The Ring and the Road to St. Lo By Andy Thomas Feldwebel Hans Jaeger cocked his nine millimeter automatic machine pistol, the reliable MP40, and grimaced in the early dawn dimness. He winced at the thought of the previous day’s carnage, the invasion of the beach not five hundred meters in front of his position, yet out of sight behind the “ridge” overlooking that now American-occupied strip of land. The Allies had commenced what was later to be known to students of the Second World War as “Operation Overlord: The Liberation of Europe.” Jaeger checked his “potato masher” hand grenades, really not much more than glorified pipe bombs, and looked at the other men there with him in the bomb-wracked church beyond the invasion beach. Indeed, without exception they were looking haggard yet expectant, as each knew that the renewed day’s fighting was about to begin again in earnest. The men holding the sector had been scraped together personally by Jaeger, as anyone in his unit with more rank than he had been killed. The remaining Germans holding down the hamlet off of the beach were there in barely platoon strength; a mere thirty men at best. It was the 7th of June, 1944. Jaeger and a few surviving teams of infantry were all that were left of their Abteilung, and now clinging to those fallback positions just off of the beach. They had been ordered, in a desperate phone message just hours earlier, before the lines had been cut, either by Allied bombing or French partisans, to hold their position at all costs. Jaeger thought of the phrase, “at all costs,” and remembered where he’d last heard that; outside of Moscow in the terrible Winter of 1941-42. Of course everyone is aware how that turned out. In his mind Jaeger feared a repeat of that. He knew that, if he were lucky he would be wounded and moved away from the front. Without luck he would be dead; worse yet he could suffer a crippling injury and remain maimed for life. Death didn’t scare him nearly as much as the prospect of being maimed; perhaps losing an arm or a leg, or perhaps going deaf or blind. Well, perhaps being deaf wouldn't be the end of the world, but he cringed at the other possibilities in any event. Jaeger took a pensive look out the window, searching for any sign of movement from the direction of the sea. The machineguns were set up in the gatehouse across the road which was running to the South, toward the road junction of St. Lo, from the beach. From his team’s position in the bombed out wooden church, Jaeger hoped “his men” could block the road, and in so doing perhaps stifle the Allied advance, at least long enough for some German reinforcements to arrive and attempt a counterattack. Jaeger forgot that he was thinking wishfully. In any event the Feldwebel Jaeger couldn’t have known that his motley Kamfgruppe, just he and a bunch of grenadiers, were the only thing standing at that moment between the Allies just over the lip overlooking the beach, and the inland, where those enemy armies would break out were they to make it that far. Were that to eventually happen, France would be lost and Germany itself would be threatened by the forces of democracy from the West, in addition to the larger threat looming from the savage bolshevik armies closing in from the East. It looked as if Germany might be split in two by the encroaching Allies, but Jaeger somehow forgot all of that and focused on the task at hand, no matter how impossible. The soldiers in Jaeger’s group, and the soldiers in every other rag-tag, ad hoc organization up and down that line, those remaining of the 352nd German Infanterie division after that first day of intensive barrages, braced themselves for the attack they knew was sure to arrive at any moment. As Jaeger’s remnant had been isolated for the previous six or eight hours, he’d not been in contact with any of the others from his division; since at best just before midnight. In addition to the lost phone contact, any long-range radios his unit had had were destroyed in the fighting of the previous day. Allied aircraft could be heard in the distance during that first dawn light, pounding German positions up and down the line. Jaeger imagined that they were targeting any German vehicles that dared move by the early light. Jaeger peered out the window and at the grenadier with a Panzerschreck on the wall outside his building. The quiet enlisted teenager was awaiting the arrival of American armor, from his appearance just a frightened boy teenager cast into the unlikely position of attempting to stave off an American assault. Jaeger didn’t hold the fearful look on the youth’s face against him. Jaeger knew that only a fool entered combat without fear. A soldier without fear often dies early. A soldier with a certain amount of fear operates at greater efficiency than a “hero,” hence the phrase “don’t be a hero” often heard coming from wives and lovers, to their soldiers leaving for the front. A soldier paralyzed by fear is the worst of all. At least a hero does some fighting, even if the risk of death in modern warfare is entirely too high; the coward often simply awaits death, folded up in a fetal position, hiding in a basement or a bunker, awaiting his cruel fate and unable to respond in any other way but perhaps by running away, hoping the hand of harsh destiny might yet pass him by. Jaeger and his kamfgruppe continued to listen as the sounds of Allied planes strafing the road behind the lines, probably a kilometer to the South of them, intensified. There were actually plumes of oily smoke rising from those spots behind the lines where presumably, Wermacht vehicles were being decimated in that first light of day. Perhaps an unfortunate German column had been caught making one too many night moves. The sounds of enemy tank treads grew in the distance, over the lip heading down to the beach where the American troops had successfully wrenched a toehold from the stubborn but ultimately outnumbered German defenders, just the day before. Jaeger eyed the abandoned house overlooking the beach. He thought he saw movements in the early morning shadows. Suddenly the fire from an American thirty caliber Browning machinegun indicated for certain the presence of Americans there. He and his men could hear bullets bouncing off of the stone gatehouse across the way. Jaeger signalled to his men to withdraw deeper into the church, as he knew its old wooden walls wouldn’t do much to protect he and his men from the American machinegun, should it sweep over into their direction. Silently they retreated into the church, where they would await the arrival of the Americans at the windows, doors, and gaps blown in the walls by the previous day’s bombardments, when they would open up on the Americans at effectively short range. The MP-40 was an excellent weapon for just such combat. There was the whooshing sound of the panzerschreck going off outside the church, then of the fresh-faced and fearful teenager dying. Apparently he’d killed the first tank to appear in the distance, but had paid with his life as a second tank had made its presence known and blown him to bits with a high explosive round. Jaeger supposed he’d be writing a letter that evening, should he be lucky enough to live that long. A second German panzerschreck opened up and the other American Sherman went up in a wall of flames and explosions. Unlike the other dead tank, the ammunition bin on the second one had been ignited and the explosion was spectacular, both visually and sonically. Americans appeared in the field in front of the German positions, and the MG42s in the gatehouse across the raod opened up. It was the 'shredding metal' sound of the MG42s; as well the air was filled with the screams of dead and dying Americans, trying to advance by crawling through their own smoke screen, but unable to avoid the deadly stream of lead coming from the German positions. Jaeger and his team, including Hansen, Hauser, and Ronne took up positions behind old wooden benches in the cavern of the cathedral, still with somewhat of a roof despite the heavy bombing of the day before. There were a couple of collapsed ceiling beams around them though, and these gave extra cover to the hidden defenders. It was almost over as soon as it had begun. The group in the gatehouse had repulsed all American advances on their left, but some Americans had approached the church from the East, outside of the line of fire. They’d appeared where they’d least been expected, but Ronne had kept his eye out so the surprise wasn’t as total as the Americans had hoped it would be. Instead, with Ronne throwing a potato masher in the general direction of the Americans, he’d alerted his fellow soldiers to their sudden incursion. There was no armor outside, save for the tanks his men had earlier killed, so the attack in that sector was apparently going to be light. Jaeger spun from his position looking to the Northwest, and fired a full burst from his MP40 into the now onrushing Americans. Miraculously he’d gone head to head with one of them carrying a forty-five caliber submachinegun, and had survived. His burst had found home while the American’s had been a tad late, and had simply sprayed the walls and ceiling as the American had been thrown back in a hail of 9mm ammunition. Blood flew everywhere from the instantly dying enemy soldier, then he lie there in a pool of his fluids, looking at once disappointed yet relieved in death, or so thought Jaeger. How many men had Jaeger killed? How many Russians had he picked off in 1941 and 1942? How many French in 1940? Jaeger had lost count, but it still disturbed him to kill, whether the democratic American dogs or the demonic bolsheviks. Perhaps they really were people, like him. Perhaps the American lying dead on the floor, probably destined to never reach home again, had once had a stern but fair mother and a hard-working father, as he had once himself had, during his distant childhood. Perhaps the dead American had loved a girl or a woman, as Jaeger once had. Perhaps the dead American had at some time enjoyed sausage and sauerkraut with beer, the way Jaeger had. Jaeger saw the crushed humanity on the floor before him and thought for the thousandth time that it could just as easily have been he. Somehow that thought neither comforted nor bothered him, as it was unproveable, one way or the other. In any case Jaeger was disturbed by it and the violence he himself had participated in over the years. It didn’t change though the fact that Jaeger had also had at times, had a great enthusiasm for firefights. Despite the grim realities of war there was something that appealed to Jaeger about combat. There was something in getting the other guy without being gotten that brought perhaps a twisted sense of satisfaction to him, as if perhaps there was an animal instinct, or possibly something “worse,” within his soul which enjoyed physical confrontation immensely. During such fleeting moments Jaeger could never quite sort out his senses. The other Germans in the building rallied and repulsed the American attack. In just a minute the fire died away, and the Americans retreated from where they’d come, fading back into a cloud of smoke as 81mm mortar shells began falling in all around the temporarily triumphal Germans in the church. Jaeger figured it had only been a probing attack and decided to fall back to Abteilung headquarters, just a hundred meters or so back, but at a spot where they could regroup. Perhaps if there were a bit of time available before a further American assault, Jaeger and his tattered troops could repair the radio sitting back there. He first signaled the men in the church, and they moved away and to the rear underneath the unsteady barrage of American 81mm rounds; harassing fire at worst. As he went to one of the West windows of the cathedral in order to signal the machinegunners in the Gatehouse to withdraw and regroup with he and his men, a stray bullet entered and exited his thigh, with enough damage to cause quite some bleeding and some disability, although it had missed his bone. “Damn snipers” he thought as he fell to the floor. At least the sniper had used an old “Springfield ‘03” rifle with 30.06 ammunition instead of the more powerful, .50 caliber variety. Jaeger was sure a .50 caliber round would have severed his leg, flesh wound or not. Realizing it wasn’t anything more than a flesh wound, albeit a bloody one, Jaeger got to his feet again, then signaled the men across the road in the gatehouse to retreat. He turned and saw his men exiting the cathedral on the opposite side. Jaeger took a candle from a holder on the side wall of the cathedral, lit it, then searched through the various piles of debris and found the door to the cellar. Jaeger didn’t bother to examine the logic of whether there would be wound dressings in the basement of the church. Somehow he was drawn there and his men had not so much as given him a second glance at his vaguely illogical orders. There were bandages in the HQ building, but no one had pointed that out to him and he’d not thought of it himself. Perhaps a diabolical spirit had manifested itself in all of them, unbeknownst to any of them, and was causing the slightly irrational behavior on the part of all involved human parties at that moment. Jaeger navigated the stairs, creating footprints in the dust beneath his candle light. There were various and sundry church trinkets about the cellar, and there was a wine rack, and a little box across the room, winking at him in the candlelight as if to say, “open me.” Before he went to it, he spied a little music box in the dim light and went to it, pulling it from the cobwebs on its shelf and opening and winding it. The music began. It was a sad little tune. What is it about a minor key that is usually so naturally sad? It’s been said that the universe is built upon a major chords, if one examines the overtones of a single note; there one finds that the first two overtones over a particular note are the Major 3rd and the perfect 5th. These two overtones, taken with the original tone, create a major chord. Thus, when hitting any single note on any instrument, whether it is obvious to the naked human ear or not, a major chord is being played. Now, when you enter the minor keys you lower that Major 3rd note in the tonic or root chord, and it goes against the actual overtones of the single tonic note. In other words, a minor chord is really “out of sync” with itself. In any event this results not in a “bad” sound, but if a minor key is used correctly, with a “deep,” or “sad,” or “contemplative” sound. The music box was playing something by Bach, a sad little piece. With Bach though, perhaps the boundaries between happy and sad are non-existent, especially with all of the modulations prevalent in even his simplest keyboard pieces. The music continued, and after pausing Jaeger turned and eyed the box he’d first seen, on the other side of the room. With his curiosity somehow piqued despite his bleeding flesh wound, Jaeger approached the box, an ornate little thing with inlaid stones in old, varnished wood. It was an antique jewelry box, and when he lifted the lid, he spied the ring, a gold band with a jade stone. The music slowly wound down in the background as Jaeger spied the somehow strange little ring. Jaeger picked up the ring and put it on. Instantly his laceration closed and the bleeding stopped. At that instant he thought he was going mad. It wasn’t that the miraculous healing had been unwelcome; quite the contrary. Instead it was the impossibility of such an occurrence happening. How could the act of putting on some strange little piece of perhaps nothing more than antique costume jewelry have instantly healed his nasty flesh wound? Had the bombardments of the day before driven him permanently insane? Was he living in some kind of bizarre dream world, rather than real life? He thought of all the fighting he’d seen, from Poland to the Netherlands, to Paris, Athens, Lvov, Minsk, the Kiev pocket, then the injury outside of Moscow in the frozen wastes of that winter just two and a half years prior. He thought of the extended leave, then the reassignment to the 352nd division there at Normandy. Nothing in all of his combat had compared to this, the discovery of the strange ring. What secret magic had Jaeger stumbled upon, that the wearing of such a simple little ring had healed his flesh wound in an instant? He took the ring back off, and the wound re-opened itself. It was getting stranger still. He apparently had a ring which would heal his wounds, but only if he were to keep it on his finger. The moment the ring would come off, the wound would re-open as if nothing had ever changed. Jaeger put the ring back on, and smiled at his good fortune. The ring might save his life. It was a good thing it was such a good fit on his finger. Feldwebel Jaeger grabbed a couple of bottles of wine from the rack and dashed from that cellar, up to the cathedral then out through a hole ripped in the rear of the building, into the morning dew and about a hundred meters to the South, to Abteilung HQ, a two-story stone building which had once been a farmhouse. Once there Jaeger took inventory of the men at his disposal. The road outside led South to St. Lo. Before Jaeger in that bombed out stone building - which had only a day before been their relatively peaceful Abteilung HQ - were the remnants of that very Abteilung. Only they were now led not by some Prussian-born blond officer but by Feldwebel Jaeger of Aachen, by way of Bohemia. To the Prussians in the Wermacht, the Bavarians were often considered to be “lazy” or “soft.” Jaeger was certainly neither, and his combat record had certainly shown anyone paying attention that such homilies were nonsense. Jaeger thought of all of the other cliches he’d heard over the years, and wondered about all of them, in light of the fact that he was a very