn’t heard the fucker before then—and I realized it must be shooting at the Jerries from the fuckin’ road, all I could figger then was that old Pettus, he hadn’t been killed after all and was giving us covering fire, keeping the fuckin’ Jerries down so’s we could get up to hand-grenade range of them. So I waved my boys on, slung my MI and got a pineapple out and ready.”

Milo was working on the seventh magazine when he saw the flash, then after a pause heard the cruummpp of the first grenade explosion within the perimeter of the German position. At that point, he ceased firing lest he find himself shooting at his own men. When he had collected the emptied magazines, he reslung the BAR and Thompson, slid down the bank and was there to greet the two sections as they straggled back to their starting point.

When Sergeant Chamberlin saw Milo standing there, his eyes widened, boggled out, and he almost dropped the cased pair of fine Zeiss binoculars he had stripped from off the now incomplete corpse of the Wehrmacht Gefreite, and he still was just standing and staring, trying to comprehend the incomprehensible, as the others came up behind him.

“Fuck a fuckin’ duck!” Corporal Gardner exclaimed, letting the bolstered broomstick Mauser that had been the machine gunner’s sidearm dangle in the dust beside his worn field shoes. “Sarge … I means, lootinunt, we thought you’s daid, fer shure. I know damn well that fuckin’ bullet hit you, Gawd dammit! I seen the dust fly up outen your fuckin’ shirt, I did. So why the fuck ain’t you a’layin’ dead, like old Pettus there, huh?”

And Milo had no real answer for the understandable questions of the squad members—Chamberlin, Gardner and the rest—or for his own, not then, not for years yet to come. So recalling old John Saxon’s explanation of the last unexplainable incident of similar nature back in the States, he spun a tale of the bullet passing through his loose-fitting field shirt without fleshing anywhere, opined that he must have struck hard enough when he dove to the rocky ground at the sound of the first shot, the one that had killed Pettus, to briefly stun him. The blood still wet in his clothing he blamed on wrestling with the BAR man’s gory corpse to free the automatic rifle and its belt of magazines.

Although he still caught the odd stare from Chamber-lin and Gardner, now and again, for weeks, they and the squad members all ended up believing him, for disbelief would have meant a descent into madness, after all. But Milo himself did not, could not put any stock in his glib fabrications. He knew damned good and well that the sniper’s shot had been accurate and should by all rights have been his death wound. In a logical world, he should be back there rotting in a shallow grave beside Pettus, with a steel pot and an identity tag for a marker, waiting for the attention of a graves registration unit. But he was not, and that inescapable fact cost him more than one sleepless night of wondering and speculation as to just what made him so different from the millions of other men now fighting and dying on the continent of Europe and elsewhere around the world.

In August of that momentous year of 1944, a second Allied invasion of Fortress Europe took place, this one in southern France, and eventually elements of this force hooked up with General George Patton’s hell-bent-for-leather Third Army. But these events were of little interest to the men of a certain battalion of General Courtney Hodges’ First Army. They had all they could do just trying to stay alive and still do the tasks assigned their much-reduced, worn-out, fought-out units. When, in early September, the entire forward movement ground to a halt through lack of gasoline, lubricants and most of the other sinews of modern mechanized warfare, the respite was none too soon for the common soldiers and the company-grade officers.

In their encampment by the side of a meandering tributary stream to the nearby Meuse River, the twenty-two men of Lieutenant Milo Moray’s platoon moved like automatons and as little as possible, their exhaustion and malnutrition writ large upon their dirty, stubbly faces and staring from the deep-sunk, dark-circled bloodshot eyes. With a seven-man strength, Chamberlin’s still was the largest “squad” of the “platoon”; Bernie Cohen had five men left in his third squad, but Ryan had been seriously wounded and the second squad now was being led by Corporal Gardner.

