Chapter 11
It’s the cold that Steve feels first, before the absence of another body in the narrow bedroll. The cold, an ache in his bones, an ache in his head like he’s been out drinking til dawn. When he breathes out he sees a plume of smoke through his slitted eyes, cut crossways by lashes. It’s pretty, like slashes of black paint on a canvas, so he does it again. His body hurts, but it always hurts, and he’d gotten used to an empty bed when Bucky was away at Camp McCoy.
His arms shake when he pushes himself up, stiff like a plank of wood. Two sweaters and one from Bucky’s kit under the winter coat they all were issued, the one Dugan cut down to Steve’s size before they’d even shipped out. Three pairs of socks too, and all the Captain America pamphlets he could keep hold of stuffed down his long underwear for insulation. It isn’t even that cold, but the cold eats Steve up sometimes.
He finds Bucky out by the fire like he’s expecting to. It’s burned down to embers, and Bucky is as still as a statue in the gray light, still closer to night than day. His hands are wrapped around his rifle, ice cold when Steve touches them, testing Bucky’s grip.
Steve bends his aching spine over the coals, stirring them with a stick. There are some twigs they have piled up for kindling nearby and a little log that Steve lays down over the fire. He hears Bucky rumble over his shoulder, “You’re gonna snuff it out.”
“It’ll be alright,” Steve says, and stands looking over the pit with his hands stuffed in his pockets, rooting around for his little tin of pills. He lets them dissolve under his tongue; they work faster that way, shot right into his bloodstream, or at least that’s the way he thinks of it.
He hears the click of metal behind him: Bucky’s hands around the rifle, or the shield shifting against his hip. The air is salty, something in it he can taste, so different than the smell of the East River, or even Coney Island: gritty, like the sound of seagulls. They’re too far inland to hear the waves even if he can smell the Channel, but they’ll be able to hear other things soon enough.
“They’ll have launched the ships by now,” Steve says. Planes, too, enough to turn the sky into glittering aluminium, same as the silver foil they’ll be dropping over Calais to keep the Nazis away from Normandy for as long as possible. Through the gloomy, rainy dawn the foil might well look like an army crossing from Dover; even real soldiers stoop to trickery sometimes. “What do you bet the seagulls will make of it?”
Bucky shifts on his makeshift stool. “Don’t know,” he says, and Steve hums to himself: Bucky’s right, they may not be able to see anything at all through the choppy surf. But maybe they’d be astonished to see the air turn thick with parachutes and plywood planes gliding silently to earth. Steve had seen the numbers, spelled out in dry columns under the curl of Phillips’ hand: ten thousand aircraft, seven thousand ships, a Biblical number of men pitching themselves onto the continent. From the tribe of Zubulun 12,000, from the tribe of Joseph 12,000, from the tribe of Benjamin 12,000 - although last Steve had heard it would be closer to 150,000 men, from God alone knew how many tribes.
The countryside around their camp is quiet and they endure patiently. At patient as Steve ever is, which under normal circumstances Buck would be the first to point out. It’s on the tip of Steve’s tongue to tease him: “Take your sickle and reap, because the time to reap has come, for the harvest of the earth is ripe.” Or, irrepressible: “Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits by many waters.”
But Scriptures annoy Bucky under the best of circumstances, and what comes out of Steve’s mouth instead is, “Do you think we’ve done enough?”
His voice is hushed in the rain, enough that maybe Bucky doesn’t hear him, doesn’t answer. At Steve’s feet, the little log smolders and goes out.
-
Dawn breaks at 0520, or rather doesn’t: the gray mist becomes a lighter gray. They huddle in Dum Dum’s tent as the first raindrops start to fall; Dum Dum sleeps alone with the equipment. His tent smells of cigars and masturbation, and Jim sits as close to the flap as he can, the headset crooked over his cap as he listens intently.
The invasion had been scheduled for June 4th, which had poured rain and cracked lighting - no good for an ocean crossing. The storm had passed but the clouds had lingered on the 5th, thick and thunderous overhead - poor conditions for bombers and parachutists. And on the third day He rises - well, it was happening now, weather be damned.