tough soldier, and was also from Bavaria. Such a combination broke that particular lie. In any event the officers of the Abteilung were all dead, as were the remaining NCOs. Only Jaeger was left to lead after the terrible bloodletting of the Allied bombardments and invasion of the day before. Jaeger and his men could hear the American tanks regrouping out of sight, over the lip overlooking the beach, just a few hundred meters to the North of them. The cathedral with its bizarre basement was presently in flames from the continued American mortar bombardment. As Jaeger looked out the windows of the HQ building toward the cathedral they’d all just abandoned, he spied those flames as they rose to consume that monument to - perhaps ultimately false - piety. In the HQ stood Ronne, Hansen, and Hauser with their MP40s. They’d to a man found the little efficient machine pistol to be more effective than the typically longer-ranging, but bolt-action, model 98 Mausers they’d discarded. The fighting in this locale was perfect for the MP40 with almost all firing taking place within a hundred meters. Long range shots were the responsibility of the others, the two machinegun teams composed of Heller, Stock, Cooper, Schwartz, and Schmidt. Those five, all from the same Hanover neighborhood, had somehow managed to stay together throughout the war. Many a night Jaeger had sat around with them playing cards and hearing their stories of all of their friends and acquaintances who had “not made it.” Earlier in the war, most each and every one of the Wermacht’s disparate formations had been from a specific locale, but as the bloodletting had gotten out of control in the East, most units by then were simply a hodge podge of reinforcements from wherever they could be found. One case in point here was Ronne, the Flemish volunteer. Ronne would have earlier been assigned to SS Wiking, but with the desperation of the late war had found himself instead in the 352nd. All in all the Germans were now paying a terrible price for their earlier aggression, and Jaeger seriously considered whether the war was lost. He could have never known so from the stoic speeches of the German leaders; from the Fuhrer himself with his impassioned pleas for sacrifice which would lead to ultimate victory, to the spineless Goebbels, whom Jaeger despised, simply from the tone of his voice over the radio. There was simply something about Goebbels that Jaeger didn’t trust. Jaeger thought of the flesh wound he’d had, and how the ring had mysteriously caused it to somehow instantly heal. The others asked him about his wound as his torn trousers were caked crimson around that area. He told them it turned out to be just a minor flesh wound, that the bleeding had been easily stopped, and that he would be fine. The soldiers had no suspicion at that explanation, and dispersed across the sector, taking positions overlooking the approaches from the beach out of the stone-constructed yet damaged Abteilung HQ, and fanning out into the trenches flanking the building on either side. Cooper, Schwartz, and Schmidt took a position overlooking the road to St. Lo, a panzerschreck at their side as minor insurance should any American armor threaten. The Americans came again, behind a smoke screen laid down by their 81mm mortars. A light tank burst through the smoke screen but in an instant Ronne had sent the crew to their ultimate reward with a blast from the fire-belching anti-tank grenade launching contraption, the Panzerschreck, itself a vast German improvement over that original American invention, the bazooka. A mortar round exploded amongst the group at that very instant, leaving Cooper without hearing and half-buried in his trench position, the other two dead instantly, literally blown to bits. Jaeger eyed his front from the HQ building. He knew from the screams of Ronne as he quickly died, and from the silence of that machinegun position that the American mortar round had been disastrous. Only the lamentations of the half-buried, dazed and stunned Cooper were heard from that position flanking the road. Suddenly shadows appeared not forty meters away within the rectory between himself and the now burning church he’d earlier retreated from. Jaeger and his remaining men opened up from their concealed and hidden positions, into the Americans, along with the second MG42 in the trench to their right, on the other side of the HQ building from the road. Jaeger emptied an ammo clip as the screams of dying Americans echoed across the steaming misty ground. Jaeger was concerned about being flanked. He’d lost his “eyes” on his left for he figured Cooper to be broken and not paying attention to the battle itself. Jaeger wondered if some stealthy Americans were, at that very moment sneaking across his unit’s left flank behind the cover of a building blocking their sight on the other side of the road. Again the attack ended as quickly as it had begun, the surviving Americans retreating back into the smoke, leaving Jaeger and his remaining group wiping their sweaty brows in relief. Apparently no Americans had infiltrated the gap on their left. A signal from the adjacent German kamfgruppe over to their right indicated that they had also held. Even without visual contact with the group on their left, Jaeger was almost certain no enemy infiltration had occurred. Jaeger barked out orders to the others, and they gathered what equipment they had left, and retreated further into their prepared positions, back to the pillbox behind the creek and the hotel behind that. Jaeger helped Cooper out of his predicament, then sent him over to investigate the gap where Americans might have sneaked through. The rest of them faded to the South, across the creek behind them. Once outside the pillbox, Jaeger instructed the machinegunners to set up inside, while he and the others went into the hotel and took up further defensive positions, in waiting for that overwhelming American assault which he knew in the back of his head must come at any moment. Allied aircraft could be heard operating in earnest, perhaps two-thousand meters behind them on the road to St. Lo, or perhaps East or West of them along the line they were so desperately trying to hold. Plumes of smoke continued to rise and replace those that were dying as the Allied aircraft constantly hammered German units out in the open. Jaeger was able now to signal both the unit on his left, and the one on his right. Cooper returned to the hotel, after taking a dash back across the road to get there. A lone .50 caliber machinegun opened up around them, taking short, two and three-shot bursts into their general area. At first it had aimed at Cooper in his road crossing but now it was seemingly firing a random, as if the American machinegunner were trying to draw fire or trying to at least locate some kind of German target. Jaeger crawled through the rubble of the hotel and looked out through an opening, over the pillbox in front of them, and down the road from St. Lo, out toward the beach where he spied an American halftrack sitting, perhaps three-hundred meters away. Even in his mortar-made deafness, Cooper called out to Jaeger from the rear of the hotel. Apparently, wire communications had been established from the field phone in the back of the building, with divisional HQ. Jaeger moved away from the opening, and walked, or rather negotiated, the length of the building, making his way over collapsed beams, and crawling over a couple of unburied dead fellow Germans from previous day’s bombardment. The smell was not pleasant, but he was still glad he wasn’t either of them. He was glad that at least he had unpleasant smells to breathe, instead of the alternative, his own rigor mortis. It’s been said that a person’s first real reaction to the tragedy of someone else is to think, rightly or wrongly, “I’m glad it wasn’t me.” That was exactly how Jaeger felt at that moment. Jaeger reached the phone and talked to someone from the 352nd division staff. He was informed that he was now Abteilung commander, that reinforcements would link up with him at a hamlet just a couple of kilometers South of them, on the Aure river. For that moment, he was to repulse any immediate attack, then he was to pull out under cover of darkness that evening. It was barely noon so it was shaping up to be a long afternoon and evening, before they could finally pull back behind the natural barrier of the Aure. Abteilung HQ - hah. The unit which had been nearly 500 men just a day before was now a mere 20 or so men. The MG42 erupted from the pillbox in front of them. Apparently tired of the sniping by the halftrack’s .50, they’d opened up with a monumental burst of fire from their 7.94mm caliber machinegun, itself spitting forth bullets - in that metallic shredding sound - from a cartridge type which is thought by some to have been the forerunner of what was later to become the .308 NATO. The American halftrack didn’t stand up under the withering fire. Within seconds it was smoking. Jaeger saluted his superior over the phone, then madly crawled back through the rubble to an opening where he caught the tail end of that particular carnage. Then there was more smoke, and 81mm high explosive rounds began dropping in all around them. He was partly glad that it were only 81mm so far. For he knew that the Americans had potentially much deadlier supporting fire available to them. Perhaps this immediate sector were not of grave importance - at least not just yet. Ronne had apparently snapped because the next thing Jaeger knew, the Flemish freiwillige was sprinting wildly across the field in front of them, letting out bursts from a machine pistol, heading straight for the ruins of the HQ building they’d just abandoned. He crossed in front of the pillbox but luckily for him the MG42 was silent at that instant. American fire suddenly poured from the stone ruins of the HQ building and Ronne was shredded like so much meat in a grinder. His bloodied corpse fell to the ground in an eternal moment, leaving him lifeless and face up on that bright June afternoon in the ancient wine country of Northwestern France, there in a sad pool of his own lifeless blood. Jaeger cursed under his breath and for a brief moment contemplated Ronne’s fate. He thought of all of the times he’d felt like doing just what Ronne had. Ronne had been an excellent soldier. War seems to take the best soldiers first, then the cowards last. Jaeger didn’t see how they could simply keep replacing such losses. They were already recruiting far and wide across the German occupied areas, and manpower was in a critical shortage. There were Yugoslavian Moslems in the Waffen SS, the combat arm of that organization of the supposedly “racially pure.” Perhaps the prospect of defeat was “lowering” the standards of the SS. In any case, what did Jaeger care about the Waffen SS? Jaeger was a member of the Wermacht, not the glamorized SS, the ones who seemed to get all of the best equipment, but on the downside, all of the harshest combat assignments, as if indeed there were anything worse than what Jaeger himself had seen over the years. The MG42 opened up again. Cooper had taken the panzerschreck with him in the withdrawal into the hotel, and he now dashed into the street in order to take a shot at an American Sherman which had just appeared out of the woods on their left, across the road to the West. In an instant the tank’s machineguns ripped Cooper to shreds, but he managed despite that to get the shot off, and it sent the Sherman into an explosion, certainly spelling the end of its entire crew. Jaeger winced as he saw Cooper die. He could never get used to seeing one of his comrades consumed by lead. The MG42 swept the front of their position, raking what was left of the stone wall of the HQ, some bullets reaching inside and again causing the cries of dead and dying American soldiers. Jaeger compared in his mind, the Americans he fought now with his impressions of the Russians he’d fought, at least up until that fateful day in January of 1942, and of the British and French he’d earlier fought in the campaign of France, back in those nearly-forgotten halcyon days of May and June, 1940. In the French campaign the soldiers of France had been disorganized and demoralized. For Jaeger much of that campaign had simply been in the rounding up of surrendering French troops, the armor divisions having won the day while his infantry unit had been part of the mop-up. This isn’t to say that German infantry units saw no heavy action in France 1940, but rather that his particular unit had not. He had fought the British around Arras and had been impressed by what he’d seen of their tanks, especially the slow-moving, yet heavily armored Matildas. Those had been very hard for the early German armor to defeat, head-to-head, with their 40mm guns and armor capable of defeating German tank guns of the time. Only some of German the artillery and anti-aircraft pieces had been able to frontally defeat the Matilda. His unit had been involved in some of that combined arms fighting. The British had impressed him as able soldiers but they were simply caught in the very bad situation of the battle of France. In Russia it had been different. Those soldiers had been brave to the point of throwing their lives away in the defense of the Russian steppes. Jaeger could still remember the advances of that summer of 1941, the zenith of the Wermacht’s meteoric rise from the ashes of post-World War One Germany. Jaeger thought of the fighting in the woods around Minsk, or prior to that, in the clearing of Brest-Litovsk. If only the high command - or rather Hitler himself - had taken heed then, perhaps Stalingrad would have been avoided. Indeed, Brest-Litovsk had been a good indicator of what was to come. In any event the fighting in the woods outside of Minsk had also been fierce. The fanatical Russian defenders had created many positions which faced only to the rear. The unwary Germans had first unknowingly bypassed these positions, then been savagely attacked from behind after they’d gone past. After that trick had become apparent, the nightmare of the forest had become more routine. It had been terribly nerve-wracking to say the least though; the clearing of those clever positions manned by obstinate peasants from the hinterlands. Another characteristic of the Russians in the war was their tendancy for massed attack, and the aforementioned propensity for “wasting” lives. Even in that first Summer of operation Barbarossa, Jaeger had seen many a massed attack, with the Russians drunk on vodka and moving arm in arm straight at the German positions, yelling “urah, urah!” as they advanced. Both in France of 1940, and in the parts of the Eastern campaign that he’d seen, the firepower of the various armies had been, man for man, less than that of the German Wermacht. Especially telling in the Germans’ favor had been the MG34, and later the MG42. The German machineguns were arguably the finest of all time. Agreed, they shot a less potent round than the Russian 7.62x54 or the American 30.06, but the rate of fire of a German machinegun more than made up for that. When a German machinegun would go off at full automatic, as it was in that moment from the pillbox in front of him, it literally ripped the fabric of the air as it went off. The sound was intimidating to friend and foe alike, almost the patented sound of death. The Mauser model 98 bolt action rifle that many German grenadiers carried was simply “serviceable,” but the German machineguns had helped win them many victories, in both the West, and later in the East. For every squad in the Wermacht had carried with it at least one machinegun to provide maximum supporting firepower. In support the German 81mm mortar had been a fine weapon, but of course the Russian 82 and American and British 81s had been the functional equivalents. Indeed, it was the German machinegun and later the MP40 which gave them so much more firepower, man for man, than the Russians. Of course as the war went on the Russians added some very well-armed “shock” units of their own, perhaps with more firepower per soldier than any unit the Germans fielded. The Russian 7.62x25 submachinegun which the Russian Guard units began carrying in greater numbers as the war wore on was arguably superior to the MP40. One thing which had always impressed Jaeger had been the semi-automatic SVT rifles of the Soviets. Luckily, such had been in short supply and most Russians had carried bolt-action rifles, usually short on ammo. In any event during that dusty, bloody summer of 1941 the Russians had been ill-equipped for the war which took them so strangely by surprise, despite the warnings from not only Churchill, but from Moscow’s best spy in Tokyo, Richard Sorge to Stalin of the pending attack, during the months leading up to that fateful date; 22 June 1941. The Sorge information had come by way of Germany through their Japanese Axis contacts. During that first summer of vast German conquest, the Russians had often fought with pistols, shotguns, or whatever they could get their hands on. The standard rifle had been a bolt-action 7.62x54, but even that had been rare in some of the units which were virtually conscripted by fanatical commissars and sent to the front, often within a matter of hours, and sometimes armed only with farm implements. Some of the under-equipped units fought valiantly for a moment, then surrendered en masse to the advancing Wermacht, every prisoner facing an uncertain fate behind the German lines. Again, luckily the SVT rifles and 7.62x52 ammo in general had been in short supply for the bolsheviks during that fateful summer of 1941. Jaeger had been on a machinegun team during the advance, moving from position to position, mowing down hapless, inexperienced Russians as he went along. The German infantry units had set marching records that summer