“It’s gonna be bloody,” their commander said. “We can’t get any air support with the weather. It’s gonna be man to man. Or Tiger tank to pop gun. Son of a bitch! It’s like fighting in a freezer.”
“We just gotta slow ’em down. Just make life hell for them until the weather clears and our boys in the sky can blow ’em away,” the commander from the 101st had encouraged, and everyone had nodded and hunkered down.
Thankfully, the people of Bastogne had run from the town as word of the approaching Panzer Divisions started to spread through the countryside. They abandoned their sleepy village, pushing hastily packed carts loaded with all they could gather, most likely wondering who would be in charge when they returned. Some of the residents had already rehung their Nazi flags above their doors, just to hedge their bets. The evacuation made it easier to establish an aid station of sorts, and the unit assembled a makeshift hospital in the basement of a three-story building on the Rue Neufchateau. A store sat on the main level with living quarters above, which the medics commandeered, while their frazzled unit billeted in an apartment house a few buildings down and across the street.
Constant shelling accompanied their days. Angelo and Mario made their way among the injured, along with the two volunteer nurses from the area and Jack Prior, the American doctor assigned to the division. They did the best they could with almost nothing—a few bandages, very little morphine, some sulfa pills, and plasma. The aid station in some old Belgian barracks a ways down the road, organized by the 101st Airborne Division, didn’t have it any better. Gangrene was the biggest problem, and Dr. Prior wasn’t a surgeon. The best hope was keeping the wounded alive long enough to evacuate them, which hadn’t happened yet, and wouldn’t happen unless the enemy could be pushed back.
By December 21, the town of Bastogne was completely surrounded by the Germans with the 101st and much of the 20th trapped inside. The soldiers started joking, “They’ve got us surrounded, poor bastards. No matter where we shoot, we’re bound to hit one.” “Poor bastards” became a rallying cry in the days to come.
On December 22, a German commander sent a letter to General McAuliffe threatening annihilation if Bastogne was not surrendered, to which a terse “Nuts!” was the only answer he received. The soldiers were laughing about it, and Angelo puzzled about the response for all of ten minutes, then shook his head and laughed too, supposing it was simply slang he didn’t understand. He’d discovered he liked Americans and was proud to be one, if only by birth.
Reports of a massacre of almost one hundred American soldiers near the village of Malmedy—soldiers who had only a few days before found themselves surrendering to a Panzer Division—probably made it easy to refuse the Germans when they urged surrender. Angelo figured “Nuts” meant “You’re crazy.” That . . . or “Go to hell.” Either worked. With divisions biting at the German flanks and the 101st refusing to surrender, the battle in Bastogne had gone on for almost a week.
Angelo did his best to be another pair of hands and to aid the dying physically and spiritually. He had started to think that he might make a decent doctor if he lived to see the end of the war, if he found Eva, and if they ever made it home. If he couldn’t be a priest, he had to do something.
It was after dark on December 24, a Christmas Eve like no other in his memory, when an old woman came into the field station, asking for help for a village woman who had gone into labor.
Mario was in the middle of stitching a wound and Dr. Prior was stemming a hemorrhage. Mario looked around wildly for someone to assist the adamant woman. She was pulling at his arm, urging him, and chattering about pain and length of contractions and the baby being stuck.
“Angelo!” he called across the space. “There is a woman in labor not far from here. She needs help.”
“Why didn’t they evacuate with the rest of the city?” Angelo finished helping a wounded soldier sip some water and then moved toward Mario and the old woman.
“The mother was afraid of going into labor. Looks like she was right,” Mario answered. The old woman had backed up, away from the blood, and her eyes were weary and desperate.
“I will go with her. You can’t leave,” Angelo agreed, trying not to think about what he might find.
“If she can, have her get on her hands and knees, Angelo. If the baby is face-first but hasn’t entered the birth canal, sometimes this position will help it turn on its own.” The instructions had Angelo drawing up short and reconsidering.
“Mario, I can’t do this,” Angelo said softly. “I’m not a doctor. I don’t know the first thing about delivering babies, especially if the mother or child is in trouble.”
“I know. But go, see what can be done, and if you can, bring her here. We can better help everyone if they’re all in one place. Take the cart.”
The old woman kissed her rosary beads even as she walked and tugged, reminding Angelo of his nonna back in Florence. He pulled the cart to a house only three buildings from the aid station, and the woman picked her way up the icy steps. He followed her, treading just as carefully as she opened the front door and removed the scarf from her head, calling out to whomever was in the house.
“I’ve brought a priest,” she hollered in French. “He was the only one they could spare.”
She turned to Angelo, who kicked the snow from his mismatched footwear—a consequence of having a prosthetic leg with a permanent black boot—and shut the door behind him.
“She’s been trying to walk, thinking that would help. I don’t know what else to do. She’s so exhausted, and it’s been going on so long.” The old woman looked ashamed, as if she, being a woman, should be of more help.
Slow steps, measured as if there was pain with each footfall, sounded on the landing above them, and Angelo raised his eyes to the top of the stairs. The woman’s hands were pressed to her back, as if holding herself together, and her hair was a dark cloud of curling disarray around her thin shoulders, but Angelo’s eyes went immediately to her stomach, which was enormous and made even bigger by the size of the girl who wielded it. She wore a droopy pink sweater around her shoulders and a loose black frock that had seen too many washings but was obviously chosen to fit over her burgeoning belly. Her feet were slim and bare, despite the cold, and her toenails, miraculously, were as pink as her sweater. Angelo wondered for two seconds how she had accomplished such a feat before his eyes rose to her face, and his world teetered and turned upside down. The woman was staring down at him like he had risen from the dead, a modern-day Lazarus come to visit.
“Eva?” he gasped.
One hand left her back and stretched toward the wall, as if she felt them closing in. She didn’t question his presence but only stared as if she expected him to disappear as soon as she blinked, and her legs buckled dangerously.
He would never recall how he traversed the stairs, or even if he did. He must have flown, because he found himself standing before her, the stairs at his back, Eva slumped against the wall, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Eva.” He said her name again, and then she was falling into his arms. For several breaths they stood with their arms locked around each other, and then Angelo was pulling away just enough to look at her again and make sure she was real. Her hands framed his face as her incredulous eyes traced his features. She kept saying his name, the word Angelo opening her lips and melding them more completely against his when he kissed her, first on the mouth and then everywhere else—cheeks, chin, nose, forehead—before seeking her lips once more.
“Eva!” A startled cry rose from the bottom of the stairs, making them pull apart briefly. The poor woman was clearly beside herself as she watched a stranger—a priest!—kissing her pregnant charge.