But high as had been the losses of enlisted personnel in Charlie Company during their hotly resisted advance across France, the proportionate loss of commissioned officers had been even higher; Milo was now not the only platoon leader commissioned from the ranks since D-Day. None of the original second lieutenants was left with a platoon, in fact. Captain Leo Burke had lost part of a leg when his jeep had triggered off a land mine. He had been replaced by his exec, First Lieutenant Tom Beverley, like Burke a Virginian and a graduate of the Virginia Military Institute, though a year or so after Burke. His new exec was an OCS second lieutenant sent down to Charlie Company by division, a replacement officer who had still been Stateside on D-Day, Lieutenant John Brettmann.

Even after a full, uninterrupted—thanks mostly to Sergeants Cohen and Chamberlin—twenty-four hours of sleep and a luxurious bath in the riverlet with soap, even with his too long empty belly now gleefully working on a can of beans with pork, one of grease patties, one of hard crackers and two D-bars washed down with a pint of coffee that really was hot and sweet, even after being able to shave with hot water and throw away his tattered, incredibly filthy clothing for a new issue that had included no less than four pairs of thick socks and a pair of new field shoes that had broad, thick pieces of leather secured by brass buckles sewn to the top to go around and protect the lower leg and ankle, even after he had pared his fingernails down to the very quick and scrubbed away the last of the ground-in, fecal-stinking black filth that had for so long found lodgment under his nails, he still was not quite the old Milo Moray when he responded to a field-telephoned summons and came into the Charlie Company CP area.

Because the other two platoon leaders had not as yet made their appearances, Milo seized upon the opportunity to pick through the small hillocks of recently delivered supplies, principally in search of new ponchos for him, Chamberlin and Cohen, but not intending to turn down any odd but necessary goodies he should chance across. He already had been able to stuff several items into his ready duffel bag—soap and shaving soap, some GI spoons, a brand-new carbine bayonet and case, four ponchos, a number of new magazines for pistol, Thompson and BARs, two, new canteens with cups and covers, a compact carton containing a gross of book matches, another of chewing gum, a dozen toothbrushes and cans of toothpowder, foot powder and some dozens of razor blades. He had just dragged his bag over to another pile and squatted before it to delve when he heard a vaguely familiar nasal whine of a voice behind him.

“You need a haircut, soldier. Who gave you permission to paw through those supplies, anyway? They belong to the unit as a whole, not to you personally, you know. You could be charged with theft, for misappropriation of government materiel, and I think I should do just that, here and now, and … eeek!”

Upon hearing a strange voice behind him, Milo’s combat-honed senses had reacted, and the drawing and aiming of the pistol, the spinning about on his deeply flexed legs, had been as instinctive as breathing. Not until then did his still-tired mind register that the figure standing there was clad in a too-clean GI uniform and polished boots, and was staring—wide-eyed and pale-faced, trembling with very obvious fear—at the gaping .45 caliber muzzle pointing up at him. As it all registered, including the gold bars pinned to each epaulette of the pressed, flat-pocketed field shirt, Milo grinned and lowered the pistol, rapidly disarmed it and returned it to its worn holster.

“Sorry, lieutenant. Are you a replacement? You must be, else you’d know better than to come up behind a man and startle him like that. I could’ve blown your silly head off, you know? The next time around, you might not be so lucky.” Then, recalling just how the new officer had looked, Milo chuckled and added, “You scare easy, don’t you, sonny?”

The officer turned and screamed at a noncom just coming out of a squad tent. “Sergeant, sergeant… yes, you, over here, on the double! I want this man placed under arrest, now! And seal that bag of his, too. I’ll prefer charges against him. Well, are you going to obey my orders to arrest him?”

First Sergeant Dixon looked quizzical. “You want me to put Lootenant Moray under arrest, Lootenant Brettmann? What in hell for? Why don’t you go in and talk to the captain about it?”

The new officer was stunned. “You … you mean … are you trying to tell me that this … this larcenous, insubordinate, murderous ragamuffin is a commissioned officer of the Army of the United States of America?”