in trying to keep up with the armored spearheads, and he’d walked literally from Eastern Poland to the outskirts of Moscow, before the wound had sent him home to a two-year rehabilitation. When the Russians had been organized and properly equipped, they’d given a good account of themselves. The appearance during that campaign of the various models of Russian tanks had given the German high command pause for concern. The fairly fast T-34, and lumbering KV tanks, even without any communications gear, had on more than one occasion terrorized the soldiers of the Wermacht during that Summer of 1941. The appearance of Stalin’s organs somewhere around Leningrad, and later up and down the line had been another cause for concern amongst the invading Germans, especially once the chances of quick, ultimate victory melted before the snows in front of Moscow in that terrible winter of 1941-42. The Stalin’s organs (or Katyushas) were rocket artillery launchers. The Americans of June 1944 were another case altogether. It seemed to Jaeger that, unlike the sporadically firing and often disorganized Russians he’d encountered those years before, the Americans were always shooting, always laying in mortar rounds, and always had fresh, albeit mediocre tanks to attack with as if some never ending supply line wound across the Atlantic and back to their factories. Indeed it did, for the German submarine campaign had ultimately been broken and the Battle for the Atlantic won by the Allies. American 30.06 bullets whizzed around Jaeger. One struck him painfully in the foot, and he wondered if it was nearly the end for him, but miraculously, he looked down and no blood came forth. He couldn’t even detect the wound as he reached down and fingered the area around the hole in his boot; there was also an exit hole in the sole of it. Such strange happenings could only be the result of that ring he’d picked up. Given that taking the ring off before had caused renewed bleeding from the earlier leg wound, Jaeger thought the better of removing the ring now to see if the foot wound would indeed, also bleed. The pain was gone as soon as he’d felt it. Physically, everything appeared normal to him. Bullets rained in from various American positions, and tracers in the machinegun ammo belts showed the fire arcs of those various heavy infantry support weapons, and also indicated every source of such withering incoming fire. The MG42 in front of him continued to spew forth a stream of lead toward the former Abteilung HQ, itself punctuated by the mezmerizing flight of the red phosphorous tracers every fifth round. The dead tank across the road to his left had a sudden “brew-up,” and its ammunition exploded in a cascade of showering yellow and orange sparks, while burning phosphorous from some of the specialized shells flew through the air leaving their smoke trails. Again the attack died away as quickly as it had developed. Jaeger screamed to the survivors in the pillbox that they were pulling back, and looked around him. Only Hansen was left there in the building by his side. Hauser had taken a .50 caliber round and it had decapitated him. Jaeger spied the bloody severed head across the room and looked quickly away in disgust. So sick of the sights of war was he at the moment at he didn’t bother to look for the body. Out of the pillbox only Heller and Schmidt appeared. Their Abteilung, just a day before five-hundred men strong was down to four men; their leader Jaeger, and the troopers Hansen, Heller, and Schmidt. They grabbed whatever gear they could, including an MG42 and as much ammo as they could carry, and a panzerschreck and several rounds, along with some panzerfausts (disposable, 1-shot panzerschreks), and retreated across the creek, along the side of the road to St. Lo, back to the hamlet overlooking the river Aure. Once there Jaeger spoke to the reinforcements who were positioned there in the town overlooking the bridge. Once Jaeger and his stragglers had made contact with the contingent overlooking the bridge he saw that his unit had been reinforced with about twenty more men, most of them with potato mashers and Mausers, but with a couple of machineguns and a few panzerschrecks, and a smattering of panzerfausts. There were still no mortars available. In the town they were in position around the former divisional HQ, a bombed out stone cathedral. The divisional HQ was now further back from the front, away from the expected impending American attack which was sure to follow against the town, across the bridge there which was the only place to easily cross the Aure within several kilometers East or West of them. To Jaeger’s slight relief there was also a Flak 88 anti-aircraft gun in a position in that large stone church overlooking the bridge across the river. The Americans would have a very hard time getting any armor across the bridge if and when they were to attack, without first knocking out the highly effective 88. Jaeger spoke on the phone with divisional HQ and took some vague instructions, the main detail being once again to “hold at all costs.” Jaeger was weary of realizing those very costs. Each firefight bore witness to the incredible expenses of war, both human and material. In his mind though there was no sense of evil really, but simply bewilderment at the scope of the conflict and the very costs he was seeing being paid, yard by yard, by combatants of all sides. Perhaps indeed the greatest sufferers in war are the women and children, once one looks at the big picture. In any event Jaeger stepped out of the church and into the courtyard behind it, the sagging stone structure blocking his view of the bridge over the river. He opened a packet of cigarettes as he tried to clear his mind - Gitanes. He found a book of matches in his pocket and lit the cigarette. It was his first in 2 days. It was a fine cigarette, giving him that slight dizziness he’d grown accustomed to from strong tobacco, and giving his lungs that strange, pleasurable sensation of being filled by smoke. Jaeger blew smoke rings and whistled softly between puffs, trying to recreate the little piece he’d heard on the music box in the basement of the cathedral, now certainly swept under the tide of the persistent American advance. He thought he heard the movement of someone in a wooden house on the other side of the courtyard. The area around the battlefield, ever since those tremendous bombardments of the 6th, was devoid of civilians. They’d all evacuated the area upon commencement of those shellings. Certainly many had died beneath the explosions in their cottages overlooking the beach, or in their towns within reasonable proximity to the invasion area. The roads were not full of refugees here. They’d all left the day before. Jaeger followed the shuffling sound and sauntered across the courtyard, toward the intact wooden house. He crept up the creaking steps, and pushed the front door, already ajar, open with the snub barrel of his MP-40. He kept his finger on the trigger. Satisfied that the door wasn’t booby-trapped, Jaeger pushed it further open and stepped into the front room. There was some shuffling coming from behind a door within the house. About the main room of the house were various ornate pieces of fine furniture, indicating that the occupants had perhaps been collectors. There was an Afghan rug on the floor, in deep blue hues. He stepped gingerly, amazed that the floor didn’t creak as the building was probably well over a century in age. Over the rug he sneaked, then came upon the door with the slight noises coming from behind it. He kicked open the door and looked in with his submachinegun at the ready. There was a large dog in what had apparently been a study. It growled, then barked and lept at his throat, and by instinct he pulled the trigger. The dog was silent. Aside from the bullet holes in some of the books in the bookcases lining those walls, and the dead dog on the floor, the study was intact. It was full of books. Jaeger normally liked books of all kinds but he wasn’t in a reading mood. He felt sorry for the mongrel and wondered where the owners had gone. Had the population of this town, and that of many other, similar towns in the area simply fled into the countryside of the French interior? Jaeger went and sat in the chair behind a desk. It was the kind of chair that one could spin around in. He sat there and spun around, ending by facing the window with the June sunlight pouring through, looking out upon the tree lined main road leading through town, and upon the other buildings, largely intact save for the battered cathedral behind him. A grenadier called from the front porch of the cottage, “Jaeger, Jaeger.” Jaeger realized he may have alarmed some of his men with the previous burst of fire. The grenadier poked his head in through the door of the study and instantly realized why the shots had been taken. Jaeger spun in the chair and told the grenadier that everything was all right, that he’d simply reacted to the dog’s attack without the benefit of a moment to think. Perhaps Jaeger could have befriended the dog. It certainly looked innocent enough with its face intact there on the floor. Jaeger dismissed the grenadier and explained that he would join the men in their positions in awhile, but that he needed a moment for reflection. The grenadier left him alone. Jaeger contemplated his existence yet again. He kept going over all of the events of the previous years, the fascination he’d felt at Hitler’s rise to power during the ‘20s and moreso the ‘30s, and the frustration at the disappearance of various friends and acquaintances under Nazi rule. In particular it had bothered him when a gypsy friend from his youth had suddenly stopped showing up at their weekly get-together in a local beer hall, something they’d faithfully done for many years. Jaeger had never received a letter from that friend, and to that day it bothered him to think of what might have happened. Jaeger thought of the rumors of “camps” and a chill ran through him. To Jaeger it was one thing to fight and take something in an honest fashion from a competitor or foe, but to move entire families of people, based on their having been gypsies into camps for killing was simply, morally wrong to him. Those were only rumors in any case and he wasn’t sure if he believed them. In any event the entire idea of “race” as expounded upon by the likes of Himmler, Hitler and Eichmann was ridiculous to him. It was especially ironic that their ideal, the blond-haired, blue-eyed “Aryan” was one which even their supreme Fuhrer couldn’t live up to, for Hitler - despite his piercing blue eyes - was black-haired. On the other hand, Jaeger was a keen student of military history, and despite his Bavarian origins, a true soldier at heart. Even in its bloodiness Jaeger “enjoyed” combat on some level. He couldn’t even admit it to himself, but indeed there was some kind of extremely desirable feeling that had accompanied him through literally every firefight he’d been involved in. Yes, despite the terror, the feelings of futility, and the outright horror of war, there was a part of him which simply loved it. He couldn’t explain what he couldn’t fully acknowledge, but in any case he was, through and through, a warrior - shaper of destinies, politicians' blunt instrument - before anything else. This is where the appeal of Hitler had found home with him. Hitler had promised to build up the Wermacht’s strength, and he had done exactly that, at least to a degree. Germany had conquered. All of this was fairly good for the average soldier as the early campaigns had been relatively bloodless in comparison to the dizzying successes and their attendant fruits of victory. Once the Ostfront had been opened, this had rapidly changed. No soldier desires to see his army thrown away; wiped out; and that was what was happening on all fronts at that moment. Rather, most every soldier is willing to take a certain risk in combat if the rewards are to be great. Ever since about December of 1941, the Wermacht had paid more than the prizes had been worth. By 1944 there were no more rewards. The only reason for resistance was to keep the Hitler’s Motherland from being raped by inferior - bolshevik and democratic - kultures. Jaeger didn’t believe in race but he believed in kulture; and nazism was better than either the zionist-inspired bolshevism of the East or cowardice-ridden democracy of the West that his Wermacht then faced. Jaeger left the study and the house, then walked back toward the bombed out cathedral on the road overlooking the bridge. He lit another cigarette. He wondered if the smoke could possibly be bad for him. As crazy as it seemed to him, the cigarettes actually appeared to have the affect of, during the wintertime helping to keep his colds in check. There was the smell of food cooking in a kitchen within the cathedral. A mess kitchen had been set up in there as those facilities were left miraculously intact by the Allied bombing, even though the ceiling to the central room of the cathedral was collapsed. Jaeger smelled the beans cooking on the stove. When the villagers had fled they’d left a good deal of provisions behind. The grenadier cooking the food had taken it upon himself to provide the men with a good meal. He’d scoured the town, well before Jaeger and his stragglers had arrived, and had moved quite a stash of various foodstuffs to the area around the kitchen. There were bags of grain, spice racks, and several bottles of wine in a large wicker basket. Jaeger congratulated the grenadier on his initiative, and took a bottle of wine. He left the grenadier to his chef’s duties and walked with the wine to the front face of the church. Jaeger bantered with the crew of the 88. He noticed something like 15, white kill stripes painted around the end of the barrel. He asked them where they’d gotten the kills. One of them burst out laughing and the Unteroffizier in charge intoned that they’d never actually seen action, but that they’d put the stripes on there “for effect.” It was Jaeger’s turn to laugh, perhaps to sigh as well. Jaeger knew that the gunners would find their targets, experience or not, because the 88 itself was such a fine piece of machinery. The only thing that concerned him was the crew’s untested ability to stand up under fire. He slapped a couple of them on the back and offered encouragement, telling them how he was confident that they would “get the job done.” The grenadier turned unit mess cook shouted for them a few minutes later, letting everyone know that the food was ready. Jaeger was in the middle of sharing cigarettes and swigs of wine, but most importantly, his war stories, with the untested gun crew. Jaeger scanned the area and located a discarded mess kit across the room from him, left there by a fleeing grenadier, probably the day before. Jaeger himself had left all of his gear back in one of those buildings overlooking the beach. The others had their gear with them and each produced a mess kit. Jaeger asked one to stay on watch and he took the man’s mess kit. He and the others went and filled their metal bowls with beans. Jaeger took another bottle of wine. Some of the other soldiers from other positions about the town showed up with their mess kits at the ready. More bottles of wine were taken, along with loaves of black bread which sat on the counter. Jaeger counted several less than 20 heads around the big pot of beans, and figured the others had used common sense and left sentries at their positions, for an American attack could come at any moment. A conclusive indicator that the proper procedures were being followed was that a handful of the men in line about the pot of beans carried two mess tins, as did he. After they’d all lined up and gotten their food, then gone back to eat at their positions overlooking the bridge, a foreboding silence fell over the area, the men in the kamfgruppe eating in quiet, as if the food was the most important thing. Jaeger opened and passed the bottles of wine around to the men occupying their stone building. He’d moved to a barracks directly overlooking the river, the 88 behind him and covering the road that ran North to South, the barracks being just to the East of the road before the bridge. Jaeger looked around him as he ate, at the overturned beds and the twisted metal lockers. The building had been bombed by Allied aircraft on the previous day, but the ceiling was relatively intact despite the large holes where a couple of bombs had exploded, leaving the twisted metal lockers and overturned bunks in their wake. There were various and sundry other debris littering that floor. Jaeger lit up a cigarette after eating as he slowly sipped on the last of a bottle of wine. One of the grenadiers broke out a deck of cards and the 4 of them there in the room began a game. The evening was spent uneventfully. They played their cards for a few hours and got to know each other a bit better, the veteran Jaeger and another named Schiffer telling tales of earlier battles. Schiffer had seen action under Rommel in Africa, and had fought in Italy as well. The stories of Africa and Italy contrasted with Jaeger’s stories of the first year on the Ostfront, and the earlier battles for Western Europe. A couple of green grenadiers gave Jaeger and Schiffer updates on the home front. They’d just finished their infantry training and had been assigned to the 352nd in the days barely preceding the Allied invasion. In a way the tales told by the rookies were more interesting than those of the veterans; tales of the experiences under Allied bombing raids, of the rationing, of the disappearance of friends or relatives in late night visits by the dreaded Gestapo, of the relocation of gypsies, bolsheviks, and other "undesirables” to the “work camps.” It was twilight for the Reich and they must have known it in the backs of their minds. The two