Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 35, No. 10, October 1990

We can only speculate now that there had to be a buildup, that the inconsistency between the rest-and-recreation life and the life up front must have made its impression on Butch. The suffering had to have helped too — the drained, wan faces, the emaciated bodies, the towns without young men, the ruins, the necessity and idiocy of war. By the time he reached Bastogne, it seems, given a sensitivity of which even he was unaware, Technical Sergeant Butch de Strange was separated by miles of subtle and unexpected changes from the Corporal Buttolph de Strange who light-years before had crashed ashore at Omaha Beach.

How Bastogne must have looked to him as his tank pushed toward it, I don’t know. I was inside the town and saw it from that viewpoint. The sun had broken through on that day of deliverance. Earlier, C-47’s had flown over and dropped us the wherewithal — the food, ammo, and plasma — to hold out a while longer as we awaited arrival of Patton’s tanks.

The town was desolation itself and I remember wondering why the ragged remains of our division bothered hanging on to it at all. It was a scene of death, the townspeople and soldiers shuffling about, the dead seeking rest. The only thing that seemed alive was the noise; the empty popping sound of small-arms fire, the overhead swish of incoming artillery, the crash of shells tearing apart an already torn-apart town. If there was any place back in 1945 that could have affirmed an atheist in his belief that there was no guiding intelligence directing the world, that place had to be Bastogne.

Well, that was Bastogne as it looked to me, and I suppose something of the same impression was made upon De Strange. I didn’t meet Butch there. By the time he got to Bastogne I was, thankfully, trudging to the rear on frostbitten feet — my ticket Stateside — as the liberating tanks came roaring into and through the town and out toward the German perimeter.

But not all the tanks went roaring through. Butch’s didn’t. It broke down beside a small, almost leveled church. And while the driver was trying out a little first-echelon maintenance on the engine, Butch got down, dropped his helmet on a tread guard, and went into the building.

Later he was to assert it was more than coincidence, that something caused the tank to break down and led him into the church. He held no doubt honestly, that he could remember no reasoning — curiosity or even the desire to get in out of the cold — for going inside the tottering structure. Surely it wasn’t devotion, he had shown little enough of that in his life. All he knew, or so he contended, was that he got down from the tank, dropped his helmet, and went in.

Once in the church, he saw nearly total destruction. Nothing was whole. Candle racks were twisted, turned on their sides. One wall had crumbled. On two of the others the Stations of the Cross were burned frames or shattered heaps below the shadow areas from which the plaster had fallen. Against the third wall, the altars stood — or had stood. The main altar was gone, a gaping hole in the wall opening onto a littered yard beyond. One of the side altars was a mound of rubble. Only the right-hand altar still stood, pocked and chipped and peeling. Its statue, God the Father, blackened and broken but still recognizable, stood in its niche, arms outstretched to the faithful — arms without hands, for they had been blasted away. A double amputee, true to the times.

But what held Butch’s attention was a crudely lettered sign, the unknown effort of some dog-face. The sign was hung from the statue’s neck by a rope — the kind that came with the issue shelter-half — and read:

I HAVE NO HANDS BUT YOURS

In one of the late-night sessions I used to have with Butch after I got the assignment to dig into his Crusade he told me of his mental turbulence at that moment. Thoughts tumbled over each other, the new struggling to displace the old. The whole statement burned itself into his consciousness, but the word yours kept repeating itself in his thoughts, a riotous mix of the aural and visual.

He couldn’t recall how long he stood rereading that sign, wholly, in part, word by word (YOURS! YOURS! YOURS!), his mind drawing back from the message like a child avoiding bitter medicine.

Butch said he wrestled there, resisting what he later acknowledged to be a clear challenge. He turned away from the statue and its sign, almost wrenched himself away, telling himself he needed time to think through this new and unbidden experience.

He got it — more input to the later Crusade mythos. As he stepped from the church, a German shell hit his tank, demolished it, killed his crew, and completed the job of reducing the church to tumbled stones and granulated plaster. Butch received a light hit, a piece of metal through his thigh. Light but disabling. Enough to knock him down, put him out, and mark him for an extended period of convalescence at some rear-area hospital. Plenty of time to think.