Lett felt a cold pinch in his stomach. Weber was right, of course. “They’re hanging us out. That’s what you mean,” Lett muttered.
“I mean. This way they can claim we don’t exist, anything goes snafu. Good and erased, like. See?”
An engine sputtered outside, and another, another. The barn door swung open. Archie and Selfer stood before three contraband German jeeps—two Kübelwagens and a Schwimmwagen.
Archie held out his arms as if he’d just rolled in a humongous birthday cake with a victory girl inside. “Here you are! See now? All a man needs is a good horse,” Archie said.
“Take your pick, men,” Selfer added. “And do get some sleep. You have a few hours.”
***
The masters of the machine had grown more delusional and desperate than Holger Frings thought possible. His first thought had been, they had tricked him and sent him to a concentration camp. The sprawling garrison and training complex of Grafenwöhr filled the Bavarian forest. The SS camp guards were Ukrainians with steel balls for eyes and didn’t understand German or English, so how could they really know the secrets going on here, no matter how ridiculous?
The couple thousand volunteers and recruits housed at Grafenwöhr came from all branches and many ranks, all housed together. They had to give up their insignia and identification. All letters were censored. When a couple men hinted in letters that they were on a secret mission, they soon disappeared and it was whispered the Ukrainian SS guards had put them against a wall. From then on, all outside contact was forbidden. Frings kept his head down but his eyes open, like many others. No one trusted anyone else, he saw.
This place was supposed to turn them into American GIs. They had sessions practicing Ami conversation, with slang such as chow, booze and moola, shit and fuck, dogface and foxhole, FUBAR, AWOL. Jeep. Joes. They learned American insignia and commands. They learned how GIs opened packs of cigarettes: Slap the pack, then flip out a smoke. They smoked like Amis, with the cigarette between index and middle fingers. They opened GI ration cans, and ate using their forks with the right hand. Instructors forced them to slouch, lean against walls, shove their hands deep in their pockets like traffickers and vagabonds. Frings had shaved his beard. Grow it back, they had said—you’ll look more like a dogface that way. They watched Hollywood war films, sappy propaganda but effective. A ten-year old musical, Top Hat, Frings had seen in a New Jersey port town in 1935. He could only shake his head at that, and when they had gum chewing practice he could only laugh. American vehicles appeared on the grounds, including jeeps and light trucks and a few Sherman tanks, but the jeeps seemed to be the only buckets the mechanics could keep running. They received rushed training shooting American weapons and were urged to “shoot from the hip,” as if Americans truly fired like cowboys. They were issued olive, green and tan American gear, most all of it ragbag or worn. They marched around in American field jackets, mishearing commands and colliding into each other as gray-haired German-Americans cursed them with shit and fuck and words they would never know before they were dead.
Frings only laughed harder. And the Ukrainian SS-pretenders did the same, pointing at them from up in the guard towers.
Grafenwöhr had many sailors because so many had been exposed to real English. Many had been merchant mariners like Frings. Few would have lasted on an S-boat. Out of all the soldiers from all branches, only about twenty turned out fluent in English and knew the slang. Frings barely made the next cut of about thirty to forty who spoke well enough, but with little slang and an audible accent. The remaining pack were hopeless, wishful thinkers, innocents or blind patriots and Führer-worshippers mostly. To test them, some did simulated time in a POW camp full of Americans. They came back looking like they’d spent a year in Eastern Front trenches. A few had broken bones, bruises.
Frings ended up in a select group the officers had christened commandos: They were the new Stielau Unit, the spearhead force of what was now called Panzerbrigade 150.
On December 11, after a month in Grafenwöhr, Frings ended up back near Cologne. His new commando unit bivouacked in a forest after debarking from a train painted with the words “Christmas Trees for the Western Front.” The train carried some of the captured American vehicles, mostly jeeps. Their forest bivouac lay southwest of Cologne, close to a village called Schmidtheim. The Belgian border awaited, just down the road. The surrounding woodlands hid hills, ravines and mud, the opposite of the open sea though visibility could be as bad with the fog they had. Frings and some of the commandos had a barn to hole up in. Like all, he covered his GI uniform and gear with a German overcoat so that any troops witnessing them would not panic or worse. Yet whenever he went outside, he felt the eyes watching him from inside the forest—there the regular soldiers crowded out the greenery with their pale-gray faces, gathered around their camouflaged armor in untold clusters. There must have been thousands of them in there, waiting, surely a whole panzer division.
