The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

67: A Tapestry of Anguish

Charlie opened her eyes to pitch darkness. The sky overhead was devoid of stars and what little light the moon offered was dimmed by clouds. Groaning in the aftermath of a deep sleep, Charlie forced her head up to remember where she was.

This was when she realised she was still in Floyd and Chuck's foxhole. Indeed, she must have been there for hours.

"I have to get back to Mabs," she said to no one in particular. Her voice emerged groggy and throaty and she had to clear her throat.

Floyd and Chuck were both still asleep, which only made Charlie's attempts to climb out of the foxhole more difficult. Floyd had his arm clamped around her waist, his fingers gentle but immovable as she attempted to pry them off of her, while half of Chuck's body weight was leaned on her where there wasn't really enough space for three people in the foxhole.

After a while of trying, Charlie decided to stop trying to be careful not to wake them and simply focus on getting out. By now, Mabs was probably wondering where on Earth she'd gotten to - not that there were very many places to go.

Charlie only barely managed to get out of the foxhole without waking Floyd or Chuck, the lattermost starting to mumble when her feet hit the snow aboveground, but when she did she was struck by how much colder it was outside. Between the body heat, being belowground, and Charlie having fallen asleep when it was still light outside, it was now alarmingly colder than she remembered it being before.

The lack of light made the landscape even eerier than it was during the day. No one else was aboveground and only sporadic whispers found her over the wind. Splintered tree trunks still sprouted out of the ground, their fallen tops lying haphazard beside them, and every now and again a sharp gunshot pierced the air.

Charlie kept her nose buried in her scarf and crouched low to the ground as she navigated her way back to her own foxhole, watching her boots make footprints in the snow as a way to distract herself from the threat of gunfire and the cold.

Mabs was asleep when Charlie reached their foxhole, so she jumped in and got comfortable - or as close to comfortable as she was likely to get - while trying to disturb Mabs as little as possible. Once Charlie was sat back against the wall of the foxhole again, her head tipped back toward the void of nothingness that was the sky, she allowed herself a quiet sigh. All she could seem to think about was how cold she was. Her fingers were numb and sore, even while buried as deep into her sleeves as she could get them, and the tip of her nose burned with how frozen it had become. Her feet felt like blocks of ice in her boots and her ears ached fiercely beneath her helmet, sending a stabbing pain through her skull. Even her neck, covered by her scarf, was cold where gusts of freezing wind made their way beneath it. She had never known a cold like this. Even the coldest winter she'd ever experienced back home hadn't been half as cold as this.

Charlie didn't manage to get back to sleep after that. Instead, she peeked out over the top of the foxhole and watched the stillness of the world around her.

Not a soul was moving anywhere above ground as far as she could see. Before her were rows of holes gouged out of the ground, both foxholes and those resultant of artillery fire, and beyond them, an expanse of wasteland Charlie supposed was their own version of a no man's land. Beyond that were the Germans, closer to Charlie than they'd been throughout her entire time in Europe. Even in Holland they'd been further than this. Now, they were so close that if one moved she would have seen it. Probably, whoever was on watch over there had watched her make her way from Floyd's foxhole back to her own.

The thought chilled her even worse than the cold.

It was early morning when the next barrage came.

Mabs had been asleep, but she was awake in a heartbeat.