Catching Milo’s eye, Dixon raised his eyebrows and shook his head, but spoke to the new officer slowly and distinctly, as if to an idiot child. “Thass right, Lootenant Brettmann, sir. Thishere’s Lootenant Milo Moray of the secon’ pl’toon, sir.”

At the sergeant’s mention of the surname, it all finally came back to Milo—the vaguely familiar voice and the pointy, ratlike features. Smiling coldly, he said in Dutch, “Well, Comrade Jaan Brettman, how are things in Moscow?”

Later, seated on a wooden case of small-arms ammo across a folding field table from Tom Beverley, with a white-faced, trembling Brettmann standing stiffly off to one side of the small tent, Milo said tiredly, “He’s full of shit, too, Tom, he always has been. If I’d really tried to kill him, ever, the little fucker would be pushing up daisies by now, and you know me well enough to know it, too. Don’t you?”

Beverlyy just nodded; he did know Milo that well. He fumbled briefly in a bag at his feet to come up with a bottle and a pair of battered tin cups. After pulling the cork with his teeth, he filled both cups and shoved one across to Milo. He did not even glance at Brettmann.

“Okay, Milo, division wished the Jewboy here off on us, and ah don’t know him from Adam’s housecat. He says you tried to kill him years back and again just now, so you must’ve known him before this, unless he’s completely round the bend … and that’s possible, too. If you did know him sometime and someplace else, tell me about it. Ah need to know all ah can about mah men and officers.”

Milo sipped appreciatively at the smooth single-malt whisky and sighed with pleasure. “There’s not all that much to tell, Tom. I knew him only very briefly. We met on only one occasion, in fact. He was from a family of Dutch Jewish immigrants; all except him were good, decent, hardworking people. Out of the proceeds of a tiny one-man tailor ship, his father was sending both him and his eider brother, Sol, to college … and all this was in ‘37, too, mind you.

“Sol Brettmann was in law school, but Jaan here apparently was a major in revolutionary Bolshevism, while on the side he was teaching impressionable, sheltered young girls the finer points of burglary and sneak-thievery. When I caught him trying to break into my strongbox in my room of the house I was then calling home, he tried to knife me, and I broke his arm for him. Because he had involved a daughter of my landlady in his criminal activities, the police were never called into it, and after he was deemed fit to travel, he was sent back East somewhere to live with relatives. Until today, when he surprised me and I drew my pistol on him, I’d never seen or heard of him again, and I’m here to tell you that even this meeting, seven years since the last, was way too soon.”

Beverley drained his cup, refilled it, then leaned across to pour more into Moray’s half-empty one. He nodded. “That’s all we need, Milo, all we need. We don’t have enough troubles with the comp’ny more than forty percent understren’th and another fucking push coming fast as sure as God makes road apples? So ah told John Saxon ah had to have an exec, hoping ah’d get a mustang like you or him that knew shit from Shinola, and what did those division shitheads send down here? A lying, thieving kike bastard of a pinko who’s so damn dumb in important things that ah don’t think he knows which end to wipe the shit off of! And ah cannot imagine how he ended up in Charlie Comp’ny, to begin with, Milo. His frigging 201 file says he’s a fucking quartermaster officer, for Christ’s sake!”

Momentarily forgetting his circumstances in his righteous wrath, Second Lieutenant John Brettmann abruptly burst out, “It was all a conspiracy, I tell you, a hideous capitalistic conspiracy, to send me over here to die. I was at Camp Lee, Virginia, showing the enlisted men how they could form a union and teaching those who wanted to learn about progressive ideas the philosophy of Marx and Engels and the teachings of Lenin. Then, all at once, I was ordered to report to a port of embarkation and found myself being sent to Europe as a replacement infanty officer. I don’t want to be here any more than you foul-mouthed, anti-Semitic alcoholics want me here. I’d never have gone into the Army, anyway, if the Party hadn’t said to.”

