He thought of her, and his tears came back. One of the orderlies was shouting for a litter. “They’ll kill us, they’ll kill us all,” Lett ranted, spewing whatever nonsense came to him, his mouth contorted, stretching, drooling. His legs felt warm, squishy—a reddish-brown liquid ran out his pajama pants onto the wooden deck.
“Dysentery case,” the nurse said.
“Get a litter, dammit!”
They moved him back into the hallway, pulled the door closed. Someone was wiping at his legs so they could get him on the stretcher. “I can’t go back on the line, I can’t,” Lett shouted.
“Don’t worry. There’s no Germans where you’re going.”
“It’s not just them! Don’t you see? Can’t you see the ones that done it?!” He grasped at their collars and glared into their gleaming eyes wanting to care—the looks of those who had never been anywhere near the line, for which they should eternally thank whoever it was they thanked. “They take it all out of a guy, see, stray dogs got it better, rats do,” he went on, figuring they would stick him with something any moment.
He felt the prick.
“That’s all right, pal,” an orderly said, “that’s all right now.”
Lett’s legs seemed to have faded away, as if they had lowered him into a warm tub, and his head felt heavy, foggy again. He smiled, and held out his hand for Heloise. She would find him here.
“There. Now, now. Not the first time a soldier caught a little trouble . . .”
Just before he went under, Lett winced at a realization. That sorry case thought he had wanted to jump overboard, and the man wanted to help him do it. That’s what he meant by a long way down. That’s how wrecked they all were, and there were so many of them.
Lett would never jump. They would have to kill him first, he thought as his dream of Heloise washed over him.
***
March 30, 1945: Holger Frings rode a bicycle through the valley that led to Stromville. He wore simple civilian clothes, an old corded suit jacket and a gray overcoat that was sparse and vaguely military like most cut during the war. A leather cap. Back in January, the temporary leave pass got him to Brussels. His time there as Sergeant Wendell Lett had made it easier for him, just another veteran GI on a deserved rest, to spend and trade his counterfeit money. If anyone asked about his accent, he told them he couldn’t help it—he grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite sect in Ohio. No one cared much now that the front had moved on into Germany. He had spent a good month or more bouncing between Brussels, Namur, and Liège, dealing with marché noir types and the assorted mobs of dead-end American deserters so desperate they’d turned to crime to survive, trading and selling everything from heavy troop trucks to parachutes for the ladies’ stockings to be cut from them. He had used the profits to finance going underground. From that point on he had made (and imagined) himself a wayward Belgian German and he kept to the countryside of Southeastern Belgium, always on watch for the slim chance that he’d find Wendell Lett making his way back to Heloise. He had to wait until Stromville was safe enough, until he had nowhere else to go. Cologne was an exhausted moonscape, overwhelmed and occupied. The Hindenburg Bridge had finally collapsed from air raid damage and the burden of endless retreating in panic, he had heard, the suspension span tumbling into the Rhine and taking untold fleeing civilians and soldiers with it. In every corner of the defeated Reich, stray German soldiers—and whatever so-called spies were among them—were sure to be rounded up. In the East, masses of Red Army troops had entered East Prussia. They would soon set upon Brandenburg and Berlin. In Frings’ darkest moments, a part of him hoped his girls would be persuaded, sensibly, to commit suicide. For the coming Russian retribution will have to sicken even Godfather Death himself.
The snow was gone, at least for this day, the valley spiked with early weeds that hinted at lovely meadows returning. He heard the roar of a truck coming up behind him and kept riding, head down. The truck passed him. It was Red Cross. Frings raised his head and eased off the pedaling.
On Stromville’s streets, the locals worked on rebuilding. The only cars and people were civilian. Riding along the main street, Frings saw the Red Cross truck pull into a square across from a building, and locals gathered around.
He saw her. She had to be Heloise. She was even prettier than her photo. Her stomach showed a small bump, and her long blouse hung from it. She didn’t gather with the others, Frings saw. Her gaze had fixed down the street, right at him. She walked over to a lamppost and stopped at it, still gazing at him.