fresh-faced kids probably had one too many sips of wine and lost their reserve in talking about the situation back home. Earlier in the war conversations amongst soldiers of the Wermacht about the Gestapo and relocation camps might never have occurred. The 4 of them sensed though that they could be open with each other. The way the American attacks had been shaping up, it was doubtful that any of them thought they would see home again, unless they were to be wounded. Death or surrender appeared to be the other alternatives. Of course none of this was spoken but such thoughts added to the grim atmosphere of the moment. There wasn’t a lot of joking or laughing as they sat and played cards and talked. Of course, Jaeger’s views on death had changed slightly since he’d found that ring. He wasn’t sure what to think of its apparent powers, and he certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone about it. No one had seemed to notice the holes in his boot, both top and bottom where the American 30.06 round had previously gone through. Earlier during the retreat Jaeger had washed the blood off of that boot in a creek while the other stragglers weren’t looking. Later that night, after the sun had set, the men actually had a chance to rinse in a field shower, set up in the courtyard behind the cathedral; it was cold water but it was welcome in any case. All of the men were given the chance to rotate out of their positions, one or two at a time, and clean up. Still later, as the water truck had left and they’d settled into their positions, Jaeger took his turn to sleep and crept to a darkened corner of the barracks, kicked debris out of the way, and laid down on the hard floor. Before dozing off Jaeger pulled the ring from his finger. The blood from the wounds began oozing forth again, and the throbbing pain of them also became apparent. He slipped the ring quickly back on and knew for sure then that he was experiencing some kind of strange phenomenon. In any event his uniform was caked in blood where the wounds had been. The shower had not kept him clean for long. He felt the sticky ooze of his blood squishing around in his combat boot. Jaeger then wondered about the origins of the simple jade ring, its golden band and innocuous square stone barely winking up at him in the near darkness of the corner of the bombed out building. He wondered what lost and forbidden foundry had produced the seemingly alien ring. What mystical gold mine had provided the gold; what anomalous mineral deposit had produced the jade; what priest of what religion had cast a spell over it to give it that oddest of all properties? Jaeger didn’t really consider the ring to be a blessing. He realized that he could have gone home if he’d never found the ring. The flesh wound in the thigh alone would have been enough to have gotten him evacuated and sent home, just because of the deepness of the wound. Jaeger thought for a moment that a ring which could have provided a permanent cure would have been very useful. As it was the ring had left him in a dilemma; he needed to decide whether to take it off at just the right moment in order to be sent home, or to continue wearing it. In any event perhaps he and his men would have a quiet night and the Americans would be considerate enough not to attack until the following morning. After smoking another cigarette, cupped within his hand so as to avoid giving off light, Jaeger nodded off while Schiffer and the others looked on, scanning the horizon of the hedgerow across the river for any sign of an American night attack. An MG42 had been set up in a small pillbox overlooking the river, not twenty meters from their end of the bridge, and surrounded by barbed wire. Jaeger wondered indeed how any soldier of the Wermacht - even a Hitler Youth graduate of the Waffen SS - could not know that the war was lost. He’d certainly surmised as much during the fighting around Moscow in 1941-42. There he’d seen too many Russians, and too many Russian tanks, and had experienced too many massive barrages, to believe that at that point somehow the Wermacht would still be victorious. Perhaps they’d had a new lease on life during the Summer of 1942, when he’d recovered at the hands of buxom nurses in a Bavarian hospital while listening to radio reports of further great gains and victories along the Ostfront, but all of that had ended in Stalingrad, then the debacle at Kursk in July of 1943, and he’d known from then on that the end was surely near. Even the respite at Kharkov in February of 1943 - perhaps Manstein's greatest victory - had not been enough to mitigate both the Stalingrad and Kursk defeats on either side of it within the spans of time. As a soldier though, especially a loyal soldier, Jaeger had resigned himself to his new assignment in the 352nd division. There overlooking the Atlantic ocean and English channel from Normandy he’d thought perhaps he would escape further fighting as the war over the Ostfront would be decided before the Western Allies would ever get the chance to invade. He’d been mistaken, his false hopes shattered by the American barrages which had broken the still early, early morning of 6 June, 1944. About the Ostfront the bolsheviks may have had a great number of men, but in the desert, in Italy, and now in France, the Americans were throwing an incredible amount of high explosives and bullets at he and his fellow German soldiers. The twenty or so men joining him in the hamlet were mostly fresh, a couple of squads who’d been on leave a few miles inland while their own battalion had been decimated in the first bombardments of the previous day’s morning, called back hastily and assembled now in the hamlet overlooking the bridge over the river Aure. Three of them were with him there in the barracks. The others, including the stragglers Hansen, Heller, and Schmidt, were scattered in strategic locations about the town. Hansen, Heller, and Schmidt were in the pillbox directly overlooking the river with an MG42. Jaeger had put them there because they’d seen combat just hours before and knew what to expect. The bridge couldn’t be lost, despite the ill logic of even attempting to forestall the inevitable and ultimate collapse of Hitler’s “Thousand Year Reich.” The other soldiers were in various buildings, all with line of sight and line of fire to the big prize, the bridge, without which the Americans could not readily cross the river at that point. Jaeger heard guns in the distance, then explosions, first several hundred meters away across the river, then as if walking over the ground toward their small town. The explosions continued closing in, waking Jaeger from his short nap. It was an artillery barrage! Within a few short minutes the town was being rocked as if it were in the center of a maelstrom, walls and ceilings being ripped and rendt from their foundations. The earth shook as explosions from American 4.5" naval guns rained in on them. A nearby explosion almost seemed to lift the opposite end of the barracks, but only for such a brief instant that Jaeger thought he was imagining things. In any case that particular explosion ripped the East wall of the building entirely out, causing the already damaged ceiling on that end of the building to collapse. Luckily Jaeger and his team were on the West end of the building. Jaeger could see that the others were “all right” as they huddled in the near-darkness in the best cover they could find. After the barrage died away, Jaeger called out for a head count. They’d lost four men in one of the buildings when a direct hit had collapsed the structure. Unlike at the HQ building back near the beach, Jaeger felt there was time for decent burials so he ordered a detail out into the field behind the church, in order to properly inter the dead. Their work was done within the hour, and by now it was almost midnight. The Americans hadn’t moved, and there was no sound or movement to their front, across the river, for the remainder of the night. Jaeger finally got a few hours of restless sleep, awaking at around three a.m. and deciding as local “Befehlshaber” that he needed to stay awake for the impending American attack. Those two or three hours before dawn went quickly as Jaeger sat and twiddled his thumbs inside the dilapidated barracks overlooking the bridge on the East side of the road leading down to the river. Hansen, Heller, and Schmidt maintained their position in the pillbox. Jaeger and Schiffer, with the novices Karl and Schneider continued their rotation and watch from the barracks. The bridge itself was of ancient stone, and was probably twenty-five meters across its length. No tank would be able to wade through the 5-meter deep the waters of the river at that location. On the other side of the bridge was the road leading to back to the invasion beach, and on either side of the road leading away there were large fields with hedgerows bordering them. The hedgerows were dirt embankments, typically a meter or two across and a meter or two high, with hedges growing out of their tops. Jaeger figured the Americans would move up under cover of those, as no one in the town could see beyond them into the fields on the other side of the river. Jaeger sensed that the Americans would appear on those hedgerows opposite the town across the river, all at once and let loose with their typically terrifying Yankee force of arms. As the sun wandered lazily into view, bringing with it the first dim light out of the partly cloudy Eastern sky, even as the birds chirped routinely, and a cock crowed somewhere kilometers away, multiple tank sounds were heard behind the hedgerows on the other side of the river. The Americans had wisely avoided the road in their approach to the town. A hand-signal alert went out amongst the tiny kamfgruppe and the soldiers of the 352nd took their positions in the stone buildings and the bunker facing the bridge. Smoke rounds began landing around the bridge, on the German side. The slight Northerly wind wafted the smoke into the German positions. Jaeger smelled the acrid phosphorus as he peered through a shattered window opening, upon the tops of buildings poking out behind the hedgerows on the other side. He scanned up the hedgerows to the West, then the road, then brought his sight back to the hedgerow opposite him. As the smoke from various mortars occluded his vision further and further, tanks were heard out on the road, but by now were invisible behind the heavy smoke screen, at least from his position. Apparently the 88 in the church had a better view and they unloaded a round seemingly at random into the cloud. The shot was true in any event and out of the smoke erupted a mighty explosion and flames across the bridge. More tanks were heard across the way, and the 88 crew was surely reloading. High explosive rounds from the mortar homed in on the 88 position and Jaeger heard the rounds exploding on the road behind him, by the church. The 88 was barking every 5 seconds or so; not bad. Jaeger had seen better crews and he'd seen worse. American gun barrels barely appeared up and down the hedgerows, on both sides of the bridge. A torrent of American .30 caliber fire rained out upon the buildings the Germans occupied on their side of the river. Jaeger heard the agonized screams of Schneider as he, Schiffer, and Karl maintained their calm and began spraying fire into the American positions. The MG42 in the pillbox had opened up and was furiously pumping out literally thousands of rounds of ammunition. American bazookas opened up upon the pillbox, a lucky shot apparently finding its way through the slit and incinerating the machinegun team inside. That was the end of Jaeger’s entire battalion of not 72 hours prior, save for Jaeger himself and the few wounded who’d been transported out during that first morning’s lull in the fighting. Indeed, Hansen, Heller, and Schmidt were now gone. The kamfgruppe as it now existed was left with perhaps a dozen men, and the gun crew which kept valiantly firing. Americans with submachineguns appeared through the thick smoke on the bridge, with a Sherman rumbling slowly along in the middle of them. The Americans used the walls of the bridge for cover from Jaeger and his men as they couldn’t see completely down the length of the bridge from the barracks. Another MG42 with a better LOS raked the length of the bridge with bullets where they weren’t being wasted against the armor of the advancing tank. Schiffer was in a position in the corner of the building, closest to the bridge. He apparently dashed out into the road and unloaded a panzerfaust into the advancing Sherman, being mowed down by the American submachineguns while sending yet another American tank into flames as his molten armored-killing projectile hit home. One by one the remaining Americans on the bridge either were killed, wounded, or they retreated. After a few more minutes the Americans on the hedgerows faded back out of sight and fire and all was quiet again save for the burning sounds of the American armor, and the cries of the American wounded on the bridge, and the German wounded about the town. Jaeger’s men had certainly held at all costs. In the air was the familiar diesel smell, the smell of destroyed tanks. Charred flesh seemed to mingle within the odor, Jaeger observed not for the first time but certainly the last, he foolishly hoped. The American smoke rounds had dissipated. Jaeger retreated to his temporary command post after leaving Karl to watch the bridge. At the command post Jaeger spoke with divisional HQ and found out that he was to remain in position and hold the bridge at all costs. He was instructed to wire the bridge with explosives should it be necessary to blow it up under the feet of advancing Americans. After a half hour of silence save for the crackling of burning tanks, Jaeger ordered Schmidt and Hansen and a couple of the others out onto the bridge, to round up the American wounded and to prepare them for transport to the rear. The injured Germans were also gathered and all of the wounded were placed in a temporary infirmary near the rear of the large cathedral, away from the bridge. Jaeger spoke with a divisional dispatcher and learned that a German counterattack was about to take place a few kilometers to the West of them, around the village of Briqueville. As the attack was launched in company strength, dozens of wild-eyed, battle-hardened Wermacht troopers moved forward to try and smash the American position, and to break through, back to the sea. The men were armed to the teeth and enthusiastic about the task at hand. The attack was made with several tank destroyers, and nearly a dozen assault guns, but again the Americans in that area were prepared and held fast to their hedgerow positions just to the North of Briqueville where the Aure was but a creek. The enthusiastic Germans were crushed by superior firepower. None of their fanaticism could save them. Many an historian would argue that the German tendency to counterattack at that late point in the war was a waste of men and material at a time when they were clearly losing. On the other hand, perhaps it is not within the German cultural spirit to just sit back and take defeat, but rather to fight and fight hard, until the bloody end, should that be the ultimate price one has to pay; to fight despite the impending doom of one's situation. Jaeger spoke with divisional HQ after the attack and was informed that his left flank had been compromised, and that the remnants of the ill-fated attack had fled the town of Briqueville itself, their armor completely destroyed. Jaeger was also orderd to retreat as there was no point in his becoming surrounded. He was told to withdraw through the hedgerows, along the road to St. Lo, and to watch for Allied air activity which might hamper their movement. They blew the bridge before they left. The 88 and crew were left behind, to be moved at the first sign of darkness. Trying to tow the 88 across the French countryside on a partly cloudy day would have been sheer suicide for the Allied aircraft were constantly on the lookout for targets of opportunity, and they utterly controlled the skies. It seemed to Jaeger that on any day where the ground was not shrouded in fog, it was a constant drone of Allied aircraft up and down the line, and to the rear, every minute and every hour. Again plumes of smoke were rising in various directions as the attacks again hit home. This time Jaeger noticed the German anti-aircraft retorting as well, and once in awhile he could hear the sounds of a crashing and exploding Allied aircraft, a victim not of the non-existent Luftwaffe, but of the German gunners on the ground. They were firing 20mm and 37mm AA pieces. The 88mm type was strictly for ground targets, or high-altitude bombers; not low-level, tactical aircraft as were swarming over Normandy as so many wasps and hornets over fresh meat; no, those were the job of the 20mm and 37mm guns. Jaeger and the others began the plodding retreat to the rear. They were to take up positions at a chateau just a couple of kilometers South of there, and according to divisional, the line would be uncompromised then. The wounded were left in the cathedral and a nun appeared out of hiding in the basement of the place and volunteered to tend to them until the Americans would ultimately occupy the town. The rest of the locals had fled into the countryside; those that hadn’t been killed in the aerial bombardments and artillery barrages. There were only 10 men left in the kamfgruppe. There were Jaeger, Karl, Schaefer, Mein, Schencker, Jabbs, Lenners, Schikelgruber, Brenner, and Kamp. The weary, desperate men were a study in the effects of war upon the human psyche. Undoubtedly Kamp and Brenner were fresh-faced idealists, products of the Nazi school system and enthusiastic about fighting, as if they hadn’t figured that the war might already be