Captain Tom Beverley just looked at Milo and Milo looked back at him. No words were necessary between them, not on this matter. For the sake of bare survival of the men who depended upon them, this officer could not ever be allowed in a combat-command position, and for just such a position he was currently in direct line.

Leaving the tent, the three officers paced across the CP area, passed the perimeter and walked on several scores of yards beyond it before Tom Beverley halted.

Pointing to the blackened, rusting hulk of a Mark III panzer squatting some fifty yards away just beyond a flat field with knee-high grass growing around shell craters, the captain said, “Brettmann, your ticket back Stateside is in the turret of that tank. Go over there and climb up on it and open the hatch and fetch me back the musette bag that’s hanging in it, heah? And be damned careful with it, too, boy. You break airy one of those bottles and ah’ll have your guts for garters.”

Brettmann paced rapidly across the field, clambered clumsily onto the hull of the gutted tank, then jerked at the flaking handle of the central hatch until it came open with a shrill protest from rust-eaten hinges. After a moment, he shouted back, “Captain, there’s nothing in here that even looks like a musette bag.”

Beverley cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed, “A’rant, then, just come on back here, on the double!”

Second Lieutenant John Brettmann had trotted about halfway back in their direction when, with a flash and an ear-shattering explosion, his body was flung a good ten feet into the air to flop down sprawling, unmoving and incomplete.

“Do you think he’s dead, Tom?” asked Milo coolly.

The captain shrugged. “Looks to be from here, and ah’m not about to send any of mah men into a minefield to find out one way or the-othuh. Whenevuh regiment or division gets around to clearing that field, they can take his tag and bury him. Let’s us get back—the othuhs ought to be there by now, and ah need to hash out some things with the bunch of you.”

Reinforced with replacements to only about twelve percent under their D-Day strength, the battalion took part in the attack on and capture of the German city of Aachen, just behind the broken Siegfried Line. But it did not prove a bloodless victory. Quite a few of the ill-trained new men were lost in it, along with irreplaceable men like Sergeants Gardner and Cooper and Captain Tom Beverley. Major John Saxon was wounded, but before he would let them take him back to the division hospital, he ordered the necessary promotions and transfers to keep his battalion running as smoothly as possible under the circumstances.

At battalion headquarters, where he had been ordered to report, Milo dropped off a handful of dog tags with the clerk assigned to handle KIAs, then sought out the harried adjutant, Captain Davies.

Looking up but fleetingly to see who stood before his cluttered field desk, the cadaverous-looking man muttered, “Moray, you’re bumped up two notches by order of Major Saxon and some single-star at division. Take over Charlie Company and get ready for another push … soon. You’ll be needing a first sergeant, since yours was killed along with Captain Beverley, but, no, I cannot supply you a noncom, or any other warm bodies, for that matter. Maybe soon, but not now. If you can beg, borrow or steal a truck and dragoon a driver for it, I can authorize you to pick up ammo and rations, and that’s it. Questions?”

But despite Captain Davies’ assurances of new actions, there was no fresh push, not for either battalion or regiment. All had just been too badly chewed up for anything until once more up to at least near strength. They were moved back to their original areas south of the Meuse River.

Slowly, in dribbles and drabs, the decimated units were resupplied and reinforced with replacements, mostly green, partially trained men fresh out of basic training Stateside, with a sprinkling of veterans just released from various medical facilities and dumped into the replacement depots or “repple-depples.” When one of these somehow wound up in the unit that had been his before his wounding, the scenes could be heartwarming. This was exactly how Sergeant Bernie Cohen came back to Charlie Company, to be immediately grabbed by Milo and made first sergeant. Chamberlin had declined that job and had also declined an offered commission; he still was running the second platoon, but as a master sergeant.

