by Brian Hodge
“Then there was the fucking problem,” said another of the skeptics.
Arguments, back and forth. Someone else claimed to have heard that angels had been spotted in the sky, too low and small to be planes, lit by the fires and seen against the clouds of smoke. Another said she’d heard that too. Others grunted low in their throats and shook their heads.
“I think we just don’t understand it all yet,” said the older man. “Maybe they weren’t here to stop what happened, but arrived for what’s coming next.” Again, that calming smile. “It will be like the Angel of Mons…but for us…this time for Germany.”
No one was convinced, and no one dissuaded…but to Horst’s ear it was an appealing lie, cooked up when it was needed most.
*
Even to call the payloads expertly planned would sell them short. The bombs weren’t merely dropped, but orchestrated, so that the destruction they wrought verged on the biblical.
High explosives first, to blow the roofs off buildings—the taller, the better—and expose their timbered frameworks, converting them into giant, combustible chimneys. Incendiaries next, by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, dropped into the exposed city to ignite whatever they hit. Fires started and grew, and then fire met fire, combining and spreading, and then inferno met inferno. On it went until it passed a threshold and was no longer a fire, but a firestorm, a system that sustained and fed itself. Above the conflagration, the heated air rocketed skyward in a violent updraft; to fill the vacuum left behind, air rushed in from all directions, creating winds with the force of a tornado. Anything human, animal, or inanimate caught loose was swept up and sucked straight into the heart of hell.
After midnight, a second wave of bombers came for sectors of the city they’d missed during the first strike. In the middle of the next day, a third, American this time, to put the coup de grace on an ocean of fire sized some fifteen square kilometers, with temperatures as high as 1800 degrees.
It was Valentine’s Day. And Ash Wednesday.
*
Before the morning was done, an officer dogged by the youngest soldiers Horst had seen yet halted his group in the shadow of a gutted hotel and stared at him…an unnerving moment in a place where one more death would pass like a puff of smoke. Maybe he thinks I’m a Jew. By now Horst had heard how the ghettos had been emptied, and where their residents had gone…not something he wanted to think about, if the stories were really true.
“You,” said the officer, a Feldwebel by his insignia. “You’re a photographer, aren’t you?”
“For the Ministry. Yes.”
The staff sergeant nodded. “You photographed me once. We talked awhile…shared a few cigarettes. As we were moving on Moscow. Before.”
Before the counterattack that had sent them reeling into retreat, he seemed unwilling to say. Good god, this would’ve been three winters back.
“I wouldn’t have been giving anyone orders then,” the sergeant said. “I was a forward observer…? The picture was famous, a little. My family got to see it. They were proud.”
The man’s face had been fuller, too, not the gaunt hollow of today. It came back to him—the picture, if almost nothing of the man himself. Horst had taken it from just above ground level, lying in front of the post the man had entrenched into the Russian snow. Arms and shoulders and head—he rose over a bank of packed snow holding a pair of binoculars, his rifle at one elbow and a pair of potato masher grenades at the other. His face had looked more square then, shadowed with a day of beard, and he peered ahead with squinted eyes, far past Horst’s lens, as though he could see every step of those last thirty or forty kilometers to Moscow.
It was exactly the kind of photo loved by the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda: a son of the Fatherland, vigilant and strong.
“Your skills are wasted carrying the dead.” The sergeant scowled at him, up and down. “Where is your camera?”
“I lost it three weeks ago during the Wacht Am Rhein. That’s when my arm was broken. Artillery.”
“And you never got another camera?” The sergeant leaned over to one of the boys and backhanded him on the shoulder. “Give him yours.”
Swamped in a gray topcoat that brushed the tops of his boots, the youth didn’t move, said nothing. He only looked stricken.
The sergeant pointed down the length of the street behind them, all ash and corpses. “You want photographs of yourself stacking bodies? There’s nothing here your mother wants to see. Give it to him now.”
The boy shucked his field pack and dug into it; pulled out a brown leather case and handed it over.
“Will it do?” the sergeant asked.
Horst opened the case and gave the camera a quick inspection: a Leica II, maybe passed down in the boy’s family, but it seemed in good shape.
“And with your arm…you can still operate it?”
“I’ll manage.”
“There aren’t enough living left here to bury what’s left of the dead. One hand less won’t matter. Before the end we’ll have to build pyres to finish what the bombing started. The cold may keep them, but we’ll never come close to finishing before the Soviets get here, if they aren’t stopped soon.”
It was true. The Eastern front was coming closer all the time. Ivans to the east, and Tommies and Amis to the west, intent on shaking hands somewhere in the middle. As they stood here choking on the smell of the end of everything.
“So shoot what you can…while you can.”
It sounded like an order, wrapped in a joke. “Why? The Ministry would never use anything from here.”
All along, there’d been so much of the war that Horst couldn’t shoot, or at least had no reason to. Germans dying, Germans dead…since the beginning, even before the beginning, the Ministry had stressed that this was not what the people back home wanted to see. No photos of the executions of partisans and Jews, either. Send such photographs in and they would die at the hands of the censors.
