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Then And Back Again
#1
[Image: gross-schneeeifel1.jpg]

Once again, the old man was performing what had become an annual ritual.  He had voyaged to that particular spot in the woods.  The location was on a small rise that formed a berm overlooking a road that twisted through the tight valley.  On the slopes flanking the road, tall, majestic pines soared skyward and grew so closely together that the floor of the forest was kept in a sort of perpetual gloom.

The weather was getting colder by the day, but the first frost had not yet arrived.  Finding a stump of suitable width, Herve Fauré gladly sat down to catch his breath.  He glanced at the woods about him.  How peaceful it all looks now, he mused.  Reaching into the right breast pocket of his hunter's jacket, Herve withdrew a small metal flask.  Unscrewing the cap, he slowly brought the flask to his lips and enjoyed a sip of Cointreau.

Further sips, slowly savored, loosened his attachment to the here and now.  As a middling stiff breeze began pushing through the pines and spruces, he closed his eyes and listened to his own breathing, while the scenery in his mind's eye subtly changed and his internal sense of passed time rocketed backwards.  Backwards, through the decades . . . to a lost world.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#2
[Image: die-sonne-blinzelt-durch-billiger-24495-...inzelt.jpg]

Harold felt cold and tired.  The watch was always long in the early hours of the morning, and he looked forward to being relieved.  At any rate, it was hard to see much.  Harold's forward observation post overlooked a valley.  Since he had arrived two weeks prior, he and his fellows had observed the valley and occasionally patrolled down to the edge of the broad creek at the bottom.  He had been surprised to realize the scuttlebutt had been correct. Things had been quiet along this part of the front.  And again, he thanked God it was not otherwise.  With a bit of luck, he thought, this war will end soon and I can go home.  As always, that thought calmed him a bit.

As overcast as it was, it was difficult to see down to the creek.  Trying to remain alert, Harold carefully opened a packet of sugar and emptied the contents into his mouth.  Swirling the sugar around in his mouth, the harsh sensation of sweetness gave him a small rush.  He closed his eyes and enjoyed a moment of escape.

Several kilometers to the east, cannoneers clad in field gray raptly watched their battery commander as he held a field telephone to his ear.  Then he straightened up and spoke into the telephone's mouthpiece.

"In Ordnung."

And with that terse phrase, he raised his right arm, stared at the cannoneers, and then his arm swiftly dropped.  All along the Schnee Eifel, and up and down the valley of the Our River, hundreds of artillery batteries, rocket launcher platoons, and mortar sections opened fire more or less simultaneously.  After months of positional warfare, the Germans were on the attack, hundreds of thousands strong.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#3
[Image: Screenshot-2021-12-13-091411.png]

Harold was confused and blinked his eyes.  Across the valley and over the far ridge, the horizon was dotted with many, many bright lights that grew and suddenly extinguished.

And then what seemed like an endless roar washed over him.  Sharp blasts, mixed with what sounded like a thousand freight trains passing overhead gave stunning accompaniment to the distant flashes of light.  Staring wide eyed in horror, he realized it was artillery fire.  German artillery fire.  Behind him, the artillery fire was pounding the reverse slope of the ridge with shattering strikes.  He could hear nothing but the sound of the explosions, which was then complemented by an awful screeching.   Trails of fire rose from the distant ridge, sharply arced, and then fell to the area behind Harold.  More huge explosions.  At this point, he comprehended nothing but light and noise ... endless, deafening noise.  The continual blasts made it almost impossible to think.

For one lucid moment, he stared down into the valley.  The valley's floor was sporadically light by the explosions, and he glimpsed movement.  His eyes, already bulging, grew larger when he realized the movement was that of hundreds of men.  The Volksgrenadiere were boldly advancing, urged forward by "old veterans" who had survived the bloodbath of the late summer and autumn.

They're coming!

Not thinking but operating solely on instinct and training, Harold raised his rifle in the air.  Have to warn the others, he thought, without realizing how absurd that idea was given the barrage that seemed to be flattening everything to his rear.  Pulling the trigger, he squeezed off a single shot.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#4
[Image: 021.jpg]

The muzzle flash from the shot immediately drew fire from the Germans crossing the creek and coming up Harold's side of the valley.  The area around his foxhole was hit several times and tracer projectiles gently arced before impacting nearby.  By now, Harold was fixated on a single thought.

RUN

Amidst the slugs impacting the soil and flying by, Harold sprung out of his hole and began running.  The darkness helped him, as did the first hesitant return fire from stunned American troops higher on the ridge.  A GI manning an automatic rifle walked his fire into the Germans and was almost immediately suppressed by return fire from machine guns.  A crazy quilt of tracer fire covered the rise leading to the American defense line, most of it from the German side.  Running in sprints and then halting for a moment, Harold attempted to keep distance from the tracer streams.  The impact of other slugs with no tracers punched up his fear.  Just then, he heard a sound like a windbreaker's zipper being rapidly opened, followed by a sharp blast and a blossom of orangey-yellow fire.  German mortars were working the American line.

