Beautiful Ruins

On the day I met the girl, I had finally had enough and gotten the nerve to act: AD, accidental discharge, right through one of my rebellious hooves. I would be sent home to Madison to live with my parents, a footless invalid listening to Cubs games on the radio and telling my nephews an ever-improving story of how I lost my foot (I stepped on a land mine, saving my platoon-mates).

That day we were to march to a newly liberated village to interview survivors (“Cand-ee, Amer-ee-can! Dolcie, per favore!”), to ask the peasants to rat out their Communist grandsons, to inquire as to whether the routed Germans might have happened to mention, as they ran away, oh, say, where Hitler was hiding. As we marched toward this little hill town, we passed, just off the road, the rotting body of a German soldier draped over some kind of rough, half-finished sawhorse made of gnarled tree limbs.

This is mostly what we saw of Germans that spring, corpses previously taken out by hardened soldiers or even harder partisans, whose work we superstitiously respected. Not that we were simply tourists ourselves; we’d seen a bit of action. Yes, dear dull nephews, your uncle had issue upon which to fire his .30 caliber in the enemy’s direction, little puffs of dirt exploding at the end of my every shot. It’s difficult to know how many clods of dirt I hit, but suffice it to say I was deadly to the stuff, dirt’s worst enemy. Oh, and we took a bit of fire, too. Earlier that spring we lost two men when German 88-mm ca

We were safely past the body and burial detail when I suddenly stopped marching and sent word forward that I would deal with the stewing corpse. I had my reasons, of course. Someone had taken the dead German’s boots already, and he’d surely been picked clean of insignia and weaponry and anything else that might make a decent trophy to show to the nephews at Thanksgiving in Rockport (“This is the Hitler battle spoon I took from a murderous Hun I killed using my poor bare feet”), but for some reason this particular dead man still had his socks. And so crazed was I with discomfort that this dead man’s socks looked to me like salvation: two clean, tight-woven sheaths that appeared to cover his feet like bedsheets at a four-star hotel. After dozens of pairs of Allied replacement socks courtesy of my empathetic supply sergeant, I had thought I might try my luck with Axis footwear.

“That’s sick,” Richards said when I told him I was going back for the corpse’s socks.

“I’m sick!” I admitted. But before I could move for the dead man’s feet, that moron silver bar, Leftenent Bean, came astride and said that a mine-rigged body had been encountered by another platoon, and so our most recent orders were to eschew burial detail. I had to walk away from what appeared to be the warmest, driest, cleanest pair of socks in Europe, to march another two miles in these soggy, spiky beasts in full pupa stage. And that was it. I was done. I said to Richards, “I’m doing it tonight. SIW. I’m blowing off my foot tonight.”

Richards had been listening to me gripe for days, and he thought I was all talk, that I could no more shoot myself in the foot than I could levitate. “Don’t be stupid,” Richards said. “War’s over.”

That was what was so perfect, I told him. Who would suspect it now? Earlier in my war, a foot-shot might not have been enough to send me home, but now, with the thing winding down, I liked my odds. “I’m going to do it.”

Richards indulged me. “Fine. Do it. I hope you bleed to death in the stockade.”

“Death would be better than this pain.”

“Then forget your foot, shoot yourself in the head.”

We’d stopped just short of this village, and decamped in the rubble of an old barn on a vine-covered hillside. Richards and I set up OP on a small ledge that served as our cover. I sat there debating with Richards which part of my foot I should shoot, as easily as a man might talk about where to have lunch, and that’s when a scraping came from the road below us. Richards and I looked at one another silently. I grabbed my carbine, pushed up to the ledge, and rolled my sight along the road below us until I landed on the approaching figure of . . .

A girl? No. A woman. Young. Nineteen? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? I couldn’t say in the dusky light, only that she was lovely, and that she seemed to be bouncing alone on this narrow dirt road, brown hair swept up and pi

“Halt,” Richards called. And I laughed. Here was a vision on a road beneath us and Richards comes up with Halt? Had I my wits beneath me instead of brutalized feet, I’d have steered him to the Bard’s more existential Who’s there? and we’d have done the whole of Hamlet for her.

“Don’t shoot, nice Americans,” called the girl from the road, in pristine English. Unsure where this “Halt” had come from, she addressed the trees on both sides, then our small ledge before her. “I am walking to see my mother.” She held up her hands and we rose on the hillside above her, rifles still trained. She lowered her hands and said that her name was Maria and that she was from the village just over the hill. Despite a slight accent, her English was better than most of the guys’ in our unit. She was smiling. Not until you see a smile like that do you understand how much you’ve missed it. All I could think about was how long it had been since I’d seen a smiling girl on a country road.

“Road’s closed. You’ll have to walk around,” Richards said, pointing with his rifle back the way she’d come.

“Yes, fine,” she said, and asked if the road to the west was open. Richards said it was. “Thank you,” she said, and started back up the road. “God bless America.”

“Wait,” I yelled. “I’ll walk you.” I took off my wool helmet liner and patted down my hair with spit.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Richards said.

I turned, tears in my eyes. “Goddamn it, Richards, I am walking this girl home!” Of course, Richards was right. I was being an idiot. Leaving my post was desertion, but at that moment I’d have spent the rest of my war in the stockade to walk six feet with that girl.

“Please, let me go,” I said. “I’ll give you anything.”

“Your Luger,” Richards said without hesitation.