In November, the other two battalions, the mortar company, the tank company and most of the medical company were sent off to join in the push through the Hurtgenwald, their objective Cologne. But the drive quickly bogged down in the face of the stiff resistance offered by the troops of General Walther Model.

On the banks of the Meuse, the battalion camped, licking its wounds, integrating the trickles of replacements for the men and equipment and weapons lost and serving as perimeter guards for the regimental headquarters complex. They ate class-A rations and loved it, not often having had access to fresh, hot food since leaving England months before, though they still bitched and groused about it as soldiers always have and always will. They were issued winter clothing and, as the weather worsened, devised ways to supplement their bedding and windproof their shelters. Old John Saxon, now a lieutenant colonel, came back with some facial scarring and a slight limp to take over his command, and still the battalion just sat in place. But it was, for them, the calm before the storm of death that awaited too many of them.

In early December, First Sergeant Bernie Cohen and a detail had gone into the regimental complex and there scrounged or “liberated” enough material to construct of wood and corrugated metal a smallish, airtight building centered by a wide firepit filled with coarse gravel and small boulders which would retain heat well. The resulting steam baths had become very popular, and that was where Milo and Bernie were when the CQ runner found them to say that battalion was on the wire for Milo.

John Saxon was clearly agitated when he spoke with the officers gathered in his heavily guarded headquarters tent. “Gentlemen, the fuckin’ Krauts have done broke through in the Ardennes. Division is damn near as short-handed as we are, what with all them men tied down up to Hurtgenwald, and the word is to send them ever’ swingin’ dick can be scraped up here, and that means us, thishere battalion. So git back to yore comp’nies and saddle up, fast. And I mean ever’ fucker you got on the mornin’ report, too—clerks, cooks and all, ever’body that can shoot a rifle. Full packs, all the clothes they can wear and still fight, three days’ worth of C-rations and weapons. Two hunnert rounds for each MI, and ammo in proportion for all the other weapons. Send your tents and records and all up here on the trucks you send to pick up ammo and rations and gas and all. Okay? Git!”

The drive down into the Ardennes was pure hell, as Milo recalled it. A snowstorm of near-blizzard proportions started up soon after the convoy took to the so-called road. Visibility quickly became bare feet, and this meant that each vehicle had to drive close enough to see the vehicle ahead with the narrow, dim “cat’s-eye” head beams that were all that regiment would for some reason allow. The inability to see meant that the lead vehicles were plotting direction with map and compass, and this kept the advance painfully slow while the men huddled together for warmth in the backs of the trucks, forbidden to smoke and thoroughly miserable.

When at long last the trucks ground to a skidding halt, the men were all instructed to leave on the trucks everything save their weapons, ammo, rations, entrenching tools and ponchos. Thus stripped for immediate action, they were marched, single-file, past a long line of GI cans fitted with immersion heaters. Each man had his canteen cup filled with hot coffee and was allowed to hurriedly fish a can of C-ration out of the boiling water.

Milo thought that the greasy corned beef hash had never before tasted so good. The coffee could have served equally well as battery acid, but it was hot, and that was just then the important thing to him. But he had had only a single drag on his postprandial cigarette when the order came down to form up and move out into the numbing cold. The snow seemed to be slacking off, but what was still falling was being whipped on by an icy-toothed wind. As he tucked away his canteen cup, he reflected silently that this was damned, poor weather in which to be expected to fight, but then any weather was.

Two days later, Milo crouched in the snow among the nineteen men that were what now remained of Charlie’s headquarters platoon and first platoon. It could well be all that remained of the entire company for all he knew, since there had been no contact with Chamberlin of the second or Hogan of the third for … ? He was just too tired to remember how long.

There gradually approached unseen an ominous grind-ing-clanking-roaring, and lumbering over a low saddle came a German tank, a big one. A black-capped man stood with his black-leather-clad torso sticking out of the turret hatch, and a dozen or so rifle-armed soldiers rode clinging to the hull behind him. As the tank began to descend the slope into the little vale that lay between his hill and Milo’s, the front of the half-track appeared in the saddle behind the lumbering steel behemoth.

