A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Sirs,” I said, snapping to attention, or what passed for attention in my case, and saluting clumsily.

  General Meade, a man of medium height, iron gray hair, vast eyebrows, and a ramrod-stiff back, considered my efforts with a critical eye. He handed them over to the colonel.

  “What do you think, Dick?”

  The colonel perused them with the same frowning skepticism.

  “Flawless,” he murmured.

  “Perfect,” the CO agreed.

  “A miracle,” Captain Polly agreed.

  “Infallible,” I added to the litany.

  General Meade smiled a frosty but tolerant smile.

  “Another smart-mouth mick, Polly?”

  “It would seem so, General.”

  “First clerk typist this year who can type. Remarkable.”

  “What else can you do?” Col. Dick McQueen, as I would later learn was his name, demanded.

  “Not much, sir. I can do shorthand. I take pictures and develop them. I sing with almost any excuse. I’ve been known to hold the ball for a point-after-touchdown kick. Don’t count on me to know anything about firing a gun.”

  “I think we’ve heard of your football exploits,” Colonel McQueen observed. “Quite impressive.”

  Wrong story, wrong image. But I wasn’t going to argue.

  “Shall we keep him, Polly?” the general asked.

  “Till someone better comes along.”

  Thus did the poor little orphan from the West Side of Chicago find a home away from home. It was not one that made me any less homesick. But at least they were ready to keep the funnylike clown off the streets through the winter.

  In a few weeks, I owned the HQ staff. It took only some wit and a few political skills for me to shape up the outfit. Practically no one noticed, neither military nor civilian (mostly German), neither man nor woman. Indeed they seemed delighted to have me around, especially since I effectively covered their mistakes and protected them from Captain Polly’s dark moods.

  We were the Constabulary, a command of some ten thousand carefully selected American troops—a substitute for a national police force—who were supposed to maintain order in occupied West Germany and in particular hunt out the remnants of Nazi fanatics who had promised to continue guerrilla warfare after the surrender a year and a half before.

  The most powerful military establishment in history had demobilized itself promptly after the end of the war with Japan. Our leaders had two choices: they could try to fight the massive demand to go home at once and risk mutiny and shattering defeat in the next election; or they could acquiesce with as much grace as they could and commit the occupation of Germany and Japan to a mostly volunteer army of kids and malcontents.

  People like me.

  The situation was pretty bad, as you will doubtless perceive from the fact that, seven months out of Fenwick High School, I was a sergeant in command of two picked squads of our allegedly best unit. Somehow my press clippings had caught up with Maj. Gen. Radford Meade, who commanded the Constabulary, and he decided that, as matter of absolute faith, I was a “first-rate” soldier.

  I was in effect a desk sarge in a third-rate state police force. “Magic Chuck” guarding the O.K. Corral when there weren’t any Clantons around and without any idea of what he would do if the Clantons showed up, especially since on our side we had no one remotely like Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday.

  Fortunately for all concerned, there was not that much to do. Genocidists or not, the Germans were a law-abiding people. There were a few criminal gangs to hunt down, mostly on the fringes of the black market (remember Orson Welles as Harry Lime in Graham Greene’s film The Third Man?). If the gangs were too big for the military police to chase, we were called in with our blue berets and white jeeps and automatic weapons. Occasionally we were assigned to round up refugees who were wanted for war crimes in our or allied sectors. And once or twice, we were supposed to search for werewolves, the legendary Nazi diehards.

  They made me a sergeant after a couple of weeks, much to my surprise.

  We were not exactly elite troops, but we were better than the rest of Seventh Army; that is to say, we were a little less likely to be selling on the black market, buying women with cigarettes and nylons, and worrying about our venereal diseases. If the Russians had pushed across the boundary line, only about thirty miles north of our headquarters in Bamberg, a quaint medieval city untouched by war for a thousand years (because the prince bishops wouldn’t let the burghers build walls so they had to negotiate with invaders instead of resisting them), we wouldn’t have been able to hold them up for more than thirty minutes.