He got off his bicycle, and walked it the rest of the way. Within steps of her, he doffed his cap and removed it. He stood before her, holding his cap with both hands.
“Mademoiselle?” he said.
“Yes. What is it?”
“It’s about Wendell,” he whispered in English, but he choked on the name.
Heloise shook her head at him. She stepped backward, glaring at him, and held onto the lamppost.
“Please, listen—”
“No!” Heloise fell to her knees. Frings dropped the bicycle and rushed to her, holding her shoulders as she cried, and she howled, pounding at his sides.
“But he might be alive,” Frings said in her ear. “This is what I want to say. Do you hear me? There is always a chance.”
She didn’t seem to hear him, or want to. She moaned. Wailed. She grabbed at her stomach. Blood trickled down her legs, from between her thighs, spattering the earth.
***
April 30, 1945: Allied officers in best dress uniform—American, British, Soviet—sat smiling at a V-shaped table bearing lavish food and drink, whole hens, caviar, whisky, vodkas. A sign in English read: “Victory Soon! Archibald Barracks Welcomes You.”
A former SS barracks near Germany’s border with Czechoslovakia had been requisitioned by the US Army. A victory party had filled its grand hall. An American Congressman stood to speak, his expensive wire-framed glasses not doing enough to offset the slickness of his pencil-thin mustache. He said:
“Just when the war was thought won in the West, events took a dark, menacing turn. The enemy even resorting to a fanatical squad of assassins who dared wear our good uniform! A false flag operation! And yet there were those who understood the threat and held to that truth, even when it wasn’t popular. I bring you one of those great men tonight. Yes, my Allied friends, it’s a sublime honor to introduce you to the Horseback Hero himself—General Archie Archibald!”
The applause resounded in full force as Archie took the stage in his new general’s uniform. He bowed and bowed but the applause and hoots wouldn’t stop. Selfer applauded from his prime spot at the table. Another general approached Archie, holding up a medal. The Congressman took the mike again and shouted over the applause: “Our Archie, he’ll do just fine back home, now won’t he? Now won’t he ever?!”
***
The celebration roared on. It had started the day before, when a sole nurse had rushed through the metal hut, then two and three and more, shouting, “It’s over, boys, it’s all over!” Locking arms and jumping up and down. Doctors and orderlies had joined in, and they moved on to the next hut, and all who could filed on outside to the grassy common area. Today, a Tuesday, they had put tables out on the commons before noon. Champagne appeared and bottles of strong cider the English called “scrumpy,” and some guy with a banjo of all things, and then an administrator man brought out a guitar that looked like a mandolin and a refugee fellow a violin. All stomped around, singing and playing, patients and staff and civilians alike in the spring sun. It was May 8, 1945: Victory in Europe.
Wendell Lett had stayed inside, poised on the rickety chair next to his bunk. His was no hospital bed anymore. Getting over the physical injury had proved routine. The bullets had busted ribs and hit nerves but somehow missed major organs. The strap on the hospital ship, simply a seagoing precaution. The problem came after. The hospital ship had delivered him to this hospital in Southern England, near Folkestone on the coast just sou
thwest of Dover. A hospital stay of a month or so led to convalescence in this Quonset hut, what the Brits called a Nissen hut. They had built a hutment of them, all lined up in a vast camp. The rounded, corrugated one-piece metal roof with a few tiny square windows was like being inside a cargo plane. It was cold when he first got here, now starting to heat up in the spring.
He could hear them outside, really singing now, but he couldn’t see it. He wasn’t lucky enough to get one of those little hatch windows near his bunk.