“Are there any rockets left for the bazooka, Bernie?” said Milo quietly.

“Yeah, Milo, two,” whispered First Sergeant Bernie Cohen. “But they won’t do no good—that’s a fuckin’ Tiger tank. They’ll just bounce off the fucker.”

Milo nodded. “Well, tell the bazooka man to take out that half-track back there, while the BARs and the rest of us try to kill those infantrymen. They’re what we really need to worry about—this slope is too steep for that tank or any other to make it up here.”

“He won’t need to,” said Cohen sadly. “The fuckin’ hill ain’t too steep for fuckin’ eighty-eight shells to climb. He can just sit down there and blow the whole fuckin’ top off this fuckin’ hill, and us with the fucker.”

The flash and tohooosh of the launched antitank rocket coincided with the tremendous explosion capped by a huge, black-smoky fireball rising from the saddle and announcing that the vehicle had been carrying gasoline, not troops. These sounds also coincided with the spraying of a deadly hail of small-arms fire on the Tiger below. The black hat spun from off the head of the man in the turret, even as that turret began to turn toward the hilltop, its long-barreled 88mm cannon beginning to rise. The unprotected Panzergrenadieren fared poorly, with no cover or even concealment to shelter them from the rain of death.

“Okay, okay!” Milo shouted. “Cease firing, cease firing, and let’s get the hell off this hill before the Krauts blow us all to hell!”

The men needed no further urging, rolling out of their firing positions and running, sliding, rolling down the more gentle reverse slope as fast as was humanly possible. Not until yet another snow-covered hill lay between them and the Tiger did they halt, panting, listening to the main armament of the Tiger bombarding their late position relentlessly.

Milo clapped Sergeant Cohen on the shoulder. “Well, it worked, didn’t it, Bernie? Why’re you still so glum?”

“Yeah, it worked, a’right, Milo, that last time, but it ain’t gonna work again, not for us. We down to one rocket for the bazooka now, and damn little fuckin’ ammo for any fuckin’ thing else. One of the BARs ain’t workin’ no more, and Bailey’s ankle is either busted or sprained real bad. We gotta find either battalion or regiment, Milo.”

But they did not; what they found instead and very soon thereafter was a full company of Waffen-SS, who were as much surprised at the encounter as were Milo and his fragments of Charlie Company. The battle was short, of course, and very bloody, and the outcome was certain when it began there amid the whirling snow. Most of it was hand-to-hand, the firearms fired at such short ranges that they often set afire the clothing of those at whom they were aimed.

A MAIN \

Milo fired off the magazine in his Thompson, but had no time to put in a fresh one. He used the submachine gun as a club until his icy-slick gloves lost their grip on it. He managed to draw and arm his pistol then, but had fired off only two shots when something struck the back of his neck and darkness descended on him.

When things had been sorted out and the Hauptschar-fuhrer had made his report, Obersturmfuhrer Karl Greisser waited until the Sanitfttsmann had finished dabbing ointment on his powder-burned face before remarking, “There weren’t many of them, God be thanked, for just look at the mess those few made of this company. Did any get away?”

Untersturmfilhrer Egon Lenge shrugged. “One would doubt it, but in this snow and wind, who can say? There are a few wounded Amis. What do we do with them?”

Greisser raised his eyebrows. “On the advance, Egon? You know what to do.”

Lenge nodded and tried vainly to click his bootheels. Zu Behfel, mein Hen Obersturmfuhrer. “

Pacing over to a knot of soldiers, he bespoke a Rottenführer. “Get two men and fix your bayonets.”

Milo came slowly out of his stupor and groggily raised his body up on his elbows. That was when the Rottenführer. “Get two men and fix your bayonets.”

