On the third of January, Easy Company was moved back to their original positions near Bastogne, where they'd begun their time in the Ardennes. One of the only upsides to returning to the place they'd experienced such terror was the lack of a need to dig foxholes: their old ones were still there. Well, most of them were - some of them had since become buried under the damage of the artillery barrages.
The other upside was that they'd been given coats before they left.
Upon returning to Bastogne, however, it was clear that in their absence the Germans had had time to properly zero their artillery in on their position. Trees had been knocked down and lay strewn across the ground, their branches detached and scattered all across the snow. They would have no cover now. There were holes in the ground not big enough for foxholes, clearly made by the impact of shells, and patches of dark snow where the heat of explosions had burnt clean through it and the ground beneath.
If it was possible for things to get worse, Charlie knew they were about to, and that put the worst sick feeling in her stomach she'd felt yet.
Their numbers had decreased significantly since they'd arrived in Belgium, and even then they hadn't been at full strength. They still only had two medics, Gene and Spina, and no surgeons. Duckie had been killed just yesterday by a sniper. And, to add unto the steadily increasing list of wounded, two men had been hit on the way over to their old foxholes. Brown and Stevenson hadn't been hit badly but they'd been hit all the same, and now they were in the aid station, where they'd be staying for the foreseeable future to recover before they could be sent back to the line.
While the men whose foxholes had been buried worked to dig new ones, Hoobler went around showing off his new toy. On the way over he'd run into a German officer on horseback, likely doing some reconnaissance, and shot him right off of the horse. Hoobs had found the luger he'd been coveting since Normandy on the officer, and he couldn't have been more smug as she flashed it around and retold the story.
By the time he got to Charlie and Mabs they'd both heard the story a few times already, passed onto them by the men Hoobs had told first, but they both listened avidly as he set the scene for them regardless and gasped in all the right places.
Hoobs let Charlie hold the gun, though she was too scared to do anything more than cradle it in her palms, but Mabs didn't want to touch it.
"Ain't nothin' good about sidearms," she claimed, turning her nose up at it and shaking her head. "I don't want nothin' to do with 'em."
"Aw, come on, Mabs," Hoobs complained with a grin. "You gotta admit she's a beauty."
"I ain't gotta admit nothin'," Mabs replied. "A gun's a gun, and I don't like 'em."
Charlie handed the gun back to Hoobs with a small, apologetic smile. "I think it's cool," she offered.
He grinned. "Thank you. Someone who has taste."
Mabs scoffed. "Why don't you go show Malarkey? I'm sure he'll appreciate it. Weren't he tryin' to get a luger for his kid brother in Normandy?"
Hoobs laughed. "I forgot all about that! Heard he ran out into enemy fire tryna find one. You guys seen him?"
"He told me he was going to find Lipton," Charlie supplied. "And Lipton's helping Shifty dig his foxhole, so I'd start there."
"Thanks, Charlie," Hoobs said. With a grin and a wink at both of them, Hoobs turned and began to pick his way around foxholes and fallen trees, on his way to show off his luger some more.
Fifteen minutes later, a gunshot rang out.
Charlie and Mabs threw themselves to the ground.
"Sniper?" Mabs asked in a whisper.
"Maybe."
"I don't hear anyone yellin' medic."
"No."
Charlie strained her ears to listen for the call even while she hoped it wouldn't come. They really couldn't afford to lose any more men, but even if they could, why should they have to? And especially to something so comparatively small as a single bullet.
"Medic!"
Charlie and Mabs remained where they were, waiting for the call for a nurse.
"I'll go," Charlie said, her voice hushed as they waited to hear anything that would tell them who'd been hit and how badly.
"No," Mabs protested instantly. "I'll go."
"I'll go," Autumn called out from the next foxhole over. Clearly, she'd just been having the exact same conversation with Boo.
"Alright," Mabs called back.
Secretly, Charlie was relieved. She didn't want to know who had been hit just yet, or how badly, and she certainly didn't want to be the one working against time to stop the bleeding.
As it turned out, Autumn was the worst person who could have answered that particular call for a nurse. Because it was Hoobler. And they'd lost him.