  But they were not likely to do that because we still had our monopoly on the atomic bomb.

  My only complaint about the HQ was that Captain Polly reminded me not only of the good April, but also of Rosemarie.

  She wasn’t my girl, I tried to argue, I didn’t want her as my girl. I had somehow forgotten, I tried to explain to God, how crazy she was. Sure she was beautiful and bright and passionate and fragile, but she was also wild and unpredictable and already she drank too much. It was her father’s fault indeed, but there was not much I could do about it, was there?

  The Deity did not venture an opinion on my faint heart.

  All I wanted, I tried to explain to God, was letters from home. I was homesick from the day I left Menard Avenue—the family had not yet moved into our new apartment on Austin Boulevard—and never got over it. Never even improved. The twenty months ahead of me stretched out like an eternity. I felt that the Army would be my life for the rest of my life. I’d not been away from my family in my life and had no idea till I lost them, temporarily I kept telling myself, how much they meant to me.

  I was so lonely I even wrote that last sentence in one of the letters to my mother. It was the letter in which I told her about my photographic efforts at the Hauptbahnhof

  The worst part of living in this town is the scenes enacted every day at the railway station. Most of the GIs are out in the encampment on the edge of the city, across the Rhine-Danube Canal (unlike we lucky few who are in the hotels and the homes near the HQ of the Constabulary). At the end of the day, I climb into my white jeep (yep, I have my own jeep and I’ve learned how to drive, mostly by trial and error) and pick my way through the Germans on their bicycles out to the encampment with messages from HQ.

  Am I a good driver?

  I haven’t knocked anyone off a bicycle yet!

  Anyway, I drive to the station at the time of the arrival of the train from Leipzig every afternoon. It’s the route for soldiers returning from prison camps in Russia.

  Our wartime ally, good old Uncle Joe Stalin, for reasons of his own has decided to send home some, maybe all, of the surviving German POWs. They dribble in groups of five or ten or maybe fifteen every day. Scores of women, young, middle-aged, old, wait patiently every day for the train. Some days all of them straggle away in the gloom—the days are mostly night in this part of the world in winter and the sun doesn’t shine much during the day either—shivering in their thin coats, their heads bent, their shoulders bowed.

  Then some days, a husband or a son or a lover appears. Every woman in the station celebrates the good fortune of the woman whose man has returned.

  You wonder how they’ll put together their lives after so much suffering, especially since many of them are missing an arm or a leg.

  A scene from the Inferno I sometimes think.

  Yes, Dad, I am reading it, you’d be surprised how literate a guy can become when there’s nothing else to do and he can’t take the smell of photographic chemicals any longer and has seen It’s a Wonderful Life for the sixth time.

  Then, other times, at the station, I marvel at the power of human hope.

  I take pictures when there is enough light. They don’t try to stop me, partly because I’m an American and can do anything I please, partly because they’re too tired to resist, and partly, I like to think, because they somehow see I’m o
n their side.

  The side of those who hope.

  Yes, I did write that last line.

  All of Europe and Germany especially were in deep economic trouble in the winter of 1946. England was paralyzed by blizzards, shortages, and unemployment. Food rations were smaller than during the war. Berliners, with characteristic efficiency, dug thousands of graves in the autumn before the ground froze, for those who would die of starvation during the winter. More than nineteen thousand people in that city were treated for frostbite during the winter. Signs appeared saying, “Blessed are the dead, for their hands do not freeze.”