lost. Jaeger had seen such blind loyalty in no one else, including Karl and the deceased Schneider, also fresh-faced the night before but seemingly somewhat immune to the propaganda back home. In any event for all of the remaining men save for Jaeger, Schaefer, and Jabbs, the battle at the Aure had been their first combat, and they were apparently none the worse for wear because of it, regardless of the differing political attitudes amongst them. Schaefer and Jabbs were studies in so-called Aryan physiology; tall, broad-shouldered, blond-haired and blue eyed. For a moment Jaeger thought it odd that Hitler himself had the black hair. What was the significance of that? Perhaps all of that talk about Aryan superiority was just that; talk. Or perhaps the aryans weren't really the Aryans. In any event, certainly Jaeger was outside of that group with his dark hair and dark, swimming, Bavarian eyes. Of course the Bavarians had a reputation for being lazy and cowardly, and other Germans sometimes referred to them in derision behind their backs, as “Northern Italians.” Schaefer and Jabbs had served extensively, and Jabbs had quite a limp from an earlier wound he’d suffered on the Ostfront. The others were nondescript, of varying shades of brown hair, of medium build and with blue to hazel to brown eyes. Of course there were more blue eyes than anything else. Jaeger was perhaps the most experienced veteran there, but this wasn’t 1941 on the Russian steppes, nor for that matter was the temperature -20 degrees centigrade. Indeed, it was a slightly balmy late Spring day in the hedgerow country of Normandy, France. Jaeger led the others from hiding place to hiding place amongst the hedgerows on the side of the road leading South to St. Lo, all the while with the unceasing Allied air activity unfolding all around them. In his crusted uniform he drove the men, there with his unkempt beard, as none of the others were clean-shaven either. Jabbs was wearing a mottled camouflaged smock, while the others were in their gray field uniforms. The 352nd had fought bravely with what they'd been given, but state-of-the-art uniforms and equipment they had not been noted for. The men darted from position to position, looking up at the Allied fighter-bombers, those birds of prey circling around and around for some sort of valuable target to annihilate. Jaeger and his men heard the sounds of explosions in the distance, throughout the hours they moved that day as the winged avengers took their horrible toll on the German vehicles which attempted to move in that daylight, mainly on the trucks of the supply columns which attempted to bring badly needed food, munitions, and replacement parts to the nearly-shattered troops at the front. Again from time to time the nearly incessant German light anti-aircraft fire would bring one of the metal birds down to its fiery death. The Kamfgruppe, only 10 men strong, was one of those nearly-shattered units which was for the most part without resupply. Led only by the calmness and courage of Jaeger, they reached their positions at the miraculously intact chateau at some time in the late afternoon. A communications team had already set up a field phone there, and Jaeger was given use of it by the officer in charge. Those men made their way to a different assignment and left Jaeger’s team with the phone, alone in the chateau. Jaeger learned that the 88 they’d left back in the hamlet was still awaiting transport by darkness. The Americans had not figured out that the town had been practically abandoned, and they were making their way cautiously along the south bank of the river, from Briqeville to the nameless hamlet where they 88 sat and the bridge had been blown. An armored car commander approached the chateau on foot from the rear, and called out to Jaeger and his men. They met and spoke after Jaeger had gotten off of the phone. The befehlshaber of the kampfwagen intoned that he’d been sent to help defend that immediate sector. He mentioned that the vehicle was parked outside, behind one of the hedgerows overlooking the road at a steep angle facing North, and it was camouflaged with netting and branches to keep the Allied aircraft from noticing it from the air. Jaeger thanked him for his support and the two of them decided that perhaps a celebration was in order in that they were all alive and they might all be dead any minute. Jaeger ordered his ten men to disperse and set up defensive positions overlooking the road and surrounding fields - and to establish contact with the other Wermacht units on their flanks - as the kampfwagen befhelshaber and the “Zugfuhrer” Jaeger descended the stairs into a musty old wine cellar. The occupants of the chateau had long since departed into the Norman countryside, leaving the building and its spoils temporarily up for grabs. Of course, during the earlier occupation, the Germans had surely demanded quarter in that place from time to time. The kampfwagen’s befhelshaber’s name was Leugnant Rudel. Jaeger and he chatted about the course of the war, and reminisced about leaves taken in Paris and time spent with French harlots. They talked about their favorite beers, the kinds of music they liked, with Rudel preferring Wagner and Jaeger admitting his taste for the decadent jazz, especially the guitar playing of one unknown and deformed-handed, Django Reinhardt. Rudel didn’t care if Jaeger was impure in his tastes. The time for ideological purity had long since passed, probably with the defeats in the East. To many Germans all of the racial talk and theory had been bogus, if not self-serving to begin with. With the war winding down and some of them beginning to wonder what on earth they were really fighting for, there was less of a need to “say the right things.” The two of them were more like survivors reminiscing years after a disaster. In any case a palpable tension filled the air as they both must have known that living much longer was going to be difficult for either of them. Jaeger thought of the ring during their explorations of the musty cellar, and fingered it slightly as they spoke and walked amongst the cobwebs and the wine shelves. They picked several bottles of the finest wines they could identify, and popped one open with a nearby corkscrew, passing it back and forth and finishing most of it in guzzles before making their way back up to the light of day. Jabbs was awaiting them in the main room of the ground floor. He explained in his deep voice that all of the other men had taken up positions overlooking the road, and that they’d gained a few stragglers in the meantime, and that contact had been established with the friendly units on their flanks. Jaeger gave Jabbs a few bottles of wine and told him to take them around to the others. He also stated that they could, one at a time, leave their positions to pillage the wine cellar. Now that there were no stimulants to prepare them for battle, they would have to settle for being drunk. Some have been known to say that war is better fought under the influence of drugs. From the Vikings with their mushrooms and the American Indians with their peyote, to the modern soldier taking amphetamines, many a soldier down throughout history has entered battle intoxicated. The Russians have won practically every war, drunk on vodka. The stragglers had been an MG42 team and a couple of snipers with scoped Mausers. Each held down the respective flanks, and flashed signals at other Germans from other Zugs who were holding down the flanks several hundred meters away on either side of their general position. Jaeger full well expected the American attack to come somewhere around the narrow paved road outside the Chateau. Jaeger took his last cigarette from its pack and threw the crumpled paper to the floor, openly firing it up in daylight without fear of giving his position away as he would in the darkness. The temperature was somewhere between 25 and 30 degrees centigrade on that late Spring day. A bead of sweat appeared on Jaeger’s brow as he was left alone there for a moment, Rudel having gone back to his kampfwagen, the 8-wheeled armored car. The field phone rang and Jaeger broke out of his daydream and went to answer it. It was around five in the afternoon. Divisional told Jaeger to be on the ready for an American assault as the hamlet they’d left had been overrun, flanked by the American victory West of there. Intelligence indicated that the Americans had turned South and were making their way along the road, right toward his position. Just then the phone line was cut as Jaeger heard the rumbling of explosions to his rear. He deduced that a major artillery barrage was taking place and the line had been severed. Jaeger signaled to the others in their positions to remain at the ready. By then each soldier in that kamfgruppe had taken a tour of the wine cellar. Jaeger was getting quite intoxicated as he took inventory of his personal weapons. There was the little 9mm pistol, the one with the 8-round magazine. Then there was his MP40, with its 32-round magazines. He had five of them, each full. In his belt were a couple of potato mashers, and there at his side he kept a panzerfaust. Their kamfgruppe had stumbled upon an ammo cache in their retreat and everyone had been able to re-supply. There was no food, and of course there were no stimulants - save for any cigarettes one might be able to scrounge up - around. He forgot about the impending American assault and wandered the chateau, looking for the pantry. He found it and treated himself to some dried meats and some stale, french bread. Certainly those were better than nothing. He felt a sort of guilt for enjoying the food while he knew the others, outside the chateau in their positions overlooking the road from surrounding hedgerows, were still probably hungry. Jaeger somehow justified his selfishness with the rationalization that he deserved the food more than the others, in that he’d been there at the beach two days before. In his intoxicated state he didn’t care much though, and it was all moot in the next moment as American 81mm rounds began falling all around the chateau. He stumbled for cover behind some thick walls, and listened to the sounds of various small arms barking out all around him. There were the MG42s, two of which his kamfgruppe had, and the MP40s, as well as the Mauser 98s and the American Brownings. An American .50 caliber halftrack appeared on the road but Rudel was quick to knock it out with a heavy dose of MG34 fire and his 20mm cannon putting the proverbial icing on the cake and sending yet another “Purple Heart Box” into a smoky demise, the cries of the dying crew members fanning eerily out over the battlefield. That .50 caliber machinegun was silent, but closer still the sounds of the American .45 caliber submachineguns chimed in, then the sounds of the American officers’ carbines also were heard. The American rifles were so superior to the German ones. The 30.06 M1 Garand fired 8 rounds from replaceable clip-type mechanisms and was semi-automatic. The German Mauser 98 had a fixed, 5-round chamber and was bolt action. The volley of fire was almost without exception always greater coming from the Americans than it was coming from the Germans. The MG42 was the exception to this rule, yet the Americans with their .30-caliber and .50-caliber machineguns were no slouches in that department. A panzerschreck opened up on the left flank perhaps a hundred meters away, presumably where some American armor was testing for a possible breakthrough point. It was a good thing there were German kamfgruppes up and down the line. Another quick explosion was heard as another oily cloud arose from the white of an explosion in about the same spot, hidden by intervening hedgerows. Jaeger was knocked unconscious. He awoke after dark and heard American voices around him. He felt himself with his hands in the silence and wondered what had happened. There was yet his MP40 hanging from its sling around his shoulder. He was sitting on the floor against an intact wall, next to an explosion hole leading out into the night. He could see a light coming from the other room. He discovered his uniform was caked in blood around his neck. He considered the implications of the ring he was wearing, and what might happen were he to dare take it off. He realized he’d suffered a massive head wound but that the ring had healed it instantly, just before it’d had a chance to kill him. He speculated then that if he were to remove the ring, he would die instantly of the head wound. He remembered the explosion. In his mind he could still picture the shell coming in, as a speeding piece of black metal against the backdrop of the partly cloudy June sky, passing unnoticed save for the recollection given him by the ring he was wearing, for if the ring had not been on him, there would have been no memory of the sight of the falling shell, or of the white hot explosion and the feeling of burning metal shattering bones and severing the head. For surely under normal circumstances, the human mind cannot process such myriad impulses before the moment of ultimate incomprehension; death. Jaeger had been given insight into that moment by the very innocuous yet powerfully alien jade ring he wore. Jaeger tried to forget the ring and simply reminded himself that he must get to a doctor, attempting to bury the irrational implications of his predicament in the furthest reaches of his mind. He next considered how he might get out of there, in order to live to fight another day. Perhaps he should wait for a firefight to break out in the distance, then he should try to sneak up on some isolated Americans and kill them in order to creep through the lines and get back to his own men. There were two Americans chattering in the next room. They were talking about Paris, and how they were going to meet the respective loves of their lives there. Jaeger could make that much out. He knew a slight amount of American. He righted himself and stood up silently, standing in the shadows to avoid detection, determined to wait for the sounds of a night firefight and looking for a direction to move toward should he get the chance. He was fortunate. The Germans had launched an ambush about 300 meters to the East of them, from what he could hear. The sounds of the firefight were breaking out in a Western direction, getting closer to him all the time and threatening to engulf the positions South of the chateau where the Americans had presumably set up their new front lines. Jaeger bolted through the shadows as mortar fire broke out around them, sending the Americans in the next room diving for cover as the yells of wounded and dying men broke what remained of the silence of the night sky. Starshells went up as the Americans tried to identify the sources of the German fire. Jaeger bolted through the shadows and found a tree line running South along the road. He took off in a sprint with his MP40 clutched in his arms. He didn’t see any Americans on or watching the road. Suddenly he was ripped by a tremendous pain in his gut as an American yelled out from a hedgerow lining the road, “Jerry on the road!” He realized he’d been spotted and actually shot through with an American .45 round, but the wound healed immediately and he continued in his sprint after that brief, agonizing moment. Semiautomatic fire from three Garands peppered the road around him as automatic bursts from a BAR and a .30 caliber carbine snaked up from behind. He dived into a shadow, presumably out of line of sight from the Americans. He then ducked and ran at the same time along the hedgerow, making his way a couple of hundred meters South on the road. The fire died down and he stood up again and continued running at full speed as the starshells overhead and behind him cast shadows on the ground in the reddish night light. He was well past the firefight now, behind his own lines again. He’d gotten through on the road. The German attack had concentrated about 100 meters East of the road at its height. The sounds of fire died away and were replaced by the sounds of crying men in the fading starshell light. Jaeger continued down the road out of fear of being misidentified and shot. He went a further 100 meters South toward St. Lo then dived into a pile of hay behind a hedgerow lining the road. It was about 15 degrees centigrade and overcast. Jaeger awoke to a heavy mist and overcast skies. There would be no Allied air attacks that morning. It was about 9 degrees centigrade. Jaeger got up and decided to wander a bit further down the road. His head hurt terribly from the wine of the day before but otherwise he seemed fine. He came across an anti-aircraft truck going the opposite direction. He saluted the Gefreiter manning the 20mm cannon and yelled out, “You must be busy” with a wry grin. The Gefreiter waved wearily back and grinned, cigarette hanging out of his teenaged mouth. The recruiting was getting both younger and older. Jaeger thought of the static division in the next sector over. He didn't know but he indeed sensed that it had been annihilated in the few days since D-Day. Behind the AA vehicle was a Sturmgeschutz assault gun, the 105mm type. Jaeger felt better with some kind of tracked vehicle around, and the 105mm gun was especially reassuring. The commander of the vehicle, and Unterfeldwebel, saluted Jaeger as they went by. Jaeger followed them on foot as they meandered about 50 more meters to the North and stopped, dispersing off of the road through a gap in the hedgerow on the Western side, disappearing behind a ruined farmhouse. Jaeger looked down at his uniform. It was caked in blood around the neckline. There were holes all over his uniform, and blood also caked his abdominal area. Jaeger worked his way over the debris and entered what was left of the farmhouse and found a dead fellow soldier, decapitated with his uniform spotless because