A Midwinter's Tale

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Now to respond to Rosemarie.

  Dear Rosemarie,

  I’m fine. Everything went well. Someday I’ll be able to give you all the details.

  It’s kind of interesting here now, all kinds of other things going on about which I can’t write, but I can explain later. General Meade has moved me from the Vinehaus to the Bambergerhof across the street, a real hotel, even a luxury hotel I imagine. I have never lived so well in all my life and don’t expect that I ever will again. Also he has assigned a brand-new Buick to me indefinitely. I guess they think I’m making a useful contribution, though I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ve been limping around here for the last week with a banged-up knee I won in a football game!

  No, it wasn’t football. I bumped into my car during a night operation. Typical Chuck O’Malley gaffe. It’s mostly better now and I can walk without a limp most of the time, but I kind of like limping a little and carrying my cane, which must have belonged once to a Feldmarschallgeneral. The Germans have a way of running words together, don’t they?

  Speaking of Germans, you remember Brigitta, the woman who has waited at the Bahnhof every day for her husband? Well, he finally came home, half-dead but only half. They’re very happy, for which, I don’t blame them. He’s recovering in the Army hospital. And I met a man the other day who they say will be the next chancellor here when they get a government organized. His name is Konrad Adenauer, though I suspect you’ll never read about him in an American paper. He is a democrat (and Catholic) and has a long record as an anti-Nazi. He seems one tough, patrician son of a bitch. But I kind of liked him.

  Now as to Rosemarie (née Rosie), you are too hard on yourself—which is what you say to me. Let’s both agree that the charges are true on both sides and take it from there. You’re going to be a great woman. And as for love, you’ll always have the crazy O’Malleys around to protect you and care for you and support you and love you.

  With them in your corner, you can’t possibly lose—unless they drive you crazy first!

  I’m looking forward to seeing you again soon.

  Love,

  Chuck

  On the following Monday, General Meade, Colonel Nettleton, and I went over to the hospital to see Kurt Richter—but only after we were sternly warned by Captain Polly that, although he was much better, we should under no circumstance wear him out.

  To which I replied that I wouldn’t, but I couldn’t testify for the general or a certain Boston Irishman.

  I lugged along, schlepped as Dr. Berman would have said, a thin package.

  Actually Kurt looked like a different man. He was still weak and thin, but the food and the medicine fed into him by the needles sticking out of his arm had transformed him. His skin was clear and bright, his voice strong, his eyes lively. He reminded me a little of John Nettleton, not as tall and not as wide and a lot more handsome in chiseled Teutonic fashion; but he displayed the same kind of facile expressions—mobile, shrewd, witty. His eyes twinkled and his lips twitched mischievously, and his smile and laughter were quick and sincere.

  Not what one would expect of a man who had led a squadron of Tiger tanks. Nor for that matter of a man who had led a squad of Shermans. Kurt and John hit it off right away, as one might have expected they would.

  “I don’t know what you people put in these bottles.” Kurt gestured at the one over his head. “They certainly work. I never expected to feel alive again.”

  “We made a lot of progress during the war in developing medicines,” the general said.

  “Thank God something good came out of it. . . I still don’t quite understand,” Kurt added, “why you are salvaging me.”

  “You’re a dependent of an American employee,” General Meade responded.

  “Dependent?”

  “The general means relative,” I interjected.

  “I don’t mind being a dependent or a relative or anything else.” Kurt smiled. “I am always astonished by American generosity.”

  “Soothes our consciences,” I offered.

  Both Kurt and General Meade looked at me as though I had said something odd. In fact, I had spoken the truth—which may be odd.

  “You were in the battle of Kursk,” I said, changing the subject, “weren’t you? The biggest tank battle in history?”

  “Is that what they are calling it? It was a stupid mistake in a stupid campaign in a stupid war. Anybody who thought about it knew we had already lost. The Russians were making more tanks than we were and better ones too. Our Tigers were no match for their T-34s. Our eighty-eight shells couldn’t penetrate their armor except if we hit the vents in the back of them. Most of our gunners weren’t that good. The generals wanted to pull back to Poland and resist there. That damn fool wouldn’t let them. He couldn’t admit that invading Russia was a disastrous mistake. I haven’t caught up yet on what happened after Kursk, but the end result is pretty clear, isn’t it?”

  “You think the war was lost at Kursk?” John Nettleton asked. Typical American, he thought it was lost at Normandy. How could the war have been lost without us?

  “It was lost when we began it,” Kurt snapped bitterly. “It was lost when we invaded Russia. It was all folly . . . and I worry about my part in it. I thought it necessary to defeat Communism. Now I realize that we were as bad, maybe worse. Losing was bad, but winning would have been worse.”

  “The war is over,” General Meade said softly.

  “It is over.” Kurt shook his head sadly. “Yet for some of us it will never be over.”

  Changing the subject again, I said, “Tell us about the battle of Kursk.”