Frings had learned of the mission. They would travel in teams, four to an American jeep. The better English speaker often had the identity of an American officer and would do the talking. Each jeep team ran its own sortie. Frings’ jeep team was to disrupt communications by cutting telephone wires and knocking out any radio stations and information posts they could find. Along the way, all commandos were to mix up signs and move minefield markers, pass on false orders, and cause confusion, panic and traffic congestion whenever possible.
His masters had given him the American name of Clarence Arthur. They made him a US Army sergeant. He wore an olive-colored US Army overcoat, thick enough but too short for the land. He wore this over a GI field jacket. The Amis’ brown boots with the leather rough side-out and rubber soles made him want to sneer and admit awe at the same time. These were fit for a lumberjack or a carpenter, and yet those soft soles would be perfect on an S-boat—or for sneaking up on someone for the kill. His trousers were British but close enough, they said. They had run out of American pants.
Under the American field jacket he wore his tighter fitting gray-green German Navy tunic complete with S-boat War Badge, the collar well hidden with the help of a wool US Army scarf. Their team leaders had told them that wearing German uniforms under their American garb was to protect them. It might, if they were lucky, comply with the Geneva Convention and save them from being viewed as outright spies—if they had to fight, they would simply shed their disguise enemy uniform. Frings knew the score. Shedding a US Army field jacket before shooting was ludicrous, like an S-boat signaling the enemy destroyer before firing torpedoes. A commando was a spy, and spies were shot.
Dogface, meet Number One. The forces of fanaticism, idiocy and glory-seeking had released him from his S-boat damnation, and he had volunteered for the madness. So be it. If he was allowed to write to Christiane, he would have assured her: “I am your Wonder Weapon.”
***
In Stromville, Heloise Vérive stood in her family kitchen over a cutting board of meager weeds and turnips, waiting for a pot of water to boil on the stove. She gazed out the window at their courtyard blurred in the late morning fog, and tried to imagine her Wendell’s return.
Her stomach shuddered and roiled inside. She convulsed and lunged to vomit, into a basin. She wiped her mouth with a towel, eyes wide with shock.
She vomited again, heaving till nothing came out but strings of saliva.
She hovered over the mess, confused, the sour waft easily overpowering the bitter scent of the vegetables—her retching had only brought up more weeds and turnips. It was all they had to eat today.
She needed fresh air. She got outside. Every day, when she had a few minutes, she stood beneath one of the two lampposts on the main street, near the highest point in town. The spot let her keep watch on the road that stretched out of Stromville, waiting for her Wendell to return. They had joked that this made her Lili Marleen, as in the famous song, but from here she could see, and be seen from, the broad valley and forests beyond. That was on a clear
day. Today wasn’t so clear. It had been two days since Wendell had last come. It was colder now. Snow fell in wisps, yet she didn’t cover her head. She was steaming from a heat inside her. She allowed herself to think it—could it be a baby from Wendell inside her?
All the more reason to keep her Wendell alive. The poor man was about ready to come apart in a way that no amount of thread could mend. She had to do something.
That afternoon she made her way east into the forest near the American front lines, among all their vehicles and depots and tents, smelling the sweetness of their Virginia tobacco and the linger of cognac and vermouth, then the stench of outdoor latrines and unwashed men. Bearded GIs—whom Wendell called “dogfaces”—rose from tents and stone huts to whistle while others stared slack-faced, simply saddened, she feared, by the beauty of a girl. “It ain’t right,” one grumbled as she passed.
