Hart's War

by John Katzenbach

  Tommy found himself choking, unable to speak.

  But in that moment, he saw a remarkable thing:

  Inside the American compound, just beyond the wire, Vincent Bedford had been at the plate, in the midst of a softball game. Like all the players, and the rest of the kriegies, he had seen the Russian prisoners’ painful approach. Most of the Americans stood riveted in place, fascinated by the skeletons shuffling past.

  But not Bedford. With a bellow, he’d dropped the bat to the dust; waving his arms and shouting furiously, Trader Vic had turned and raced back into the nearest hut, the thick wooden door slamming with a resounding shot behind him.

  For an instant, Tommy was confused, not understanding what Bedford was yelling. But it became clear within seconds, because the Mississippian emerged from the hut almost as quickly as he had first disappeared, but now his arms were filled with loaves of dark German-issued bread. He was shouting: “Kriegsbrot! Kriegsbrot!” at the other POWs in his distinctive southern drawl. Then, without hesitating to see if his message was understood, Vincent Bedford ran forward, sprinting quickly to the camp gate. Tommy saw the German guards suddenly swing their weapons in his direction.

  A German Feldwebel, wearing a soft campaign hat, broke away from the squad guarding the gate, dashing toward Bedford and waving his arms. The Feldwebel was shouting, “Nein! Nein! Ist verboten!” As he raced toward the U.S. airman, the Feldwebel was struggling to remove his Mauser pistol from his holster. He stood in front of Bedford, just as Trader Vic reached the gate.

  The column of Russians slowed even further, their heads pivoting toward the shouting. Now they were barely moving despite the sudden insistent commands from the guards, “Schnell! Schnell!”

  The Feldwebel stared angrily at Bedford, eyes narrowed with hatred, as if, in that second, the American and the German were no longer prisoner and guard, but merely deadly enemies. The Feldwebel managed finally to get his weapon out, and with frightening, serpentlike speed, brought it to bear directly on the southerner’s chest. “Ist verboten!” he repeated harshly.

  Tommy saw a wild look in Bedford’s eyes.

  “Verboten?” He spoke in a high-pitched drawl, his lip pulled back in a sneer. “Well, guess what, fella? Fuck you.”

  Bedford stepped briskly to the side of the German, ignoring the weapon. In a single, graceful, and smooth motion, he cocked back his arm, and like a shortstop fielding a grounder deep in the hole, he threw a loaf of bread over the top of the barbed-wire fence. The loaf spun in the air, cartwheeling through the sky, arcing like a tracer round until it landed directly in the midst of the Russian prisoners.

  The column of Russians seemed to explode. Without leaving their formation, they all pivoted, facing the American camp. Their arms were raised instantly in entreaty, and their deep voices pierced through the May afternoon. “Brot! Brot!” they shouted over and over again.

  The German Feldwebel thumbed back the hammer of his pistol, making a clicking sound that Tommy heard above the entreaties of the Russians. The other guards chambered rounds as well. But they all stood in place, none making a move either toward Bedford or the column of Russians.

  Bedford turned to the Feldwebel and said, “Why don’t y’all just relax, buddy. You can kill ’em all tomorrow. But today, at least, they’re gonna get to eat.” He grinned wildly, and tossed another loaf over the fence, then a third. The Feldwebel stared hard at Bedford for a moment, as if internally debating whether he should fire, then shrugged in an exaggerated fashion. He slowly returned his pistol to its holster.

  By this time dozens of other kriegies had emerged from the huts, their arms laden with the hard loaves of German bread. Men started to line the fence, and within minutes a rain of bread cascaded down upon the Russian prisoners, who without breaking formation gathered up each morsel. Tommy saw Bedford launch his final loaf, then stand back, arms folded, smiling widely.

  The Germans allowed the scene to continue.

