Read Online Articles of War by Nick Arvin - Free Book Online

which, he thought, could only be the heat of the newly risen sun.
    He raised his head. There was no sun, but a wash of blue glowed in one quadrant of the sky. All around him the earth lay ripped, blasted, and savaged. It would be better, he thought, to move now in this half-light than to wait for full daylight, when the snipers could see him clearly.
    He rose and moved in a crouch, proceeding from one hole to the next, trying always to keep low and covered, never feeling himself low enough or sufficiently covered. All of the holes he ducked into were empty, which surprised him. He had assumed that the others were still here, and he was confused. He risked very briefly standing erect and looking around. He could not see anyone.
    He sprinted ahead to the next hole, and the next. Sliding into a particularly large excavation Heck saw, happily, that here, after all, was another GI, cowering in the bottom of the hole. The soldier was so huddled and afraid that Heck felt a repugnance. “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “Did the others go? Do you know? Did they leave us?” The other GI did not answer, catatonic perhaps, with his arms pulled tightly around his face like a child. Heck moved down next to him and when he reached out to nudge him, his fingers sank through the man’s ribs into a moist hole. Heck flinched away and looked at his hand in the pallid light: his fingers were covered in a dark substance. “Are you all right?” he said and reached to shake the man again, but stopped short, his bloodied fingers hovering over the man’s shoulder. The man in his cowering position had not yet moved and the touch of his flesh had been cool. Heck turned away and rubbed his fingers violently against the earth and got out of the hole and ran.
    That man was dead, he thought. That man was dead. And the feeling of his fingers sinking into the flesh came back to him. He wiped and beat his hand against his trousers as he ran.
    He came to the end of the field. There was a ditch and, shortly beyond, a brick wall eight or ten feet high. Sitting at the muddy bottom of the ditch he felt well hidden. He discovered he had lost his helmet. He felt no desire to go looking for it.
    He began to rub his eye with his fist, but stopped suddenly and examined his hand. Traces of dried blood remained between the fingers. He scrubbed his fingers with some of the mud from the bottom of the ditch and rinsed them in a standing pool of brown water and wiped them against his shirt. With a clump of dead grass he did his best to clean out his pants where he had soiled them.
    While the sun emerged and ascended he remained hunkered in the mud. He felt relatively sheltered, and any other alternative seemed less safe. Eventually even from his position within the ditch he could see the sun burning above him.
    He heard, faintly, noises of growling and clanking. The sounds slowly grew louder, until they were unmistakably the diesel engine and clomping treads of a tank. As the noise approached, however, its origin seemed to shift, echoing off different buildings, causing him confusion as to which direction he should flee toward. He decided he would do best to stay hidden and hope they would pass by. After the disorder of the previous night and the pounding the Germans had given the town, he assumed that the enemy had retaken the territory—if it had ever been in American possession in any realistic sense at all—and not until the tank came into sight at the far end of the field with a large white star upon its turret did it occur to Heck that this might be friendly armor. He remained hidden, watching, bothered by the idea that this might be a trick or that if these were Americans they might mistake him for the enemy but held primarily by an inchoate uncertainty that he did not question. Behind the lead tank moved a squad of infantry, in American uniforms, and behind these followed two more tanks. He didn’t see any of them look his