He didn’t know how long he could keep this up. For a long time he had thought the hospital ship was the worst part, when he had broken through his morphine and who-knew-what haze on that ship, not knowing at first it was a ship, stumbling out onto that chilling deck in pajamas of all things until the nurse and orderlies and dysentery found him. Seeing the sea surge and want to swallow them like that was a horror in itself. He couldn’t imagine what Frings had been through out there. After his injuries were sure to heal, he told them he couldn’t remember much. He knew he had been in battles, and that D-Day happened, and a surprise counteroffensive had really walloped them in the Ardennes, and that was it. The doctors listened. They asked questions. He kept it simple. He gave them a few discoveries. He suddenly recalled his rank, a sergeant. He was platoon leader. He believed his name was William. Last name of Long, Lamb, something like that. He so wanted to find out who he was, he said, and the doctors had seemed to take that as a good sign. It wasn’t a surprising occurrence. His was a fugue state, they called it, brought on by dissociative amnesia, reversible in theory but it was never clear how long it would stay with a man. Extreme battle fatigue had triggered it. It had stricken hundreds of thousands of GIs, if not millions. Lett had seen it up on the line. Guys just blanked out, all out of change. It was the only, final way to block the goddamn horror of the endless grind. A few were faking it but most were full-blown cases and the Army had far more than the War Department had bargained for, even after what they’d learned from World War One.
He had used this monster they created against them. Time was running out, though. For now, no one knew where he was. He had quit sending any letters stateside well before the Ardennes Counteroffensive, what American papers were now calling the Battle of the Bulge. He hadn’t even dared getting a letter to Heloise. The censors could get wise to that tactic, and he didn’t want to break her heart with the promise he could not keep. It could all shatter in an instant. He could always run into a dogface who knew him, or they could send him back to a hospital in the states at any time. And if he suddenly copped the miracle recovery, he was theirs too. He was a veteran platoon leader, a rare breed that they still needed. Of course they would send him back up on the line. VE-Day didn’t matter. Sure, it was a good party for the rear and the home front but who were they kidding? He hadn’t lost sight of the truth and he repeated it to himself as his sacred counsel, as if old Sheridan was right there whispering to him in the dark under ground: This was for the duration plus six. They would send him to the Pacific, where the Japanese would fight to their very extinction. If it wasn’t Asia, they would take aim at Joe Stalin sooner than later. The German POWs had talked about it all the time. Don’t get too comfortable, Joe, for soon we will join forces against the Bolshevist hordes aiming to enslave Europe, and Amerika was next. He got a constant reminder of where he was heading right here in the hospital. Some sobbed whether asleep or awake, while others could not speak or had taken on warped, warbled, stuttering voices like deaf men unable to hear themselves. One man burst out screaming at random and it was like artillery shrieking every time. Another went catatonic, eyes open like some undead mummy, and they rolled that one away, never to return.
A couple of the nurses passed through and urged Lett out to share some laughs but he stayed silent, as he was wont to do. Down the line of bunks, a couple of the hard-done cases lay on their beds, facing the corrugated metal, arms folded up. And the guilt washed over Lett again, like the icy rain in the Ardennes. He was using up a precious bunk. Other Joes needed it.
He had been waiting for the right time. He would make his move any moment. Outside he heard laughing, chanting. The whole hospital center had to be out there. Inside his footlocker, he had secondhand civilian clothes, a simple sweater and a peacoat, corduroy pants and brown brogues, a workingman’s cap. Other patients had handed down the civvies when leaving. He had bought the rest of the items on one of the excursions the nurses led into town and no one had lifted an eyebrow. Yanks bought and traded for everything these days, so why not civvies? They had a little allowance for such trips. He saved what he could. To augment his stash, he had tried his hand at the card games in the hut. He had always hated cards. Maybe that was why he won so much. It all helped.
The Quonset hut door had been left open. In rushed a spring breeze with hints of the sea and a musky scent of chestnut trees. Keeping an eye on the doorway, Lett opened his footlocker and pulled the clothes on over his pajamas.
One of the remaining three had turned his way, sat up, and stared at him. His name was Thatch. Thatch had the boyish face like Lett and even the curly hair messing with his forehead but he sported a glare that made him more Jimmy Cagney that Mickey Rooney. Thatch had been up on the line. Thatch had been in the Hürtgen. The man never got near trees without screaming, howling, curling up in a ball. A guy like Thatch would have to live in the desert back home. Yet they were sending him back—he’d gotten orders to report to a repple-depple near Namur, Belgium. He had tried to postpone redeployment by pricking his finger and draining the blood into a urine sample, complaining he had pains. The doctors knew that old trick. It only convinced them he had been faking all along.
