OUTSIDE AACHEN, Dawson's company continued to hold. After Aachen fell, there were fewer, less vigorous German attacks. On October 22 reporter W.C. Heinz of the New York Sun got to Dawson's headquarters to do an interview. Dawson summarized the action simply: "This is the worst I've seen. Nobody will ever know what this has been like up here."

Heinz arranged to stay a few days to find out. The dispatches he filed beginning October 24 give a vivid portrait of a rifle company commander in action in World War II. Of them it can be truly said that they held the most dangerous and difficult job in the world.

Dawson's HQ was in a cellar in the village. There was a kerosene lamp, a table and some chairs, a radio playing classical music, and a couple of lieutenants. Heinz got Dawson talking about what it had been like. "And the kid says to me," Dawson related, " 'I'll take that water to that platoon.' And he starts out. He is about fifty yards from this doorway and I'm watching him. He is running fast; then I can see this 88 hit right where he is, and, in front of my eyes, he is blown apart."

Dawson spoke of other strains. "I had a kid come up and say, 'I can't take it anymore.' What could I do? If I lose that man, I lose a squad. So I grab him by the shirt, and I say, 'You will, you will. There ain't any going back from this hill except dead.' And he goes back and he is dead."

Dawson sighed. "He doesn't know why, and I don't know why, and you don't know why. But I have got to answer those guys."

He looked Heinz in the eye. "Because I wear bars. I've got the responsibility and I don't know whether I'm big enough for the job." He continued to fix his eyes on Heinz. "But I can't break now. I've taken this for the thirty-nine days we've held this ridge and I'm in the middle of the Siegfried Line and you want to know what I think? I think it stinks."

Dawson began to shed tears. Then he jerked his head up. "Turn it up," he said to a lieutenant by the radio. "That's Puccini. I want to hear it."

Two GIs came into the room. They were apprehensive because Captain Dawson had sent for them. But it was good news. "I'm sending you to Paris," Dawson announced. "For six days. How do you like that?"

"Thanks," one replied reluctantly.

"Well. you had better like it," Dawson said, "and you had better stay out of trouble, but have a good time and bless your hearts." The men mumbled thanks, and left.

"Two of the best boys I've got," Dawson told Heinz. "Wire boys. They've had to run new lines every day because the old ones get chopped up. One day they laid heavy wire for two hundred yards and by the time they got to the end and worked back, the wire had been cut in three places by shellfire."

Dawson told Heinz that he had men who had been wounded in mid-September, when he first occupied the ridge, who returned four weeks later. They had gone AWOL from the field hospital and made their way back, "and the first thing I know they show up again here and they're grinning from ear to ear. I know it must sound absolutely crazy that would want to come back to this, but it is true."

The following morning one of the lieutenants told Dawson, "Captain, those wiremen, they say they don't want to go to Paris."

"All right," Dawson sighed. "Get two other guys-if you can."

THE BATTLE of Aachen benefited no one. The Americans never should have attacked. The Germans never should have defended. Neither side had a choice. This was war at its worst-wanton destruction for no purpose.

Lieutenant Colonel John C. Harrison (who later became a justice of the Montana Supreme Court) was a 31-year-old Montana State University graduate, acting as liaison officer with corps headquarters. On October 22 he went into Aachen to report on the damage. He wrote in his diary, "If every German city that we pass through looks like this one the Hun is going to be busy for centuries rebuilding his country."

Harrison saw not one undamaged building. The streets were impassable. It made him feel good. "I thought how odd it is that I would feel good at seeing human misery but I did feel that way, for here was the war being brought to the German in all of its destructive horror. The war has truly come to Germany and pictures of these terrible scenes should be dropped over the entire country to show them what is in store for them if they continue."

Metz and the Hurtgen Forest:

November 1-December 15, 1944

NORTHWEST Europe in November and December was a miserable place. A mixture of sleet, snow, rain, cold, fog, and flood. The already poor roads were churned into quagmires by military vehicles; veterans speak of the mud as knee-deep and insist that it is true.

In the centre of the American line, in the Ardennes, portions of First Army did go into something like winter camp. It was a lightly held, quiet area, where divisions just coming into the line could be placed to give them some frontline experience. The terrain made it the least likely area the Germans might counterattack. All was quiet there. But north and south of the Ardennes, First and Third armies were on the offensive, the weather be damned.

Replacements were steadily coming onto the line from England. The new divisions were made up of the high school classes of 1942,1943, and 1944. The training these young men had gone through stateside was rigorous physically but severely short on the tactical and leadership challenges the junior officers would have to meet.

Paul Fussell was a twenty-year-old lieutenant in command of a rifle platoon in the 103rd Division. He found the six months' training in the States to be repetitious and unrealistic. In the field, "our stock-in-trade was the elementary fire-and-flank manoeuvre hammered into us over and over at Benning. It was very simple. With half your platoon you establish a firing line to keep your enemy's heads down while you lead the other half around to the enemy's flank for a sudden surprise assault, preferably with bayonets and shouting. We all did grasp the idea," Fussell remembered, "but in combat it had one single defect, namely the difficulty, usually the impossibility, of knowing where your enemy's flank is. If you get up and go looking for it. you'll be killed." Nevertheless, Fussell saw the positive benefit to doing fire and movement over and over: "It did have the effect of persuading us that such an attack could be led successfully and that we were the people who could do it. That was good for our self-respect and our courage."

Fussell was a rich kid from southern California who had a couple of years of college and some professional journalism behind him. There were hundreds of young officers like Fussell, lieutenants who came into Europe in the fall of 1944 to take up the fighting. Bright kids. The quarterback on the championship high school football team. The president of his class. The chess champion. The lead in the class play. The wizard in the chemistry class. America was throwing her finest young men at the Germans.

AMONG THE fresh divisions was the 84th Infantry. It came into France on November 2, assigned to the new US Ninth Army, which had taken over a narrow part of the front. The 84th's K Company, 333rd Regiment, was outside Geilenkirchen, some twenty kilometres north of Aachen.

"K Company was an American mass-production item," one of its officers remarked, "fresh off the assembly line." It certainly was representative. There were men who could neither read nor write, along with privates from Yale and Harvard, class of 1946.