Winter above Bastogne

I heard them before I saw them, that morning. A rumbling beneath the floorboards, as if the earth itself had a toothache. Mother did not even blow out the lamp; she was already standing at the window with her hands against the cold glass, and I remember thinking: the cows, who will milk the cows if this becomes a war. That's how foolishly you think at such moments. Outside, the snow lay thick over the yard, and beneath that white blanket you could hear something moving that was bigger than we had ever seen, bigger than the village, bigger than our fear could grasp.

Of that decision we knew nothing at the time, and only much later, from the accounts of men who understood more of it than a farm girl, did I hear that it had been planned months earlier, somewhere deep in a headquarters in the east, far from our fields. They said the Führer himself had bent over the maps, that he wanted Antwerp, the port, to drive the British and the Americans apart. We knew Antwerp only from the market where father sometimes drove with the cart. That something so vast was being conceived while we were digging up potatoes, I could not grasp then, and honestly I can still barely grasp it now.

What I did notice, in the weeks before, was that the nights sounded different. No more planes above our roof, no searchlights, but a dull, sustained sound from the east, like a herd you cannot see but can feel approaching. Our neighbour Emile said he had heard engines at night in the forest near the border, muffled, as if they were driving softly on purpose. He whispered it, as if the trees might pass it on. We thought of wild boar, of woodcutters, of anything but what it truly was: thousands of men and machines hiding beneath our own pines, waiting for a signal.

Then came that sixteenth of December and there was no longer any doubt possible. The windows rattled before it grew light. I lay beside my little sister and we clutched each other's hands under the blanket while father downstairs tried to determine which direction it was coming from. The fog was so thick that morning you could no longer see the barn from the house, and precisely because of that, as I heard later, the Germans were able to advance so far without planes coming to stop them. American boys, only just stationed in the villages around us, were overrun before they properly knew what was happening. Some of them had bought bread from us only the day before.

A few days later a rumour went through the region that drained the colour from people's faces, even at our own table. Near Malmedy, it was said, SS men had shot prisoners of war dead at a crossroads in the snow, dozens of them, unarmed, hands raised. At first I did not believe it, such things seemed too cruel to be true, but the priest confirmed it from the pulpit in a voice trembling with something I had never heard from him before. From that moment something changed in the village. The fear acquired a face, and it was no longer just fear of the war in general, but of what exactly stood before our door.

Bastogne was not far from our farm, half a day's walk if the weather allowed, and when word came that the town was surrounded, even I as a child understood why that was so serious: all the roads that mattered converged there. American soldiers withdrew into the surrounding woods, dug themselves into the frozen ground, blankets tied around their helmets because they had no winter coats. We ourselves barely had enough food for ourselves, let alone for an entire army, and yet one evening mother carried a basket of potatoes to the edge of the woods, without saying a word about it to father. I went with her and saw boys no older than my eldest brother, their feet wrapped in burlap, shivering with cold, who thanked her in a language I did not understand but whose sound said enough.

There was much whispering in those days about what was happening inside the encircled town, and it was only after the war that I heard the whole story, from an American soldier who came back to the region once more after the liberation. The Germans had sent the general there, McAuliffe was his name, a letter demanding surrender, or else the artillery would level the town. And that general, the soldier told me laughing, had written back just one word: Nuts. The German officers who received it did not even know what it meant and had to ask whether it was a yes or a no. When I heard that later, it was the first time since the start of the offensive that I heard anyone laugh about those days.

What I did experience myself was the day the sky finally cleared. After a week of grey skies and snowfall that muffled everything, even the sound of the war itself, one morning the sun broke through, bright and hard on the snow, so that you had to squint your eyes shut. A little later we heard the humming of aircraft, a great many aircraft, high up in that blue sky, and from their bellies fell little balls that unfolded into coloured parachutes, red and yellow and orange, drifting toward Bastogne. Father stood beside me in the yard and said nothing, but I saw his shoulders drop a little for the first time in days, as if until then he had been holding his breath without knowing it.

Three days later the rumour went through the villages like a spark through dry straw: Patton was coming. I did not know that name, but the men in our kitchen spoke it as though it meant some kind of deliverance. His tanks had come all the way from the south, they said, and had turned an entire army around in a matter of days, something nobody had thought possible. When the first Sherman tanks drove through our region on their way to the opening they had forced near Assenois, we stood literally waving along the road, cold and hungry, but with something in our chests that for the first time in weeks was not fear.

Yet it was not over with that, as I had hoped at the time. The weeks that followed were perhaps the hardest of all, though less was said about it in the village, as if everyone had grown tired of being afraid. Around Houffalize, we heard, house after house, wood after wood was recaptured, in a cold that the oldest people among us could not recall. Soldiers passing through our village on their way to the front no longer looked like the fit young men of December; their faces were hollow, their eyes empty with exhaustion, and yet they went on, into the snow, into the woods, toward sounds we had long since learned to recognise as an approaching battle.

Sometime in late January, I no longer remember the exact day, Father said one evening at the table that it seemed to be over. The lines were back where they belonged, we heard, and the Germans who had not been captured or killed were withdrawing to where they had come from. On the road to Houffalize, a neighbour boy who had gone to look told us, a burnt-out German tank lay half under the snow, one track torn off, and no one to haul it away. So the wrecks remained lying there for weeks like black scars in the white, and we walked past them to church on Sunday as though it had become as ordinary as a tree fallen after a storm.

I was still a child, and what I remember most about those six weeks is how quiet it became afterwards, and how strange that silence felt after so many months of noise. The cows had to be milked again, the potatoes dug up again, as if the earth neither knew nor wished to know what had just swept over it. Only years later, when I heard the stories from the other side, of what it had looked like among the Germans, in that headquarters where it had all been devised, did I truly realise how small we had been in what had played out above our heads — a farmyard somewhere in the Ardennes, while elsewhere, at another table, with other maps, our fate was being decided.