  After a few moments, Tommy noticed a single loaf of bread that didn’t quite have the distance. Short-armed was the baseball term for a throw that was destined to land shy of its target. This loaf fell to the earth a dozen feet away from the column of men. In the same instant, he saw a small, rabbitlike Russian soldier on the edge of the lines of men spot the loaf. The man seemed to hesitate, taking note that no other prisoner had broken formation to retrieve the precious bread. At that second, Tommy could suddenly imagine the man’s mind, calculating, assessing his chances. Bread was life. Leaving formation could be death. A danger. A risk. But a great prize. He wanted to shout out to the man: “No! It’s not worth it!” but he could not remember the Russian, “Nyet!”

  And in that hesitation, the soldier abruptly darted from the column of men, bent over, his outstretched arms reaching for the short loaf.

  He did not make it.

  A single, ragged burst from a machine pistol pierced the air, shattering the cries of the prisoners. The Russian soldier pitched forward, sprawling a few feet away from the precious loaf. He twitched once, his back arcing in agony, a dark bloodstain spreading into the dust around him, then lay still.

  The column of prisoners seemed to shudder along its length. But instead of shouts of outrage, the Russians grew instantly silent. It was a quiet laced with hatred and fury.

  The German guard who’d fired slowly walked up to the body and nudged it with his boot. He worked the bolt on his weapon, ejecting the spent clip, replacing it with a new load. Then he gestured sharply at two men from the column, who slowly stepped out, crossed the short distance, and bent down to pick up the body. Both men slowly made the sign of the cross over their hearts, but one of the men, his eyes lifted toward the German guard, reached out and seized the deadly loaf of bread. The Russian soldier had a snarl plastered across his face, like some cornered animal turned at bay, a wolverine or a badger, ready to defend itself with whatever tooth and claw it had left in its tattered arsenal. Then the prisoners grasped the body, lifting it to their shoulders like some gory prize. They returned to the line of men, but only after staring harshly at the murderous guard for several long instants. Tommy Hart was afraid the Germans might open up on the entire column, and he quickly looked around for someplace to take cover.

  “Raus!” the German commanded. There was a touch of nervousness in his voice. The lines of men reluctantly struggled back into rough formation and slowly started forward again.

  But from deep within the column, a single anonymous voice surged upward in a slow, sad song. Deep, resonant, the strange foreign words drifted into the air above the line of prisoners, rising above the muffled, shuffling sound of their feet. None of the Germans made any immediate effort to halt the song and it continued, its words perhaps incomprehensible to Tommy but its meaning apparent. The singing finally faded away, as the column disappeared into the distant line of fir trees.

  “Hey, Fritz,” he whispered, though he knew the answer. “What was he singing?”

  “It was a song of thanks,” Fritz Number One quietly responded. “And a song of freedom.”

  The ferret shook his head.

  “It will likely be his last song,” he said. “The singer will not come alive from the forest.”

  Then he pointed Tommy toward the gate, where Vincent Bedford remained standing. The Mississippian was also watching the Russians until they passed from sight. His smile had slid from his face, and Bedford lifted his right hand and touched the brim of his cap. A small salute.

  “I did not think,” Fritz Number One muttered, as he hurriedly motioned for the gate guard to open up, “that our friend Trader Vic was a man of such bravery. It was foolhardy to risk his life for some Russian that is going to die maybe today, maybe tomorrow. But soon. But it was very brave.”

  Tommy nodded. He thought much the same. But he was even more surprised to learn that Fritz Number One knew Vincent Bedford’s camp nickname.

  As the gate to the South Compound swung shut behind him, Tommy caught a glimpse of Lincoln Scot
t. The black flier was standing in the distance, on the edge of the deadline, staring out to where the Russians had entered the thick dark line of trees. As always, Lincoln Scott stood alone.

  Shortly before the Germans turned off the electricity for the night, Tommy slid into his bunk in Hut 101. He perched a work on civil procedure on his upraised knees, but found himself unable to absorb the dry prose of the textbook. The case synopsis seemed dull and unimaginative, and he found his mind wandering to the courtroom in Flemington and the trial that had been held there. He recalled what Phillip Pryce had said about hatred forming the undercurrent to the legal proceedings, and thought there had to be a way to turn that rage around. He thought the best lawyer finds a way to harness whatever external force is directed at his client and take advantage of it.

