Godfrey smiled. “Oh, no. God, no. She’s got you covered. Just, head for the north edge of the village, look for a little rue leading along the creek. It’s a cottage. Red shutters. Can’t miss it.”
Lett tipped an imaginary hat, and walked off for the village.
Her name was Véronica. Her two-room cabin smelled like perfumed candles, as if to cover GI-stink maybe, and Lett didn’t ask. She had high eyebrows, painted on. They drank a glass of red wine. She said she hated brandy and hoped the Americans drank it all. Her English was excellent. She looked to be about forty. She had to be a pariah in this village, Lett thought, unless she had brought some manner of fading fame with her. She wore a dark thin sweater with pink peter pan collar and a long skirt, looking like a schoolmistress.
She sat him in a wooden chair near the table. She unbuttoned his field jacket, and her rouge lips seemed to enlarge twice their size as she leaned toward him. Her large breasts brushed against him, he could smell a little underarm odor on her, and it only made him want to give in more. He didn’t move to touch her. He didn’t want to soil any of this with what he had become.
He closed his eyes. He imagined her pulling up her dress and working her way onto him, her flesh stroking his and melding with his as he sank his face into her breasts . . .
He smelled something, meaty rich like dark chicken and salty fat like bacon. It popped his eyes open. She had returned with a plate, fetched from the tiled corner oven, and gestured for him to pull up to the table. His mouth hung open. The plate held a heap of legs and breast, crispy potato slices, cooked cabbage.
“It’s duck. A confit,” she said.
Lett dove in. The chair creaked and banged at the floorboards as he ate. He finished without a peep, just his mouth hanging open again, and to his surprise Véronica kissed it.
She loaded him up another plate.
“France thanks you,” she said when he finished. “We shall not clean you up though, not yet. They shall only make you dirty again.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Lett had to shake his head. “You didn’t have to do this. I didn’t even want to talk. I just wanted to sit. In a chair. In a house with four walls. I would have been happy just watching you drink wine.”
She gave him a playful slap on the forehead. Keeping him in the chair, she gave him a neck message that made his mouth hang open one more time.
“You shall make one girl a most wonderful husband someday,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, but he had a hard time imagining it, seeing it. He didn’t tell her that part. There were those odds again.
He didn’t know what Véronica was, and he didn’t ask. He left her two packs of Raleighs because he wanted to. She shrugged at them, and kissed him on the cheek as he left.
As Lett made his way back in the dark, he wondered what this world would be like if women ran it. People would still die, but surely they would not be slaughtered by the shipload.
A few Joes smoking made it easier to find the platoon in the dark—Godfrey and Krebs were evidently letting the boys light up at will, considering. Someone was snoring. A couple others trembled in their sleep, and many uttered muted squeals from those nightmares that they all had. It was strange to see them like this at night, above ground and out in the open, and getting harder still for Lett to imagine living as he had before, in peace. The card game was peaking, complete with drunken whispers. But most men just lay stretched out in the open air, such a rare luxury that may never happen again. Lett felt for an open spot, plopped down and lay on his back, and sighed with ease for the first time he could remember. He found the stars in the sky, so many they crowded out the darkness in places. He didn’t know where Godfrey was in that moment, but he knew the lieutenant was keeping an eye on him from somewhere in the dark. He knew another thing, as he started to doze straight off: They would not be shelled here that night.
That one carefree eve was the last true rest they got, one of the first since Normandy. Another month had passed, someone said, but it might have been ten years or ten minutes. Lett had turned twenty-two years old and didn’t realize it until two days later. All sense of time was lost to a guy like Lett. They had crossed the Marne and Seine Rivers. They passed through Paris but couldn’t stop and enjoy it. They overstretched their lines out of the brass hats’ eagerness, which left them even longer without their supply of chow, gear, mail and more. They had more uneasy patrols, faced more scrappy flanking attacks. Lett had killed four Germans face-to-face total, if he bothered to count, and many more from a distance. The close ones were never like in the movies. Usually they would just run into each other. He saw their faces most nights, in his nightmares. They were floating in a dingy together, on rapid water, just the four of them. Sometimes Lett drowned them, holding their heads underwater if he had to, one by one, bubble after last bubble. Other times they drowned him. The people at home would never know what killing was. They’d never know that he had killed pigs. On a patrol they had checked out a farm after a battle. Bodies lay everywhere, American and German. Ten or so pigs must have gotten free, and had gorged out the stomachs and chest cavities of the corpses. The beasts circled and paced the scene and rolled in mud and blood. So Lett shot the swine, one by one, and left them where they lay. Someone else could go and cut the pork out of them.