She came to another sentry. The American straightened but sighed as he did so. She carried a basket hanging off her arm. She pulled back the basket’s flowery cover. The deep plate inside still held a few pieces of glistening pain perdu she had made using bread about to go stale, milk and eggs and butter and sugar and vanilla hoarded top-secretly and probably the last in town. Americans knew it as “French toast.” The others sentries had taken thick slices, but not all.
“I look for your courier, Joe,” Heloise said in English. She described Wendell but didn’t name him and waited while the sentry asked around, licking the powdered sugar from his lips. He had another Joe shuttle her to a command tent. There she met a Lieutenant Godfrey—Tom Godfrey, the only American Lett had mentioned by name that was not dead. Godfrey smiled for her, but it didn’t do his recent scar any favors. Such a genial man, she thought, though now he would have to keep his mustache no matter the fashion.
She stood before Godfrey’s desk, alone with him. She set down her basket, now empty.
“How did you make it this far?” Godfrey said in excellent French.
“Real butter,” Heloise said.
Godfrey laughed.
“I am looking for a sergeant,” she said.
“Yes.” Godfrey’s face paled, losing any signs of mirth. “Lett. Wendell Lett.”
She leaned into the desk. “Where is he?”
“He’s alive. I can’t tell you much more, I’m afraid.”
Heloise’s stomach quivered, rolled. She retched and tried to hold it in but couldn’t. She rushed to the tent door, and vomited out.
A few minutes later, she sat back inside the tent holding a damp rag to her face. Godfrey had given it to her.
“How long have you been pregnant?” he said.
She waved at air, dismissing the notion. Had she told him when her head was spinning? But then some men just knew these things. “Euh, I’m not sure if I am.”
“Though you will find out for sure? Won’t you? For Wendell.”
Heloise nodded. “We love each other.” She grabbed Godfrey by a wrist. “Listen, please. You must not tell him.”
“You know what I think? I think the man knows what he wants. He just has to finish the job.”
“But you must not tell him. I do not want our baby to make him do it. I do not want him to have any regret. He must do it for his reasons. Not for my reasons. Do you see? I only hope, it is not too late. In the meanwhile: You can protect him. Will you protect him? Can you?”
“I’m trying, dear. You have to know that I’m doing all I can.”
***
Wendell Lett and the other GIs of X, Y and Z stared down at the mud-caked yet foreign black boots on their feet, deep in thought, letting the road rock and jostle them, their shoulders bumping. They rode in the back of a troop truck. It was December 12, before sunup. They wore German Army greatcoats and tunics, unbuttoned to reveal their GI field jackets. Keeping their true uniforms on underneath was Lett’s idea. He had found a GI Field Manual and looked it up. What they called “perfidy”—using dirty tricks in war—could be a war crime. Yet, wearing enemy clothes could be okay as long as soldiers didn’t fight in them. It didn’t mention what happened to a dogface in disguise on the wrong side of the line, but it was all they had.
Lett had added a German scarf to his disguise. As they rode along, he watched Weber. Weber was shaking his head, muttering to himself. He opened a tin of pills and popped a couple in his mouth. Weber was their only real born Deutsche. His German was fluent. He was the only one who could do extended talking. He would have to keep it together.
The troop truck left Lett, Weber and Auggie at their insertion point and moved on. They were to cross over at a gap in the line, at an unmanned portion of the Siegfried Line between the Ardennes and the Hürtgen. Their German jeep was waiting parked just inside the trees. They had picked a Kübelwagen and let the other teams fight over the Schwimmwagen. So what if a utility vehicle could swim? It only attracted attention. They slogged through the underbrush, tossed their gear inside the Kübelwagen, and buttoned up their German tunics and greatcoats.
Their local Belgian guide stood watching at the nearest tree trunk. They hadn’t even heard him. He was older and dressed like a farmer in wool and denim. Only Weber could understand his Belgian German dialect. The three got in their German jeep, Weber at the wheel, Lett up front and Auggie in back, and Weber got the engine started after a solemn give-and-take between fuel cock, ignition key and clutch, choke and cranking motor button. Once the engine had warmed up, he pushed the choke all the way in and steered them into the road, driving as slow as he could without stalling. Their guide ambled along the front fender, as if leading a donkey.