  Things were not quite so bad in Bamberg that year. Few starved to death or froze to death, only those who were already old or sick. Yet, almost everyone was hungry and cold. Nothing had prepared me for the physical and moral degradation of the Germans in 1946. I had grown up in the Depression. I had seen vets selling apples. I had helped my mother in our parish’s soup kitchen on West Madison Street. I had seen bread lines. I had seen the bleak despair on the faces of neighborhood children when they were ejected from their apartments and sat forlornly on the family furniture that had been summarily thrown on the front lawn. I had recoiled with horror at the Negro (as we called them then) slums along the Lake Street elevated on the way to the Loop. Yet, nothing prepared me for Germany the year after the war. For the first month I could not eat, the only time in my life that I experienced such a problem.

  I tried to persuade my GI friends who were working in the smalltime black market—those who were sending home a couple of thousand dollars a month—that they were cheating these sick, dispirited, shivering people. They didn’t see it that way, or if they did, they weren’t troubled.

  “Hell, Sarge, everyone’s doing it.”

  “It’s no skin off my ass.”

  “They lost the war, didn’t they?”

  “You seen the concentration camps? They don’t deserve our Pity.”

  “Their own are robbing them, why shouldn’t we do it?”

  “They owe me two years of my life. I’m getting mine back.”

  The Bambergers, their faces pinched, their eyes averted in shame, listlessly shuffled down the streets in tattered old clothes, shoes with newspapers for soles, thin blankets clutched tightly around their shoulders for coats. Some of them were as thin and worn as the survivors of the concentration camps in the newsreels I had seen. Many of them died of pneumonia or influenza complicated by exposure and malnutrition. Some lived in freight cars that had been damaged in the air raids on the railway yards, burning pieces of their crude homes to stay warm. Others huddled under the bridges in lean-tos made of Wehrmacht greatcoats. They were the Nazi enemy, but I could not harden my heart against them, particularly against the kids.

  I gave most of my monthly supply of cigarettes, nylons, and chocolate bars to kids. The Depression, I often thought, was the Garden of Paradise compared to Germany in the winter of 1946.

  Corruption permeated the Army of Occupation, as I would later learn from history books it permeated all armies of occupation everywhere. A GI I lived with sent home eighty thousand dollars to his parents after six months in Bamberg. In 1947 dollars. It was routine for some soldiers to send home ten thousand dollars a month. They’d make out a postal money order for eleven thousand dollars, one thousand of which was a tip to the postal clerk for winking at the transaction.

  Everyone was doing it, they would argue. So it couldn’t be wrong. We could buy a gallon of gas for ten cents and sell it for twenty dollars. A carton of cigarettes (we could buy one every week at the PK) was worth fifteen dollars on the black market. We paid the elderly woman who straightened up our room in the old Messerschmitt House two packs of cigarettes a week. She took care of ten rooms. Not a bad profit. She was our slave maybe, but a well-paid slave.

  As were the women and girls whom we made our sexual playthings—slaves they were for all practical purposes, but we paid them well and sometimes even took good care of them.

  I didn’t smoke, but I bought my carton a week and gave packs to people who seemed to need help. I also stashed them away in a locker at the Residenz, against a rainy day, as my mom would have said. I didn’t deal, however, in the black market, not the minor one that most of the other GIs played in or the big-time one that ran so efficiently that it reminded me of the Chicago mob. No matter how corrupt everyone else was, I told myself after I’d been in Bamberg for a month that I was a good Catholic, the product of twelve years of Catholic education, eight years at St. Ursula, four years at Fenwick (from which I had graduated a lifetime ago, that is six months ago). I would not become a crook, not even if everyone else around me did.

  Before my term in Germany was over, I had violated far more serious laws of both God and country.

  “We corrupt everything we touch in this country,” I had exploded to Col. Dick McQueen, the chief of staff of our outfit. “Especially their women. Our guys claim that for a pair of nylons, a chocolate bar, and six packs of cigarettes, they can have any Barnberger woman they want.”

  “They exaggerate.”

