Sentimental Journey

by Jill Barnett

  “I thought it was your vast knowledge and huge ego.”

  “That too.” He smiled and focused the binoculars in the direction of that far hillside. The sun glared at him and made it hard to see.

  “Cassidy?”

  He lowered the glasses and turned back to her. “What?”

  “They didn’t tell you I was blind, did they?”

  “No.” He looked back to the plane, adjusted the focus again.

  “Is that because you wouldn’t have taken the job if they had?”

  “Don’t go getting all mushy on me, now. I’m in the Army. This is my job. I do what they tell me.”

  “I’m trying to thank you.”

  “You know something, Kincaid?”

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking maybe it’s a good thing you can’t see.”

  She faced him, a little stunned. “Why?”

  He turned the binoculars toward the sunset. “Because our ride home just flew away.”

  “MEIN VATER WAR EIN WANDERSMANN”

  Rheinholdt’s men had finished three long days of hard work under the blistering sun, burying over five hundred canisters of petrol and ammunition in the sand at mapped points along the routes of the Panzer Divisions. Now, miles away from the last emergency supply point, they had bivouacked in the deep fold of a desert wadi, where campfires and smoke would be hidden from enemy sight during the black, clear nights when fires could easily give away a unit’s position.

  Daylight hours here were different. The heat made the air wave and blur. There was natural camouflage in the desert that caused the human eye to see things that weren’t there; a huge and distant lake that was only sand; a camel caravan that turned out to be a line of tall scrubs; smoke that was really sand blown upward by random wind funnels.

  It had been a difficult twenty-four hours for everyone. The day before he had lost two men. His unit’s latest assignment involved working close to the front. HQ had given them top priority and issued his men the new steel helmets that had just come from Berlin.

  But the dark helmets stood out and shone in the sun, attracting gunfire twice. One soldier died, and the other had been seriously wounded and had to be sent back to the coast for medical treatment.

  This from a piece of equipment that was supposed to protect them.

  Rheinholdt stood with his hands clasped behind his back as he searched the broad horizon. Sunset looked to be two hours away. They were to wait in this vicinity for a rendezvous with the engineering corps before moving on to the next assignment. He turned back and observed the camp below from his position on a stony plateau just above them.

  His men were listless. They lay like snakes baking in the sun. Desert war was a worse kind of hell. Logistically, a nightmare. After receiving no supplies or mail for over a month, the men were hungry for news, mail from home, and something decent to put in their stomachs.

  But he could not blame this kind of lethargy solely on the heat, on days of blazing sun, on sand that stung your eyes or fleas that burrowed into your skin. Or on the fact that the supply convoy was more than a week late.

  A comrade dies and death becomes suddenly concrete to every soldier in the unit. A hand with no lifeline right there before your eyes. The dead soldier could have been talking to you minutes before or joking around the fire the previous night, singing old beer-drinking songs along with a gramophone record and sharing a cigarette or a tin of fruit.

  In one instant of war life can be gone. Standing face-to-face with mortality, a soldier must ask himself if the next bullet or scrap of shrapnel is marked for him. And when war becomes too real, confidence drops. Morale sinks faster than a rock in a cup of water.

  Rheinholdt walked back down into the middle of the camp, unnoticed in the lassitude. He stood nearby and watched a soldier swat at flies while he used his bayonet to stab pieces of floating meat from a can of AM rations: the vile Italian meat packed in tins that were stamped “AM” for Administrazione Militare.

  Rheinholdt tilted his field cap back and rubbed his chin. “So, Dietrich. How does it taste?”

  He looked up, surprised. “I believe, Herr Leutnant, that AM stands for Alter Mann.” He laughed at his own joke. “It tastes like old man.”

  “You could be right, yet I always believed that the AM stood for Alter Maulesel . . . old mule.”

  Every man within earshot laughed.

  “Duce’s men call it asino morto. Dead donkey,” someone added.

  He noticed that none of the men had stood to attention once they recognized him. He was their commanding officer, but military discipline faded on the front lines, where his concern was more about the well-being of his men, as well as their fighting preparedness . . . of which he saw little. It was time to remind them there was a war on.

  Rheinholdt let them laugh, then nodded at the Kar98k lying beside Dietrich. “Hand me your rifle.”

  Dietrich sat up straighter.

  Rheinholdt examined the bolt-action weapon, then tossed it back on the ground. “Clean it.” He turned to the others. “The rest of you. Put your weapons here.” He gestured to the ground.

  The men moved slowly, some of them groaning only because they had to sit up.

  Five minutes later he had examined all the rifles, .08s, and two MP40S. “Every one of these weapons has sand in it.”

  They looked at him from eyes that held no emotion. Their faces were sunburned to a deep red, in spite of their already tanned but filthy skin. They all needed a shave almost as badly as they needed a bath.

  “You are to stop this”—he waved his hand—”lazing about and remember where you are and why. You will clean those weapons every night. You will sleep with them. And when you wake up, you will clean them again.”

