Among the Trunks, Hurtgen

The Hürtgen Forest lies just inside Germany, south of Aachen: fifty square miles of dense fir, steep ravines and mud, fortified with bunkers, mines and pre-registered artillery. The U.S. First Army went into it in September 1944 and did not come out until February 1945 — the longest single battle the U.S. Army has ever fought.

Shells that struck the treetops burst overhead and rained steel and splinters on men below. There was no digging in under a tree burst; the only cover was to stand against a trunk. Whole divisions were fed in and used up.

The forest cost the Army about 33,000 casualties. The three men here are simply too tired to move.

The forest is the picture: a wall of black trunks, many of them snapped off at the top by shellfire, rising past the edge of the picture into a sky the color of wet paper. The light is flat and colorless. At the bottom three soldiers sit in the mud beside a pool of standing water, rifles across their knees, none of them looking at each other. They take up a tenth of the picture. The rest is the trees closing over them.