  “Well, in their winter offensive in the Ukraine in 1942–1943—after they had destroyed our Sixth Army at Stalingrad—the Russians had pushed a deep salient into our lines.” He drew a large, imaginary U on the bedsheet. “They had recaptured Kharkov for the second time—what was left of it—right here and were hoping to push on to Kiev, which was here. But they bogged down in the mud and ran out of gasoline and supplies. Our generals had the wonderful idea of snipping off that salient and doing to the Russians, who were building up their forces, what they had done to us at Stalingrad. The sensible thing would have been to attack here and here”—he gestured with his fingers, at the base of the salient—“but they decided to confront the Russians up here at the apex so they could take on and destroy the Russian tank forces. That was one stupid decision we can’t blame on Hitler. We had three thousand tanks, including many of our new Panthers. I don’t know what General Hoth, the commander of our Fourth Panzer Army, thought, but in the field we knew that we had all those tanks and eighteen hundred planes. Most of us were convinced that we were better than the Russians. I had my doubts. They had more tanks and I had seen one of the T-34s we had captured and I knew it was better than ours. Still, I was convinced we were more skillful.”

  He paused for breath. If Captain Polly had been there, we would have been banished from the room.

  “So”—he shrugged—“they were at least as good if not better. It was a hot, sultry summer morning, and we charged into them with formations of two hundred tanks, like Tennyson’s light brigade. They counterattacked with even more tanks. It was a nightmare after that. We were fighting in clouds of dust that turned day into night. Often we were shooting point-blank range at each other. Airplanes screamed out of the sky, Stukas dive-bombed the Russians, but they still kept coming. Most of us were temporarily deaf because of the sound of the machines and the artillery and the rockets. It became almost hand-to-hand combat. We would discover a T-34 coming out of the mists, just as they had discovered us. We would fire at each other, not twenty-five yards away sometimes. Even if we got off the first shot, it would often bounce off their armor. In that four- or five-hour nightmare the battle was lost. Then a big summer rainstorm hit us, lightning and thunder even louder than the guns. The dust cleared away, but it was impossible to see through the heavy rain. Still we shot at everything that moved. We bumped into abandoned tanks and crunched
over hundreds of dead bodies. I remember wondering whether hell could be any worse.”

  Kurt sighed deeply. The general and I said nothing.

  “I’ve been there, Kurt,” John Nettleton said in almost a whisper. “A place called Saint-Lô. Nothing like Kursk, but I’ll not forget it either.”

  “You won?”

  “Just barely.”

  Silence pervaded the room. The war in the west was over after Saint-Lô, but there was no point just then in adding that information to the conversation.

  With another sigh, Kurt went on.

  “We held them. A standoff. Except that we were the attackers and our attack had failed. The next morning when the sun rose, they had another thousand machines lined up against us. That’s when our generals decided to withdraw. My panzer was hit as we were covering the retreat. Our ammunition exploded. Everyone else was killed. I thought about charging the T-34 that killed my men with my bare hands. Then I thought of my beautiful Brigitta and wanted to live. Someone took care of that T-34 anyway, a direct hit on the ammunition. The shock knocked me over. When the Russian infantry captured me later, I was wandering around in a daze. They weren’t bad men. Before we were turned over to the prison camps, they treated me much better than we would have treated one of theirs, though”—he grinned—“not as well as you Americans have. It was only the picture in my head of my wonderful Brigitta which kept me alive.”

  “Any man with a wife like Brigie would want to stay alive.”

  “Perhaps. Even now I think I’m selfish. All my men are dead; all my friends are dead. And I am home with my wife and”—he waved a hand weakly—“in the luxury of an American hospital.”

  “As my mother would say, God must have something special for you to do.”

  He closed his eyes.

  General Meade looked at me as if to say, “Should we leave now?”

  You bet.

  “Chuck, if I may call you that, Herr Roter, do you have that picture of my Brigitta at the Bahnhof?”

  “Sure. I thought you might want to see it.” I opened the package I had brought along and presented him with an eleven-by-fourteen print on the best paper I could find, mounted on a sturdy backing. Brigie did not look as healthy and vital as she was now, but the shot showed a haunting and appealing—and determined—woman, whose allure no one could escape.

  “I call it ‘Fidelity.’ ”

  “It is my Brigitta,” he said as he admired the print. “This will appear in a book? It should be in a book.”

  “I just take snapshots,” I said.

  “A man that sensitive ought not to be a tank commander,” General Meade said to me as we left the hospital.

  “No one, sir, should be a tank commander,” John commented.

  “He will have a hard time,” I said. “So will she.”

  The general merely nodded.

  Would they make it? I wondered. They damn well better.

  On Thursday morning, we briefed the officers of B Company in their barracks over in Bamberg Nord. A major, two captains, and three lieutenants. They did not much like the idea of a sergeant outlining tactics on a large aerial map—with a pointer no less.

  “How the hell do we know they’ll be there tonight?” the major demanded in a surly tone.

  “We don’t, sir. They have been in the same meadow on the last three Thursdays, but we cannot be sure that they don’t omit one operation a month. It would seem, however, that the exchange of goods is a routine matter for them.”

  “What do we have besides your word,” one of the captains growled, “that any of this has happened?”

  I placed my prints on the briefing table, not including the close-up of our suspect.

  “How did you get these, kid?” Lieutenant Lowry, a young shavetail, just out of the Point and not two years older than me, demanded.

