I hesitated. “No, sir, I don’t. But as my mother would say, there are a lot of things that happen in this world that we don’t understand.”
“A wise woman, your mother . . . but this time the question is about an underground Nazi guerrilla movement that intends to continue the war. Ever hear of them?”
“I read about them in Time, sir. But I’ve never met any of them.”
“Precisely. The poor Krauts have enough to worry about trying to keep alive and persuading us that they were never Nazis and hated Hitler. But Mr. Luce of Time Incorporated takes the werewolves seriously. He has sent out one of his best photographers to take pictures of the Constabulary capturing some of them.”
“I see, sir.”
“They’ve even got a locale, over in the Bohemian Alps.”
“Close to the Russkies?”
“You bet. We have no evidence of any guerrilla activity in our area. But Major Carpenter of CID has information about this nest of werewolves.”
The general made a slight face to indicate his distaste for Major Carpenter, a spit-and-polish soldier with paratroop wings and looks but, as I knew and the general did not, no record of combat.
“I see, sir.”
“So the major will be in charge of the raid, if you can call it that. We’ll send along two squads of our men because it’s our jurisdiction. I want you to be in charge of our lads, Chuck. Keep an eye on both the man from Life and the major.”
“Me, sir?”
Fear had erupted in my loins and permeated my whole body, not a shiver this time or a chill, but bitter cold as if from a fierce arctic wind.
“Yeah. I like what I read about you in the papers, Chuck.” He had waved the sheaf at me. “You seem to know what you are doing, unlike most of the misfits we have out here.”
“Yes, sir. Those stories are exaggerated, sir.”
“I don’t believe it.” He had laughed.
Polly Nettleton, the one who really ran the Constabulary if anyone did, frowned later when I brought a stack of memos up to her.
“Be careful, Chucky. It could be dangerous out there.”
“I’ll wear my long underwear, ma’am.”
“I don’t mean the cold.”
“Why me?”
“Because after McQueen and me,” she said with her wondrous Irish smile, “you’re the smartest person in this outfit.”
“Shows how bad things are.”
So there I was in the Bohemian Forest with two squads of our comic-opera soldiery, assigned to do battle with a Nazi guerrilla army that we were pretty sure did not exist.
Even now, I remember the sour taste of terror. I had been numb with fear during the long, bitter-cold ride in our rickety jeep. Now I was so scared that I could hardly climb out of the jeep in response to the major’s orders.
It’s natural to be afraid, I had told myself, when you are going into combat for the first time. Except this wasn’t combat, was it?
Well, it could be, couldn’t it?
I said the Act of Contrition twenty times during our ride up the foothills.
Or was it the grace before meals?
And, good Catholic that I was, I had examined my conscience in preparation for death almost as many times.
If the werewolves were good soldiers, they would hear us coming. If they had as many weapons as they were supposed to have, they could cut us down in about three seconds.
We were the good guys, however. It was easy to tell because we wore the white hats—well, actually, blue hats, but we drove in white jeeps. As to the werewolves, how could anyone with a name like that be anything but bad guys?
The only sin for which I could not plead excusing cause or at least extenuating circumstances was my treatment of Rosie, or Rosemarie as I now called her more politely. Faced as I was with what my fevered imagination considered the prospect of almost certain death, I figured I ought to apologize to her for all my nastiness.
I would write her a letter:
Dear Rosemarie,
Maybe I’ve grown up a little here in Germany, not much, but perhaps just a little. So I want to apologize to you for all the times I was rude or sarcastic to you. Maybe you know that it was just a silly little game that both of us played, but I was the one that kept the game going, and I’m sorry. I hope we can be friends when I return.
I also want to thank you, however belatedly, for your wonderful gift before I left for the Army. I use it every day and think of you whenever I click the shutter.
Love,
Chuck
In my head, I hesitated about the second-last word of the letter. It would certainly guarantee a reply after she and Peg had discussed its implications, and I was so lonely and so sexually hungry that I desperately wanted mail from a beautiful young woman, even my sometimes despised foster sister.
As we inched down the hill toward the farmhouse, slipping and sliding on the snow, we looked like comic-opera soldiers, in paratroop boots although we were not paratroops, yellow scarves, blue berets (or helmets), blue cords on our shoulders, .45-caliber pistols on our wide, white belts, everything but the Sam Browne straps over our shoulders.
The fancy uniforms were supposed to impress the Germans. Maybe they did, though at the time most Germans were in no position not to be impressed by the occupying armies.
Mostly we rode around the country in our white jeeps and looked as efficient and as competent as we could.
I can’t remember what I thought as we drew near the farmhouse. But I’m sure the letter to Rosie was in the back of my head and maybe her image close to the front of the same head. I probably decided that I would not tell her that her mixture of beauty, passion, and intelligence overwhelmed me, though even then I kind of half knew that was the truth. Nor would I write that while one part of me resented that my family had destined us for one another, another part of me was both delighted and terrified by that prospect.
Nor would I say how much I disliked her father. I disliked him mostly out of envy. He was rich and we were poor.
The word love would be enough and more than enough when I finally transferred the letter from my head to paper when we got back to Bamberg.
