We Happy Few | Band of Brothers

Chapter 37: Less Than an Hour

On the afternoon of January 3rd, most of Easy Company headed back to their old position overlooking Foy. A few men, however, did remain in the Bois Jacques attached to Dog Company to hold the main line of resistance. 

After what felt like hours of walking, the group made it back to the position near Foy, only to find that it was nothing like they remembered. The foxholes had been trashed, the trees had been blown six ways from Sunday, and large branches littered the forest floor.

"Oh, you gotta be fucking kidding me!" Toye's loud, characteristically raspy voice growled as he jumped into what used to be his foxhole. "Someone's gonna die. Someone's gonna fucking die."

Rolling her eyes, Margot turned around to entertain Joe's temper tantrum. "What are you crying about back there?"

"Guarnere, look at this shit!" Joe hoped he could get a bigger reaction out of the Platoon Sergeant. "One of those 1st Battalion fuckers took a dump in my foxhole!"

Guarnere, however, couldn't really be bothered to care. "I think they shit in everyone's foxhole, Joe." He looked around at the utter destruction of the forest. "I don't think they wanted to spend much time above ground."

As the company neared the front line, Lipton bent down and pulled out his binoculars. Across the field, Foy was full of Germans. Their artillery was still hidden, but there was no doubt they had some. 

With the order to hang in, the troops started strengthening their cover and fixing up their foxholes. Using the fallen tree branches to their advantage, the men and women started piling them up around the holes in the ground, hoping it could help with the cover, or at the very least, cut back on the wind during the nights.

Men used shovels as hammers as they smacked smaller branches into place along the walls of the foxholes for support. Easy Company was in the midst of what could only be described as a mass home improvement project. 

Trying not to trip on the uneven ground beneath her feet, Margot dropped an armful of smaller tree limbs down onto the snow, her jacket covered in pine-needles after the fact. "I look like a damn tree myself," she commented before patting herself clean. 

"Smallest tree I've ever seen," Joe scoffed as he dropped another pile right down next to Margot's

"Ugh, I think you mean best tree you've ever seen."

Joe couldn't help but crack a small smirk. He could never win with Margot. Every snarky comment he made, she had a perfectly thought-out rebuttal. It was one of the things he liked about her; one of the many things.

Margot could tell she had bested Joe in the tree debate, but before she had a chance to gloat, the familiar sound of an incoming mortar whistled through the air. "Incoming!" Lipton shouted as he ran back for the foxholes.

Buck's voice followed soon behind, and it was laced with pure panic. "Take cover!" he screeched.

It was almost impressive how fast Easy Company could go from doing mundane stuff like cleaning up to running for their lives when they needed to. It was a fine-tuned skill that they had acquired over many months, and many trials and errors. 

They hadn't always been that efficient, and they hadn't always been that lucky. 

Before Margot even knew what was going on, she was running. Her legs were moving as fast as they could and her eyes were frantically searching for a foxhole to jump into. Explosions went off all around her, but all she could hear was the sound of her own heart beating in her ears. It was a loud thumping sound, almost like someone was hitting one of those big marching band drums over and over again right next to her head.