Late one morning two days ago, Lett had found Thatch outside alone on a bench in his pajamas, no robe.
Lett had sat with him. “Everything jake?”
Thatch had nodded. “I knew you’d find me here,” he had said after a couple minutes.
“That a fact?” Lett had said.
“I saw your face. When I just mentioned the word ‘Belgium.’”
Lett wouldn’t deny it. He had felt his face empty right out. Thatch noticed everything.
“You just did it again,” Thatch said. “So listen up, see. Here’s what’s going to happen: You’re going over for me.”
“Look, maybe I should go get your robe for you. That or a doctor. You might have a fever.”
Thatch glared at Lett. “You’re not fooling me. You know exactly who you are, and you been eyeballing a way to get out of here.”
Lett didn’t say a thing. He sighed and stared at the chestnut trees, at lush green clusters of branches swinging and swaying like the gear on a GI hoofing it.
“They issued me new field ODs,” Thatch said.
Lett moved to get up, but Thatch latched onto his wrist with surprising speed and grip. He had probably saved a snafu or two at the front before they ruined him.
Lett lowered back down.
“I got my ID card, paybook, travel docs, immunization sheet, the lot. Best thing is, I got a pass to that repple-depple in Namur.”
Lett should have been smiling. He felt his face go numb, his skin like a layer of tinplate.
“There’s that face again. You got a will and a way. You just gave me your answer. So come to me when you’re ready to hit the gas.”
Lett looked around the grounds. They still sat alone. Was it some kind of test? He had to be sure. This might be too good to be true. It could mean the stockade.
“Hell, we look enough alike,” Thatch said. “Just promise me you’re not really going to that repple-depple.”
“Okay. I promise.”
With that, Thatch had slapped his palms on his knees like a man who’d just enjoyed a nice lunch.
“What are you going to do?” Lett had said.
“Don’t you worry about me.”
“What about your dog tags?”
“Ah. Excellent question. I can’t give you those, soldier. When they do find me, I want th
ese bastards to know just who they got.”
Now Lett stared at Thatch, sitting up on his bunk in the Quonset hut. Now it was Thatch whose face had emptied out. Lett had given Thatch a chance to back out when they’d heard the war was over, but Thatch had only shaken his head. The man had his own way out, and who could blame him?
“Well?” Thatch said. “Come and get it.”
Thatch eyed the door for Lett as Lett emptied Thatch’s footlocker. “Keep your eyes open. Keep moving. And don’t you look back,” Thatch whispered to him, like a platoon looie to a man about to lead a night patrol. “If I see you come back here, Willy or whatever your name is, I’ll fucking kill you myself.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go! Get. You got those poker winnings to boot. I’m almost jealous. Go.”
Thatch’s small duffel was march-ready, half full with ODs and the documents. He had also left Lett a plaid civilian daypack he’d bought in town.
“I just can’t do it,” Thatch said, as Lett slipped the duffel inside the daypack. “It’s a hell of a thing.”
“You remind me of a Joe I knew,” Lett said. “A couple of them, now that I think of it.”
“Sure I do. And I’ll bet they’re dead too.”
Lett nodded. “Thank you.”
“Forget it.”
“But, why?”
“Why you? Because you seem like a fellow who would do the same. We hole buddies look after our own, am I right? Now go.”
Lett went. He had it all planned out. He took the far paths on the rear of the hospital grounds, where there was a civilian entrance—a little stone fence with iron gate like for the cemetery of an English country church. The guard there was dancing with another guard as three nurses cried with laughter. They drank scrumpy from thick glass handle mugs; it trickled down their chins and glistened in the sun. Lett had his cap down low. He grinned, big and brightly like a civ, and they waved and he waved and they kept on dancing and laughing because the main thing was the war was over and done, friend.
He kept grinning as he strolled right out the gate.
Under False Flags Page 22