The big guns had started ten or fifteen minutes ago. Huge, ripping claps, muffled only a little by the distance and the wind. Warships, turned broadside to the beaches, softening up Hitler’s Atlantic wall. There’s smoke on the wind, which is blowing their way.
“That rain’s gonna have them down on our heads,” Gabe says nervously, looking up at the heavens. There might as well be a beehive on the other side of the trees, for all they can see of the planes droning overhead.
“This one’s German,” Jim says, and passes Gabe a scrap of paper with dots and dashes written all over it. Dear Mika, France is terrible but I am, Steve sees written across the top of it before Gabe tilts it away, squinting down at the sheet of paper.
“They’ve sunk a destroyer off Luc-sur-Mer,” Gabe translates, “there are men coming onto the beach there.” Steve closes his eyes and traces mental fingers over the big map laid out in Phillips’ office. Sword Beach. British 3rd Infantry. Earlier than the others. Two pillboxes on the hills above them, brimming with machine guns and anti-tank weaponry, chopping up the water in front of the landing crafts.
Overhead the bombers make another pass, invisible in the mists. Bucky lights another cigarette, his boots shuffling around outside of Dum Dum’s tent, also unseen. The bombing goes on for what feels like hours, punctuated only by the erratic heartbeat of Morse code coming faintly through Jim’s headset. Colleville, Arromanches, Sainte-Honorine: the vast stretch between Omaha and Gold beaches. The landscape would look like the surface of the moon, to the tens of thousands of men crossing the rough waters of the Channel.
“First landing craft are beaching on Utah and Omaha,” Jim says. “Taking heavy fire.” Steve closes his eyes and takes a long breath, seeking the smell of Bucky’s cigarettes. “Casualties are to be assumed,” Phillips had said, passing down the news and orders that came from Eisenhower himself. The Nazis had been throwing mines, concrete, money and men at the Atlantic wall since 1942; for the last half year the pace had grown feverish. They’d filled northern France with more than six million mines and built hundreds of concrete bunkers along the beachheads, stuffed full of soldiers staring patiently at the gray water. Or playing cards the way Dum Dum is attempting to, grumbling around his cigar at being kicked out of his own tent.
Casualties were to be assumed.
“Qu'est-ce qui se passe maintenant?” Dernier asks.
Bent over his notebook, Jim flicks a dark look up at the rest of them, but doesn’t say anything. Just keeps writing down the news. “Rommel’s done a damn good job,” Phillips had said, looking down at the big map. Fingertips on aerial shots of the beaches at low tide, iron hedgehogs sprinkled across the sand like a child’s forgotten set of jacks.
“We should lend a hand,” Monty says now, crouched down next to Jim, steadying himself with one hand on the radio.
“Our orders are to stay put,” Dugan says, looking up from his cards. They had been; the orders were clear. Their unit was too strategically valuable. Stay put, wait for D+1 objectives to be achieved. Brass will radio instructions once it’s safe to do so. The propaganda value of Captain America worth more than neoprene tanks now. Maybe worth more than real ones too.
“21st Panzer Division has been ordered to the beachhead,” Gabe reports, neck curved over his torn sheets of paper, “and there’s infantry moving north through Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer.” Dernier curses, his restless shadow bouncing from one side of the tent to the other.
“It’d be suicide, getting down on that beach,” Jim says. “We’d be cut to ribbons before we got anywhere near.”
“We don’t need to be on the beach,” Monty argues, looking to Steve. “We can send false radio messages, lead those Jerries straight into each other.”
“That won’t be much help to the infantry,” Gabe says. Dernier looks at him, appalled, before Gabe follows up with, “Those bigs guns are the problem. Those little pillboxes. The Nazis have the high ground and all that fortification.”
“Can’t shoot behind themselves,” Steve muses.