Milo came slowly out of his stupor and groggily raised his body up on his elbows. That was when the Rottenführer jammed the full length of his bayonet into Milo’s chest, then again and yet a third time. With a groan, Milo sank back into the trampled, bloody snow.

Satisfied, the Rottenführer moved on to perform another mercy killing. He thought well of the company commander for ordering this. Only a very humane man would take time out from an advance to see to it that wounded enemies were not simply left to die of pain and shock and freezing.

Although in severe pain from the penetrating stabs of the bayonet, Milo stayed completely still until the last sounds of men and vehicles had faded into the distance. Although someone had taken his wristwatch, he discovered that the American weapons and clothing and equipment had been left where they lay by the Germans.

“The bastards must be running on a tight time schedule,” he muttered to himself. “They didn’t even search us for cigarettes … not that they’d have found any on this bunch.”

His own searching showed him fourteen bodies, fifteen, including his. So as many as five could have gotten away clean. Of course, there could be some he had not found in the deep snow, too, and some of those not here could have crawled away wounded to die nearby.

He found his Thompson, checked the action, cleaned and dried it as best he could, then jammed his last full magazine into it. His pistol still hung by his side on a lanyard he affected, and he cleared and bolstered it. A careful search of the bodies of his men gave him a handful of dog tags, a few more rounds of .45 ammo for his weapons and nothing else; they had all been down to the bare essentials days ago.

Search as he might, however, he could not find his map case, and as he thought of it, he could not recall seeing it within the last twenty-four hours or so. He reflected that it and its contents would not do him much good anyway, because he did not know where he was except in the very broadest sense, and he could spot no prominent terrain features or landmarks amid the windblown clouds of snow and the very low overcast. He did still have his compass, however, hanging unbroken in its case on his pistol belt; thank God for small favors. If he took a course a few degrees west of due north, he should eventually come out of the Ardennes somewhere in friendly territory, unless the German counteroffensive had rolled the invading Allies clear back to Antwerp by then.

Colonel John Saxon was in an exceedingly foul mood when he hustled into the commo tent, not liking at all being bothered for any reason at his daily bowel movement.

Taking the microphone into his hairy paw and appropriating the radio operator’s seat, he growled, “Saxon here. What is so fuckin’ all-fired important, Mr. Whoever-you-are? And I’m warnin’ you, it better be fuckin’ good! Like capturin’ old Schickelgroober, that kinda good.”

A cool, precise, obviously unflustered voice replied, “Colonel Saxori, your regimental headquarters says that you have or at least had an officer named Milo Moray, a captain and company commander, in your battalion. Is this true?”

“Yeah, it’s so,” attested Saxon, the still-recent hurt of loss taking a good bit of the fire of anger out of him. “The fuckin’ Krauts Wounded him and then bay’neted him and a whole bunch of other wounded fellas to death. Two, three boys come to get away and make it back and tell us ‘bout it. Why? Have you found his body?”

“In a manner of speaking, colonel, in a manner of speaking. This is S-2, Second Armored Division. I’m Major George Smith. A man was captured by one of our advance units a few kilometers southwest of here yesterday. He was wandering around alone in bloodstained clothing, and that in itself made him suspicious, since there were no wounds to be found on him. After the regimental S-2 questioned him, found that his German was as fluent as his English and that, although he claimed to be a captain, there were no indications of rank on his uniform or in his effects and his identity tags carry an enlisted man’s service number, he was sent back here under guard.

“Whoever he is, colonel, he is a linguist. He speaks not only English and German, but French, Dutch, Flemish, Yiddish, Scottish, Spanish and Romanian, and those are only the ones we’ve been able to check out. He has the order of battle of your battalion and regiment down pat and about as much of that of your division and First Army as one could expect the captain of a line company to know. I like the man and I’d like to believe his story … and it’s a hair-raising one, too. But I’ve got to have more proof of his identity than he can give me, or has given me up to now, anyway. With all these phony GIs wandering around the countryside and speaking German when they think they aren’t overheard, we have no choice but to be damned sure just who or what we’ve got.”

