The Undaunted

The Perfect Circle of Hell

But Jenny knew the promotions only served to underscore just how many had died and how lucky she was to find these three men had dodged not just a bullet, but some pretty damn heavy artillery.

"Where are we off to?" Martha asked Owens as they pulled on to the road, following Jack and Casey's jeep.

"Something I thought our CO would want to deal with," Owens said quietly.

But later, Jenny wondered how anyone could deal with what they found. In the forest, surrounded by shell craters, trees splintered like matchsticks or disfigured with bullet holes, and foxholes lined with snow in which men had been living in groups of three or four for warmth for weeks, was an injured man. He had been lying in the snow for three days after stepping on a mine.

"The medics tried to get to him," Casey added as they walked closer, "but they got shot at every time. The Krauts have pulled back now so we can reach him."

Jenny could see that the injured soldier was still, somehow, conscious in spite of losing a foot and lying in the snow between two opposing sides for three days. His lips were moving. Jack dropped down beside him.

Steeling herself, Jenny took a picture of Jack, kneeling down in the snow and lighting a cigarette for the injured man, who was telling Jack that he had been set upon by Germans under cover of darkness on the first night. The Germans had booby trapped him, rigging up a device under his back that would explode the moment he was lifted up by the medics or someone like Owens from his platoon, killing them all.

Thank God he was still conscious, Jenny thought now. Thank God he had been able to tell them.

While Jack smoked a cigarette with the man, more the leader right now than he had ever been, he spoke soothingly to the young GI and saluted the courage it had taken not to succumb to blackness in order to save a life or two. All the while, an engineer worked to cut the wires leading to the explosives and all Jenny could do was record with her camera, honor this man in black and white for an act that would never win a war, but that meant Owens's parents or Casey's parents, or somebody else's parents would still have sons to pray for.

***
The costly Battle of the Ardennes meant that Jenny hardly spoke to Jack for the next month. To even want to take his attention away from the things he had to do would be pure selfishness. But, every time she saw him, she remembered the caress of his thumb, which meant that the quick dozen words and smiles they occasionally exchanged weren't enough for her.

Soon, like every other fight, the Ardennes was over, but Jack was with the advance troops as they pushed down to Cologne. Jenny and the other correspondents scurried back and forth to Spa from the front each day, a situation that wouldn't change until they had secured a base in Germany. All the traveling meant even less chance to see Jack, and then she rolled her jeep over in the ice, which was a common problem among correspondents in the late winter weather.

Jack visited her that March at the hospital where she had been sent to have two broken ribs bandaged. He was fuming, his eyes roving up and down her prone figure in the hospital bed as if to assure himself she was whole and alive. "Jenny, what the hell...?" he started to say.

"Iris Carpenter rolled four jeeps in a week," she broke in on his tirade before he could start, her voice weak and hoarse, giving him a small smile even though it hurt her to breathe.

"I don't give a shit about Iris Carpenter," Jack said, stepping closer to the bed, furious in a way she'd never seen before.

What has happened to us? Jenny wanted to ask. She almost wished they'd never danced together but at the same time she wished they had danced for longer, anything to relax the strain that seemed ever present between them now. And she vowed that she would never ask him about what had happened in the ballroom because it had only made things awkward between them.