     The captain had awakened them at five: the third platoon was to relieve the first platoon. They'd had less than a day behind the lines, trying to catch up on their sleep, clean their weapons, and otherwise clean up. But the situation along this section of the front was very bad, and the third platoon could expect no comfort.
     So here they stood just before dawn, all 26 of them. They were badly understrength after the desperate assaults in the early days of the offensive. Just eleven days ago they had been full of fire, ready to sweep the Americans back to the sea. Now half the platoon was gone.
     Sergeant Kramitz checked everybody's gear and dressed down one of the youngsters for failing to properly secure a buckle. A loose buckle clinked as you marched, a dead giveaway to the enemy. Then they set out in the gathering light, climbing a narrow mountain trail to the trenches that first platoon had dug. Kramitz stumbled over a dark form, then swore in disgust. It was a body, so freshly killed that it had not yet frozen. He looked like he'd been killed by a random shell. The men gathered around. Somebody recognized him; he was from fourth platoon.
     A faint sound, and the platoon crouched down. It was another group coming down the same trail. The newcomers shambled down like zombies, dead with fatigue. They didn't look at anybody -- they just stumbled forward. When they came to the body, they were too tired to step over or around it, so they just trod over it. One boot came down squarely on the corpse's face. "Watch it!" Kramitz hissed. But they didn't even look at him. They just walked past.
/Fatigue
     A frontline soldier does not work 8 to 5; he is on duty 24 hours a day. During a major military operation, he is expected to function for several days with no scheduled sleep at all, grabbing snatches of nap as opportunity arises. During the Battle of the Bulge, the extreme cold, the physical hardships imposed by hauling equipment across steep and icy terrain, and the long nights combined to impose even greater fatigue on both sides. Nevertheless, night attacks were common and soldiers on both sides had to maintain alertness 24 hours a day.
     The nighttime vigils took the greatest toll. A defending frontline unit cannot afford the luxury of permitting its soldiers to sleep at night. Typically, one-third of the soldiers would stand two-hour guard duty while the other two-thirds slept. Theoretically this gave each soldier four hours's sleep in a six-hour nightwatch. In practice it was never this good. The extreme cold and random shelling made it difficult to get any sleep, and sleep that is interrupted is not as refreshing.
     The cumulative effect of sleep deprivation under conditions of such stress destroys the soldier's mental faculties. The Americans called it combat fatigue or shell shock; it was often misunderstood as a kind of glorified cowardice or short-term insanity that struck the weak-willed. In fact, combat fatigue was more a mental numbness, a generalized mental lethargy that eventually struck everybody. In the American army, a soldier peaked after three months and was useless after six months. After that time, they'd rotate you to the rear, if you'd lived that long. Few did./