A Special Providence by Richard Yates Page A

past the artillery positions, was a thinly wooded field of snow in which they were told to dig two-man foxholes. The digging quickly exhausted Prentice – his quivering jabs with the entrenching tool became less and less effectual – but Owens helped him out, and before long they had a hole deep enough to be considered finished. For what seemed hundreds of yards in all directions the field was ravaged by black holes and mounds of thrown-up earth. Everywhere men crouched and dug, or sat in their holes and waited, or gathered in nervous little groups to talk about what they were heading for, which was said to be something called the Colmar Pocket. First Battalion was to lead the attack, and their first objective was to be the taking of a town called Horbourg, around which elements of the 3rd Division were said to have been embattled for several days. It all sounded unreal to Prentice.
    “How long,” he squeaked to Owens, “– how long do you think we’ll be staying here?”
    “Oh, probably till morning. I don’t think they’d have us digging in if they figured on moving us out any sooner.”
    But he was wrong: they moved out that same afternoon. A shelled-out village, some three miles to the rear of Horbourg, was the jumping-off point for the attack. “A” Company arrived there to find the place a jumble of men and machines: the broken streets, strung with many-colored communications wire, were crawling with vehicles of all kinds, and there were men from the 57th, the 3rd, and a French unit, all busy and hurrying in what seemed a state of total confusion. There were a few civilians too, mostly old men and women in black, with shy, bewildered faces. It puzzled Prentice at first that they seemed to be speaking German, and that the spattered road signs were in German too, until a dim store of schoolroom knowledge reminded him that Alsace was only technically a part of France.
    “You hear what I heard?” Owens asked him as the column sat resting against a shrapnel-scarred wall, waiting for Agate to finish his briefing with a number of other officers. “They say Horbourg’s changed hands three times in the past two days.”
    “Changed what?”
    “Changed hands. Between us and the Germans.”
    “Oh. No, I hadn’t heard that.” His voice was still either a squeak or a husk, and he was weak and lightheaded from the day of marching and digging and marching again. He hoped Agate’s briefing would take a long time, so that he could stay seated on this wet sidewalk with his back against this wall. He wasn’t sure if he’d be able to get up and move again.
    The orders, according to Agate, were that they would move out soon after nightfall. An artillery barrage would be laid down on Horbourg at seven o’clock, and then they’d go in. In the meantime, each platoon was assigned to a separate cellar or stablein the village for resting and waiting. The password for the night was “Mickey Mouse.”
    Prentice was called upon to deliver several routine messages to Sergeant Brewer while they waited, and he found his fever and fatigue dissolving into a kind of appalled exhilaration that felt nothing at all like fear. He hoped he was being noticed as he walked slowly but conspicuously alone down the streets of churned snow, where everyone else was moving in groups, and he took pride in delivering his small messages, even though the effort of speaking made him twist and rise on tiptoe before any sound came out. He hoped the men who overheard him wouldn’t think this chirping was his normal voice.
    Late in the afternoon the company cooks brought food up to the village for the first hot meal they’d had since Belgium – salmon patties, dehydrated potatoes, and canned fruit salad – and most of the men seemed in high spirits as they sat or squatted over their mess kits in the street.
    “What kind of catshit is this?”
    “Salmon-patty catshit, that’s what kind.”
    Prentice looked around for Quint but couldn’t see him,