  He kept a few stubs of pencil in a tin by his bed, and he twisted beneath his blanket, grabbing for one, and reaching at the same time for a sheet of scrap paper. He wrote this last thought down, and decided he would reexamine the carpenter’s case once again. He smiled to himself, thinking this was a small act of legal desperation, because the facts that Hugh Renaday was stolidly relying upon were arrayed like a phalanx of hoplites against him. Still, he acknowledged, Phillip was a man of subtlety, and an intriguing argument might serve to shift him away from the evidence. That would be a major coup, he thought. He wondered what sort of reputation the attorney who freed Bruno Richard Hauptmann would gain. Even in this fictional re-creation of the case.

  He looked down at his watch. The Germans were oddly erratic in when they shut the lights off. For people who did most everything with utter predictability, this was unusual, and almost inexplicable. He guessed not more than thirty more minutes of light remained in the hut.

  He took the watch off his wrist, and turned it over, reading the inscription as he slid his finger across it. He closed his eyes and found that he could shut away the camp sounds and smells, and taking a deep breath could find himself back in Vermont. There was a tendency to fantasize about the special moments back home—the first time Lydia and he kissed, the first time he felt the soft curve of her breast beneath his palm, the moment he knew he would love her no matter what happened to him. But he fought off these memories, favoring daydreams about the ordinary, the routine days of growing up. He would remember pulling a glistening rainbow trout that rose to his dry fly from a small curve in the Mettawee River, where the flow of water had carved out a little pool that held big fish, and only he seemed to know about it. Or the early September day he’d helped his mother as she packed his bags for the academy, folding each shirt two or three times before placing it gently in the big leather suitcase. He’d been an excited fourteen that day, and hadn’t really understood why she kept dabbing away tears.

  He squeezed his eyes shut. The ordinary days were the special ones, he thought. The special days were spectacular. Events to be memorialized.

  He took a deep breath and slowly opened his eyes.

  Tommy let out a long, slow sigh. It takes a place like this, he realized, to make you understand.

  He shook his head slightly, reaching for the textbook, his attention driven like a herder’s cattle team into focus, with mental whip and imagined sharp words.

  He was lying like that, in his berth, concentrating on the case law governing a dispute between a paper corporation and its employees from more than a dozen years earlier, when he heard the first angry shout coming from one of the other bunk rooms in Hut 101.

  The sound made him sit up sharply. He pivoted his head, like a dog that catches a scent on an odd breath of wind, turning toward the noise. He heard a second, then a third shout, and the thudding noise of furniture slammed against the thin walls.

  He swung himself out of the bunk, as did the other men in his room. He heard a voice say, “What the hell’s going on?” But by the time the question was out, he’d already headed to the central corridor running the length of Hut 101 and toward the noise of the fight in progress. He barely had time to think how unusual this was, but in all his months at Stalag Luft Thirteen he’d never, not once, seen or heard of two men coming to blows. Not over a poker game loss, or a hard slide into second base. Not a dispute on the hard dirt basketball court, or over a theatrical interpretation of The Merchant of Venice.

  Kriegies did not fight. They negotiated. They debated. They took the minor defeats of camp in complete stride, not because they were soldiers trained to military discipline, but because they understood implicitly that they were all in the bag together. Personalities that clashed invariably found ways of working out their differences, or studiously avoided each other. If men held rage, it was rage at the wire and at the Germans and at the bad luck that had put them there, although most realized that in its own way the bad luck that had caused them to be shot down was the greatest good luck of all.

  Tommy ran toward the voices, hearing intense fury and uncontrolled rage. It was hard for him to understand what the fight was about. Behind him, the corridor was filling with the curious, but he’d managed to move quickly, and so he was among the first men to arrive at Trader Vic’s bunk room.

  What Tommy saw astonished him.

