“It’s my fault,” he muttered.
“What? No, it is most certainly not.”
“What do you know about it? Eh? What?” He pounded at the table.
Christiane shuddered, as if doused with icy water. She glared at him. A tear rolled down her face. She went to wipe it, but touched the wrong side. It was that mirror again. She wiped it on the third try. Of course she would be sad, Frings thought. Then again, it wasn’t her parents who had died. Hers lived safe on an estate in Brandenburg, well east of Berlin—not as owners but the caretakers, though it was hard to tell the difference. Like her sister Hedwig she had come to Cologne to be a nurse, which she promptly gave up once they were married. He wondered why she never returned to the hospital once the war started. Certainly dressing wounds did more good than baking cakes for warmongers.
“And where were you? Just where were you?” Frings said.
“Where do you think? We were safe over in wretched Dietz just like you wanted.”
Floundering around in this room was like being in a fucking hospital. All Frings wanted to do here was get drunk. He just wanted to get back out and sink ships.
“I would have liked to see my two little girls,” he said.
“But, I fear for them so,” she said. “The enemy is coming. They will come to our door. Then we will stop them, Germany will,” she added, as reciting the words of a song.
“Sure, certainly,” Frings said, lying. Calming down. The last thing he needed to do was smash the table. He lit his pipe.
There was just one thing he didn’t understand. “It’s strange that your sister Hedwig has taken in the girls,” he said. “She never liked other children besides her own.”
“Well, she does now,” Christiane said. “It’s amazing how war changes people, Holger.”
“I suppose.”
They sat in silence, drinking, smoking.
“You must know: I’m moving the kids farther away,” Christiane said. “Far from the city. The right bank is not safe. Dietz isn’t good enough.”
It hit Frings low in the gut, making him gasp. “What? Why? No. Our street hasn’t been hit. We have a solid shelter.”
“Your mother had a solid shelter.”
“No, I won’t allow it.”
“It’s decided,” Christiane said, her voice so firm he had to look up at her. He even looked in the mirror at her. Her jaw had set hard.
He grunted. “So, it’s off east to the Brandenburg estate. Is that it?”
“No. They will be close to Cologne. But out of town.”
“Your sister’s, then.”
“Yes,” she blurted as if he’d won a guessing game. She had practically spitted it out.
What could he do? He loved his daughters dearly, but Christiane and they were the ones who had to put up with the fear of bombings all the time. He understood that. He poured another. He bit down on his pipe, wanting to snap it. He muttered, “If these goddamn bronze bigwigs would only give us the right tools to fight. So we can get this over with.”
“They are trying, our leaders. Quit calling them names, all these bad words. They love Germany.” She rolled her eyes at him. She never rolled her eyes. Where had she learned that?
He said: “Tell me something: What did you mean, ‘we’?”
“What? I never know what you’re saying.”
“In the telegram you sent. You wrote, ‘here we feel much sorrow.’”
Christiane checked the mirror. “It’s just an expression, isn’t it?”
And they sat in silence again, slumped, hands limp on their laps.
“I’m going back,” Frings blurted.
“I know that. You have to.”
“No. You don’t understand. I’m going back early. Tonight.”
“Why? What are you talking about?”
“I have to. My boat’s a bucket full of holes without me.”
“I see.” Christiane took a deep breath. She nodded. She stood and straightened her jacket like someone about to give a speech. “Well, if you must. It is your duty.”
She told him: If he was going back early, so was she. There was a train to Cologne that night. He watched her pack, the Dutch gin getting on top of him, making him sink down in a plush corner armchair. He didn’t even know if he had a way back, a train or a truck or what.
She was the first to leave. She stood in the doorway, suitcase in one hand, a bag slung neatly on the other shoulder like an officer’s map case. Tears rolled down her face.
“I can’t take it,” she said. “I need to be secure. You understand? I need them safe.”
“I know,” he said. “Write soon. All right?”
“I will.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and the lips, but they were dry. He needed moisture. He sunk his tongue in, and she let him. He held her by the back of her head, cradling it, and then held her face in his rough fingers. She smiled. Her tears had already dried.
