Why We Fight

S01E09

The charred huts continue to emit noxious fumes. Lumber, having fallen in careless piles, sticks up from the rubble at odd angles that give the appearance of skewed crosses marking the mass graves. Malarkey comes upon a pile of dead bodies. "Hey Babe," he calls to Heffron. "Look at their arms." Imprinted on a wasted, wan wrist is a black-ink number. "Like cattle," laments Heffron. "Goddamn," Malarkey says, shaking his head and covering his mouth anew.

Coughing, Bull and Luz open a door to one of the huts. Inside, men huddle in bunks, crammed tightly into tiny spaces and trembling from trauma and terror. Bruised and battered, they gag and cringe at the specks of light streaming in from the insufficient doorway. Outside, Winters and others slide open the door of what looks like a train compartment, revealing by far the biggest stack of dead bodies we've yet seen. Perconte can't even look at it, and neither can I. Feet and hands and shins and ribcages stand out, along with lifeless, lolling heads, but bodies become indistinguishable in this repellant flesh pile.

Elsewhere, Janovec sadly removes his helmet to pay respect to another pile of corpses on the ground. The misshapen torsos and jutting jaws, hollowed cheeks, further illustrate the appalling conditions in which these people were expected to...well, not to live, but to wither, and languidly expire. A grateful walking cadaver claws his way out of a hut, spots Perconte, and smiles feebly, saluting. Touched, Perconte stiffens and salutes back.

Winters approaches Nixon, stopping to him; the men face away from each other, as if to lock eyes is to break face and break down. Winters plans to call Sink; in the meantime, he wants Nix and Speirs to somehow get food and water to the tortured masses. Nearby, a scraped and wasted man kneels, caressing the head of a dead friend, which rests in his lap. The corpse's skin is loose, hanging in folds from his emaciated body.

In town, Donnie and Martin try to double-time the process of loading food onto army vans. A red-faced, puffy German baker protests the pilfering of his food, but Webster has no patience for this and shouts for him to shut up. The baker screams anyway, until Webster whips out a pistol and shoves the man backward against his own counter, gun pressed to his neck. "Shut up, you Nazi fuck!" he yells. The baker, frightened, swears he isn't a Nazi. "You're not a Nazi? My mistake, you fat fucking prick," Webster fumes. "How about a human being? You one of those? Are you gonna tell me you never smelled the fucking stench?" A fellow soldier tries to calm Webster. "He says he doesn't know what the hell you're talking about," the guy insists. A few people have questioned why Webster didn't know that, given his working knowledge of German; I posit that his anger made him deaf to the other man's words. He just didn't listen, because he was too caught up in spitting nails at the baker's doughy head. Webster menaces, "Bullshit," but does withdraw and leaves the quivering baker alone with his yeast and flour. This reaction seems much more organic than his earlier tirade at the German prisoners; in fact, I feel like that scene might have actually made sense had it followed this stuff instead of preceding the concentration-camp discovery.