Taking off to an area that wasn't under fire, Harold entered a draw and followed it for a while before climbing a spur, descending, and then doing the same thing several times.  The sounds of the battle were growing more distant and now only small arms fire could be heard.  He only stopped long enough to catch his breath, and then plunged forward into the woods again -- down into the draws and up over the spurs.

Consumed by fear, Harold only wanted to reach an area where he wasn't being shot at and at which other American soldiers could be found.  He was steadily feeling colder, and with heavy heart, realized he had left his pack behind.  This meant he had no rations.  Pausing for a bit longer, he drank a swig of water from his canteen with trembling hands.  The shooting from which he had ran had stopped, but he had no firm idea of how to return to where his platoon had been, and furthermore had no desire to go back that way.  By now, the sky was lightening in color but the thick clouds kept the early morning dark.

What now?

This was not a situation for which the military had trained him.  He was all alone, lost, and in proximity to enemy forces.  Harold was a country boy who, in a firmer mental state, could have perhaps oriented himself and survived long enough to find friendly troops.  But in his fearful state, he latched onto the first indication of other people that he heard: a distant rumbling of motors.

As it turned out, the sound was not so far away as he had first thought.  The contours of the terrain and the dense woods had muffled the noise, so after coming out of the draw he was in and crossing a lightly wooded plateau, Harold descended a thickly wooded ridge.  He worked his way down through the trees towards the sound of the motors, glimpsing a road at the bottom, a road that twisted through a tight valley.  The road was occupied by a column of walking soldiers with what looked like jeeps.  As Harold reached a berm with a good view over the road, he stopped.  With a sinking heart and rising horror, it dawned on him that the soldiers were Germans.  Mixed among the sound of marching boots, he could hear bits of conversation ... conversation in a language he did not understand.

Sinking to one knee, something snapped within him.  Cold, hunger, and terror had done their work.  Harold could see no way out.  He closed his eyes and began softly praying.  Gripped by fear, he began shaking, slowly at first, and then more violently.  He knew only that his eyes were tightly shut and that his heart was loudly pounding.  Pounding, pounding, then ...

What's that?

A sharp, wrenching pain in his chest.

Can't breathe ...

Still clutching his rifle in his right hand, he lost consciousness and sagged to his left.  A mature spruce caught him, and almost gently held him among its boughs and branches.  His final sensation was of the damp needles of the spruce caressing his cheek.  And with that, Harold slipped away from this world, dead of a heart attack at the age of nineteen.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#5
[Image: ratio3x2-1200.jpg]

The German offensive had caught General Eisenhower's headquarters by surprise.

Ignoring the lessons of 1940, a favorite of Eisenhower's --General Bradley, allowed his subordinate, General Hodges, to poorly deploy the troops of the First United States Army as they strove to crack the fortifications on the German frontier and push into the Rhineland.  In September of 1944, that had seemed feasible; three months and the ordeal of the Hürtgen Forest later, all Hodges had to show for his staggering losses was a badly deployed field army and a handful of shattered German bunkers.

Hodges' maneuvers had jammed two entire corps (some 200,000 men) into a narrow corridor that ran from the Dutch border south to the massif known to the Germans as the Eifel and to the Allies as the Ardennes.  To enable this concentration of troops, the part of the front that ran through the Ardennes was thinly manned--screened actually-- by a single corps made up of three divisions that had taken stiff losses in the autumn and a new division that had yet to see combat.

Against this thinly manned front, the Germans had secretly massed some 25 divisions.  Hitler intended the offensive to be a stroke that would split the Allied forces in two and seize the port of Antwerp, through which their primary supply lines passed.  Historians have argued about how the Allies could have missed the German troop concentration, but the reasons mainly boiled down to overconfidence that the German forces would soon collapse and too much reliance on an intelligence source called ULTRA.

Thus, when the Germans attacked, Eisenhower's headquarters was surprised, Bradley's force was split into two parts, leaving him unable to effectively exercise command, and General Hodges practically went into a state of shock as it dawned upon him that his field army was in a fight for its life.  Beyond the reaction of the military headquarters, a cold fear washed over Washington and London, as well as terrifying the inhabitants of Belgium and Luxembourg, the vast majority of whom wanted no part of a return of the German military.  For all of them, it was a thoroughly unwelcome reminder that the war could still be lost.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#6
The author notes that today marks 77 years since the commencement of the German offensive into the Ardennes.