They got a break from marching while the advance into Northeastern France kicked into high gear. They hitched rides on trucks and tanks and crammed into local cars they marked up with US Army stars. Allied aircraft ruled the skies, yet friendly strafing was common. They fought using far more replacements now, many of them college kids that had once been spared for the stateside Army Specialized Training Program, the ASTP, but the War Department had to abandon keeping the smart kids at home because front-line units were losing too damn many. They came from the repple depple at the rear—the replacement depot, a kind of orphanage for the damned, the way Lett saw it. In Lett’s company, the casualty rate was reaching well over 150 percent, which didn’t seem possible until one counted all the replacements who bought it and often within days. There were too many reasons for this. The replacements’ training wasn’t as good, seeing how they were rushed into duty. Many got hit freezing up and bunching when trouble started. Under fire, the veteran GIs knew never to cluster—that only gave the krauts a bigger target. Under fire, the old Joes always kept their heads up and eyes open and legs moving. They could tell incoming German shells and outgoing American, and didn’t hit the deck every time they heard artillery or saw a bomber up high. Of course they shuddered and tightened up though when hearing the clatter of a Tiger tank, the rapid rattle-belch of heavy German machine guns, like industrial sewing machines running out of control, or the shrill howls of Nebelwerfer rocket launchers. All of those made their assholes eat underwear. The homefolks and rear-liners figured the veteran got less scared as he slogged along, but it didn’t work out that way. Lett had dizziness, nausea, stomach cramps, sweating, headaches, rapid and irregular heartbeat, insomnia, and those nightmares. They all did. Their fear was a confining pit of a cell. Part of the problem was they felt so alone once any action started. GIs lost contact with one another. Americans were talkers normally, but under battle pressure they clammed up more than Germans or Brits. Then there was the relentless fatigue. Dogfaces weren’t bums or goldbrickers or sad sacks but they did look somewhat like hobos, meaning laborers on the move, and felt and behaved like them too. These were dejected, stooped, weary men. Hands trembled, heads jerked at unknown sounds, guys stared into space and truly didn’t know where they were. One man thought he was back in the bocage for a whole week. He saw imaginary dense hedgerows along every open road.
A doctor visiting from the rear had revealed, after Tom Godfrey plied him with whisky, that GIs with little or no relief from combat ceased being effective soldiers at about 200 days, on average. The War Department had been doing studies and was learning the truth from their guinea pigs on the line. Yet even those findings were laughable, the docto
r admitted. All it took was one nasty shelling. Lett himself saw that far fewer than thirty days took many guys down. For one ninety-day period, Lett’s unit was off the forward line for about ten days tops before he stopped counting. The Brits rested units after about two weeks, they were hearing, but GIs stayed up on the line for sixty days or more without real relief? They weren’t even guinea pigs. They might as well have been rats. It wasn’t about the weak or strong, cowardly or brave. Every man had his breaking point. How a GI broke was different for each Joe. Even a rest only helped so much. Some originals who had been injured had come back, with limited duty. Lett had assumed they’d be rested and ready. They only seemed more jittery and vacant, hollow, haunted.
They entered Belgium, one step closer to Germany. Sergeant Krebs was killed, mortar round, direct hit. That left less than ten in the platoon from before Normandy, maybe forty in the whole company. They made another old timer platoon leader, a Sergeant Charles, and Lett got his sergeant stripes. Sooner than later they’d make him platoon leader. This would only make him stand out for good, Lett knew. And once the Grim Reaper took notice, the bastard never let go.