“Tell me something,” she said.
“Anything.”
“Have you killed anyone?”
He took a step back, scanning the carpet for the right answer.
“Well? Have you or haven’t you?”
He nodded. “Of course, yes, I have.”
“Good. Then keep doing it. And do much of it. Before they do it to you.” Her eyes lit up, as if she heard a voice speaking the words to her, nothing at all like the way her eyes used to glow. She held onto the doorway and smiled, bearing teeth, and it looked more like a grimace. “You must hold on. You must have faith. Soon we will have our Wonder Weapons, Holger. Our Wonder Weapons will turn the dark tide. Everything will change. You will see. Those degenerate murderers! They will all see the truth of our power!”
Frings hitched rides back to his latest base in Ostende, Belgium, ending up in a troop truck full of boy soldiers, replacements rapt at the sight of a fighting sailor. They peppered him with questions about the heroic war at sea.
What could he say? Tell them what they wanted to hear? Confirm the pap in the newsreels? The truth would break their hearts, or at least turn this truck into a prison. So Frings told them:
“I’ll be dead soon, and so will you. You are all going to die, boys. And it’s going to be worse for you when it comes for you, because you are fighting on land.” He gestured with his pipe as if telling a campfire story. Their faces had directed downward, facing the muddied planks of the truck bed. One boy was already sobbing. “Meantime? You will not even recognize the home that means so much to you, and it will not recognize you. Yet you’ll keep fighting to get back to it. Then that’s gone too. My father, my mother, my sister are all dead. My wife believes in Wonder Weapons that will save us. But nothing will save us. Nothing will save you.”
***
Wendell Lett, trembling, eyed Tom Godfrey as he passed around his officer’s liquor ration, pouring right into their open canteen cups. Godfrey was giving them more than usual. He wouldn’t look Lett in the eye. He had gathered all old hands around to the platoon CP that evening, no matter rank or duty. The moldy old barn they’d set up in smelled like bullshit, but it wasn’t from the stalls. Godfrey had just been called to battalion and had to hear the so-called logic behind the magical feat they were to pull off next. They were going to take the Belgian town up the road in the morning: Mettcourt. Artillery would soften it up. They could call in tanks and fighter-bombers if they had to, battalion said, which usually meant they could not in time. This one would be tough. The retreating Germans were turning desperate, crazed, nasty. When they decided to hold a town, they meant it. Their own recon wasn’t helping. They had a captured German combat medic who’d gotten lost behind their lines, and Godfrey had Lett interrogate. Waffen-SS were holed up everywhere in Mettcourt, the medic told Lett, wanting to save lives, any lives. But battalion wasn’t listening, because division was not listening. It was almost making Godfrey retch. He kept swallowing hard, like he had cotton stuck in his throat.
“They’re like factory owners,” he told
Lett. “They have no right idea what happens on their assembly line. Up on the front line. Never seen the terrain, let alone the enemy position. It’s all radio and telephones and remote control, that’s the real horror of it. Just links, more detached the longer and higher the links go. And up there they never get replaced because they never get killed like the rest of us. They find a good billet and cozy up. The new brass rotating in? It’s all go-getters and high flyers with big plans but the problem is, those plans are meant for us.”
In the morning, September 7, their artillery stopped far too early, Lett thought, his hands jittering as he slung his rifle talking to himself, lips chapped, sticky. He had abandoned his bulky M1 Garand for the smaller and lighter M1 carbine, and the change had been troubling him extra for days. Now the fear of extra trouble hit him hard. His stomach clenched up, and rolled. He pulled his pants down right outside the barn. A kid just in from repple depple saw him and stopped and gaped at the sight of his bearded, twitching, shitting new sergeant.
