Fall of Giants

He did suffer a moment of sadness that evening. It was dusk, and he happened to look out of a smashed kitchen window to the spot on the bank where Chuck Dixon had died. He no longer felt shocked by the way Chuck had disappeared in an explosion of earth: he had seen much more death and destruction in the last three days. What struck him now, with a different kind of shock, was the realization that one day he would have to speak about that awful moment to Chuck’s parents, Albert and Emmeline, owners of a Buffalo bank, and to his young wife, Doris, who had been so against America’s joining the war-probably because she feared exactly what had happened. What was Gus going to say to them? “Chuck fought bravely.” Chuck had not fought at all: he had died in the first minute of his first battle, without firing a shot. It would hardly have mattered if he had been a coward-the result would have been the same. His life had just been wasted.

As Gus stared at the spot, lost in thought, his eye was caught by movement on the railway bridge.

His heart missed a beat. There were men coming onto the far end of the bridge. Their field-gray uniforms were only just visible in the half-light. They ran awkwardly along the rails, stumbling on the sleepers and the gravel. Their helmets were of the coal scuttle shape, and they carried their rifles slung. They were German.

Gus ran to the nearest machine-gun emplacement, behind a garden wall. The crew had not noticed the assault force. Gus tapped the gunner on the shoulder. “Fire at the bridge!” he shouted. “Look-Germans!” The gunner swung the barrel around to the new target.

Gus pointed to a soldier at random. “Run to headquarters and report an enemy incursion across the east bridge,” he shouted. “Quick, quick!”

He found a sergeant. “Make sure everyone is firing at the bridge,” he said. “Go!”

He headed west. Heavy machine guns could not be moved quickly-the Hotchkiss weighed eighty-eight pounds with its tripod-but he told all the rifle grenadiers and mortar crews to move to new positions from which they could defend the bridge.

The Germans began to be mown down, but they were determined, and kept coming. Through his glasses, Gus saw a tall man in the uniform of a major who looked familiar. He wondered if it was someone he had met before the war. As Gus looked, the major took a hit and fell to the ground.

The Germans were supported by a terrific barrage from their own artillery. It seemed as if every gun on the north bank had trained its sights on the south end of the railway bridge where the defending Americans were clustered. Gus saw his men fall one after another, but he replaced every killed or wounded gunner with a fresh man, and there was hardly a pause in the firing.

The Germans stopped running and began to take up positions, using the scant cover of dead comrades. The boldest of them advanced, but there was no place to hide, and they were swiftly brought down.

Darkness fell, but it made no difference: firing continued at maximum on both sides. The enemy became vague shapes lit by flashes of gunfire and exploding shells. Gus moved some of the heavy machine guns to new positions, feeling almost certain this incursion was not a feint to cover a river crossing somewhere else.

It was a stalemate, and at last the Germans began to retreat.

Seeing stretcher parties on the bridge, Gus ordered his men to stop firing.

In response, the German artillery went quiet.

“Christ Almighty,” Gus said to no one in particular. “I think we’ve beaten them off.”

{VI}

An American bullet had broken Walter’s shinbone. He lay on the railway line in agony, but he felt worse when he saw the men retreating and heard the guns fall silent. He knew then that he had failed.

He screamed when he was lifted onto the stretcher. It was bad for the men’s morale to hear the wounded cry out, but he could not help it. They bumped him along the track and through the town to the dressing station, where someone gave him morphine and he passed out.

He woke up with his leg in a splint. He questioned everyone who passed his cot on the progress of the battle, but he got no details until Gottfried von Kessel came by to gloat over his wound. The German army had given up trying to cross the Marne at Château-Thierry, Gottfried told him. Perhaps they would try elsewhere.

Next day, just before he was put on a train home, he learned that the main body of the United States Third Division had arrived and taken up positions all along the south bank of the Marne.

A wounded comrade told him of a bloody battle in a wood near the town called the Bois de Belleau. There had been terrible casualties on both sides, but the Americans had won.

Back in Berlin, the papers continued to tell of German victories, but the lines on the maps got no nearer to Paris, and Walter came to the bitter conclusion that the spring offensive had failed. The Americans had arrived too soon.

He was released from hospital to convalesce in his old room at his parents’ house.