Horst took them anyway sometimes. Held onto them without understanding why—for some future day, maybe—although he eventually reasoned that no matter how terrible the things they showed may have been, forbidden photos were the act of a hopeful man. They meant that some part of him saw an end to this, and that he would live to see it.
“You think this is still the same war?” the sergeant said. “It’s already come in over the radio. Goebbels wants photos from here. Immediately.”
It still seemed a mystifying request…until Horst realized that Goebbels wouldn’t want them for the edification of the German people. Rather, he would want to show them to the rest of the world; the neutrals especially. Now, more than ever, they needed the sympathy of other nations: See what the British and the Americans have done here? See how they have burned our children in their homes? See how they have set entire hospitals alight?
And they dare accuse us of great crimes?
*
Before sending Horst on his way, camera in hand, the sergeant assigned one of the young soldiers to accompany and assist him—not the boy who’d surrendered the Leica, but another one just as skinny, wearing a topcoat made for a man with longer arms. The flanges of his helmet nearly touched his shoulders, and if a razor had scraped his chin yet, Horst would’ve been surprised. He was blue-eyed and pale, with plump cheeks that flushed in the cold like summer’s first blush of red on an apple.
They didn’t speak for a while—why ask his name when he would probably be dead by spring?—until the alien loneliness of the place, and the constant presence of the dead, got to be too much. The boy identified himself as Schütze Kaltenbach, which should’ve been enough, but all along Horst had never really thought like a soldier. Rank meant little, just a formality of hierarchy, and as a private, the youth was at the bottom of the ladder.
So what was his name?
“Bruno,” he said.
Looking lost and far from home, he watched Horst take pictures, a succession of ghastly moments frozen by flames. Here,
someone burnt down to little more than a skeleton, lower legs straddling the framework of a fallen bicycle. There, a family huddled against a wall that had started to crumble away behind them, their faces seared into tight, dark masks that pulled away from their ivory teeth. Across the room, another of them lay stretched out on the floor, jaws stretched wide in a final yawn as though she’d died while gasping for air that had been sucked away to feed the fire.
“I wish I’d been here,” Bruno finally told him, and slapped his hand against the worn wooden stock of his weapon, as if he needed to feel the sting of it. “I would’ve shot down some of their planes.”
“You’d do this with your rifle?”
“I’m an excellent marksman. I would’ve climbed to the top of a bell tower and aimed for the pilots.”
Horst glanced at him over one shoulder. “How long have you had that rifle?”
“About…six weeks.”
“Then I’d expect you to bring down a whole squadron,” he said, and tried to sound as though he meant it.
*
After nearly five-and-a-half years of war, Horst wouldn’t have believed that it was possible to find and photograph things he’d never seen before. But they were around every corner of these monochrome ruins, and he was grateful for the camera because this let him relate to it all differently now, able to focus on technique instead of atrocities.
At the bottom of a dip in a street they found someone who’d dropped to his knees where he’d apparently gotten stuck upright in liquefied asphalt, trapped while he burned like a torch.
Elsewhere, they came across the charred hulk of a horse, and what looked like a person fused inside a long rent along its belly. He’d heard of desperate winter travelers crawling inside an animal to stay warm while caught out in a blizzard. This was the first time that he was aware of someone attempting it to stay cooler.
“They shouldn’t keep me here!” Furious, Bruno rubbed his hand along his rifle stock. “I should be off at the front. I should be there killing as many as I can.”
Horst knew better than to caution him against eagerness. “You’ll get your chance soon enough.”
“How many have you killed?”
“With a camera? How many do you think?”
Bruno regarded him with disbelief, even disgust. “But it’s your duty…to Germany and the Führer. It’s your duty to kill!”
“I’ve been doing my duty since before Poland. What were you doing six years ago?” Horst asked him, harshly now. “Wars are fought with more than guns. They’re fought with pictures, too. Your sergeant understands that, even if you don’t. They needed photographers…so I volunteered.”
Bruno may have had to let this sink in over several sulking steps, but he now seemed mollified. There was no reason to tell the youth why he had volunteered: that with war in the wind, offering his talents to the propaganda ministry seemed the best way to increase his chances of survival. Over the years, he’d met few photographers who wouldn’t admit the same thing, although sometimes it took an evening of lager or schnapps to bring the truth out of them.
Which wasn’t to say Horst hadn’t believed in the cause at first. Goebbels was a persuasive man, and made a compelling case for why Germany could not afford to lose, for a second time, the side of war that was fought with ideas and ideals. With precision, with logic, Goebbels had condemned the lies of the British during the last war, and the way they’d turned the world against Germany with stories of how the Hun delighted in chopping off children’s hands, gouging out men’s eyes, raping their women, torturing the old. The British had lied before and they would lie again…but this time it wouldn’t go unanswered. This time lies would be countered with truths, and propaganda would fight alongside bullets, bayonets, and bombs.
This would be Horst’s calling.
Until then, he’d been happiest to train his lens on forested hills and lakes and migrating birds. Back then, he’d believed the camera did not, could not, lie. He aimed, he focused, he snapped the shutter release, and he came home with the truth. Anyone could see the places he’d been just as he had.
