All Things Nice » Band of Brothers

41: Left

The Germans had beaten them to it.

"Fuck!"

Posey scrambled up onto the line and aimed. She forced herself not to think about anything but the targets she shot at and whether or not she hit them. The bullets fired from her gun as though someone else was pulling the trigger.

All around her was chaos. Men were running through the hedgerow, moving their firing positions as commanded, and getting hit left, right, and centre. Posey dropped her head after hitting each target, hoping to minimise her chances of being shot. Cries for a medic were increasing in both frequency and volume.

"Wells! Move your firing position to the left!" Lipton shouted at her as he ran down the hedgerow. Posey nodded, sliding backwards into the trench and crouching as she ran left. When she had gone far enough, she dragged herself back up onto the line, and aimed. Only then did she realise that their entire left flank had gone down.

"Jesus!" she shouted, hearing her voice as though from a different room, before aiming and shooting once more. She fired erratically until she saw two bodies run straight out into the fray. When she saw why, she gasped. "Panzers."

A seeming herd of German tanks were cresting a hill directly towards them, and two of their own were right in their path, getting ready to fire a bazooka. Posey knew it was useless to fire at tanks with an M1, so she forced herself to turn away from whatever disaster was about to take place. She prayed the two martyrs who'd decided to take on the Panzers weren't anyone she was close with.

Posey took to trying to defend their left flank once more, feeling increasingly like she was fighting a losing battle as the men beside her began to drop like flies as well.

"Dog and Fox pulled back! We're fuckin' on our own!" someone cried.

"Who's on our right flank then?" Posey shouted back to them. She ducked and shot a glance sideways to find Webster from Third.

"First Platoon!" he called in reply. Posey nodded; Shifty was in First and he was a sharpshooter. The right flank would be fine. If only she could say the same of the left.

She fired off a few more shots wherever she spotted movement before the ground shook beneath her. She ducked and looked up to find that the bazooka had hit its mark. One of the Panzers was down.

"Covering fire!" someone who sounded like Winters shouted. Posey paid it no mind. The left flank needed to be defended and it felt like she was the only person there to do it.

She fired off round after round, ducking only to reload. Her hands burned with how tight her grip was and her neck ached from the odd angle it was at in the horizontal firing position. Still, she continued shooting. Whenever she saw movement, she fired and hoped she'd hit her target; she didn't have time to wait and check for herself.

Posey ducked to reload when the ground shook again, but stronger this time. The shaking was steadier, less like a bomb and more like an earthquake, and there was a rush of sound coming from her left. She turned to find the group of bushes being flattened under a stampede of reinforcements.

"Shermans!" she exclaimed, her face lighting up at the sight of them. One of them fired its first shot and hit a Panzer head-on. Posey cheered and heard Webster whoop from where he was a little ways to her right. "Fucking get them!" she shouted into the fray.

Her distraction by their now-recovered and better than ever left flank was short-lived. Winters' booming voice drew her attention back to the battle. "Lets go! Pour it on them! Let them have it, come on!"

She began firing once more, with a newfound vigour that accompanied the reassurance that she wasn't alone on their left flank anymore. She fired shot after shot, round after round, adrenaline pumping through her and filling her with energy. She shot like her life depended on it.