  They sat there like wooden ducks.

  He wondered for a brief moment if they had even heard his order. “Now.”

  They scattered swiftly.

  “Understand this . . . ” he added, watching them and their expressions.

  The men were annoyed and angry, but looked more alive than a few minutes ago.

  “I will not send another man to the field hospital.” He turned and walked straight toward the parked trucks, sidestepping a stack of rocks they used to anchor the tents against capricious desert winds.

  He stopped behind the closest lorry and pulled back the canvas flap, checked the contents, then turned to one of his NCOs. “Distribute these cans of vehicle paint to the men. Have them use it on their helmets.”

  “Which color paint, Herr Leutnant? There are three colors.”

  “The mustard. The same one used on the half-track. While the paint is wet, they are to roll their helmets in sand. That should stop the glare and camouflage their heads in the trenches.”

  The man gave a sharp nod and sent five enlisted men to pull the paint cans from the lorry.

  “The men have too much time on their hands. Make certain they have plenty to do before sunset.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Leutnant.”

  Rheinholdt walked over to his tent and went inside, where his personal belongings were sitting on a wooden cot. He began to unpack his canvas rucksack and settle in. He folded flat the empty sack and set it under the cot, then picked up a small shaving mirror and hung it on a wooden tent support.

  From the mirror, a filthy, almost unrecognizable face stared back at him. Rings of grimy dirt were around his eyes in the shape of sand goggles, and his lips were swollen, cracked, and blistered. He looked like a badger. His overlong hair was stuck to his scalp in the shape of his field cap and was dusty gray on the ends from sand, dirt, and wind. He scratched his scalp with both hands for a full minute. A few of his men had used their razors to shave their heads—relief from the fleas.

  He glanced down at his dull razor for a weak moment. He was filthy and ragged and as much out of uniform as most any soldier in the desert. He had cut the canvas tops of his high boots down to the ankle and allowed his men to do the same. He didn’t wear his tunic daily;
he settled for a shirt and shorts.

  But he was still an officer. And by example, the leader of his men. He could take the fleas and the dirt and the itchy, scabbed scalp.

  With a small cup of salty water from one of his canteens, he brushed his teeth, repeatedly scrubbing the brush against an almost nonexistent block of toothpowder. He rinsed his mouth, then used the same water to wash his face and hands before he dumped what was left into a canister for use in the vehicle radiators. He rewrapped a paper-thin piece of government-issue soap in old crinkled cellophane, then set it aside and sat down, unsnapping the flap on his shirt pocket before he pulled out an envelope.

  It used to be ivory. Now it was smudged with dirt and fingerprints and spotted from where he’d spilled tea on it. The paper was torn, frayed from handling and rereading the letter inside every night. He blew into the open end and carefully pulled out the folded pages.

  A photograph fell onto his knee.

  His wife and children looked back at him as if he were the camera lens.

  He picked up the photo and propped it against his mess tin atop an empty supply crate next to his bed. With the torn old envelope still in his hand, he rested his elbows on his knees for a moment and just looked at his family.

  Hedwig wore a lace collar on a dark woolen dress with a narrow belt that made her waist look as small as that of his daughter, Marthe, who was only ten. She stood next to her mother with a wistful smile that was so like her mother’s that he felt a wave of pity for the young man who would someday fall in love with his elder daughter. A man couldn’t say no to a smile like that.

  Standing on the other side of Heddy was Renate, their five year-old. She had an altogether different smile. She was grinning toothlessly. Inside the envelope was one of her front teeth she had sent him for good luck. He tapped the envelope against his palm and looked at the small ivory tooth. It was one of life’s infamous ironies that a tooth could make him smile whenever he looked at it.

  The thing he remembered most about his teeth as a child was that they were always loose. But his father’s and mother’s teeth had been loose, too, from malnourishment. One look at the photograph was enough to see that his own family looked healthy, with rosy cheeks, shining hair, and none of the pallor that hunger had given his own childhood and that of his brother and sister’s.

  Life had changed since the aftermath of the First World War, when he was very young and hungry and would dig in the fields with his father, searching for roots to cook because there was no food. After hours of combing their bare hands through dirt roads and barren fields for something—anything—to eat, they would come back to an icy-cold home with a few pieces of wood for a fire and filthy hands they had to wash in melted snow. On fortunate days, stuffed in their pockets were a few flower bulbs and a stub of a tree root for the soup pot.

  He remembered the dead dogs in the streets and the sticklike bodies of the children who lived nearby, children who seldom played because if you were hungry, your head and belly ached too much to do anything but try to sleep it away. Two of those children, the boys in the next house—one, his friend Rudolph whose father had been killed on a battlefield in Belgium—died a few months apart. There had been many nights when Rheinholdt had fallen asleep to the cries of hungry babies and the churning of his own stomach.