Twenty minutes later their guide walked off into the forest, leaving them inside a misty fog forming for dawn. Lett, Weber and Auggie had crossed over into the German lines, though they could only see walls of trees and the two-rut road before them. No bunkers, no checkpoints. Weber kept his eyes on the ruts, both hands on the steering wheel.
The forest receded in fog behind them. Weber drove them through a village. The signs were in German. They really were in Germany. A couple farmer locals chatted, ignoring them. They saw German uniforms ahead, which made them stiffen, and they passed the group—a crowd of teenage soldiers gathered around a horse-drawn kitchen wagon. The soldiers took no notice of them. The sun had come up, and they drove onward, heading east. Lett consulted maps on his lap as cows watched from a field. Passing them the other way were a small troop on bicycles, a couple utility vehicles, a staff car. Alone again, they drove along a trickling stream, and passed over an ancient stone bridge.
They should have been nabbed first thing. Lett’s hope had been that they would be spotted and could somehow hightail it back across the border. This had been far too easy, he thought. This was the kind of luck that dropped a guy in a hole. His hands were shaking. He stuffed them between his legs, ostensibly for warmth.
“No sentries? Then there’s horses towing a chuck wagon. Horses and boys and old contraptions? Is that really all they got left?” Lett said.
“Yeah, wouldn’t that be swell? Which way?” Weber said.
“Right. No, left.”
Weber steered them back into forest, and down another narrow road. Soon a layer of hay covered the road, dampening the sound of their tires.
“Why the hay?” Auggie said.
“Search me,” Weber said.
They drove the long single road down the middle of ever-deeper forest, the highest stories flocked with snow. Lett looked around, the close tree trunks passing in a blur.
He saw it first. Then Auggie, his mouth open. Weber did too. He inched along, his knuckles tightening on the wheel, the dread stretching his mouth open. “Shit. Shit,” Weber muttered.
On both sides within the trees stood tanks, vehicles, artillery, and troops in droves, and more tanks. Machinery. Depots. More troops. Static. All around them. Waiting. An on and on, crammed inside the forest.
The road seemed never ending. The Kübelwagen stalled. Frantic, almost drooling in panic, Weber restarted and continued
his slow slog.
Two sentries approached the roadside and waved them along, giving them the universal signal that they’re on the wrong road and should move it along and quick. Weber accelerated, the hay kicking up and rustling inside the wheel wells.
They drove through a valley and into another wood, this one empty. Lett and Auggie scanned behind and around them, to confirm that no one was coming or following. They saw a covered bridge up ahead. Weber sped up for it. He braked in the middle of the bridge, his chest heaving, his mouth stuck open. He took deep gasps of air, but it only made it worse. A panic attack.
“What’s the matter?” Auggie said.
Weber reached back, grabbed Auggie by his collar. “In German, you hick,” Weber said, snarling. He released Auggie. They sat listening to the engine idling, and the stream rushing below.
“Why all the hay back there?” Auggie said in broken German.
Weber snorted a laugh, because he’d figured it out too.
“It hides tracks,” Lett said. “Keeps things quiet.”
“And for miles. Miles of them. Jesus Christ.”
“Let’s just go. Okay, Web?” Lett said. “Everything jake?”
“Sure. Sure.”
They passed through another village, past more farmers and boy soldiers, horse carts and old trucks.
“That’s the thing. They want it to look like this,” Lett said. “Like nothing’s doing. No checkpoints means no point in looking.”
They cleared another valley, its grazing field void of cows. Lett stared at the map, hoping to find a different road back, but these all passed through villages, towns.
“We got what we need, right?” Auggie said. “Right? So let’s get back.”
“We can’t go back that way,” Lett said.
Weber pounded on the steering wheel. “Goddamn.”
“These German maps S-2 gave us, they’re just ancient,” Lett said.
They reached the crest of a hill. Slowing, they looked down to see that their road led into a secondary highway. Refugees and retreating German army units moved along the highway in a vast, disorderly stream.
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