If we got back to Bamberg.
Thus, I must have persuaded myself I had made my peace with both Rosemarie and my Maker, though given who and what I am, I’m sure I cautioned the latter that the word love was still open to discussion.
As I had cheerfully told my “men,” all of whom were my age or even younger, we should not worry much about the Russkies. There was no reason to think that their occupation armies, even their elite troops, were better than we were.
The frightened Life photographer was hiding behind one of our jeeps on the rim of the little wooded hill where the rest of our command cowered as I led my squad toward the farmhouse where the alleged Nazis were waiting.
“Want to come with us?” I asked him as I flicked the safety off my machine pistol, John Wayne riding to battle.
I had fired the pistol exactly twice in practice and was by no means certain that it would either work or stay in my hands if I had to squeeze the trigger.
The photographer shook his head with an effort at nonchalance. “I’ll let you guys make sure that there’s something to photograph.”
Right.
If I were killed in action, General Meade would have shaken his head sadly and said, “He was a damn fine soldier.”
All I wanted to be was a damn fine accountant.
Well, we didn’t have to put up with TV cameramen in those days.
My skepticism about the werewolves was based on a few months of watching the Germans struggle back from defeat. It seemed to me that whatever their faults, they were not about to risk either their lives or a chance for an improvement in their living conditions in the name of a lost cause.
Especially since, to hear the citizens of Bamberg, no one was or ever had been a Nazi. Bamberg had not been bombed because it had very little industry. Through the years the burghers we
re too busy fighting with the prince bishop to build up much industry. In ages past they had learned how to live with invaders. They bought off the Hussites back in the fifteenth century. During the Thirty Years’ War they were Catholics or Lutherans depending on which army was in town. So they could get along with us if they had to, and they had to.
But they didn’t much like us, even if we were preferable to the Russians, who had preceded us and had terrorized the city and raped every woman they could find in the months before we replaced them. When I had tiptoed into the concert hall (on Dominican Street and in the old Dominican church, which was then a concert hall), I had been favored with a number of dirty looks. What is this barbarian doing here? Surely he cannot appreciate the Bamberg Symphony playing and singing Beethoven’s Ninth?
I had given them dirty looks back and sat down to enjoy the music. It had been well enough done, heaven knows, but not much joy was displayed in the choral movement. Admittedly the Bambergers did not just then have much to be joyous about, but I suspected they wouldn’t have smiled during Schiller’s verses even in the best of times.
Dirty looks are one thing, I reassured myself as I led my seven-man team across the clearing toward the farmhouse, armed revolt is quite another.
Snow was beginning to fall again from dark clouds scudding, it seemed, almost above our fingertips. I wondered how warm it was inside the house.
I waved my arm in a signal to my men the way I had seen officers do in the war movies. They fanned out around the house the way they had seen soldiers fan out in the war movies. I wondered if any of them besides me had fired an automatic weapon even once.
“Kelly, Crawford,” I whispered hoarsely above the wind, “cover me.
“Huh?” Kelly yelled. “What’d you say, Sarge?”
“I said cover me,” I shouted back.
Neither Of us was quite sure what that meant.
I took a deep breath, murmured a prayer, decided absolutely that I would add love to my letter to Rosemarie, and kicked the battered old door of the farmhouse open.
Rather, to be precise about it, I tried to kick the door open. It didn’t budge. I kicked it again. And yet again.
You see it in a movie and you laugh till you cry.
Finally the door swung open and an elderly German woman said, “Ja? . . . Mein Gott!”
I shoved her aside and pushed my way into the front room of the old house. An old man, a middle-aged couple, and a boy about fourteen crowded up against the wall by a weakly burning fireplace, hands reaching for heaven.
What else do you do when comic-opera soldiers crash in on a cold winter day?
“Search it,” I ordered my men. “Every inch . . . and put the safeties back on your weapons.”
Only one man did so. The others had forgotten to release them in the first place.
My quintet of prisoners hardly seemed a threat to the United States of America. Rather they looked hungry, threadbare, tired, and scared stiff, exactly the way most Germans looked when the Constabulary paid them a visit.
If this was the best the neo-Nazis could do, they weren’t much of a problem.
“No one else, Sarge,” Kelly shouted happily.
“Crawford?”
“Empty, Sarge.”
“Great.”
I stepped outside into what was now a blizzard and signaled Major Carpenter and the rest of our “combat team,” which was hardly a team and certainly wasn’t ready for combat, and the Life photo man.
They came running down the hill pell-mell, like Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg.
What if it was a trap, I thought, with a real-life werewolf holding a gun at my head.
“How many men, Sergeant?” Sam Houston Carpenter waved his gun dangerously.
“Three, sir, including an old man and a boy.”
Carpenter, who, as I knew, had fought the war from a desk in Grosvenor Square (Der Eisenhower Platz it was also called) in London, seemed more relieved than disappointed.
“Have you found the weapons?”
“We’re searching, sir.”
The Life man, now heroic, brushed the two of us aside and charged into the house, camera clicking wildly.
With all the film he was using he ought to come up with a few shots in which by accident the light and composition were presentable.