  “I merely walked among them, Lieutenant Lowry, sir. In the dark they all assumed I was from the other convoy.”

  “Very risky,” said the major with a hint of respect in his voice.

  Very crazy too, I thought, but did not say. “Photographers will risk anything, sir, to get a good shot.”

  They didn’t laugh. Dullards!

  So we left Bamberg Nord late in the afternoon, under a clear blue sky. It was a pleasant day, but it might be a chill evening. Everyone was dressed in combat fatigues instead of fancy uniforms and with helmets over helmet liners. The troops were silent for most of the ride on the two-lane road down to Büttenheim. Most of them had not been in combat and clearly did not relish the prospect of going into battle against fellow Americans. They were not supposed to know what the operation was about, but they had doubtless heard rumors.

  There were the usual snafus—flat tires on some of the vehicles, mechanical failures on others, wrong turns by those trying to catch up. We had been a half hour late leaving Bamberg Nord. After the general had completed his detailed briefing behind the onion dome in Büttenheim, we were almost an hour behind schedule. It was already getting dark. We gotta hurry up.

  I was the only one who knew what that trail was like, and I didn’t want to lead two hundred men down it in the dark.

  “Now, remember this,” General Meade continued to babble. “Most of these men are not armed. They may be criminals but they are Americans just the same. We will try to avoid violence. After I order them to put up their hands, you emerge from the forest with your weapons at the ready. I will then order them to drop such weapons as they may have. Then we will move in and take them into custody. Keep your safeties on until I give the order to open fire. Is this clear?”

  The men nodded solemnly. This was not the cushy garrison duty that they had come to take for granted.

  “All right! Let’s move out.” The general sounded a little bit like John Wayne in later films.

  The thought of these kids (most of them my age) flicking their safeties off and opening fire terrified me. They would kill a lot of unarmed men and maybe some of their own men too. I resolved to stay out of the line of fire.

  We found the trail on the first effort, thank heaven. It was already dusk when they had all dismounted from their trucks and the general and I began to lead them down the trail. I had slung my weapon over my shoulder and secured my Leica and extra rolls of film in one thigh pocket of my fatigues and Rosie’s Kodak in the other. I made sure a dozen times that my safety was on.

  As we blundered through the forest and night quickly spread over the sky, I felt for a moment or two that I was Dan’! Boone leading the settlers out of the village and into the forest to repulse a marauding band. I figured then that it was probably the most exciting thing that would ever happen in my life (I was wrong), so I might just as well enjoy it. Thus far, I felt no fear, no tight knot in my stomach, no dry throat, no rapidly beating heart.

  Routine. Piece of cake. Right?

  The men complained about everything, as GIs will do—the dark, the rough trail, the underbrush, the cold.

  “Quiet back there,” the general yelled.

  That shut them up for a few minutes.

  “It is absolutely essential that when we get into the perimeter around the meadow, they be quiet,” I told him.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll be quiet.”

  Only a few traces of light were still in the sky, rose and gold stains from the sunset, when we finally deployed around the meadow. The general supervised the deployment and made sure that we were far enough into the trees so that the headlights of the trucks would not pick us up when the two convoys bumped into the meadow.

  “How long, son?”

  “Half hour maybe an hour.”

  I fixed a small (for those days) flash attachment, purchased the day before at the PX, on my camera. I would use it on both cameras, so there would be no time wasted in changing films. I had practiced the night before switching the flash from one camera to the other. I had finally got the hang of it.

  The cameras were my idea, another nutty one that almost got me killed.

&n
bsp; As we waited, I was still not afraid.

  Dummy.

  An hour and a half later, neither convoy had arrived.

  “They’re late tonight, son.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Maybe somehow they had got wind of our operation. Or maybe it was just a night off.

  A half hour later, the general whispered, “How much longer should we wait? The men are pretty restless.”

  We would not be able to keep this operation a secret. By tomorrow evening, everyone in Germany would know about it. Our suspect would simply suspend operations.

  “Fuck ’em,” I snapped. “We should wait till the convoys arrive.”

  Then I added belatedly, “Sir.”

  What the hell, the Army wasn’t going to be my career.

  I thought about Trudi. She had exploded with joy when I told her that I had new papers. Was that what she wanted all along? Was I played for a sucker so she and her mother and sister could get the documents they needed?

  The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this is what had happened. But the painful emptiness inside me did not diminish.

  Finally, two and a half hours after we had settled in and all of us were shivering with the cold, just after the general had shouted an order for silence, the first headlights poked through the woods. They pulled up to our side of the meadow and turned off their lights. It was the Bamberg convoy. Sam Houston Carpenter’s voice was louder than those of the others as the men stretched their legs outside the trucks.

  He had hassled me throughout the summer not because he wanted Brigitta, not because he was in league with Agent Clarke, but because he was worried I might go after the three hospital orderlies he had not arrested and they would talk. Dummy.

  Then the second convoy appeared and the unloading and reloading began, a smooth, efficient, and practiced routine. As before, twenty trucks, including the two tankers and forty or so men. We watched them for a couple of minutes. I heard the general fiddle with the mike on the portable PA we had brought along.