  A bunk bed had been partially overturned, and was leaning up against another. A hand-hewn wooden locker filled with cartons of cigarettes and tins of foodstuffs lay scattered in one corner. Some clothes were strewn about and several books were dashed to the floor.

  Lincoln Scott stood alone, back against one wall. He was breathing hard and his fists were clenched.

  The other bunkmates were arrayed in front of Vincent Bedford.

  The Mississippian had a trickle of red blood streaking down from beneath his nose, across the corner of his mouth, and onto his chin. He was struggling against four men, who pinned his arms back, holding him. Bedford’s face was flushed, his eyes wild.

  “You’re a dead man, nigger!” he shouted. “Hear me, boy? Dead!”

  Lincoln Scott said nothing, but stared at Bedford.

  “I’m gonna see you die, boy,” Bedford screamed.

  Tommy felt himself abruptly shoved aside, and as he pivoted, he heard one of the other kriegies abruptly cry: “Attention!” In the same instant, he saw the unmistakable figure of Colonel MacNamara, accompanied by Major David Clark, his executive officer and the camp’s second in command. As all the men in the room clicked their heels together and saluted, the two men pushed themselves into the center of the bunk room, rapidly surveying the detritus from the fight. MacNamara’s face reddened swiftly, but his voice remained even and harshly calm. He turned to a first lieutenant Tommy knew only vaguely but who was one of Trader Vic’s roommates.

  “Lieutenant, what happened here?”

  The man stepped forward. “A fight, sir.”

  “A fight? Please continue.”

  “Captain Bedford and Lieutenant Scott, sir. A dispute over some items Captain Bedford claimed were missing from his private locker.”

  “Yes. Continue.”

  “Blows were exchanged.”

  MacNamara nodded, his face still filled with restrained anger. “Thank you, lieutenant. Bedford, what have you to say in this matter?”

  Trader Vic, shoulders pushed back, stepped forward with precision despite his disheveled appearance.

  “Items of personal importance were missing, sir. Stolen.”

  “What items?”

  “A radio, sir. A carton of smokes. Three bars of chocolate.”

  “Are you certain they are missing?”

  “Yes sir! I keep very careful count of my inventory at all times, sir.”

  MacNamara nodded. “I believe you do,” he said stiffly. “And you believe Lieutenant Scott to have committed this robbery?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And you accused him of this?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Did you see him take the items?”

  “No sir.” Bedford hesitated slightly. “I returned to the bunk room. He was the only kriegie here. I made my usual evening co
unt of the stock—”

  MacNamara held up his hand, shutting him off. He turned to Scott. “Lieutenant, have you taken any items from Bedford’s locker?”

  Scott’s voice was husky, rough-edged, and Tommy thought he was trying to withhold emotion. His eyes were straight ahead, as if fixed not on any person, but the opposite wall, and his shoulders remained thrust back.

  “No sir.”

  MacNamara narrowed his own eyes, staring hard at the black flyer.

  “No?”

  “No sir!”

  “You maintain you’ve taken nothing from Captain Bedford?”

  Asking the same question three times got Lincoln Scott to turn slightly, so that his eyes locked with Colonel MacNamara’s.

  “Correct, sir.”

  “So, you believe Captain Bedford is mistaken with his accusation?”

  Scott hesitated, assessing the question before replying.

  “I would not characterize what Captain Bedford is, or is not, sir. I merely state that I have not taken any possessions that rightfully belong to him.”

  MacNamara scowled at the response. He pointed a finger at the flier’s chest.

  “Scott, I will see you tomorrow morning after Appell in my room. Bedford, you I will see . . .” for a moment, the briefest of seconds, the commanding officer hesitated. Then he spoke sharply: “No, Bedford, I’ll see you first. Right after morning roll call. Scott, you be waiting outside, and when I’ve finished with him, I’ll see you. In the meantime, I want this place cleaned up. I want it completely shipshape in five minutes. And as for tonight, there will be no further outbursts. Absolutely none! Do you men understand that?”