  McQueen was a tall, handsome man with thick blond hair, fair skin, and a vast smile. He was the most competent officer of our unit, much smarter than General Meade. He owned a Medal of Honor that he never wore. The only decoration he did wear was the badge of the combat infantryman. He seemed to me to represent the integrity and ability that West Point was supposed to inculcate in its officers. If there were more men like him in Bamberg, I told myself, there would be a lot less corruption. Like General Meade, whom he would replace the next year, he had taken a shine to me.

  “Not all that much.”

  “I don’t like it either, Chuck. I don’t know what we can do about it. The GIs are lonely and hungry and have the nylons and the chocolate bars, and the women want to live. Don’t underestimate these people. They’re going to bounce back. You can see their determination in the hatred in their eyes.”

  “If they were buying my sisters with nylons and cigarettes, I’d hate them.”

  “It’s this way after every war when one side is completely vanquished, Chuck. We’re corrupt but not as corrupt as most armies of occupation.”

  At first, I hadn’t noticed the hatred. The Bambergers seemed eerily docile to me. Maybe that was the flip side of hatred. They did bounce back all right. Hatred was perhaps less the explanation than habits of hard work. They also exploited their own, just as my buddy had said. Their great postwar artists, such as the novelist Heinrich Boll and the filmmaker Werner Fassbinder, thundered against the corruption and greed of the German “economic miracle” and rightly so. Yet, it was not all corruption and greed. Survival was a powerful motive. So too I thought was determination to overcome shame and humiliation.

  And guilt. A few of the Germans—not many—I came to know before I went home were ready to admit that their country had done terrible things.

  “We kick them into the gutter and stomp on them,” I said to Colonel McQueen at the end of that discussion. “And now we’re starting to pick them up, dust them off, and give them another chance. Why?”

  “Because we’re Americans, Chuck.” His eyes had a faraway look in them. “Because some of us can see ourselves in the same situation but for the grace of God.” His face became grim. “Because we can imagine our women having to do the same kinds of things to stay alive.”

  “We’re helping them so they can fight off the Russkies for us, aren’t we?”

  “We’d do the same thing if the Russkies all became Boston Irish Catholics tomorrow like John Nettleton.”

  Colonel Nettleton was the husband of Capt. Polly Nettleton, General Meade’s assistant.

  “God forbid!”

  “It’s good to have people like you around here, Chuck, people who worry about morality. We should have more.”

  “I have the impression that here at HQ one of me is almost too many.”

  We both laughed, but uneasily. Colonel McQueen had said exactly what I had hoped he would sa
y, and my conscience was calmed for the moment. Yet, he had seemed anxious through the whole difficult conversation. Later I would wonder if his nervousness was that of a man who knew he was violating his own principles.

  My ambivalence about Germany is as strong today as it was in the winter of 1947, when Dean Acheson in the State Department was preparing the drafts of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshal Plan, which would save the economies of Europe and launch the German “economic miracle.”

  Germany would play an important part in my ongoing comedy of errors, and not always a benign one either.

  12

  “O’Malley,” said Major Carpenter, his Southern drawl turning clipped in anxiety. “You take one of your squads down there and y’all see what’s going on with those werewolves.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said briskly, trying to hide that I was as scared as he was.

  I mean, werewolves are supposed to be scary, aren’t they?

  So I waved the other seven men out of our two jeeps, barked, “Follow me,” and led them down the snow-covered hill to the edge of the clearing in which our target stood—a run-down, old farmhouse in the foothills of the Bohemian Alps.

  It had started the day before when Gen. Radford Meade had stopped by my clerk typist’s desk, a sheaf of newspaper clippings in his hand.

  “What do they call you, Red?”

  “Chuck, sir.” I had risen to my feet with considerable lack of grace as I told him for the tenth time what people called me.

  “Sit down, Chuck.” He had rested his rear end on the side of my desk.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know what werewolves are?”

  “Of course, sir. A werewolf is a legendary character in German folklore, a human by day and a wolf by night, or at least on nights when the full moon is shining. A kind of Teutonic Dracula.”

  He had grinned. “You believe in them?”