of the way had fallen and remained as the blood had drained from him, leaving his uniform clean. Jaeger winced at his own callousness and undressed the headless corpse. He took the contents of his uniform’s pockets, a rosary, a wallet with pictures of his parents, brothers, and sisters. The corpse had also given up some identification papers and a few coins, as well as a couple of stamps and some small currency. He took the other, dead soldier’s pants and shirt, and put them on. They fit him well. He ripped the name off of the front and was now a lowly grenadier, albeit a cleanly uniformed one without a name. He found a gray field cap in the pockets of his new pants and put it on. Some German grenadiers and a Major appeared in one of the doorways. Jaeger saluted without trying to explain his real rank. Rank didn’t matter to him just then. The Major spoke in an authoritarian tone. “Grenadier, you will fight with us. I’ve been ordered by divisional HQ to gather any stragglers in the area and to defend the road at this point. This stone building and its surrounding sheds will provide us with our defense. Let’s fortify them as much as possible before the Americans realize how weak we are. Indeed, as they left the building and gathered in the yard, and with a beleaguered Feldwebel bringing back 7 or 8 more stragglers, their entire kamfgruppe was perhaps 20 men; the Sturmgeschutz 105, the AA truck, 3 MG42s, 2 Panzerschrecks, and a few MP40s, including Jaeger’s. The barn happened to be full of ammunition so this must have been a German storehouse prior to the invasion. Jaeger and the others gathered as much ammo as possible. The grenadiers with just Mauser 98s weighed themselves down with machinegun ammunition before teams as designated by the Major and the other Feldwebel dispersed in interlocking fields of sight and fire overlooking that particular road to St. Lo. Jaeger left with a team totaling 3 men with MP40s in the defense of the farmhouse ruins. Somehow the Major had liked the demeanor of Jaeger and had entrusted 2 grenadiers to him, even though he had no reason to think anything of him other than that Jaeger was another weary, unshaven grenadier. Akin to rumblings from hell the battle flared up again under a fair wall of smoke from the American mortars. The 105mm gun from the Sturmgeschutz went off to Jaeger’s left at about 50 yards from his hiding place. The cries of American wounded on the receiving end of the exploding shell broke into the cacophony as Jaeger signaled the two grenadiers with him to stay put. The MG42s opened up, one on this side of the road and one on the East side, then another further West. Within minutes all three had been apparently silenced as more screams entered the air, presumably from the German positions now as the American attack drove home. It was very difficult to stop an attack made at odds of 2:1, 3:1, 4:1 or higher as the Americans always seemed to manage. The kamfgruppes could punish the Americans severely for every yard of ground taken, but the Germans in the end appeared never to prevail. The Americans simply kept pouring reinforcements into the battle, not small groups of men and vehicles only when the weather was right, as the Germans were limited to. At that moment Jaeger thought he could hear the fire of at least 3 American Sherman tanks on that line. His group had only the StuG 105. An American tank broke over the hedgerow directly in front of them. Jaeger checked to see that the others were still on the Northern wall of the building looking out at the approaching tank, then raised a panzerfaust from his side and aimed it at the advancing Sherman with its guns blazing. In an instant the disposable grenade launched and sent the Sherman into flames upon contact. Jaeger forgot the blazing wreck in front of him and the various small arms peppering his position, and went into a daydream about that late summer, evening crossing of that vast Russian river en route to the closing of the Kiev pocket. What had proven to be Hitler’s greatest military triumph may have also doomed the Reich in that it was actually the main reason they hadn’t taken Moscow in that harshest of winters. Jaeger felt a chill as he thought of the trenches outside of Moscow and the orders to stand fast. He again saw the blazing tank in front of him, and felt a shattering pain in his thigh as he realized he’d been hit in the femur. The ring saved him again as the wound healed within a short moment and the pain and wound were gone. Jaeger shuddered to think what he might look like should he take the ring off. Jaeger let out a long and maniacal scream and emptied a clip from his MP40, into the hedgerow facing him, behind the burning tank with its smell of seared human flesh and burning munitions and petrol. His 9mm bullets danced like angry insects in the bushes and atop the hedgerow opposite him. A bleeding American corpse popped out of the bushes and instantly hanged over the front of the solid dirt hedge facing him. The Americans were moving. More silhouettes appeared in the bushes as Jaeger changed ammunition clips and he heard the screaming of one of the grenadiers in the next room, apparently mortally wounded in the wall of withering enemy fire. Jaeger turned and saw blood all over the floor in the room next to his, as the head of the dead grenadier rolled into the doorway. Jaeger was aghast. He thought of himself without a head, something he knew was sure to follow if he were to remove the mysterious ring he’d found in that nondescript cathedral just past the lip overlooking that deadly Normandy beach. He thought of the foot wound, of all of the other wounds, and how he was yet in apparently perfect physical condition. He yelled again and burst into a sprint out through the shattered doorway of the farmhouse, into the field outside, where from the hedgerow not thirty meters away on the other side the American silhouettes arose against the late afternoon, overcast sky. Jaeger let out another wild yell and emptied his next clip into the shadows as he ran, approaching them at full speed. Curses in American were heard across the way and some of the soldiers broke and ran away from the “crazy kraut with the burp gun” as one of them was heard to say. Americans caught in the burst fell to the ground in the destruction of their flesh beneath the terrible bullets, the wounded enemy soldiers moaning and writhing in agony. For a brief second there was no retaliation from the American ranks as Jaeger went to grab a potato masher and lobbed it somehow gleefully toward the American positions while cutting sharply to his right and bursting across their front, toward the road in the realization that without ammunition of any sort, the ring wouldn’t ultimately save him. American weapons opened up, those that weren’t panicking and those that weren’t wounded. 8 or 10 ten men fired at Jaeger from close range as he ran across their front. The grenade went off and sent two or three of those Americans into inaction. Those remaining after the results of Jaeger’s assault fired everything they had into the insane German soldier in front of them. Bullets lit into Jaeger from multiple directions, giving him the sensation of complete agony as his body was ripped and repaired several times in those brief seconds. The only critical place, and Jaeger knew it then, was his ring finger; as long as that ring remained attached to him he was… invincible! Jaeger ducked out of sight onto the road and dived into a hedge on the opposite, Eastern side and began crawling frantically under that cover back to his own lines. The Americans were left on the other side of the road, with only the now cowering Grenadier Jaeger had left behind in the farmhouse to contend with. Before they resumed firing at the farmhouse those who were left standing in that squad exchanged amazed and frightened glances. Surely each of them had seen their very shots hit home, but in each case every bullet wound had healed on that mad German, right before their very eyes. The thought of some super soldier fighting for the Wermacht was not a pleasant one to those men, especially given that the little encounter they’d had with Jaeger had cost them three dead and two wounded. The encounter with Jaeger was the source of rumors amongst the Americans for weeks to follow. There were always the rumors amongst the Americans regarding “camps,” and “strange experiments,” and the encounter with Jaeger had caused a few of them to speculate that perhaps the Germans had indeed created a “superman.” The Americans there gathered their wits about them and under the orders of their sergeant, continued firing at the farmhouse. One of them was assigned to run to the road and see to it that Jaeger not be able to flank them easily. It didn’t matter though as Jaeger was going completely the opposite direction, South along the road, instead of trying to circle around behind those particular Americans he’d been not three meters from just moments before. Jaeger looked at his uniform. It was full of holes and there was blood everywhere. In his mind he knew he was in trouble because of the ring but he kept telling himself that if he could just get to a surgeon, everything would be all right. Even his otherwise rational mind wouldn’t argue with that obviously unrealistic thought. Of course, with his wounds, especially his head wound, he would die instantly should the ring have been removed from his finger. Certainly nobody else in the war had shared his unique experience. Indeed, where had the ring come from and how had it ended up in the basement of an anonymous cathedral nearly overlooking the Normandy beach? He didn’t know if he was blessed or if he were cursed in the worst way possible, to die a thousand deaths perhaps. How many had he died to then? Perhaps he’d already suffered wounds enough for twenty or thirty deaths. He shuddered again to think of what he might look like should that ring ever come loose. He examined it again, shifting it around his finger, then watching it glint in the twilight, the almost alien jade color winking playfully up at him. He certainly didn’t feel playful as he resumed his crawling along the hedge lining the road to St. Lo. He heard explosions behind him and knew somehow that it was the StuG, the assault gun going up from some Sherman or M-10 shell which had hit home. He was glad that he’d always been a grenadier, and had never been part of a vehicle crew, except as a rider in a halftrack. He couldn’t see himself dying in such a cramped space. He wanted to die where there was room, if indeed he would ever have to die at soldiering. He wondered about that now. Jaeger thought of the cries of the wounded, that one time during the French campaign where that certain tank had taken a 75mm artillery shell, and it had set the tank on fire, trapping the crew inside twisted metal. They had screamed for help as the battle had raged around, but finally the ammunition bin had caught fire and they’d gone up in flames. Jaeger would never be the same after that. He was different from that day on. It was no longer a game, but a hideous play that had to be acted out nonetheless. His nerve as a professional soldier was unmatched, even by the Prussians. The pain a man suffers in a battle is the closest he will ever get to the agony a woman experiences in childbirth. Perhaps in a way the warrior is also giving birth; birth through the vandalism of his destruction, for after a war there must certainly follow peace and rebuilding. Perhaps combat, even in its terror, agony, and gore, is part of the cycle of life and will never be eradicated. Perhaps indeed the hands of pacifists have the most blood on them in the end. Even Ecclesiastes had declared somewhere, “a time for war, a time for peace.” Certainly the inspired word of the one rumored to be called “YHVH” cannot be ignored. In a battle a particular part of a man is fulfilled, and despite its grim realities, war is the ultimate game, even if it is at once also a tragic play. What man can honestly say he wouldn’t enjoy conquering the land, the home of his neighbor, taking all of the women and other plunder for himself? To deny these drives in the human male is to deny something very powerful indeed. The urge in the male for expansion and conquering is ignored only by the foolish. Perhaps that ancient drive to conquer, to subjugate, is the one thing that might one day take humanity to the stars, if indeed it is not first the source of our destruction. Jaeger wondered for a crystalline moment if women might one day harness the destructive power of the male, and turn it into something truly creative, or if war were simply part of the inevitable “universal waving of the waves” as his wacky school instructor had been wont to say. Jaeger further wondered if any man, when asked privately, would deny the appeal in fighting and dying in a war, as opposed to say, shriveling up like an incontinent, thoughtless aged prune in some sanitarium. Indeed the lure of combat to men, the lure of conquering, this is the dirty little secret most people - especially in our day and age so far removed from that titanic conflict - choose to ignore. Like little sheep looking for that ever-elusive peace, such “sheeple” try to deny the conquering, expanding nature of man, instead of perhaps harnessing it, which is indeed the only realistic answer outside of widespread physical or mental castration of males, which is out of the question to most people. He wondered about Hitler and the Nazis’ constant references to “race” as he crawled along after twilight, trying to reach his own lines and a clean uniform. How could a man with black hair preach the superiority of those with blonde? What comprises a race? Would it be more accurate to refer to them as a culture, rather than a race? Perhaps the problem wasn’t the bolsheviks or other various and sundry scapegoats; and the answer wasn’t National Socialism, and other than those two “minor points” everything was fine in Germany. Jaeger himself was of fairly dark complexion, yet, yet he’d fought for liebenstrum just as any other good German of his age had. He thought of the few Russian volunteers he’d fought alongside during 1941, and realized they must have hated Stalin more than Hitler. Granted, for certain minority groups especially, life under Hitler and the Nazis was often harsh and cruel. Jaeger had heard the stories of the camps and the things that would go on in them. He thought back to his convalescing after the wound outside Moscow, and the days and nights in the bed facing the rail yards, and the constant coming and going of trains, and the murmur of distant crowds out of sight of his window. He remembered the day he could walk and the view he took out the window before leaving the hospital from the street side, taking a cab in the opposite direction across the town from the rail yards and the military hospital. Jaeger remembered the seamed stockings of the nurse by the door as he’d left the hospital, and the outline of her stocking tops under her crisp, tight skirt, one high heeled shoe dangling as if daring him not to later relieve himself at the thought of her. Jaeger forgot the fantasy woman as a shell burst within meters of him, sending him sprawling to the ground next to the hedge. By then it was dark. An American barrage had begun. It was drizzling and windy. The smoke wouldn’t sit still for the attacking Americans, he thought as he took off in a sprint to the South, away from the battle developing behind him. Star shells lit up the cloudy June Normandy sky, and the drizzle continued unabated as American shadows crept forward through hedgerows, then across open fields, in search of the German pockets of resistance awaiting them in and around those medieval hedgerow barriers. The Germans could strike from anywhere into a group of American troops. A platoon of Americans might be more than half way between two hedgerows, on their side the known, and on the opposite hedgerow, within its age-old bushes, the unknown. At any time during such a movement could a German position open up. The MG42s so common to that battle once again proved their eminence in that industry of death, the phenomenon known as modern warfare. The Americans had gained a reputation by then for having incredible firepower at their disposal. Outside of close in capabilities, the Americans dominated that battlefield behind those lines, on every road leading in and out of the greater battlefield, at least when the weather permitted and it wasn’t nighttime. The Yanks were winning in the war of logistics. The screams of the wounded filled the air again as the Americans met some German resistance, behind Jaeger. Jaeger decided to avoid action and instead to move South in an attempt to hook up with divisional and perhaps get new orders. He broke into a run on the side of the road, and found his way to a blacked out roadblock a few kilometers South of there as the sounds of the firefight died away to the North where contact had been made, and the starshells marking that area began to fade, leaving the gloomy, slightly clearing night sky in their wake. Jaeger was interrogated by the Feldwebel at the roadblock. Jaeger convinced him of who he was, and was shown into a hotel that had been commandeered and appeared to be a temporary command post, with what were presumably field phone wires running haphazardly about the exterior, in through an upper window to the place. Jaeger recognized the Oberstleutnant. He had been the regimental commander, the one his Major had reported to. Oberstleutnant Koenig saluted Jaeger and greeted him in the next breath, recognizing him from some drills they’d done not two weeks before. Koenig was visibly warn by the war. He’d also seen combat in France, the Balkans, and the East before having been transferred into the 352nd at Normandy. He’d been wounded like Jaeger, but his rehab had been