They’ve seen some of the batteries themselves, creeping around in the humid night. Bucky had found the first one, stumbled on it accidentally when they were on their way to plant mines in the roads that had built it. The site had been unmarked on their maps, unmentioned in the coded briefings they received sometimes, through Resistance informants. It had been dumb luck alone that he and Jim hadn’t roused the guards, or the hundreds of men they spent hours watching the next day, roaming in and around the trenches and the buried bunkers. Hardly any of it showed from above ground: only a few deep depressions in the grass, hiding gun pits invisible to aerial surveillance.
“Naval artillery not knocking ‘em out?” he asks. He directs the question to Jim, who shakes his head.
“Not so far,” he says, grimacing. “Our ships reported a few direct hits on Pointe du Hoc before they had to cease fire for infantry landing, but they’re still being fired on. There’s been a smokescreen ordered to protect the ships.”
Pointe du Hoc, though, was a known target. Had been for years. The highest point along the cliffs, and straddling two points of Allied attack. Thick concrete burrowed into the hillside, like some kind of strange, malevolent animal in its nest. The barrel of a gun poking out between its lips, big enough for Steve to put his head into. Big enough to punch holes in tanks, and in the landing crafts coming off the water, trying to spill their human cargo close enough to shore that they wouldn’t drown before they got shot.
“Their eyes will be on the ships,” Dernier says, and more in French that’s too fast for Steve to follow, but his mind leaps ahead of the translation:
Steal a Nazi truck from the nearest town, put Monty at the wheel in one of the uniforms they’d stripped off a corpse. Dernier beside him, playing the role of collaborator; everyone else in the back. The German Monty learned from Bucky shoddy but enough to be waved inside a by a distracted guard. Two hundred infantry stationed inside, all eyes on the invasion, all hands on the 155mm guns that made up the bulk of the battery’s defensive capabilities. A few of Stark’s modified Daisy Cutters, which had been dropped to them with their resupply last week, flung into each covered casemate …
Not much worse than catching shells, Steve thinks.
Bucky’s boots scrape back and forth outside the tent. He hadn’t much to say to Steve this morning after the fire went out, after the rest of their company was roused by expectation and the far-off noise of the invasion. The canvas is too thick to see the shape of him, just the barest flash coming from under the flap as he moves in and out of the weak light, and then stops.
“Suit up,” Steve says.
-
By the time Steve and Dum Dum find their way down to the beachheads, they find that Captain America has preceded them.
Steve had expected it, of course - Jim had taken the big radio, leaving them with the little set they’d taken from an abandoned farmhouse. It had just enough range on it to pick up the broadcast from the BBC, describing the battle from across the Channel as it happened only a few miles away from where Steve and Dugan sat waiting. Dispatches from the front, spaced every few hours, read calmly in English tones:
“We are in the ships. The next time our feet touch dry land it will be on the soil of Europe. For the moment we all exist in a peculiar secret world of our own - England behind, yet visible, and a certain beach on the continent as yet undisturbed by the thunder of our attack.
“That feeling of being people apart prevails among all the thousands of men now assembled and ready to go. But there is a feeling of relief, too, that at long last we are off. That this is the real thing.”
And it was; the real thing, that is. Staggering in size. Steve, at least, is staggered, and beside him Dugan is uncharacteristically quiet as they crest the hill and stand in awe.
The air is clotted with blimps and planes ferrying the wounded back to England. On the sand are hundreds of trucks, half-tracks, tanks, many thousands of men coming off beached ships. From above they look like ants, or like the metal soldiers Bucky had as a boy, which Steve had coveted like few other things he’s wanted in his life. The water itself was thick with ships, stuffed full to the far horizon and miles to either side. Beyond, hundreds of blockships waited patiently to be scuttled along the beach, laying the first foundations of a monumental feat of engineering. When the Allies had found themselves unable to secure harbors at Calais, they’d decided to build artificial ones in Normandy instead.
They pick their way gingerly down the cliffs. Up close the wreckage is vast and startling. Crushed jeeps, gray with ash and fire. Miles of wire - barbed, but also to lay for radio and telephone - tangle in with seaweed along the water mark. Helmets and boots and jackets strewn across the sand, here and there still occupied by their owners. Sheets of paper blow about in the wind, not quite strong enough to disturb soggy cigarettes, as thick on the sand as bullet casings and seashells. The lines of men slogging through the scrubby sand and up the high bluffs look at Steve with some curiosity, but not much.