His luger had gone off in his pocket, she explained to them when she came back, white as a sheet with eyes far away and unblinking. He'd cut the main artery in his leg. They hadn't been able to see how badly he was bleeding beneath his clothing, but even if they had there would have been nothing they could do. Once the artery was hit it was game over.
Autumn and Hoobs had been close friends since before D-Day. They'd gone to the dance together, and while they hadn't found in one another any sort of romantic spark, what they had found was a good friend. The two of them had seemed to just get each other, and no one seemed to get Autumn, not right off the bat anyway. She was a complete enigma and liked it that way, but Hoobs had known exactly who she was right from the start.
Charlie couldn't imagine the kind of pain Autumn was in right now, but looking at her made her own heart ache. Autumn, who never seemed fazed by anything, who was always ready with a smirk and a sarcastic quip, had lost all of the light in her eyes. She looked vacant. Empty. Completely lost. And Charlie didn't have a clue what she could do to help.
"Autumn, why don't you go sit down?" Charlie asked in the softest voice she could manage. She hadn't left her foxhole for anything other than tending to wounded or relieving herself since Christmas Eve, but she left it now, accompanying Autumn over to her foxhole and getting her settled.
Charlie sat with her while they waited for Boo to return from delivering Hoobs' body to the aid station, and all Autumn did was stare.
Mabs fluttered about, offering blankets and cigarettes and water and gum, but Autumn didn't seem to hear a word of it. She simply stared at the dirt wall in front of her, eyes unseeing, ears unhearing.
Boo returned with sunken features and Charlie moved over to make space for her. Eventually, Autumn fell asleep. Not wanting to wake her, Charlie stuck around, and she wasn't sure whether or not she was surprised when Joe Liebgott came wandering over.
"How is she?" he asked, crouching at the edge of the foxhole. His eyes were on Autumn, soft and concerned, but the question was clearly directed at Charlie and Boo.
Charlie let Boo reply, since she knew her best.
"In shock," Boo said quietly. "She hasn't spoken much. Just keeps staring."
"Is there anything I can do for her?"
Charlie looked at Joe hard while he spoke to Boo. He'd been flirting with Autumn outrageously for a while, and she'd always rejected him, but there was something a lot more serious than friendly concern in his eyes now. Whether their relationship to each other was more than Charlie had thought or whether he simply wanted it to be more, Charlie wasn't sure, and it certainly wasn't the most pressing matter at hand right now, but she was certain there was something there.
Charlie left the foxhole so Joe could take her place and all but collapsed back into her own. Mabs wasn't there - Charlie figured she was telling Henry the news - so she tried to sleep, but she didn't feel anywhere close to sleepy just now. Tired, yes, but not in the traditional sense. In the sense that required movement and activity instead of sleep.
So, now that she'd ripped the bandage off and left her foxhole, Charlie decided to seek out some of her friends. She found Skip and Alex sitting in a foxhole with George and squeezed in the best she could upon their invitation.
"How's Autumn doing?" Skip asked.
Charlie shook her head. "Still in shock at the moment. She's sleeping now."
"Damn," Alex sighed.
"Been a while since we've seen you in this neck of the woods, Charlie," Skip said, changing the subject. He was referring to how she'd been letting them come to her as opposed to the other way around, and she shrugged in acknowledgement of this fact.
"I thought it was about time," she said, even though that wasn't strictly true. Still, she didn't want to bring up Autumn again. "Nice foxhole you got here."
"Yeah, pretty roomy, ain't it?" Alex asked, patting the wall beside him.
"Smug bastards," George grumbled with a grin.
"Well, we need the space with everyone comin' and goin' all the time," Alex retorted.
As though he'd been listening in and waiting for a cue as good as that, First Lieutenant Compton appeared and crouched down on the edge of the foxhole.
"Skip, Alex, George," he greeted, giving each of them a nod. "Lieutenant Lancaster," he added when he turned to Charlie.
"Lieutenant Compton," she answered him with a nod of her own.
"How're you guys holding up?" he asked.
"Oh, you know," Skip began, his voice shaking with his shivers, "we're just lazing around. Shooting the shit. All that fun stuff."
"Right," Compton agreed with a short laugh. "Well, you guys take care of yourselves, alright? We don't want to make any more trouble for the lieutenant here, do we?"
All three of the enlisted men laughed.
