From Charlie’s enlistment in 1942 until the end of the war, Margaret had tracked his journey on a map she tacked up next to her bed. Starting in Fort Meade, Maryland, pins were placed on the North Carolina–South Carolina border where Charlie next was shipped for practice maneuvers, then to Fort Benning in Georgia. In October 1942, Charlie and the 175th Infantry Regiment crammed into the ocean liner RMS Queen Elizabeth and set sail for England, where they were ultimately given temporary quarters at a former British military base, Tidworth Barracks.
She wrote to him every day; he wrote back as often as he could, although that became increasingly difficult as K Company got closer to the front lines. In his letters, Charlie described Tidworth Barracks as ascetic—just a dozen brick buildings with no central heat, each named for a battle the British had fought in India. The barracks had coal-burning fireplaces at each end, but Charlie’s bunk stood in the middle, so very little heat reached him throughout that cold, wet English winter.
Charlie deployed his usual comic detachment when he wrote to her, but Margaret thought the barracks and the daily training routines sounded miserable. The UK was being bombed constantly, so every night blackout conditions were in effect. Any rare moments of R and R were spent struggling with directions to a restaurant or pub without benefit of street or route signs, which the British had removed in case of enemy invasion. Charlie and his fellow troops conducted practice amphibious assaults on local lakes, rivers, and moors until K Company and the larger infantry regiment were transported to Devon to wait to board the tank landing ships in which they would be shuttled to the beaches of Normandy.
“Of everything we’ve experienced here in England,” Charlie wrote while waiting to ship out for France, in a rare moment of candor,
it wasn’t the bone-chilling cold of the desperate English winter that made me most miserable, though there was one night where I gladly would have traded a limb for a bucket of coal. And it wasn’t the constant threat of air assault marked by sirens, panic, confusion, and impotence. It was the moors—the dark, dank, foul, freezing, fetid swamps filled with bacteria and leeches and swarming with mosquitoes, a hundred pounds of gear strapped on our backs, pushing us down into the muck, while the slough tricked us with false floors, causing us to stumble and drink in the grime—the experience was akin to dunking my body into a pool of death, that’s the only way I can think of to describe it. I cannot say anything more about what we are doing next, but I am sure it will be worse. I don’t know if our times in the marshlands prepared us tactically or just barely introduced us to a taste of the horror that awaits on the mainland.
Now, ten years later, standing on her tiptoes on a sandbar in the Atlantic Ocean, saltwater waves splashing into her nose and down her throat, Margaret had some understanding of what Charlie had described.
The previous night, Margaret had made a glorious discovery. Quadrani and Hinman, their counterparts on Susquehannock Island, had found the three ponies that had swum to their island and concluded they were a stallion, mare, and foal—a family. On walkie-talkies, they shared what they’d learned. Gwinnett assigned each of the members of his team night shifts in which they were to surreptitiously watch the sleeping strings to see if any made their way to the beach and then the ocean. They did that for three nights straight, with no results. But then Margaret found a string in a field and patiently waited behind a shrub thicket of marsh elder. Within an hour, just after midnight, she watched a mare lead her family down a narrow path toward the beach. Margaret, crouched over and scurrying quietly behind them, watched as they galloped into the shallows of the surf and onto an apparent sandbar, after which the stallion, mare, and two foals swam out across the bay, the stallion now taking the lead. She raced back to wake up her colleagues and share with them the confirmation of what was something of a revelation in their field—that the ponies, quite unusually, apparently traveled in families, not larger strings, and that the mare, at least in this case, was the driving force to get the family to the water.
Tonight, however, as they watched a new string make the journey, it seemed the foal might prove too weak. A strong wind raised a more pugilistic surf than normal, with trains of swell waves hitting shore. As the stallion and mare boldly galloped into the surf, the foal stumbled, her legs wobbly and spindly.
“She looks off,” said Kessler, kneeling in a patch of beach heather behind a dune, where the group had been sitting since dusk.
“Maybe she was premature? Or just a runt,” Cornelius speculated.
The foal made her way to the sandbar, which was within a few dozen feet of shore, the waves slapping into her flank as she followed her parents.
“Is she going to be able to handle the swimming part of this?” Gwinnett asked. “I think I saw her two days ago struggling to keep up just on land.”
Aiming Kessler’s powerful flashlight at the sandbar, Margaret watched the foal stumble and fall behind while her parents set out into the water. Margaret had long been interested in the bond between mares and foals and whether it had an impact on the larger string, but right now, her intense focus was less academic in nature; she realized that at some point the foal would need to begin swimming, and she didn’t know if the young pony was up to the task. The foal looked weak but determined, faltering and nearly collapsing before taking a few halting steps, falling farther behind her parents. Margaret held her breath, wondering whether the stallion or, more likely, the mare would opt for nurturing heroism or if more Darwinian impulses would decide the foal’s fate.
“Jesus,” Margaret said as a wave smacked the foal’s shoulder and half submerged her head in the water.
“Maybe best not to watch, Margaret,” Gwinnett said, placing his hand on her arm. She twitched instinctively and his hand fell back to his side.
The foal, now ten or so yards behind her galloping parents, continued on her path to Susquehannock Island, but her struggle seemed to increase with each step. She slowed as she waded into deeper water, and she began to disappear. The farther and deeper she went, the harder it was for the team to track her progress.
Margaret snatched the flashlight from Kessler and ran down the beach, trying to get a better view of the foal.
“Margaret, what are you doing?” Gwinnett shouted from behind her.
The slight extra weight in her midsection slowed Margaret a tad as she began sprinting down the beach, trying to catch up with the foal, running parallel to the angular path of the sandbar and into the surf, lifting her knees to avoid being slowed by the breakers.
“Margaret!” shouted Gwinnett. “Margaret?”
But Margaret barely heard him; she was focused on the young pony, who was trying to keep her head above the waves, fighting not to be dragged down. Margaret waded in and then threw the flashlight onto the sand and dived into the water. She had the foal in her line of sight, maybe twenty feet away, still vaguely illuminated by the moon. The water was shockingly cold.