He knew better now. The camera lied all the time.
It washed a scene clean of the stink and the screams. The right perspective and light could make even a putrid corpse look beautiful. And if his camera took a photo worth a thousand words, those words were only as true as the bureaucrat who wrote them decided they needed to be. He thought of his forbidden photos and suddenly wished they were in his pockets so he could burn them, rather than see them misused. In a field outside a village somewhere to the east, a mass grave filled with orderly rows of systematically shot bodies—they could’ve been left there by anyone the caption said had done it.
As they walked shoulder-to-shoulder, watchful for the worst that Dresden had saved for him, he wondered if Bruno had seen the old photograph of his sergeant, or another man just like him, and itched to follow where he led. Probably he had. Whoever it was, Horst wondered if the shot was his; if he’d had even the slightest hand in the making of this boy next to him, so eager to find his path to glory.
*
In mid-afternoon they came across the carcass of a giraffe lying along the banks of the Elbe, its legs all stiffened angles and its neck a graceful curve. Beneath the coat of ash it seemed unburnt, but its side was stitched with a row of holes. Horst snapped it, taking care to include the man who sat next to it and sobbed, refusing to leave its side. He told them he was a zookeeper, and how dozens of the animals had gotten out when the walls started to come down. It gave them a chance, at least…but look, look: almost to the river when it had been cut down by the pilot of a fighter plane.
“Except I’m no better,” he said, and wept harder. “The meat-eaters…the ones that hadn’t gotten out yet…we shot them in their cages. I’m no better.”
As they walked away, unexplored streets and pathways still beckoning, Horst wondered what might happen if he weighed down his pockets with broken bricks and turned around. If anyone would stop him from walking into the river, or if they might find it a perfectly reasonable reaction.
As he had done several times since they’d set off together, Bruno tipped his head back and looked at the sky. Until now, Horst thought he was envisioning a canopy of planes, dreaming of shooting them down with his rifle.
“Have you heard about the angels?” Bruno asked.
Horst told him that he had. Didn’t mention whether or not he believed it, and Bruno didn’t ask.
“They’re saying a miracle’s coming…that it’s like the Angel of Mons, for our side,” Bruno told him. “I…I don’t know what that means.”
“You would if you were a British schoolboy,” Horst said. “It was at a battle in Belgium early in the last war. We outnumbered the Tommies and should’ve won the day, but then we started to lose ground. Not long after, everyone in England was saying the tide turned when one of them called on Saint George and he, or an angel, appeared with a line of phantom bowmen and drove us back.”
“Did it really happen?”
“It was a story a writer made up for his newspaper, and even he said it wasn’t real.”
“So…it didn’t?” He sounded hopeful and dismayed at the same time.
“A lot of men who were there swore they saw it.” Horst shrugged. “But it would be interesting to know how many of them only remembered it after they heard the story.”
Bruno kicked at the ground as they walked and again looked as though he wanted nothing more than something to shoot. “It doesn’t mean they didn’t come here.”
“Don’t believe anything you hear in a war, Schütze Kaltenbach.” It felt important to use the boy’s rank for this. Maybe he’d be more likely to take it as an order. “Only if you see it, and sometimes you can’t even trust that.” Horst let the camera dangle from its neck strap and swept his good arm in an arc. “Look around you. If angels really came, does it look to you that they were on our side? And maybe they did. Just don’t forget your Sunday lessons�
��they burned cities, too.”
Bruno glared at him, red cheeks gone redder. “It was bombs that did that.”
“Of course. But what a playground it would’ve made here for them, ja? Maybe even the angels aren’t immune to temptation.”
Again Bruno touched his rifle like a talisman. “I should shoot you right now. For talking treason.”
“Go ahead, Schütze, if you think you have to.” And there were so many things that had built up inside over the years that he’d never been able to say. Waiting for—what, a child whose uniform and weapon made him look like the nearest thing to a soldier? “You wouldn’t be the first German whose first kill was another German.”
*
Of the roll and a half of film that had come with the camera, only the last few exposures remained when another enlisted man on a motorcycle tracked them down. Three wheels instead of two; it had a sidecar, empty. The rider wiped his goggles and tugged down the scarf covering his mouth and shouted over the engine that they’d found…something. He hadn’t been told what. Just something that had to be photographed.
While Bruno straddled the seat over the rear wheel, Horst swiveled the mounted machine gun out of his way and slid down into the sidecar. The rider throttled and they buzzed through the streets, weaving around debris and scraps that lay strewn about like heaps of burnt laundry.
He took them to a site where a group of civilian workers and soldiers, the sergeant among them, stood clustered in the street. Ashen walls, ashen faces. More than one of them had been sick in the dust. They were gathered before what he guessed, with its identifying features gone, was the rear of some massive building, maybe a government hall.
Horst pushed out of the sidecar and took a few steps away from the cycle, in no hurry to go any farther. He peered up and down the streets, startled for a few seconds when he saw a figure perched on the edge of an even more massive structure in the near distance. Just stone, he realized, a statue along the corner roofline of a cathedral, gazing over Dresden with impotent benevolence.