"Yes, please don't," Charlie chimed in. "I have enough on my plate as it is." Her half-joke fell flat when she didn't manage to muster a smile or a laugh to accompany it, but no one seemed to take it as a joke anyway.
"We'll be careful, Charlie," Skip assured her.
"I'm serious," Compton went on.
"Sure thing, Buck, nothing stupid," Alex told him. To Skip, he added, "We got it, right?"
"We got it," Skip confirmed.
"Alright," said Compton with a sigh.
Silence fell as they all waited for George to answer. When he didn't, Compton prompted, "George?"
"Eh?" George said, either too cold to answer or only half listening. "Nothing stupid, Buck." He flashed a smile.
Compton stared into space for a moment. "Yeah."
He turned and left them after that, looking stuck inside his own head. Charlie's eyes followed him until he was out of sight, her eyebrows scrunching up as she tried to puzzle him out. She hadn't known him to be so introspective before now.
Once he was gone, Alex scoffed a laugh. "'Don't do anything stupid'? Who the hell is he talking to? Bunch of morons who volunteered to jump out of a perfectly good airplane. Can you get any more stupid than that?"
"Probably not," Skip agreed.
Charlie shook her head. "Why you guys all agreed to sign up for the Airborne I will never truly know."
"Pays better than the other branches," Alex pointed out.
Charlie nodded, though she couldn't imagine that being enough of a draw to look past the fact the extra money was only because of the increased mortality rate. Maybe she was just speaking from her privilege, though; she knew she would likely never understand what it meant to really struggle for money. At least, she hoped she wouldn't.
"I swum across the Niagra once," Skip said out of nowhere.
"Yeah," Alex said, clearly not convinced.
George laughed.
"I swear," Skip insisted. "On a bet."
"Must have been good money," Charlie said.
Skip shrugged. "I did alright."
"What, in a barrel?" George asked.
Skip turned baffled eyes on him. "No. God -" He shared a look with Alex. "I didn't go over the Falls, George, I swam across the river."
"I don't know," George mumbled defensively.
Skip shook his head as he recalled the event, continuing, "Ten miles up from the Falls, I tell ya, that current is damn strong."
"Oh, yeah," Alex agreed.
Charlie glanced at him sidelong. "Was it cold?"
"Freezing," Skip promised her. "And the current must have carried me at least two miles downstream before I got across. But -" He held up a finger, "- I got across."
Laughing quietly to himself, Skip went on, "Now, personally, I didn't think it was all that stupid but, uh, my mom and my sister Ruth? They gave me all kinds of hell."
Charlie hummed. "I can imagine."
"Yeah, I bet, Muck," added George.
"So did Faye," Skip added, almost reluctantly, as though he hadn't wanted to bring her up but hadn't been able to help it.
Charlie wanted to smile at the mention of Faye Tanner, Skip's sweetheart from back home. He was absolutely smitten with her and anyone could see it, and though the men teased him relentlessly for it he never attempted to deny that he was in love. And Charlie thought that that was maybe the truest form of affection: allowing everyone to see it and never once shying away, even when you were encouraged to.
Predictably, George began his teasing. "Ah," he said with a smirk, "sweet Faye Tanner."
Skip kicked him gently. "Shut it, George," he replied without missing a beat.
"Well, they had a point," Alex said before George could go any further. He was a good friend. "You're an idiot," he said to Skip.
Charlie nudged him. "Made for a good story though, didn't it?"
"Thanks, Charlie," Skip told her with a laugh. "Always on my team."
"You remember that next time I need you," she joked half-heartedly. But she didn't need to say as much, for Skip was always there when she needed him: when James had died he'd been right there to cheer her up, when she'd been avoiding Floyd he'd been her go-to friend, when she'd had something of a breakdown in Holland during the party with the Brits he'd left the party with her just to talk it all over, and after the bombing of Bastogne on Christmas Eve he'd been there with a blanket, trying to make it better however he could. She loved him for that, for never needing to be asked for his help. She didn't know what she'd done to deserve a friend like him.
Even though he, too, must have been aware of the irony in her statement, he still replied, "I'll try my best, Charlie," with a small, good-humoured grin.
Charlie nodded back at him, all the while hoping that, whenever a time came that he needed her, she would manage to show up for him just as well as he always did for her.