The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

66: Impenetrable Darkness

When the world burst into flame, Charlie thought it was all over. There was so much light, so much noise. The ground she clung to seemed to come loose. There was no way any of them would survive this. The artillery they'd experienced in Holland was nothing compared to this. This was the end of all things. This was unsurvivable.

Bang after earth-shattering bang shook the world. Charlie's brain felt like it was rattling around in her skull with the impact. She squeezed her eyes tight shut and gritted her teeth, tightened the hold her hands had over her head to give herself whatever shreds of extra protection she could.

The ground burned beneath her forearms, beneath her knees. The ice covering it seeped into her fatigues, dampening them and spreading the cold even further into her. Bright light flashed behind Charlie's eyes. She thought she heard screaming between the bangs and the whistling of incoming shells.

Everything was so loud, louder than anything she'd ever heard. So loud she expected her eardrums to burst. She forgot what it felt like to be surrounded by quiet.

And then silence. The ringing in her ears grew louder before it faded away. The ground carried on vibrating before it went still. But the light faded instantly, leaving impenetrable darkness in its wake.

It might have been an hour before Mabs spoke. "You alright?"

"Yeah," Charlie replied, even while both of them remained plastered to the frozen ground of their foxhole, terrified to move. "Are you?"

"Yeah."

Distantly, the sound of First Sergeant Lipton's voice carried over on the wind. "Everybody alright? Anyone hit?"

Charlie and Mabs couldn't hear any reply. But they also couldn't hear any shouts for a medic.

"How are we supposed to just lie here when someone eventually gets hit?" Charlie asked, still not sitting up.

"Because we have to," was all Mabs could say in reply to that. Because they weren't combat medics, she meant. Because nurses didn't run into shelling to treat men, they stayed back where it was safe and waited for the wounded to be brought to them. Except there was nowhere safe for them to retreat to; they were here, in the same lot of foxholes as the medics, and if someone needed help so desperately they would need to operate aboveground in the field hospital then surely they needed help so desperately that nurses should be allowed to run to him.

"It's stupid," Charlie mumbled.

Mabs hummed her agreement but said nothing more.

As it turned out, they'd lost two replacements in the barrage, both of them from Third Platoon. Lipton had told Charlie and Mabs as much while checking in on them on the way back to his foxhole. Charlie hadn't known the two replacements, Dunn and Mendoza, and she was glad; she didn't think she could withstand losing someone she loved in the midst of all of this.

"Wonder how long we'll have to wait before the next one," Mabs spoke lowly into the silence following Lipton's departure.

Charlie didn't have an answer, so she didn't reply.

The hours drifted by laboriously slowly, filled only with the odd exchange of sentences here and there and the sound of wheezing breaths. Charlie and Mabs both resolved to finally cut into their food rations when they could bear the hunger pains no more, but what they allowed themselves for fear of a dwindling supply was too little to do much good.

"God, I'm fuckin' starvin' already," Mabs lamented as she collapsed back against the wall of the foxhole. "We ain't even been here a damn day."

Again, there was nothing Charlie could say; no words of reassurance would have done any reassuring because they simply weren't true, and any agreement went without saying and thus wasn't worth aggravating the pain in her cracking lips.