Wednesday November 11^th, 2020
A weekday e-mailer from
Matt Matthews
 
Veteran’s Day
 
To Members and Friends of 
First Presbyterian Church
Champaign, Illinois
 
Dear Friends,
 
My father was not an infantryman at home, for he was never on the front lines of anything domestic. My mom was the go-to person for at-home decisions. Dad did as he was told, and was a good, present father. He lived by this creed: If Momma’s not happy, nobody’s happy. Mom and Dad were a team. No, Dad wasn’t an infantryman at home, for he was never on the front lines of anything domestic.
 
But he was on the front lines in the Battle of the Bulge and faced what military historian Charles MacDonald called “numbing horror.” And from that experience in battle in the December 1944 and as a POW immediately thereafter, he began developing a lifelong capacity to accept and mourn what cannot be changed. 
 
This morning I give thanks to God for our veterans, and I remember my dad. This is an excerpt from my book in honor of all veterans. Thank you, all of you, and your families.
 
* * *
 
When my old man grinned, 
nobody could help but grin too. 
—Ernest Hemingway, My Old Man
 
 
I want to carry you
And for you to carry me
The way voices are said to carry over water.
—Billy Collins, Carry
 
 
I am trying to picture my dad’s face as we fan out along the top of this wooded ridge in the Ardennes. This is very near—as close as our guide will get us—to where Dad fought in the Battle of the Bulge. As a kid, I pumped my old man for war stories, but through the decades, I got only a delicate few. His happy face would go slack. He’d look away. My late father told me little about his part in the war he seldom mentioned.
           
I strain to imagine the wartime snow that slammed into these woods as ferociously as the Germans did in 1944, but the June breeze is too delicious for me to envision such a cruel December. Stiff from the long drive, I stretch. It feels good to walk beneath this cathedral of pine. The day is postcard perfect—sunny, warm, cheery blue skies. Our guide Martin, my three sons, and my wife stroll on cat’s feet. It’s just us in these woods. 
               
Dad’s image flickers in and out. His absence is like a presence to me. Even as an old man he wore a boyish, friendly expression; yet, were he here, still living, he would look ancient. Were he here, I might reach out to touch his shoulder and then pull back. I wouldn’t want to disturb him. I had pestered him enough about the war over the years. He would be quiet, as I am quiet now. He would avoid my eyes. 
            
On December 16, 1944, snow showers and low clouds made it impossible for Dad’s 422^nd Regiment to see the Germans. But they were there, and coming. There was no way to soften the roar of Panzer tanks and trucks crammed with volksgrenadiers as they groaned west below this ridge. The macadam roads were a disaster—narrow, bogged in mud, and often obscured by snow—but the Germans charged as quickly as conditions allowed towards St. Vith, the Belgian town nearby, and other points west. Dad had no place to hide, save for the foxholes that tourists would still be able to find sixty-seven years later. They were ghosts, this unseen enemy and their machines. They shouted in a language Dad may have recognized from the Saturday operas he listened to on the living room radio back home in Virginia. These soldiers, however, were not singing.
            
Distant birdsong provides the soundtrack on this early summer day. There is no crowd, no traffic, no interruptions. A few shafts of sun penetrate the high canopy of pine branches drawing golden splotches on the ground that dance with the breeze. My wife Rachel steps from the dappled, cool shade and kneels in a glowing oval of sun to admire the blue bellflowers poking through the ground cover. Our three sons walk together to the edge of the ridge. Needles pad their steps. The younger two look to their oldest brother for cues. Joseph stands silently, so they also are silent. I can hardly speak.
            
With trembling fingers Dad checked the strap of his helmet, cinched it tight, hunched his shoulders, held his head low, kept his rifle at the ready. He could smell the snow and the dirt and the vomit from nervous men around him. He stomped his freezing feet; their company was last on the list to get delivery of army-issue overshoes. His regiment of 3,000 had dug in only five days before, and their supplies were still catching up. It was the coldest winter in forty years. If the Germans didn’t kill them—and they aimed to—living in the outdoors in the stinging cold would. 
            