swifter, and he’d seen fighting in Russia through the Autumn of 1942, as part of the 4th German Panzer Armee to the South of Stalingrad. He’d been wounded in Operation Tempest, the attempted relief of Stalingrad. He’d been out of action for only nine months or so, and was finding his duty in Normandy to be to his liking. That is to say they had been to his liking up until the Allies had invaded, specifically the overwhelming Americans flooding his positions and threatening to smash the entire Axis line. Koenig was gray-haired and bald on top, with spectacles which gave him an owl-like appearance. His wisdom though was the wisdom of the warrior, the professional soldier not motivated by politics but only with the immediate tactical or strategic tasks at hand. It was obvious to Jaeger that Koenig was anxious, pacing the floor furiously and barking out orders to subordinates with the field phones ringing off the hook. It was yet only 2 a.m. Koenig shook Jaeger’s hand and gave him a strange look once he observed him in his tattered and bloody uniform in the light. “Say, you wouldn’t be that crazy soldier that wouldn’t die they were talking about just up the road now, would you?” Koenig grinned and nudged Jaeger as he made the comment. Jaeger became uneasy at the apparent news that his little escapade had not gone unnoticed by some of the other German grenadiers around at the time. Some of the others must have seen his act of bravery, and the unbelievable way in which the wounds had healed themselves before their eyes, almost quicker than they would occur. The word had spread fast, but Koenig didn’t really take much stock in it. He was just teasing Jaeger, and Jaeger knew that. “Sir, I haven’t heard of any such thing, but we could use a grenadiers like that right now, don’t you think? Maybe ten thousand of them would do…” Jaeger smiled slightly as he spoke. Koenig showed Jaeger to a room of his own. Koenig asked him his rank, for he knew Jaeger to be more than a grenadier and deduced rightly that the uniform had been borrowed from a casualty. “Feldwebel, Sir.” Koenig ordered a grenadier to fetch Jaeger an Oberfeldwebel’s uniform. Jaeger had apparently been field-promoted. A grenadier showed Jaeger his room and brought him yet another clean uniform. He once again transferred the contents of his pockets to the pockets of the new uniform. Jaeger wondered what he would tell Koenig. Jaeger figured that if he just kept quiet, he might be put back out on the line, and that might be the safest place for him at the moment. At the right interlude Jaeger would desert, and find a French doctor somewhere in the countryside to operate on him while he removed the ring. Perhaps he didn’t need a physician, or at least not a medical doctor, but a gypsy woman, perhaps one of those he’d seen taken by the Gestapo from the village in Hungary where he’d once been on leave, during that late Spring of the year 1941. Jaeger thought of the short love affair with the Hungarian beauty, of the smell of her freshly washed hair, and the touch of her tender little fingers upon his body during that spring leave. Jaeger couldn’t or wouldn’t remember much beyond that. The girl may have been a gypsy, and by then was probably in a “relocation camp” somewhere. In any event Jaeger was somehow sure the young lady were dead by now. He couldn’t put his finger on the source of the notion, nor could he give a rational answer for it; it certainly wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that his little lover had ended up in the Nazi dragnet. They’d certainly “relocated” or imprisoned literally millions of people, from what Jaeger had heard whispered in late nights out drinking beer with his fellow NCOs. Some of them told distressing stories of atrocities, and again Jaeger could never forget the traffic he’d seen and heard first hand at that certain rail yard. Jaeger fell onto the bed and went into a deep yet fitful sleep. He dreamt though not of things he was familiar with, as he had in the past, but of places and beings completely foreign to him. The one thing the places and beings had in common was that they inspired a sort of fear and loathing in him, as if they were tormentors or tyrants from some previously unknown, invisible worlds, and something in his life, some event which had transpired, had opened his sleeping mind to those secrets. He awoke in the middle of the night in a sweat, and remembered running from some terrible monster, just before he’d awakened. The monster had been chasing him across some barren, wind-swept plateau and he was glad despite his “real” surroundings to be back among those things which are at least known, if not incomprehensible. The sweat went away and the wool of the long underwear beneath the uniform kept him warm even as the window out to the cool June dead of night was open. Jaeger thought of the particular monster which had chased him through the barren, wind-swept plain. It had been quite a bit taller than him, perhaps 3 meters high. It had been a kind of reddish color, with pointy horns and a tail that swung swiftly back and forth, with a large triangular tip to it. The beast had made clicking and shuffling sounds as it had chased him, seemingly at leisure in a game of amusement across the barren, hard ground. Its mouth had emitted guttural, inhuman sounds. Jaeger lie there awake, not wanting to go back to sleep, and began speculating on the cause of his new dreams. He glanced down at the jade ring and realized that it may have brought more than healing into his life. He suddenly realized that the little diabolical ring which seemed to wink back up at him might be the cause of his new, unfathomable nightmares. Jaeger knew the ring was a part of himself and he further knew that he didn’t want to face those dreams again. At least in a real battle a soldier has some little bit of control, but in those dreams filled with hideous and hostile alien beings, he had no control; instead he had only to run from them until he could find a way to wake up from within the hideous plots and subplots of the newfound extraterrestrial milieus of his dreams. Jaeger lie there instead, thinking of his future, and wondered again whether he were already dead. He thought of the true love he’d never found, of the complete peace of mind which had always eluded him, and of the war that had taken so many decent men of all sides, and of the civilians it had engulfed in those continent-spanning flames of human discontentment, flames whipped up through the frenzied oratory of one Adolf Hitler, the civil servant’s son from Austria; grandson of a jewess. As the dawn light crept into the room and Jaeger remained in that restless insomnia, a grenadier brought him an MP40 and several clips of ammunition, then told him that under orders of Koenig, he was to rally in the courtyard South of the hotel within the hour. They were assembling yet another Kamfgruppe to try and stem the American advance which must surely be swooping down on them from the North, toward the important town of St. Lo. Caen to the West was apparently already under tremendous Canadian pressure, from what Jaeger had deciphered from the radio conversations being carried on in the background behind Koenig during the previous evening’s discussion. Jaeger was the survivor from his Bataillon. On that mid-June morning in 1944 Jaeger assembled with survivors from other battalions, and they formed a thirty man platoon, or kamfgruppe. Those haggard looking veterans, some with their first taste of combat only hours or days before, assembled there in their tattered uniforms and weary minds, but with a resolution to defend that hedgerow country to the last, not because they were good Nazis, or because they were full-blown socialists, or even racial or cultural supremacists, but because they were professional soldiers. The professional soldier isn’t so much a political animal as he is an instrument of the politicians. You can tell a professional soldier black is white but he’s more interested in training, in perfecting his art of warfare, and being ready at any moment to put that work into practical use, in the fighting of battles. When the soldier’s job is done correctly, with constant preparation and awareness of the enemy, no fight is ever carried out; but that is ultimately a politician's rather than a general's question. In any event not much has really changed over the past few thousand years; gangs run by gang leaders or committees yet pillage everyone in their path for the benefit of their own coffers. Soldiers are merely the apolitical instrument of those exploits. Politics and fighting are both completely as natural as sex to the human condition. In Jaeger's day though an element of dishonesty had clouded the issue, for some armies fought for silly words such as 'revolution' or 'democracy' when in point of fact war had always been, was then, and would always be, about the booty. Jaeger fell into line in the courtyard, and they lined up with the typical discipline of Wermacht soldiers in rows of around ten soldiers apiece. A Major faced them after they’d fallen in. In a crisp Prussian voice he gave them a little pep talk on the inevitability of German victory, if they could just find it in themselves to sacrifice just one more time before the German scientists would unleash their secret weapons. These, promised Major Himmel, would spell the end of the Allies, and ultimate victory, not only in the air, but on the land and on all fronts, including the terrible Ostfront, where German armies were being literally chewed up and spit out by the massive, crushing forces of Stalin; the Red Army and Air Force. Indeed, the successes of the Summer of 1941 were not to be duplicated by the Germans again, in any theatre of the war, ever. In 1942 the Wermacht had made further great gains, but those had been thrown away by Hitler at Stalingrad. In 1943 they may have had the armored formations for a protracted war against the Bolsheviks, but Hitler had again intervened and snatched defeat from the jaws of at least parity if not victory, at a little-known town called Kursk in the first half of July, 1943. Even there Hitler had “almost won.” “Almost” certainly isn’t good enough in war let alone in any other area of life. So the German Wermacht had been reeling literally from that battle onward, as their armored formations had been squandered at Kursk and would never really be replaced. The German industry turned out decent numbers of tanks, but you can’t replace high quality tank crews forever. At some point the replacement troops will be of poorer fighting quality than those who were lost in the maelstrom. Even with the rising German production numbers, the shortages of fuel and of quality replacement troops would hinder their war efforts as it became apparent that the industrial and population advantages of “the Allies” became too much to overcome. Where the Germans might turn out a thousand tanks, the Russians alone were probably turning out five or ten-thousand tanks, and they weren’t low-quality tanks, but hordes of battle-ready T34 and T34/85 tanks. They may not have been of the high quality of the German Panther (Mark V) and Tiger (Mark VI) tanks, but they were certainly close enough, and with such great numerical advantages that the Germans were hopeless to stem the tide of the Red Army in its fantastic resurgence from those earlier defeats, back in the nearly forgotten days of the dusty Summer of 1941. All in all Jaeger figured the Germans were simply outnumbered in the grand scheme of things. Their desired liebenstrum would have to await some other fuhrer as Hitler was losing the war. Jaeger could see beyond the wry grins of the ever-changing commanding officers, beyond the pep talks before each firefight. He could see that, somewhat like it had been against the Russians before Moscow in those frozen winter days of 1941 and early 1942, he and his army were once again faced with a numerically superior enemy. How long could the Wermacht go on losing ground before Berlin would be taken? They had lost Africa, were in the course of losing all of Italy, and now the Americans had landed in France; all the while the Red Army was pushing, unstoppable like a terrible steamroller out of the East. Jaeger noted again that Kimmel hadn’t said anything about “pushing them back into the sea” or anything remotely like that, but instead had exhorted them simply as professionals, to carry out their duties. Instead of assuring the men that they were about to win a great victory, he asked them to hold out, just awhile longer so that the German secret weapons might turn the tide. Jaeger didn’t buy it but at the same time he knew he would fight. He would have fought with or without the ring, but with the ring he considered himself to be a dead man and thought he might just as well face extinction out on the battlefield, where some stray bullet or artillery shrapnel might severe his ring finger and turn him into the pile of jellied, inanimate flesh that he knew now to exist outside of the power of that ring. Jaeger shuddered as the men formed single file and marched in a line, up the road toward contact with the Americans. They were to hold their sector at all costs, and to prevent the Americans from eventually taking St. Lo. Who could have known then that they all faced extinction? Jaeger was somewhat aware of the possibility but he wondered if the others were so perspicacious. In that dim morning light the American fighter-bombers had not appeared in the clear skies above them, and the men moved quickly to their destination along the line, about a kilometer to the North of them. Apparently some Americans had broken through the night before, but a concentrated counterattack had improbably destroyed the Yankee units which had gotten through. Jaeger’s kamfgruppe was to shore up the line and to help in holding it for yet another day against the seemingly inexorable expansion of the American beachhead. It was the 17th of June, 1944. Jaeger and his group had dispersed over the last fifty meters before a hedgerow in their sector running East to West, facing the Americans to the North. Jaeger with his new uniform took a couple of other desperate-looking grenadiers, Klause and Schnell with him to a corner where four hedgerows met. It was still early but the drone of Allied aircraft was in the air, even in that early morning. Explosions were heard, as they were on any clear day, back behind the lines. Plumes of smoke rose kilometers away, presumably where the fighter-bombers were attacking those unfortunate German vehicles whose crews had lost the benefit of darkness in their movements about the countryside. The Allied aircraft were searching for targets of opportunity. During any clear day, almost no moment went by without at least the distant sound of their engines in the sky. Of course there was the continuing “ack-ack” of the various German anti-aircraft batteries, and the attendant sounds once again of airplanes crashing in flames, but anti-aircraft was a poor substitute for Luftwaffe planes which were by now non-existent. What had become of the Germans’ once vaunted Luftwaffe? Jaeger considered that Summer of 1941 again, and even further back into the French campaign. In both cases the Luftwaffe had been a presence on the battlefield. If there were a strongpoint to be demolished, Jaeger or his local commander could have at once called in Stukas to attack it. Now there were neither strongpoints to be smashed nor Stukas in the air. It has been speculated that only two German aircraft were over Normandy on the 6th of June, 1944. Those were practically the only two planes the Germans had managed to field over the entire campaign. As an historical note, sometime in July of 1944 the Germans had attempted to scramble 600 fighters out of airfields in and around Paris for ground support of a Wermacht counterattack outside Caen. Those planes had been destroyed by overwhelming Allied superiority, mostly on the ground while they were taxiing for takeoff before the ill-fated last gasp of an attack. At that moment Jaeger wished for the piercing whine of the dive-bombing Stukas, even in their clumsiness, as they would attack the Allied positions and help the Wermacht in pushing them back to the sea. It wasn’t happening. Allied production had so overwhelmed German that the Luftwaffe was almost a non-entity by then, especially in the West. What was left of the Luftwaffe was trying to defend German targets against Allied heavy bombing raids, but that battle was being lost as well. The remainder of the Luftwaffe was attempting to help the Wermacht in staving off the advance of the Red Army from the Ostfront. It was a lost cause. Even in the Ostfront, as the bolshevik operation Bagration were about to unfold, the Luftwaffe would appear to be non-existent. In any event the Stukas had proved excellent in the Polish, French, and early parts of the Russian campaign. During the Autumn of 1940 they’d also been used in, and withdrawn from the Battle of Britain. That taste of failure was a warning to the Luftwaffe staff that their Stukas were actually obsolete in anything but uncontested skies. By 1944 the Russians had a massive air force of their own, with arguably the best low-altitude fighter in the world at that time, the Yak. The Yak would make short work out of any old, slow Stuka dive bomber. Of course the Americans had the best planes overall by far, aside from the Germans. The Germans had the jets and the rockets; all of the secret weapons Hitler hoped would win the war. With the superlative Messerschmitt 262 having been available for production since 1942, Hitler made one of his many mistakes and told the engineers to take it and make it into a bomber, before ever putting it into production as a fighter. As a fighter it might have stemmed the otherwise inevitable tide of Allied air superiority, especially