I followed him in, unlimbering Rosie’s Kodak, as I perhaps perversely called it in my mind, and carefully snapped a few shots of my prisoners. Life was looking for fanatical neo-Nazis. I saw only five terrified human beings.
“Can’t find any weapons, Sarge,” Kelly reported to me, not the major, a violation of military courtesy that the major hardly noticed.
“Oh, damn,” Life moaned, “there have to be weapons. I came a long way in the cold to get pictures of weapons.”
Did he want us to fake a weapons cache? Maybe.
“Another false alarm,” Major Carpenter sighed. “Keep on searching, Sergeant. We have to find something.”
I pondered making a deal with the Germans. Tell me where the guns are and I’ll see that you get off. But they were going to get off anyway, even if there were guns.
I prowled around one of the crude, simple bedrooms. No running water, poor devils. I moved the small homemade wooden bedstead. Underneath it a trapdoor.
“Kelly, open this trapdoor.”
“Sure, Sarge.”
Good military response, right?
Underneath the trap was a tiny, bitter-cold cellar, maybe a four-foot cube. Unwrapping tattered, old Wehrmacht gray blankets, I discovered a half dozen rifles and a couple of boxes of ammunition, maybe two hundred rounds.
Jeez, why didn’t we bring the Second Armored Division? “Huh, Sarge?”
Had I said it aloud?
“Never mind, Crawford. . . . Major Carpenter, we’ve found the weapons and ammo, sir.”
So the Life man got his pictures, Major Carpenter would probably get a promotion, and the Constabulary got its werewolves. Don’t the Mounties always get their man?
And I caught a few good shots in my project, sanity protecting, of documenting what it was like to be defeated in a war.
“Well, son,” the general asked me the next day, “what do you think of our werewolves?” I had reported to him in his steamy quarters in the Concordia, a fabulous eighteenth-century burgher’s home on the banks of the Regens down the street from our HQ on the Domplatz. There was enough heat in the house for the whole shivering city of Bamberg.
“They claim that the weapons were left there in 1945 by a retreating SS unit and that they never touched them. They were afraid to turn them in because they didn’t want to be accused of being werewolves.”
“What do you think, Sarge?”
“None of the weapons were operational, sir. And the ammo is worthless.”
“Precisely.”
“And Life has its pictures.”
The general smiled at me. “You catch on quickly, son.”
“But what about those poor farmers? They have no record of being Nazis.”
“They’re warmer in our custody than back on their farm.”
“That’s for sure.”
“And better fed.”
“So when Life leaves, we keep them around for a while and then drop the charges for lack of evidence?”
“That’s the humane thing to do,” he sighed as he rose from his easy chair and tossed another log on the fire, “isn’t it?”
The general doubtless missed his wife and family, but he lived like a Renaissance prince, except with running water and central heating. Being a ranking officer in an army of occupation was by no means all bad.
“Yes, sir.”
“Then I guess we’ll do something pretty much like that, huh?”
“Yes, sir.”
By then, we were probably, for all our corruption, the most humane conquerors in history. We’d seen the pictures of the concentration camps; some of us, myself included, had visited Belsen. But, despite my arguments with Dr. Jack B
erman in the darkroom, Americans find it hard to believe in collective guilt. Cold and hungry kids are cold and hungry kids, no matter what their country might have done in a war.
The farmers with the guns in their cellar were poor and frightened peasants, regardless of Belsen. Had they voted for the Nazis in 1933? Probably not. Their part of the world, the far northeastern fringe of Bavaria, usually voted for the Center Party, a mostly Catholic, mildly liberal group. Yet, they were part of a culture and a country that had done unspeakable things to millions of innocent people.
Jack Berman, a psychiatrist at the local Army hospital with whom I argued philosophy in the dim red light of the darkroom next to the post exchange (in the basement of the Residenz), thought that all Germans were guilty. I was clever enough to say that not all Jews were guilty for the death of Jesus, only a handful who had died long ago (a line I had picked up from a Dominican at Fenwick). Berman laughed and replied, “You Irish are always quicker with words than we are. We are, however, talking about different kinds of guilt.”
“So the people we picked up in the Bohemian Forest?”
“They are guilty of course, but what purpose is served by imprisoning them on charges which would never stand up back in the States?”
“So we must try to be just and fair and humane all at the same time. We come to the same conclusion but by different roads?”
“Mine is better,” he said with a laugh as my pictures of the women at the railroad emerged in the solution.
“I’d rather be judged by mine.”
“Wouldn’t we all.”
“God is mercy,” I insisted, using the words of the Fenwick Dominican.
I expected him to answer that God was just.
Instead, he said, “So we must all hope.”
We had at least provided the editors of Life with the pictures they wanted.
Including a picture of me standing triumphantly over a half dozen unworkable Wehrmacht rifles, with the dangerous werewolves up against the wall behind me. On the cover of the magazine. If that was the best shot our madly clicking photojournalist had produced, he hadn’t done very well.
A hero, right? In that fancy getup I should be singing a Rossini aria, I told myself with disgust when I saw the picture.
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