[Image: Luxembourg-American-Cemetery.jpg]
Hamm Cemetery

Cheers
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#7
[Image: Screenshot-2021-12-17-075450.png]

The tension in Herve's unit was palpable.  All anyone really knew was that the Germans were attacking, and it was on a large scale.  And the rumors!  Everything from SS commandos in American uniforms to claims that General Eisenhower had been assassinated.

As a caporal, Herve was a non-commissioned officer and therefore responsible for good order and discipline in his section.  He clamped down on rumors and wild talk to the dismay of the babblers.  He didn't care; he wanted to be respected, not popular.  A brief stint in the resistance had won him rapid promotion when the Kingdom of Belgium, freshly liberated by Allied forces, had begun rebuilding its army.  As small units were easier to stand up than larger units, the Belgians opted to organize infantry battalions they called fusiliers.  Since the liberation, the fusiliers had proved their worth by ensuring the areas behind the American armies were orderly, and by taking on "housecleaning" tasks like rounding up German soldiers who had not yet surrendered.  If there was any truth to the rumors about German infiltrators, he thought, his unit had dangerous duties before them.

He ordered his men to project confidence even if they didn't feel it.  The German attack had extinguished the euphoria of the recent liberation and replaced it with grim foreboding.  It was, he believed, important for the Belgian people to see their own soldiers confident and in control of themselves.  God knows, he thought, that already too many people were panicking, including men in uniform.  And it was, in another sense, grand theater on his part.  Here he was, he thought, the "old man" at a ripe 20 years of age.

Motor noise interrupted his thoughts.  A convoy of Studebaker trucks, with olive-colored canvas covers over their beds, were parking nearby.  Apparently, headquarters had decided where they wanted to deploy Herve's battalion.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#8
[Image: goldstar-flag.png]

It was near the middle of the day in the broad valley in West Virginia.  About three hundred feet back from the gravel road, a small wooden house of "Jenny Lind"-style construction had been built.  Near it was a wooden barn.  In front of the house, the field stretched to the road, although the tilled earth could not be seen for the recent snow which had fallen.  Smoke rose from the chimney but otherwise the scene was still.

Inside the cabin was a table made of oak with wooden benches that served as seats.  At the table, a woman was seated with her arms on the table and her head pushed into her arms.  She had been crying for over an hour, for her entire world had collapsed.  On the table before her lay a telegram.

[Image: holt-tgram.jpg]

Harold's father would not see the telegram until that evening, when he returned from felling trees on the far side of the ridge.

Before very long, and all too soon, in a front window of the Holtenwood house would hang a Gold Star Flag.

~ ☼ ~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen
#9
[Image: Screenshot-2021-12-26-111102.png]

In spite of the massive chaos in the Allied camp following the rupture of the Ardennes front, several positive influences served to blunt the German advance.

The U.S. Army, like the British Army, had a high ratio of support forces to combat forces.  Thus, while the Germans broke through in several places along the front held by the U.S. VIII Corps, they did not have open roads before them, for the "rear area" of VIII Corps had plenty of soldiers not normally on the front lines.  To the credit of the surprised U.S. soldiers, many fought bitter rearguard actions, and some, like the engineers, were able to blow up bridges.  There was a veritable sea of micro-battles, all of which dealt friction to the German advance -- and consequently, delays that ultimately doomed the German plan.

Some historians have claimed the only reserves available to General Eisenhower in mid-December 1944 were two American airborne divisions.  But this was not true.  To the north, General Montgomery had British 30 Corps, which he used to backstop a defensive line along the Meuse River and therefore "draw a line" beyond which the Germans would not advance.  To the south, General Patton had assembled the U.S. III Corps for future operations.  This corps was sent north to attack into the southern flank of the German offensive.  One of the airborne divisions, the 101st, successfully held critical road junctions in a town called Bastogne, although surrounded by a German force several times their own size.  The stubborn defense of the 101st Airborne Division forced the German mechanized columns to bypass to the north.

By the end of December, it was clear the German thrust had failed.  Their 2d Panzer Division, out of fuel, was defeated by American and British forces just east of the Meuse River, while to the south, Bastogne's encirclement was broken by the advance of General Patton's soldiers.  And, in the interim,  one of the most bitter winters in recent European history had descended upon northwest Europe, filling the hills and valleys of the Ardennes with a deep snow.

These parts of the battle are well known, but what followed was less heralded.  For Hitler did not believe in giving up ground without a fight, and so the American and British forces began a difficult and casualty-intensive series of battles to drive the Germans out of the Ardennes in the middle of a terribly cold winter.  These actions lasted the entire month of January 1945.  Fighting as part of these clashes were battalions of Belgian Fusiliers, and it is in late January we return to the experiences of Herve Fauré.

~☼~
[Image: 14sigsepia.jpg]

Location: The lost world, Elsewhen


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