Dead Enemy
by Lt. James "Grumpy" Smith
A rifle marks the spot. I’d look out from my jeep
and see this. Not one but many, many. It should have struck no happy thoughts.
He’s dead. Can’t shoot at us anymore. But there was something sad and lonely
about this scene. Yes, I know, his fellow soldiers had not abandoned him. The
fact that they buried him and marked
the location of his body showed their concern.
As the Germans
retreated in a hurry, there was no time to take the dead solider to their own
cemetery. He was wounded, had survived the battle, and had died on route. You
can just picture the scene. Lying on the floor of a German truck or ambulance,
surrounded by his friends, a medic trying but failing to save him. Was he
conscious? Did he know he was dying?
It might have been better if he didn’t.
I
knew each rifle sticking up from the ground was someone’s son, someone’s
brother, someone’s husband, someone’s sweetheart.
Each rifle meant a story – a sad story because it marked the end of a
youth with all the years of promise ahead. A wife, a family, an ambition. Such a
waste.
I knew that each rifle represented a patriotic youth serving his country,
his town, his family. Like me he felt that God was on his side. I was his enemy.
Probably he cheered when he saw us fall. And me. I silently cheered that his
rifle was now silent.
The
body was not buried deep. The gravediggers just got the body below the ground
level. .Each rifle marked a mound of hastily turned over earth. Each body was
laid face up. Sometimes, in sandy areas,
the wind blew the sand so you could see a face. I soon learned to stay
away. To view the scene from a distance. But like everything else, you learn to
adjust to everything that combat throws at you. After a day or so of seeing the
rifles I never gave them a glance or a thought.
Let’s
go a
little beyond this scene. Someone with a truck must come along, dig up these
bodies, (better do it now not later) and take them to our own Nazi cemetery.
There another crew, maybe captured Germans,
dug the bodies in.
There
is a follow up on this. Every soldier wears a dog tag. You have noticed, there
are two tags. One you’re buried with. The other goes to headquarters. You
probably never thought much about it, but the fact that each soldier wears a tag
tells you something about war. Some replacements were killed so fast that no one
even knew their names. Beyond that some were hard to identify. One of our men
found himself in a mine field, and tried to crawl out feeling with his hand. An
explosion removed his face.
It
seems like such a small thing, but
something that bothered us no end was the flies. They swarmed all over
the faces of the dead., especially around the eyes and corners of the
mouth. If I stopped to look I’d find
myself staring down into a bloated face, eyes wide open. Yes, most were
wide open. I just had to swat away the flies as if to say
“You deserved better than this.” But they only swarmed back. After
this I kept away. Once later, when it was colder I passed a dead Moroccan. I
started to talk to him. When I actually sat down beside him I knew, “Smitty,
you’re going off your rocker.” I phoned in his location, but nobody
came. He was still there when I left. Someone had taken his boots. I felt sorry
for him – frozen stiff in the snow with no boots on.
Hey, I’d better stop dwelling on this!
Editor’s Note: Lt. Smith was
a forward observer in the 17th Field Artillery Regiment, 13th
Brigade. The action described here took place in
North
Africa
in the spring of 1943.
©
Weston Military History Group, 2004.
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