As the days went by, the number of artillery barrages only increased. Either the Germans were gaining confidence or they were getting the much coveted shipment deliveries that the Americans sorely lacked, because each day they seemed to be facing more and more bombardment.
And then the Germans started to barrage at night, too. Just in case sleeping was getting a little bit too easy.
Charlie could feel herself wasting away as time wore on. They were rapidly running out of food with no resupply in sight, so rationing was stricter than ever; her ODs were starting to hang off of her, become baggy in places they'd once been snug.
Mentally, she was just going through the motions. She'd started a habit of walking the line to visit the nurses in Dog and Fox Companies to see how they were doing and try to scrounge supplies - but really just to give herself something to do - and was quickly adopting another one of going to visit her friends. Luckily, Skip and Alex were in the same foxhole and so were Malarkey and Alton, so she could get all of them done in only two hits. Floyd she went to separately but Chuck let her linger for as long as she wanted, even though their foxhole's size made it a tight fit, and sometimes she went to visit Shifty, too, where he was sharing his foxhole with Hoobler.
Today, the sky was a pale grey and the fog was thick as Charlie picked her way through the foxholes towards Skip and Alex, the first hole she tended to visit since it was closest to the one she shared with Mabs.
"That you, Charlie?" Alex called as she approached.
"Yeah, it's me," she replied. "Put the tea kettle on, would you?"
"Already boiling, Charlie," Skip drawled as he scooted over to make room for her.
A moment later, Charlie was settled in between them. "So," she began, "what's new?"
"Well, today we have even less food than we had yesterday," Alex said, which made her scoff a laugh.
"Oh, wow. I hadn't heard."
"We've been ordered to restrict ourselves to one round of gunfire per man," Skip informed her seriously. "So, you know, let's hope the krauts don't try anything anytime soon."
"Keeping my fingers crossed," Charlie replied. Just how bleak could all of this get?
"How are Dog and Fox holding up?" Skip went on to ask.
Charlie yawned as she replied, "About the same as us. Hardly any medical supplies, hardly any food or water, hardly any ammunition."
"Sounds about right," Alex said bitterly. "Anyone else find it hard to believe there weren't anyone else the Army could'a sent here before us? Like, I don't know, a company who actually had supplies?"
"Ah, see the Army'd have to be smart to think like that, Penky," teased Skip.
"Yeah," Charlie added, speaking into her scarf, "and they'd have to care."
"Ain't that the truth," Alex agreed.
"Do you have any cards?" Charlie wondered, wanting to change the topic of conversation; it wasn't at all a good idea to linger on thoughts of how bad everything was for long, even when it seemed there was precious little else to discuss.
Alex announced that he did, in fact, have a pack of playing cards with him, and they set up a game of Pinochle. It was impossible to ever truly forget where they were, what with the unforgiving cold and the spontaneous pop of machine gun fire in the distance, but the game took Charlie's mind off of things for a little while. She turned her thoughts to the game and trying to outsmart Alex and Skip, and that served as enough to prevent her thoughts from wandering to ruminations of when the next barrage would be and how little supplies she had to work with and how cold she was and how hungry and how thirsty and how tired.
The next barrage arrived while they were setting up a second game.
"Shit!" Alex shouted as they all threw themselves on top of each other.
The explosions were so loud Charlie felt them inside her skull. It sounded like the world was being torn apart. When would she stop being surprised by the pure violence of the noise? When would all of this start to feel less scary? She'd endured who knew how many barrages and yet each one was just as terrifying as the last.
When it ended Charlie waited for the call for a nurse. She sat with her knees pulled up to her chest, her eyes unblinking, her entire body pulled taut like a guitar string as she waited for the moment when she'd have to haul herself out of the ground and run into an inevitable bloodbath.
"Nurse!" cried one of the medics.
Charlie didn't spare Alex and Skip a word or a glance as she hoisted herself out of the foxhole and went running towards the sound of the voice. She didn't bother to duck close to the ground or keep her head down, anymore. She'd done this too many times. Instead, she kept her focus concentrated on getting to whoever was wounded and jumped into the appropriate foxhole directly.
"Oh," Charlie said when she took in the damage.
It was Al Mampre, one of their medics.
He'd only been hit in the shoulder, and it wasn't fatal, but he'd have to be taken off the line. They were short of one medic already - Ed Pepping, who'd been wounded in Holland and hadn't found his way back to the company before they'd been redeployed here. They really couldn't afford to lose another medic.
Spina had already done all of the heavy lifting where tending to the wound was concerned but he informed her that the bullet was still in there. Together, they heaved Mampre out of his foxhole and carried him to the field hospital, where Mabs extracted the bullet while Charlie divided the contents of his med bag between hers and Mabs' kits.
Mabs went with Spina to deliver Mampre to the aid station in Bastogne and Charlie stayed behind. She remained in the field hospital for a moment, looking around at the shoddy tent which had taken its fair share of beatings with the impact of the heaving ground, and decided she didn't trust it. Without giving herself time to doubt the decision, Charlie started unpacking all of their reserve medical supplies and equipment and packaging them in whatever ways she could to ensure each nurse could carry them with her. She had a bad feeling about the field hospital, being out here and exposed as it was, and she didn't want to consider what dire straits they'd be in if it happened to get hit with all of their supplies still in it. It just wasn't a risk worth taking.