There are soldiers picking through piles of weapons for anything still worth firing. In the water there are the bodies of men, and other men standing knee deep in the waves discussing how to get to them. Whether it was worth swimming out into the still-mined waters, or waiting for the tide to sweep the bodies to shore, or sending a mine flailer into the water to at least make it safe for the soldiers still up and walking around. Still also scores of men filling in the deep trenches that zigzagged along the beach, that had forced their invading army into tight bottlenecks to get up off the sands, rife with mines and sniper fire.
And everywhere, everywhere are red and blue circles, with white stars painted in the middle. The shield is painted on the sides of tanks, pinned as fabric scraps to overstuffed infantry packs. There are white wings and clumsy A’s painted on the helmets of soldiers. Captain America had landed at Normandy, even if Bucky himself is nowhere to be seen.
Dazed and facing the wrong way for his good ear, Steve doesn’t hear footfalls. He feels Dugan rear back, but isn’t quick enough to stop Dernier from barreling into them both and lifting Steve right off the damn ground. He kicks out, mostly without effect - one boot connecting with Dugan’s kneecap, who howls and hops around. Dernier is also howling, but with laughter instead, and then Gabe’s arms are around Steve too and they all go toppling down into the wet sand together.
“Vive la France!” Dernier is saying, his eyes almost creased shut with smiling, and red with tears. “On to Paris! We will go to Germany as conquerors and free men!”
“Get off,” Steve says, patting Dernier on the back. Dum Dum helps everyone to their feet, brushing sand off shoulders absently. “Everyone’s okay?” Steve asks, and feels Gabe’s fingers tighten on his arm.
“Fine,” he says hurriedly, when Steve gives him a sharp look. “We thought once Bucky got hit, but - everyone’s fine. It was the damnedest thing, Steve. The base at Pointe du Hoc was empty. The guns were all gone, all of them.”
“They were firing from the rear base, the hidden one,” Steve says, peering into the high bluffs as if he could spot it from where he stood. He can’t see much of anything, soldiers fading to smears of abstract colors, about as easy to pick out as leaves in a wind. There: a field hospital, topped with a stark cross bleeding into a field of white. There: sparkling silver wire cutting across penned in prisoners, unmoving, faces only a pale blur over the gray green of their uniforms. There: the triangle of broad blue shoulders and white waist, red stripes (at least, Steve’s been told they’re red), surrounded by infantry-drab admirers.
“Yeah,” Gabe says. “We got on the horn to our guys and let them know the coordinates they should be firing at instead. Germans picked our signal up, but - ” here Dernier laughs, broad and happy, “ - they didn’t have anything big enough to knock out their own base, so.” He shrugs. “The USS Satterlee took out Maisy battery, and we went on to the beaches.”
The rest Steve had heard on the BBC, from Alan Melville reporting breathlessly from the Normandy beachhead. That red white and blue figure appearing up on the cliffs, shield glinting in the sunlight that had just begun to break through the morning storm. Captain America razing a broad swath across the machine gun nests dotting the cliffs, preceded by the odd screaming noise of Howard’s custom explosives.
That cinematic moment when Captain America had fallen, and Steve’s heart had stopped in his chest for three breathless beats, until Melville told the world with Cap was on his feet again. The rallying of a Ranger battalion that had gotten themselves pinned on the beach. The blue gloved hand that had reached down to pull the first Ranger up off his rope ladder, and onto the beachhead proper. Captain America and his Commandos, capturing German pillboxes. The closing of the gap between Omaha and Gold beaches.
The wind had whipped heavy through Melville’s broadcast, and at times crackled when a German shell landed close by. It had felt almost as though Steve had been there himself.
“What now?” Dugan says, and Steve looks down towards the water, at the tens of thousands of soldiers streaming onto the continent.
He smiles, and says, “They’ll find a use for us.”