The Spirit of the Corps » Band of Brothers

68: Dire Straits

As the days went by, the number of artillery barrages only increased. Either the Germans were gaining confidence or they were getting the much coveted shipment deliveries that the Americans sorely lacked, because each day they seemed to be facing more and more bombardment. 

And then the Germans started to barrage at night, too. Just in case sleeping was getting a little bit too easy.

Charlie could feel herself wasting away as time wore on. They were rapidly running out of food with no resupply in sight, so rationing was stricter than ever; her ODs were starting to hang off of her, become baggy in places they'd once been snug.

Mentally, she was just going through the motions. She'd started a habit of walking the line to visit the nurses in Dog and Fox Companies to see how they were doing and try to scrounge supplies - but really just to give herself something to do - and was quickly adopting another one of going to visit her friends. Luckily, Skip and Alex were in the same foxhole and so were Malarkey and Alton, so she could get all of them done in only two hits. Floyd she went to separately but Chuck let her linger for as long as she wanted, even though their foxhole's size made it a tight fit, and sometimes she went to visit Shifty, too, where he was sharing his foxhole with Hoobler.

Today, the sky was a pale grey and the fog was thick as Charlie picked her way through the foxholes towards Skip and Alex, the first hole she tended to visit since it was closest to the one she shared with Mabs.

"That you, Charlie?" Alex called as she approached.

"Yeah, it's me," she replied. "Put the tea kettle on, would you?"

"Already boiling, Charlie," Skip drawled as he scooted over to make room for her. 

A moment later, Charlie was settled in between them. "So," she began, "what's new?"

"Well, today we have even less food than we had yesterday," Alex said, which made her scoff a laugh.

"Oh, wow. I hadn't heard."

"We've been ordered to restrict ourselves to one round of gunfire per man," Skip informed her seriously. "So, you know, let's hope the krauts don't try anything anytime soon."

"Keeping my fingers crossed," Charlie replied. Just how bleak could all of this get?

"How are Dog and Fox holding up?" Skip went on to ask.

Charlie yawned as she replied, "About the same as us. Hardly any medical supplies, hardly any food or water, hardly any ammunition."

"Sounds about right," Alex said bitterly. "Anyone else find it hard to believe there weren't anyone else the Army could'a sent here before us? Like, I don't know, a company who actually had supplies?"

"Ah, see the Army'd have to be smart to think like that, Penky," teased Skip.

"Yeah," Charlie added, speaking into her scarf, "and they'd have to care."

"Ain't that the truth," Alex agreed.

"Do you have any cards?" Charlie wondered, wanting to change the topic of conversation; it wasn't at all a good idea to linger on thoughts of how bad everything was for long, even when it seemed there was precious little else to discuss.

Alex announced that he did, in fact, have a pack of playing cards with him, and they set up a game of Pinochle. It was impossible to ever truly forget where they were, what with the unforgiving cold and the spontaneous pop of machine gun fire in the distance, but the game took Charlie's mind off of things for a little while. She turned her thoughts to the game and trying to outsmart Alex and Skip, and that served as enough to prevent her thoughts from wandering to ruminations of when the next barrage would be and how little supplies she had to work with and how cold she was and how hungry and how thirsty and how tired.