***
Holger Frings’ father Peter had a withered right leg from World War One. When war had broken out, Frings’ grandfather Siegfried had expected his son Peter to join the Imperial Navy. The Frings were all men of the water. As a young man, though, Peter thought it a rebellious act to volunteer for the Army. In any case the big war would be over so fast, everyone had said.
Peter’s rebellion put him in trenches along the Belgian border with France for three years, the dirt walls packed with the body parts of men ripped apart and churned back into the earth by shelling. Eventually this got Peter gassed, which gave him a life of breathing troubles, then a leg mangled by shrapnel after his regiment was ordered to hold a defensive line increasingly indefensible under so much shelling and mustard gas and the new British tanks, but it had hardly looked that way to the deaf and blind generals back in their villas, as Peter called them. Peter’s leg hobbled him but didn’t keep him from returning to the Rhine to work alongside his father, Siegfried, for the Frings men were boat pilots and river guides and Peter would always be too.
Holger Frings had always thought his father a stupid man for becoming a Landser. How could he not have known that the water was the only freedom from all the curses of the land?
Now the sea war brought its own curse. The only thing Frings wanted after hearing of the air raids that took his father, mother and sister—his only sibling—was to keep going out and sink ships, destroy the enemy, kill their sailors, help exploit any advantage the S-boats could find. Flotilla command would make him take a leave. It was mandatory. Three days. But even that had to wait. The Normandy invasion routes had to be tested before it was too late. So the flotilla continued to poke at the Allies’ defensive perimeter, laying mines and harassing the patrolling corvettes and MTBs.
After one nighttime sortie, Hanssen’s boat had sighted an unexpected target: A Royal Navy rescue tug had gone astray, drifting, an hour before daybreak—one stack, two token flak guns. The little goose hadn’t moved. It might have had engine trouble. They still had two torpedoes and they were on their own, free from Schirakow and Baum and the rest of the flotilla. Captain Hanssen did just what Frings hoped. They set upon the hapless tug. They charged it going twice full ahead, guns firing, both torpedoes away. The tug exploded like a toy volcano. It went under within minutes. And they sped back for base, Frings steering them safe along the French shoreline. In that moment before impact, he had sensed no fluttering hearts in his fingers on the wheel, no, not any more. He had shouldered the true reality of things. This war was a new kind of war. Hanssen was right—they needed to be more reckless. It was the only way to get this goddamn job done. It was the only way back to his Christiane, to his daughters, and any life he still had left.
He finally took his leave on August 5. He had wanted to come to Cologne, but Christiane talked him out of it. Seeing the city in total ruin would only sap his spirit, she wrote. Besides, his family’s bodies couldn’t be found, and the funeral had been put off. So they would meet in Brussels, halfway. Christiane refused to bring the girls. She said Belgium was too close to the savage invading Allied armies with their gum-chewing black Americans and the corrupt, Imperialist English. The girls had to stay safe with her sister Hedwig in the country, and Frings couldn’t argue with that.
He had wanted a quaint hotel away from any sign of war or occupation, believing Christiane would prefer it. He also didn’t want to stomach seeing all those rear-line staff types with their Druckposten, those “stress posts” that pained them so by keeping them from the front lines where they really wanted to be, or so they proclaimed. Yet Christiane had insisted on a main hotel, the Metropole, that was requisitioned for German officers and NCOs. It stood in the Old Town near the Grand Place square, surrounded by majestic buildings.