The field hospital got hit in the next barrage.
When Charlie skidded to a halt in front of it, a replacement with a hole in his abdomen gushing blood behind her, she didn't know whether to laugh or cry. She'd been right. She'd been right. Whatever intuition had told her to empty the field hospital had been right, and she couldn't believe it.
Henry ordered the men carrying the replacement to lie him down on the ground and Charlie started working on him immediately. With Henry overseeing her work and Gene working as an assistant of sorts, they did their best to stem the bleeding.
He died anyway.
Charlie couldn't meet anyone's eyes as she sat back from the man's motionless body. She didn't know what she'd find looking back at her, be it blame or sympathy or something else entirely, and she didn't want to find out.
After a beat, Henry led the men carrying the replacement somewhere else, somewhere they could bury the body - or try to, at least - and Charlie made her way back to her foxhole. She couldn't bear to think about it, so she forced herself not to.
It was only a day later that another of the newest wave of replacements was killed. A man - or boy, really - who'd been sharing Babe's foxhole, named John Julian. Apparently, he'd been shot in the neck while out on patrol when they'd accidentally hit the German line. No one had been able to get to him.
"It's hell out here," Charlie said to Mabs when she'd told her the news.
Mabs had just nodded.
The day after that, they finally got a supply drop. The fog had lifted marginally and a flight of C-47s managed to drop all sorts of supplies over Bastogne.
Charlie went with Henry and Gene to retrieve them, and the town looked even worse for wear now than it had done when Charlie had first seen it. Somehow, it looked even greyer, even dirtier, even more lifeless. The piles of bodies alongside the edges of the road had gotten higher and the smell was pungent; Charlie's nose burned every time she inhaled. She had to resort to breathing through her mouth instead.
Wounded men were being treated not only inside of the church but outside of it now, too, a testament to how full it was getting. None of the men inside could be evacuated because the line was cut off. They were surrounded on all sides; if you got hit, this was as far back as you could get from the front line.
The jeep skidded to a stop in the midst of little parachutes raining down all around them. Charlie, Henry, and Gene headed into the church directly, desperate for new supplies.
Gene split off in one direction while Henry and Charlie took another. "Supplies?" Charlie asked a black woman who was shifting crates around in a back room.
The woman nodded and handed each of them a crate. "Bandages, plasma, morphine, sulfa," she said, gesturing to both crates. "Will that be enough?"
"That's wonderful," Charlie told her, laughing through open-mouthed shock. "That's - wow, thank you."
The woman nodded, gave her a small smile, and turned back to her work.
"Keep looking for spare supplies," Henry told Charlie in hushed tones. "Take whatever looks unaccounted for."
Nodding, Charlie split off from her, her hands tight on her crate of fresh supplies, and tried to be casual as she wandered around looking for any spare bits of medical equipment.
"You lookin' for morphine?" a soldier sitting against a wall asked as Charlie passed. When she turned to him, poised to answer, he tossed a syrette at her anyway. "Don't look like I'm gonna be needin' it much for a while."
"Thanks," Charlie told him.
He shrugged.
With supplies running as low here as they were back on the line, the only things Charlie found lying around were fresh supplies from the drop, and they were all accounted for. By the time she met back up with Henry outside of the church she only had the one extra syrette from the wounded soldier, and Henry had nothing.
"There's no jeeps at the moment," Henry told her, shifting her own box of supplies in her arms. "We'll take the next one that comes in." Then her attention was diverted elsewhere. "Hey, isn't that Doc Roe?"
Charlie followed her gaze to find Gene sitting with one of the nurses Charlie had seen flitting about the church. She was a pale-skinned civilian nurse who wore a blue kerchief over her hair and always seemed to be busy - though that was the case with every nurse Charlie had ever seen, not just in Bastogne but throughout the war. The nurse and Gene were sitting on two discarded wooden chairs, surrounded by rubble, talking quietly about something that was making Gene smile but not the nurse.
Charlie watched as the nurse took her kerchief off and said something to Gene while looking away.
"Didn't you used to have a crush on him?" Henry asked.
Charlie looked away from the pair, her eyes wide as she turned back to Henry. "What?"
Henry wore a small smirk as she prompted, "Well?"
"How did you know about that?"
Henry smiled coyly and turned to look down the street, as if waiting for a jeep to appear. "I used to listen in on your conversations. You and the others. I only ever got to know you in a professional setting so it was the only way I could know you as people as well." Then she glanced back at Charlie. "Do you still like him?"
Charlie gave a quiet laugh. "Not like that." It felt so long ago that she'd liked Gene in that way. She gestured towards where he was sitting with the nurse with a small smile. "I think I've lost my chance, anyway."
Henry laughed at the joke. "If he asked you out now you'd say no?"
"He wouldn't," Charlie answered with a shrug of one shoulder. "But, yes, even if he did I'd say no. We'd be terrible together. We both isolate ourselves to cope." She wanted desperately to ask about Malarkey and whether Henry was ever going to give him the second chance he was trying so hard to earn, but a truck sped down the road, its driver calling for nurses.
Charlie and Henry answered the call, as did the nurse who had been sitting with Gene, and they went back inside the church to help. When they next came outside the sky was darkening with evening, and Charlie wasn't sure she had it in her to be worried about what night would bring anymore.