The platoons approached the town without much resistance. Some blocks were smoldering but not enough. Nearing the center of town, they found a street intact. Lett’s squad broke into teams, to clear blocks of buildings down one side of the street. Godfrey had his own squad on the other side; he wasn’t about to hang back on a dirty job like this, he had told them. Most of Lett’s squad knew the ropes, Lett had made sure of it. People called it street fighting. It was more like breaking into homes with TNT. They started upstairs if they could, moving downward. Take the first house, rush up the stairs to the top floor. Blow a hole in the adjoining wall with a bazooka or explosive charge, move through to the top floor of the next room or building, and work back down, up, do it again, back down. Hallways, stairways, rooftops, basements. Hustle on, don’t stop, keep it moving, squint and don’t breathe in. Enemy snipers would try to wait it out and stay hidden. If a team stopped it was stuck on defense. It was dangerous as hell, a floor could give way or stairs or a place could be booby-trapped, but anything was better than open street. The street was for the loony, the rear-line commandos, the newbies. Out there the kraut machine guns and snipers told a guy his fortune. Ricochets doubled the danger, and the Germans gunning from the top floors knew it and tried for them. Lett was as comfortable as could be taking a street this way, which meant his insides boiled and froze, seized and churned up. But by now he worked like an automaton in low gear, going at it mechanically, deliberately, cautiously. And if he bought it? He bought it. It wasn’t going to be from anything he’d caused. It would happen because of someone’s mistake or just dumb bad luck, something that reeked but he couldn’t smell.
They toiled their way through the buildings, up and down, down and up, to the end of a main street. They’d found one sniper, downed him with one shot, and found three others defending a kitchen. All SS. The three gave up, but Lett’s team were here clearing houses, so what were they supposed to do with them? Their BAR man shot them. The smoke and dust clogged their sight, their breathing, muffling the sounds of the same shit-storm Godfrey’s squad was creating across the street. Lett tried not to think about Godfrey’s squad. Godfrey had a green bunch with him.
Lett’s squad reached the last building on his block, overlooking a small, tight square. A group of civilians had fled here, huddled together on the ground floor, children among them. Lett had a team check the cellar. Was it sturdy? It was, they said. They had to be sure. He needed them to be. They were. So Lett told the civilians to get down there and stay there.
Lett’s team spread out on the ground floor, scouting the scene from windows and doorways, panting and sweating, veins buzzing, the bazooka and BAR men hugging their heavy shooters. Lett’s head pounded. His stomach burned with cramp. Water streamed out his eyes from the smoke. His hands had clawed up and stiffened, as if from a living man’s rigor mortis if there was such a sick thing. He pressed his fingers back around the wood of his carbine.
Decoy smoke was thrown out back down the middle of the block—a GI had crossed the street for a powwow. It was Corporal Baines. Baines huddled with Lett. Godfrey’s squad were having a rough go of it, Baines said. They had reached the end of the building but hadn’t been able to clear out all the Germans. “They’re everywhere, just everywhere like rats and more rats, above and below and behind us,” Baines rattled on, gasping for breath. Sweat and tears streamed down his jaw, neck.
“Get a hold of yourself. All right? Take a moment,” Lett said.
“Okay, okay, but . . . the looie’s doing his best but odds aren’t good, aren’t good at all.”
“Listen. Listen to me. Backup is on the way.”
Two more squads were coming up through each block in support, but it wouldn’t be enough. Lett would have to send for more. He had looked across and saw the play. At the nearest edge of the square was a fountain, between the ends of the two blocks. The square was tight enough, the fountain broad and squat, but it would not be easy.
Lett looked across to Godfrey’s building again. Smoke poured out various windows. Far back down the street, two medics were rushing into Godfrey’s building.
Godfrey showed in the doorway opposite Lett, huddled with a demolition team, BAR men. His face was a pale mask. The huddle was going on without him. He stared out. Finally, Lett made eye contact. It seemed to snap Godfrey out of it. He gave a thumbs up.
It was something. Lett had Baines toss out a smoke grenade.
“Go! Go!”
They headed out in teams of two, crouching, aiming, boot toes scuffing on cobblestone. Wind swirled the smoke and pulled it away. Baines fell, blood splashing on the stones. A bazooka man took one in the face, his metal tube bouncing away clanging. The rest got pinned down before leaving the doorway.
