The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

75: Waiting to Be Filled In

Slowly, she lowered her hand, and she stared straight ahead. There was nothing there. Of course there wasn't. Who was living if Skip and Alex were dead?

"Let's go sit in the foxhole, huh, Charlie?" Mabs said softly. She crouched down in the snow beside her and laid a gentle hand on her shoulder.

Charlie didn't move.

"Charlie?"

"I want to stay here for a while."

"It ain't safe."

"So?" Sure, it wasn't safe aboveground, but Skip and Alex had been in their foxhole when they'd been hit. Nowhere was safe out here. She could just as well die out here as sitting tucked into some fantasy of safety that was really just a hole in the ground, a grave as much as any other, just waiting to be filled in.

Mabs started to protest and then stopped herself. Instead, she sat down in the snow beside Charlie and looked out at the frozen horizon with her. "Then I'll stay, too."

For some reason, it was those words that finally got Charlie's bottom lip to wobble. She looked down at her lap.

They sat in perfect silence for a while, listening to the world go by around them. No one came to speak to either of them nor paid them any attention beyond a glance. Everyone knew why they were sitting there.

With fresh snow seeping into the bottom of her coat and fatigues, Mabs thought she was colder than she'd felt the entire time they'd been in Belgium. The wind seemed to rattle through her, getting inside of her body and freezing her from the inside out. But still, she stayed. Charlie needed her to be here. And she would rather be right here, sitting with her best friend when she needed her, than back home with anyone else. So she didn't speak a word.

After a while, she couldn't help but say what was on her mind, if not because she thought Charlie needed to hear it then because she couldn't not say it. "They would've wanted you to be with Babe."

Charlie didn't say anything. She made no movement to indicate she'd heard Mabs speak at all. But Mabs knew she must have.

"Skip and Alex would have wanted you to be with Babe last night," Mabs persisted. "Babe needed a friend, and you were there for him. They wouldn't have wanted you to be anywhere else." It might take Charlie a little while to believe that, to stop blaming herself for not getting to see her friends on their last night alive, but Mabs knew that eventually she would. Time would help, and so would distance from the place that had ruined her as it had. But eventually she would see, and Mabs hoped that that would bring her peace.

Charlie stopped spending all of her time in her foxhole, or anyone else's, after that. Instead, she took to walking around aboveground, keeping her head down and her eyes on her boots as they tracked footprints into otherwise fresh snow.

She sat in her foxhole overnight. She rarely slept. As soon as the sun started to rise she left and wandered to her heart's content.

The first time she experienced a barrage while aboveground gave her some sick rush of excitement, some insane feeling of being truly alive when she'd felt so much a shadow of herself ever since coming here. She'd run and dived into the first foxhole she'd found, which had belonged to two of the replacements who'd joined them on the Island, and when the call for a medic went up she didn't sit tight and wait to see if someone would call for a nurse, she leaped out of the foxhole and ran.

Running through the fray had given her an even bigger rush of adrenaline. Such light. Such terror. Such noise. At least there was life in the fear. She hadn't felt fear like this since the first time they'd been in Bastogne.