Joseph, 18-years-old, is Dad’s age when Dad had gone through basic training in Oklahoma and Indiana. It crushes me to think of my first son ill-clad and suffering 4,500 miles from home in winter cold, yet, I can’t stop my imagination. He is damp, blowing into his cupped hands, nearly unrecognizable in uniform, crouched like Dad waiting to kill or be killed. I blink hard, twice, and look at him gazing off at the farms below us. Benjamin and John Mark look pale and older in this filtered light, kindly ghosts of another sort. From what travails will I be unable to protect them, as my grandparents were unable to protect their two sons? 
            
I am reduced to clichés. Dad is so close yet so far away. The sudden weight of missing him disorients me. I remember snatches of half-conversation wheedled out of him about what happened on this ground. The air smells of pine and flowers. Treetops sway beneath a dome of clear blue sky. It is quiet like a church. 
            
Hoarse with emotion, these Americans only recently off the boats and unbloodied so far by the European War effort barked at one another. Is this it? Where are they? Are the krauts coming or not? Snow and clouds had blanketed this lovely tree-lined ridge turning everything a Christmas card white. There was a lot they couldn’t see. So much they couldn’t know. There was no chance of air support in this soup. No relief was in sight. And they had no idea how alone they were and how cut off from the rest of their division they had become. They didn’t know yet that most of them were doomed. 
            
Unless you’re lost, this out-of-the-way place isn’t on the way to somewhere else. Right on the border of Belgium and Germany, there are no stores, homes, or farms in this forest. Besides area teenagers who park up here to make out, the only people who visit are people with something to find, aged American vets, among them, trying to remember where they had dug in when German steel split the dawn and trees splintered and snow covered everything.
            
The grunts—basic riflemen like Dad—waited for orders. Lieutenants, who had trained in the strategy of battle but had never tasted it, checked their maps. They strained into binoculars pointed eastward into Germany. They checked their maps again. And again. They were waiting for orders from Colonel Descheneaux in Schlausenbach, or from higher-ups 11 miles behind them in St. Vith. Radio communications were spotty. Everyone waited for orders—except for the Germans, who had theirs. They smashed through the thinly defended lines on the Belgian-German front, lurching heavily through the farms, crossroads, and towns that American troops scrambled to defend, then abandon. This blitzkrieg could not be denied, especially in the first hours when everyone was caught off-guard, and even if ready, were so ill-provisioned and undermanned to repel for long. 
            
Martin sidles up to me. He studiously follows my gaze. Yellow-green fields spread out below. One field is carved by a mile-long serpentine line of blonde hay coiled in tractor-sized rolls. On another field, a few spindly trees cluster around distant, weathered barns. 
            “We’re close,” he whispers.
             “Am I looking towards Germany?” I ask. 
            He touches my shoulder and turns me around. He points. “Now you are,” he says quietly. “Right down there.” 
            
It is close. And it is from this direction that my father and the rest of the 422^nd and 423^rd regiments of the 106^thDivision had expected the German attack. They did not know that by nightfall on the first day of battle the Germans had almost already surrounded them and were directing their formidable resources beyond them, behind them, to the west. This bulging Allied line is where the battle got its unfortunate name.
            
“This,” Martin said, “is really close, Matthew. Your dear father stood very near this place.” 
            
I nodded. 
            
Everyone on the ridge kept their heads low, tested their trigger fingers, swallowed hard, prayed or pleaded. They weren’t allowed to smoke lest a sniper draw a bead on the lit end of a soldier’s cigarette, but they could blow frost rings into the frigid air. Their squatting bodies began to freeze in place. As soldiers are wont to do before battle, some made their peace with God. Some were resigned. Some thought they were ready. All of them were freezing. All were hungry, all afraid.
            
This was it. 
            
And they waited. 
            