“I unnerstand, major,” said Saxon. “You cain’t be-too fuckin’ careful, out in hostile country. I tell you what— you got this man there with you?”

“In the next room, colonel,” replied Smith.

“Then ask him or have somebody else ask him these-here questions I’m gonna tell you and then tell me what he answers.”

When the major resumed transmission, he said, “Colonel, the man states that his high-ranking buddy is Brigadier General Jethro Stiles, that the clapped-up cardshark of your battalion was a Belgian named Jaquot, that the name and rank of the man who tried to kill him back in the States was Sergeant Luigi Moffa, and that—”

“Never mind, major, never mind,” crowed Saxon, grinning from ear to ear. “You got the genyewine article there, not no Kraut. Send Milo home.”

When he finally got through to Brigadier General Stiles, Saxon said, “I hope you sittin’ down, gen’rul. Okay? Milo ain’t dead. Naw, he turned up and was picked up by some Secon’ Armored fellas, two, three days back, and their fuckin’ S-2s has had him sincet then, tryin’ to figger if he was who he said or a fuckin’ Kraut in GI clothes. I give the dumbass fuckers some questions could’n anybody but Milo answer right, and when I got the right answers, I told the bastards to send him back to battalion. I thought you’d wanta know, gen’rul.”

During his long, solitary sojourn through the winter wastes of the Ardennes, dodging German panzers and infantry units and finding himself forced by these and by natural obstacles to bear farther and farther east of north, Milo had had much time to think. He now was pretty certain that there was something extremely odd, to say the very least, about the way he was put together. He had been knifed in Qhicago by the late Jaan Brettmann, shot by Moffa back at Jackson, shot again by that German sniper and now bayoneted two or three times over by that SS man, yet he still was here to think about it all, and any one of the wounds he had suffered could have, should have, killed him outright. Not only was he still alive, he didn’t even have any scars from these terrible wounds.

All around him since D-Day, men—good men, strong men, healthy and well-trained and intelligent men—had been dying, many of them of injuries far less outwardly serious than those he had sustained and survived. So, why? He was human in every other way saving that he never sickened and that he could come unscathed out of patently deadly situations and incidents. He breathed, ate, digested, defecated and urinated. He functioned perfectly well sexually (at least no woman had voiced any complaints about his performances). He slept when he could. He was capable of pity, disgust, hate, respect, anger, possibly love too (but he had never found himself “in love,” not in the classic sense, so how could he be sure?), the whole gamut of human emotions. So what made him so different?

He did not formulate any answer before he stumbled across a tank crew engaged in replacing a damaged track link on their Sherman, screaming profane and obscene invective at the tank and each other and offering prime targets, had he been a German.

First Sergeant Bernie Cohen had been in a state approaching traumatic shock since battalion had called down to announce that their long-lost company commander, Captain Milo Moray, had somehow gotten out of the Ardennes alive and well and would be along whenever Second Armored could get him in. He still could not believe it even when Milo alit from a jeep and came into the Quonset hut orderly room of the reforming company.

Not until Milo had racked his Thompson, dumped his pistol belt on the table he called a desk, laid his helmet atop the belt .and started to remove his jacket could Cohen manage to speak.

His thin lips trembling, the noncom said, “But … but Milo, I seen it! A Kraut jammed a K98 bayonet in your chest at least twice. I know I seen it. I was in the trees not fifteen yards away. That’s why I told everybody you was dead.”

Milo just smiled and gripped the stunned man’s shoulder, saying, “I know, Bernie, I know you saw some poor bastard bayoneted, more than one, too, for they did that to fourteen men there. But they did miss me. I’d been cold-cocked during the fight, and I guess they thought I was already done for. When I did come to, the Krauts were long gone and the bodies of our guys were already stiff. I’m sure you did think I was dead, so forget it.”