Four o'clock in the afternoon, and the frost lay rimed on the long grasses of Skyline Drive, like wet straws stuck into a bowl of sugar, writes Kevin Myers.
The high pastures were an icefield as far as an eye could see - which wasn't far: perhaps a hundred metres.
Beyond that a grey fog mysteriously co-existed with a freezing wind. Ten minutes of that, and well-prepared though we were with boots and modern thermals, we fled with gratitude to our cars.
The US soldiers defending freedom in December 1944 had no such soft option. For we were in the Ardennes, the forested, mountainous meeting place where the cultures and loyalties of Gaul and German meet and mingle. It was here that the German launched their great offensive shortly before Christmas 59 years ago.
In the village of Baugnez, the Americans were taken completely unawares by the avalanche of German armour erupting through the woods. In the local café, its owner, Adèle Bodarwé, was chatting to a local farmer, Henri Lejoli. She was Belgian, but her son was serving in the German army. As the German armoured forces burst into the village, firing all round them, US soldiers ran into a woodshed beside the café.
As German troops fanned out through the village, Henri Lejoli stood at the door waving to them. Then he obliged them even further by pointing out the woodshed where the Americans, including a military policeman, Homer Ford, were hiding. The SS men took the GIs from the woodshed and herded them into a field beside the café. In time, over a hundred American prisoners of war were gathered there; and then the SS began to shoot them. The murders were half-systematic, half-recreational: some SS were laughing as they fired, but one moved through the heaps of crumpled bodies, methodically executing his wounded victims like a vet finishing off injured horses after some appalling steeplechase.
He missed Homer Ford, who, injured in the leg, lay doggo in the snow. The initial shootings went on for 15 minutes; but for another two hours, passing German soldiers fired into the bodies, as casually as boys skipping stones off the sea. At the end of the massacre, 86 Americans were dead, another 43 were injured; with nightfall, they crept away, as a fresh snow-fall began to conceal evidence of this terrible massacre.
There is a large memorial to these murdered men. Most of them, paradoxically, have German names, the sons of immigrants to Pennsylvania and Ohio; but there is no memorial that I could find to Adèle Bodarwé, who vanished that day, never to be seen again. She was an eye-witness and had to be disposed of, regardless of her son being a German soldier. Henri Lejoli was an eyewitness too, but he protested he was a loyal German; and had he not pointed out the Americans to the SS men? The SS released him, and this devoted servant of the Fatherland, the accomplice to murder with a French name, departs alive from the pages of history.
The massacre of Malmedy is not in any sense unique, either in the second World War or in the region. The murder of prisoners is one of those abominable features of war which we tend to learn about from the victors; yet we know, in considerably less detail, that German prisoners were often killed too. And as for poor Adèle Bodarwé, she was merely the latest in a huge number of civilian victims of German visitations through the Ardennes: 1914, 1940, 1944.
Survivors of the massacre managed to escape through nearby woods, soon reporting back to nearby units what had happened. Word was passed through US army command, and the result was electrifying: far from the terrorist murders at Malmedy damaging US morale, they stiffened it. But regardless of those events and the effect they had on the outcome of the battle, it was clear from the outset that the US army was not going to accept defeat. The Germans had already learnt that on the first day of their offensive from the extravagant courage of a 20-year-old platoon commander, Lyle Bouck.
He and his 17 men occupied an outpost outside the village of Lanzerath, facing directly onto one of the main axes of attack as thousands of Germans poured westward. The GIs held the advance for the best part of a day before their positions were outflanked and, one by one, picked off. But despite the huge execution they had done to the advancing hordes of German soldiers, the handful of surviving GIs were treated well.
Adle Bodarwé and the men of Malmedy were not the only victims of Hitler's Germany here. Thousands of them are buried in the German cemetery in the Ardennes, four to a gravestone. They are the German soldiers who were cut down by, among others, Lyle Bouck and his men; 17- and 18-year-old boys who were five or six when Hitler came to power.
They had known nothing but fascism and war until the two came together to end their young lives; and almost untrained, and quite unversed in the ways of infantry fighting, they perished before the guns of freedom with peace but months away.
They are not quite forgotten. Wreaths now sprout on some of their graves, as indeed they should. The blighted young of Germany deserve to be remembered not just by their families, but by us all. You cannot stand beside the graves of all these teenage Joachims and Heinrichs, and even a single Cyril, without sensing that Germany too has known its holocaust.