over Germany herself where the American and British bomber formations would have had a very difficult time defending against them, as was proven in 1944 when the ME-262s actually reached limited production and some of them were able to attack Allied bombing formations, with devastating results. So although the Germans had a number of jet and rocket planes models, most notably the ME-262, the Americans were the best at building propeller planes. Furthermore, the Germans had never built any of their rockets or jets in any kind of numbers necessary for affecting the outcome of the war. As for the Americans and their propeller planes, without even going into the great planes of the Pacific Theatre; the Hellcats, Helldivers, Corsairs, and B-29 bombers, the planes of the European Theatre were great; the P-47 Thunderbolt or “Flying Tank;” the P-51 Mustang, said by many to be the best fighter of the war; the P-38 with its twin engines and myriad .50 caliber machineguns; the B-17s, B-25s, B-24s, A-20s. As for strategic bombers like the B-17 and B-29, the Germans simply didn’t build anything similar during the war. Perhaps they’d built some designs to the level of the A-20, but they never built any 4-engine bomber in numbers, or with the payload or protection of the B-17 “Flying Fortress.” There had been a German air commander in the ‘30s who’d been a big proponent of strategic bombers. He’d died in an accident and his ideas had gone with him. Only the British and Americans had built heavy bombers. The British had built the Halifaxes and Lancasters. In any case the Luftwaffe had seen better days. Nary a Stuka was to be heard now, only the seemingly incessant droning of Allied aircraft up and down the lines, including the rare nighttime carpet bombing attacks by massed formations of 4-engine bombers prior to a given large offensive move. Jaeger had been spared the experience of having been on the ground underneath such an attack, but he could still remember the large raid on the night of the 5th/6th of June, and the way the earth had literally rumbled beneath him as he’d heard the attack against another position on his flank and near the beach. Jaeger had suffered through some naval shelling on that first day in any case. It seemed to him now like the naval guns had fallen silent, at least for the past few days. Perhaps they had moved, or perhaps they were out of range now. The familiar sound of a German Panther was heard on the road about 100 meters to Jaeger’s left. Jaeger, Klause and Schnell hunkered down in their position, Jaeger with his MP40 and Klause and Schnell manning an MG42. The Panther left the road and stalked up to the hedgerow, sitting behind it facing North. A few grenadiers came pouring out of a shed on the field behind them and helped the tank crew as they left the tank and unrolled a camouflage net over its top. A couple of the grenadiers disappeared and returned moments later carrying branches filled with leaves. The grenadiers and the tank crew worked together to try and make the tank invisible to Allied Aircraft. The Panther itself was a beautiful tank, Jaeger thought as he admired its elegant form; beautiful and elegant if indeed such an engine of destruction can even be remotely seen as such. The steel, predatory feline across the road sat underneath its netting on that clear, cool June morning. There was a strange calm in the air, even as the sun arose and the sky became light. In the distance, there were no allied aircraft or bombardments to be heard. Perhaps in that quiet moment the members of the tank crew played cards in the stony silence, out of sight of Jaeger and the other grenadiers in positions up and down the line of hedgerows on either side of the majestic beast, in its full battle paint with already 9 (real) kills marked in white stripes on the end of its long gun, poking from beneath the glorified cheese cloth of the camouflage netting. Perhaps the tank crew sat nestled in their miniature fortress and played games of chance, indeed as the battle must certainly have been drawing near, even as the grenadiers in that motley kamfgruppe sat in silence on the outside. Up to a certain point, a tank is a great thing for the crew members inside of it. Immune from machineguns and other small arms fire, the crew of a tank can often wander the battlefield with impunity, ripping and rending enemy positions with its own machineguns and deadly cannon. The point where a tank becomes useless is the point where it is penetrated, often by enemy armor, but sometimes by antitank gun or air attack. Once a tank is penetrated, depending upon the type of ammo which has broken through those sloping plates of steel, it is often the end of the road for all of the crew members. Certain types of shot send showers of molten metal throughout the tank, stirring up crew members’ flesh and turning the inside of the tank into a giant container of what appears as strawberry jam. Strictly armor piercing shot will attack the tank in a different way. It has no thermite or cordite or whatever built into it, but instead is simply armor piercing shell; a chunk of pointed metal that clangs against the side of an armored fighting vehicle and either penetrates, or does not, depending on the physics involved in each situation. When that metal chunk penetrates, it typically does one of three things; it can splinter into a million pieces and shred a crew much the way the “HEAT" ammunition does; or the shot can stay intact and bounce about the insides of the tank, having had the power to enter through the armor, but not the velocity to escape, leaving a large chunk of metal bouncing around inside the tank, typically killing or incapacitating one or more of the crew members in its wild bouncing; or it can cleanly enter one side, and exit the other, sometimes without disturbing a crew member, or even any mechanical device; the latter situation, although rare, was most often encountered when either a Panther or a Tiger gun (long 75 or 88, respectively) would go up against a Russian T-34 or an American Sherman (M-4). Indeed, sometimes the heavy German guns, with tremendous velocity and thus penetration, would simply enter one side and leave the other when going up against Allied armor. In any case the Panther crew was safe and snug and out of sight, from what Jaeger could tell. For all of the protection afforded the crew by such heavy armor, Jaeger was glad to be outside instead, the ring he wore being beyond consideration in this particular equation. Jaeger had seen tanks of all types explode or worse, and was always glad to be outside, where if he were to die he would at least face death out in the open and not from the cramped confines of an AFV, in the sweaty, smelly heat of a tank’s cramped and spartan interior. Out of nowhere the sounds of American fire rang out. Jaeger could see over a couple of hedgerows, and out onto the road to his left and off in front of his position; perhaps 300 meters. He saw the antennae from several American tanks dashing up the road, then filing off just a 100 meters or so away, but out of sight save for those very antennae. American small arms fire broke out from in front of them as the attack was joined in full. Again, aircraft were heard in the distance, to the left, to the right, to the rear, but always out of sight. Jaeger eyed the horizon in all directions and saw clouds of smoke arise there and about in the distance as he figured the Allied fighter-bombers were doing their deadly work. He looked again to his front as the fire broke out, then the 81mm mortar rounds began falling all around him. First to his left the grenadier was ripped by a machinegun burst and Jaeger turned right to see his other companion rendt by a mortar round. Jaeger’s ears were quite shot, and even though he’d been hit by a few bullets, and by more than a few shrapnel fragments from the nearby mortar rounds, the ring continued to heal him. The fact that his ears were still shot was a puzzlement to him, but he didn’t have time to really think about that for the Americans had already broken cover from the hedgerow across from him to the North and were advancing under a smokescreen, seemingly laid out by their own smoke grenades. Jaeger raised his MP40 and let out an entire clip, which in reality took less than 2 seconds. The rounds found home in several Americans, and the cries of the dead and dying were once again heard as the battle was furiously joined. Jaeger could hear the gurgling groans of the grenadier lying severely wounded to his right, and crossed himself on that soldier’s behalf the way a good catholic would, even though Jaeger knew that he himself was no catholic. The Panther across the road contacted American armor, and it wasn’t pretty. Flames went up to Jaeger’s front and left, across the road where the Shermans had presumably attacked the Panther through its front. Jaeger could already count 2 plumes of smoke from ostensibly dead American tanks, and as he loaded a new clip into his MP40, he saw that the Americans on his direct front had broken into retreat. As the smoke grenades ran out, fire still came from where the Americans had retreated to. Jaeger could see though that his single furious burst of 9mm fire had accounted for 4 Americans; 3 dead as a doornail from various head and torso hits, the 4th writhing in agony out there in no man’s land. The Panther’s main gun continued to bark as more American armor was destroyed. Jaeger figured that the attack had been broken, and the Americans continued to fall back as if it had. There was silence then, punctuated by the occasional shot from a sniper rifle on either side. The battle raged further up and down the line. In an instant Jaeger understood the reason for the sudden quiet in his sector. The Americans had called in an airstrike. Suddenly 3 P-47 Thunderbolts appeared in the sky over their position, and they flew from the North to the South, along the road, then turned and came back up, over the road. As they approached on their second run, German machineguns broke out against them as the Panther stayed put, facing the North. The Thunderbolts shot down and as they passed one by one, they let out a horrible amount of rockets into the general rear of the Panther. Then it was over for the intrepid German tank crew. Even with their 11 or 12 total kills, their 75mm long gun and thick, sloping frontal armor could not save them from the ultimate Allied advantage, complete control of the skies over and around Normandy. The rockets impacted around and against the tank with tremendous explosions and the ones which hit cut instantly through the thinnest armor on roof and the rear of the tank. There were no cries to be heard as the turret lurched skyward from its mount at the ignition of the Panther’s ammunition stores. The force of the explosion knocked Jaeger to the ground, even from his, opposite side of the road. Of course the rockets had wiped the tank crew out. With the explosion and ensuing fire Jaeger didn’t figure anyone from that crew would be making it to their own funeral. Indeed, the Panther was a 5-man coffin then and there. The only human remains left within the then burning hulk would be fragments of tattered, scorched flesh and bones. Within seconds of the destruction of the Panther, as the P-47s went to wherever else they were called, the American attack broke out in full force in front of Jaeger; withering fire came again from the opposite hedgerow as 81mm American mortar rounds began to drop all around his position. Jaeger didn’t even have time to react. A machinegun burst found him and this time it severed his ring finger. Instantly Jaeger was no more; what had been the appearance of a human being in the preceding moments turned into a pile of bloody pulp in a tattered field gray German Wermacht uniform. The severed finger containing the strange ring landed several feet away. The Yank, sergeant Johnson bounded over a hedgerow and led his American squad in the attack across the open field toward the now silent spot where a German burp gun had rattled away previously. Covered by withering fire from other American positions, Johnson and his men advanced to the next hedgerow. When they reached it and Johnson peered over it, he saw only a couple of dead Germans and what appeared to be a completely tenderized steak in what looked like it had once been a German uniform. Johnson signalled his men to advance with him up onto the next hedgerow, and as the battles raged hundreds of yards up and down the line on either side of him, it was quiet to his immediate front and flanks. There was no enemy fire. The 81mm mortar support had moved to the next hedgerow, even though no German fire had opened up from there. The 81mm shells went off routinely in the distance in any event. Johnson signaled to the rest of the platoon behind him on the last hedgerow back, and they started to move up in order to reinforce their position on the newly taken hedgerow. Johnson thought of the hell of hedgerow fighting. Every day for several days they’d moved forward, hedgerow by hedgerow, farmhouse by farmhouse, chateau by chateau. Even then after only a couple of weeks of fighting, he was the only person left from his original squad. Already the overall platoon had lost 70% of its men to the wounded and dead. How many little assault guns had his unit already come across, typically waiting with such a low profile in the shade here and there, and opening up with such intense, distinctive, deadly fire? How many of the dreaded Panther tanks had they encountered, and how many times had they retreated in the face of one or more of those grand deadly enemy beasts, in order to call in air support that the job might be done? The American Shermans and the bazookas simply could not handle frontal Panther armor. The little assault guns were trouble enough to kill. Sometimes, if the Shermans outnumbered the Panthers with a 5:1 ratio or better, they could overwhelm them and get in killing shots from the side or rear of those majestic predator cats; those monuments to German engineering. Johnson spotted the ring then, shining in the June afternoon light on what appeared to be a severed human finger. Curious, and despite the protestations of the rest of his squad, he once again volunteered to cross the field while the others from the platoon who’d now taken position along the same hedgerow would cover him as they had before. In crossing the field Johnson knelt for a brief moment, an innocuous gesture in the eyes of his comrades, and pretended to tie his boot lace as he also reached for the ring. He took the ring off of the cold finger and spied it. It was a curious Jade stone set in gold. He put the ring on. He and his squad then continued across the field. This time, the men covering him didn’t fire, and the mortars had also gone silent at the request of the platoon radioman. The next hedgerow was actually their objective; of course only if he’d been reading his map correctly. They reached it again as the battles raged out of sight but within earshot on either of their flanks. It was sounding as if the Germans were being rolled back along the length of the front, judging by the orientation of the various dins. They again reached the next hedgerow without incident. The platoon commander, a green lieutenant with some common sense, ordered the rest of the men forward. They had a couple of men with .45 submachineguns, and he ordered each of them, one to the right, and one to the left flank. They would watch the right and left sides of the box structure of the field as it was surrounded by hedgerows, in an attempt to ensure that the Germans wouldn’t sneak up on them in a flanking attack. He left one machinegun facing south on the previous, northern hedgerow, overlooking the entire field as the rest of the platoon took up positions facing south, on the south hedgerow of that field, overlooking the next field, further to the South. The machinegun would cover the entire field, and could be swung right or left to attack any Germans who might kill either of the sentries on the flanks and launch into an attack from ostensibly behind the majority of the platoon, which was facing South and not paying attention to the rear. There they stayed for the day, and overnight. By the morning everyone had dug in around that perimeter, and it had been reinforced, and contact had been made with American units on both flanks, so the chance for any German flanking attack on them became virtually nil. The rear machinegun was brought up to the South or forward hedgerow and joined the rest of the unit in overlooking the next field, with yet another hedgerow on the other side. In that field was a destroyed farmhouse, and for some time the Americans called in a 155mm barrage upon it, setting it ablaze with the fire in turn consuming anything that would burn within those former walls. There certainly couldn’t be any Germans left in there after that. In any case by first light they would move out and their first objective would be to inspect the farmhouse cellar. Johnson went on to do many heroic acts on the road to St. Lo. Sometime in July of 1944 though his luck finally ran out, for he was struck by a German artillery round and the explosion had been too much, even for the ring. The ring was flung even from whatever severed finger there had been, and came to rest in the ashes of a bombed out bakery. A frenchman, the owner of the destroyed bakery, came along after the tides of battle had swept beyond St. Lo, and he put the ring in a box and stored it in what was left of his basement. After the war he rebuilt the bakery using his life savings, and the ring remained in that box in the basement, from generation to generation, as he passed the family business along to his sons. Even today his grandson, the current bakery owner has no hint of what strange and terrible ring sits there in his cellar.