Private first-class William P. Matthews, from Hampton, Virginia, was O-positive, Caucasian, five-nine, and 144 pounds without his pack. He parted his dirty blonde hair on the left and had a ready smile and blue eyes. He could tell a joke. He wasn’t shy. Everybody called him Billy. He was twenty-years-old. In less than forty-hours he would be a prisoner of war.

* * *
 
I have tried to parse the coordinates from all the confusing battle maps I have studied over the years. Altitude, contours, the wide sky and the cribbed forest. Things are different on the ground. There are no pencil marks and arrows drawn on this earth. In which direction is Schlausenbach? Martin has driven us over so many curvy roads, through so many villages, that I feel a little seasick. We have come from the south, from Bastogne. Patton had got to this spot by many of the roads we have just followed. I wonder where Ihren Creek is, and the Schönberg Road. I can’t hear the battle in this quiet stillness. I had thought I might. I had thought some noise of battle would linger. There is no low groan of tank engines, no pop-pop-pop of small arms fire, no cannon. Nothing. I had halfway expected some tired GI to wander up to us from the brush. “Fellas, you got a Coke? I’m dying for a swig of something sweet.” 
            
But none of the battle weary make an appearance. I can’t even hear their cries, and I listen closely, cocking my head at every point of the compass. I can’t smell the diesel belching from German tracked armor and the 25-ton tanks churning the narrow roads below to porridge. I can’t even feel the penetrating cold, which surprises me most. I want to ask Martin if he is sure this is the place. Is Martin sure this is the place Dad stood—these warm, stately woods, this shadowed ridge, this graveyard silence? 
            
Modern, white wind turbines stand like steeples; their elegant tri-blades circle languidly in the breeze while their solid white trunks, tapering a little wider at the bottom than the top, remind me of a narrow teepee, or the white alb of a tall priest pronouncing a solemn benediction. Besides the silted foxholes, no evidence exists that anything but beauty ever graced this gently rolling land. Two hawks ride the thermals ascending from the sun-warmed fields. The Scots pine in which we stand have no low branches and their naked trunks shoot straight up, piercing that innocent, blue sky like arrows. My family has spread out beneath the trees, each of us looking his or her own way, turning over private thoughts. 
            
I find myself constantly looking for Dad. When I close my eyes, I don’t see a man in uniform less than half my age haggard by cold and fear. I don’t see a soldier at all. Instead I see a grandfather with a full mane of white hair as he sits on a wooden front porch swing, teaching two-year-old Joseph how to clap. He wore no uniform, only a contented expression and kind eyes, and a striped polo shirt.
            
And when I open my eyes, I see my jet-lagged family at the end of the first day of a three week trip from America. Rachel still gazes out over the fields. The boys chat. What are they thinking? When our boys look around do they see what they remember of their Pops? John Mark, who used to nap in his lap, was only two when he died a decade before. Do my boys even remember what my dad looked like?
            
Dad was ill equipped to say much about the emotional landscape of the war, but he did say more than once how beautiful this part of Belgium was. Quaint towns. Hills. Trees. Real nice, he said. Real nice. We are here. And he was right.
            
I watch the hawks twist slow circles in that wide, summer sky. The ridge between St. Vith and Schönberg is where the 168^th Engineering Combat Battalion defended the St. Vith Road, the road that Dad had desperately scrambled to find. In a clearing below us, near that road, he and most of his regiment either surrendered or died. If I knew precisely where to look—if Martin could pin point the exact spot—I am certain that I will be able to see my dad before the enemy carts him off. 
            
I’d wave. And this young stranger named Billy Matthews would wave back. 
 
c 2017 One Thousand Miles: 
Following My Father’s WWII Footsteps,
Avenida Books, Matt Matthews.
  
* * *
 
REQUIEM aeternam dona ei, 
Domine, et lux perpetua luceat ei. 
Requiescat in pace. 
Amen.
 
* * *

Join us tonight at 7 pm for our Mid-Week Gathering…
Email zoom@firstpres.church for the link.