Frings wore his Navy undress blues; he had tried his civilian clothes but felt like an impostor so he changed back, telling Christiane he didn’t like the way his civvies fit after losing so much weight. They met in the lobby, hugged, kissed, and went up to the room. They sat at either side of the polished Biedermeier table by the window like two traveling businessmen come to meet about acquiring a new machine lathe. Back home, he learned, Christiane now helped out with the Winter Relief and worked with a caterers who did party events for the golden pheasants of the Rhineland Nazi party. She made cakes, served champagne. He didn’t care for that but what could he do? War required work. The catering job had turned into a permanent position, which meant she had to join the Nazi party. War work demanding blind loyalty. This was another reason he had gone for the Navy: Members of the German Kriegsmarine could not be forced to become a member of any political party, including the Nazi party. This had been a long naval tradition, and they had somehow held on to it despite Hitler’s grip on all institutions. So they had few brownshirts or screwhead types mucking up the Navy ranks, at least not on board.
She had felt at her lapel a few times. Frings’ seaman’s eyes could make out a tiny hole there where she normally wore a Nazi party pin. It was all he could do not to nag her about it. They would discuss her party membership when he returned.
Her brown fur coat looked new as did the structured dark blue dress and jacket she wore with a yellow blouse, somewhat like a naval staff officers’ uniform. She had even gained some weight, apparently one of the few Germans to do so. It suited her, complementing her natural curves. He concluded that it had to be all that catering.
“War becomes you,” he said, hoping she still appreciated his sense of humor.
She laughed. “You’re not doing poorly either.” She reached across the table and touched his S-boat badge.
“Just a little tinsel. Earned it though, I can say that. I don’t have chest disease like all your rear-line stallions.”
Her smile faded. “’Chest disease’? What is that? Some sort of sailor slang?”
“You could call it that. Just means, the ones who started this mess, who are running it now, they’re obsessed with hoarding all the medals they can. So they’re sick for it, see?”
“Well, of course you are not,” Christiane said, stabbing out her cigarette.
She used a cigarette holder now, and more makeup, and her hair was shorter. She kept finding herself in the vanity mirror, but not in a narcissistic way. It was more surreal, as if she was checking to see if she was still here. As if watching her outside herself. Frings knew what she felt. Grief had a lot to do with it, he told himself.
His pipe hung from his mouth, unlit. He was on this third Jenever, an homage to captain Hanssen out there in the shit somewhere. Hanssen liked the Dutch gin. She drank mineral water, with bubbles.
“I do like your beard,” she said, but in the same blank way she had commented on the gilded steep facades of Brussels’ Old Town. Quaint, but still foreign.
He toasted her. He downed his gin. He told h
er how his father Peter had returned from the last war changed forever. Sometimes the man would just stare off, or break down crying. He had seen bombing. Shelling. Dead friends. The horrors still visited the old man. No one could imagine, he had told his son. Frings had never stopped trying to make Christiane understand why he had gone into the Navy. If he had to fight for his country, it could not be on land. That was where men went to die, or were changed forever at the least. He was not going to be changed. They had everything—a proper apartment, two beautiful daughters. When back in Cologne, he was going to get a good boat job on the river. He hoped Christiane still believed it, because she was scared. He could tell. Her eyes pinched where they used to glow.
“About Cologne,” she said, lighting another cigarette. “I should tell you what I know. It’s why we’re here stewing like this, isn’t it?” She told him how the bombing attacks killed his family. His father Peter had been on the Rhine, aboard a tug boat working as an inspector. British fighter-bombers strafed the river before sundown. At that point, Frings’ mother Ursula had only known that her man had gone missing aboard a tug in a river attack. She had gone to bed that way, if she slept at all, and it wasn’t clear if she’d even tried to go to the air raid shelter. It was supposed to be safer where they had moved, still on the left bank but south of their long-damaged family apartment in the old St. Martin’s Quarter. It was never safe enough for Frings. Two years ago, he had made Christiane and the girls move farther out, across the river to Dietz. The heavy bombers came in later that night. Frings’ sister Ingrid had been with her mother, comforting her instead of returning home to her own street. Christiane said: “I found out later—in the chaos, the tug your father was on had been left to burn, until the river took it. The bodies aboard have not been found.”
“Wait a moment. A tug? He was on a tug?” Frings’ brain seemed to boil, stinging his eyeballs. He squeezed his eyes shut and pressed his fists to the table. He saw that enemy tug blazing, erupting, descending.
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