Lett had made it to the fountain. He signaled for the rest to cover him only now, send a getaway man back, get more medics. The smoke had shifted back. He couldn’t see Godfrey through it, but he heard the burps of German machine guns and saw the glow of a flamethrower through the blur.
They didn’t have a flame team here.
“Fuck, fuck,” Lett whispered, clicking in a new magazine.
The smoke cleared, bringing wisps of a black residue and the reek of fuel, like tires afire. Lett looked over to Godfrey. The flame had expired, but the doorway was torched.
Godfrey appeared, on his haunches. He gaped as if he was screaming, but no sound came out. He clenched at air, as if climbing a ladder. His Thompson gun lay next to him.
Another team drew fire so Lett bolted across to Godfrey, hurtling into the doorway. Godfrey was blackened. Half his face and upper lip were a bright glowing red, wanting to blister. His helmet had fallen back and his hair stood up, singed. He kept clenching at air, screaming in silence. Lett touched his shoulder. He looked right through Lett, crying now, and curled up, seeming to shrink to boy size. Lett held him there, at his hip. He smelled a stench of burnt flesh, but it wasn’t Godfrey. Deeper inside the building stood a black mass, what looked like a stump for cutting wood. A charred man. Only the GI helmet nearby told Lett whose side it was.
“We’re going back,” Lett said. He dragged Godfrey through the buildings on Godfrey’s side, up and down, finding the holes they had blasted through, stepping over bodies. Bullets whizzed at them through blown-out windows.
The squads had pulled back. Lett heard footsteps, German voices. They kept going.
They reached the end of the building where Godfrey’s squad had come in. Frantic covering teams waved them through, back toward the edge of town.
Somewhere on the way out of town, Lett handed Godfrey off to a medic. That was the last logical thing Lett remembered. His reasoning had reformed into something else. He only remembered moments. It was like piecing together a bender blackout. Despite the smoke and stench he had never breathed so clearly, felt his muscles so strong, had so much energy. He charged back into town.
He reentered buildings but couldn’t recall which. He might have gone deeper in, beyond the fountain. He must
have looked like a man busted out of an asylum. He remembered the hot urine down his legs, soaking his trousers. He recalled a scowl on his face, a sick rictus of gusto. He kicked in doors, rushed up stairs, lunged through blown-out walls. He snatched up a Thompson gun, ammo magazines. He shot at corpses. He found four SS crouched in a bathroom among glossy shards of porcelain tile and bathtub, SS men but they were all cracked, hands up high, fingers pinched together waving imaginary white hankies. “Kamerad! Surrender,” they shrieked. Lett laughed and fired into them but the Tommy gun only clicked and clicked, empty. Grimacing, he stood over them and reloaded. The soldiers squealed and cried, hands over faces, eyes, ears, monkey see, monkey do. Lett moved on. In an attic he came up behind a sniper in a dormer. He kicked the bastard right out the window.
At some point he sat on a carpeted floor in the remains of a living room, holding a soldier in his arms, cradling him. They were both crying. The other was a German, no more than 15. Then it was only Lett crying. His trench knife stuck out of the teenager’s underarm, up high in it, the blood dumping out like a faucet. The boy’s muscles relaxed, his frame went limp, and it was like Lett was holding a sack of sand and rocks. “Sleep well, sleep well,” he muttered in German into the teen boy’s ear. And Lett slumped against a wall, suddenly dead tired. He just wanted the air attacks to come, to bring the roof right down on him. Get it over with, speed this up.
The air attacks never came. No one came. He made it back outside. Daylight was fading fast. He saw the fountain, and he stopped and listened. No one fired at him. Had the SS pulled out? He was so goddamn tired, his legs quivered like noodles. His lungs had flattened. His scowl had dropped away. He wandered back, right down the middle of the open street.
He found the platoon outside town on the edge of the wood, already digging in, feverish and wheezing, hissing whispers at each other like convicts on the lam. Someone was leading Lett along. It was the replacement who’d watched him shit by the barn. The kid had his arm around Lett’s waist. He carried Lett’s carbine, but there was no Tommy gun now.
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