  Those were the days when Germany and her people almost cracked under the stifling inflation that made money in Germany worthless, the days of poverty, when they wore clothes made of ersatz cloth so paper-thin that it melted in rain and cracked in the freezing cold. It had been a time of no food or jobs or future, only poverty and despair.

  Eventually, when Hitler had turned to propaganda to impress the outside world, most Germans, like Rheinholdt himself, accepted him because their own lives were now better. Things had changed.

  His father did not like Adolf Hitler, and said he was only a fool trying to fool the world with his rows of cardboard tanks set up in city squares. In time, those long rows of military tanks made of cardboard and wood became real and were shown worldwide on German government-produced newsreels. Even when there was color in people’s skin again, his father still did not trust the Nazis.

  “You cannot join the Army, Frederich. You will be a Nazi.”

  “I will join the Wehrmacht, Father, not the Nazis.”

  “It is the same thing now.”

  “I do not think so. The Wehrmacht is Germany’s army. But even if what you believe is true, is the Nazi army so terrible?”

  “Ja!”

  “It is only politics.”

  “You are wrong.”

  “But can you not see promise in what they say? We will all have an automobile. The photos—long lines of Volkswagens—we subscribe and we will have cars. Every German. The cars are just waiting.”

  “I see no one getting these cars they promise. All I see are photographs of them. Like that nincompoop’s rows of cardboard tanks.”

  “But the tanks are now real. And the government gave every German house a radio. You have one over there. Look. See? Soon you will have an automobile, too.”

  “I see. I see more than you do. They gave us radios to listen to their talk of power and strength, about their enemies and about their ideals, which are nothing but laws of absolutes. How can this be good for Germany? I tell you, you cannot trust these men.”

  “You said yourself that the men behind Hitler are the fanatics. They will not last.”

  “Nein. This is an ugly thing, Frederich.”

  “You were a soldier. It is a noble profession.”

  “Noble?” His father’s fist slammed down on the table, and he stood up, looking down at him. “Can you be my son? How can you ignore what is happening? Do you not see the demonstrations? Do you not listen?”

  “It is only propaganda . . . for the world to see, not for Germans.”

  “You believe this?”

  “Ja.”

  “Your mother and I went to the theater last night. They kept the doors shut and guarded during the newsreels and during the Reich’s films. Why do they lock the doors if this is not for Germans?”

  Rheinholdt had only looked at his father.

  “And tell me this, are Joseph and his father not Germans? Did the security police not come to the bank last month?”

  “They came only to question them about some foreign accounts.”

  “And when they left, Joseph and his father were wearing the Jewish Star on their clothes. Joseph cannot remove it. Your friend. Your own sister’s husband must wear this thing. What do you think will happen to her, to his family and their children?”

  “Liesel is not Jewish. No one will harm Joseph or his father. The bank is too important to the city. Those foolish stars are only from Goebbels’s bitterness. They mean nothing.”

  “You are young. You do not know. War is coming. I know what war is. I have seen it. I have been in a foxhole filled with my comrades’ bodies. I have had the sun come up on a battlefield and looked down to see blood on my hands. War is young men ordered to kill strangers by strangers, for plots of land that matter little to those who kill and are killed. You, my son, will be part of war, perhaps part of creating it.”

  His father slumped down in his chair like a puppet with broken strings, which was unlike him. He was a strong, stubborn, and outspoken man. After a minute he covered his face with his hands and said quietly, “You will shame me.”

  Rheinholdt did not join.

  His father died two years before the German Army invaded Poland. Four months before that, Rheinholdt was conscripted into the German Army, after the banking house he’d worked for became part of the government.

  The army took him away from home, away from his daughters and wife. All he wanted, in truth, was for this war to be done and to go home alive. He also felt it was his own responsibility to see that his men went home to their families alive.

  He put Renate’s tooth back inside the envelope and set it near the photograph. For a few minutes he sat there,
his elbows resting on his knees as he tried to remember what home looked like.

  “Herr Leutnant?” The corporal was standing outside his tent. Come in.

  “Here is the information you wanted for Fusilier Hoffman. He was from Bavaria, the town of Altomunster.”

  Rheinholdt took the address. “Thank you, Gefreiter.”

  The corporal left and Rheinholdt pulled his paybook from his back pocket and balanced it on his knees. He flipped it open and pulled some folded sheets of writing paper from the side pocket, then spread the paper out on a footlocker and took out a pen.

  He had only written one other letter of condolence, before he came to North Africa. He rolled the pen in his fingers. The words seemed too difficult to find.

  The paybook slipped; it fell through his legs, onto the ground. He dropped the pen on the footlocker, bent, and picked up the book, then set it next to the writing paper. The pages fanned open to the book’s center. There, printed in bold letters, was the slogan:

  The German Army Is Invincible!

  He stared at it for a long time, then picked up the pen again.

  Perhaps the Wehrmacht was invincible, but he had to write to the parents of an eighteen-year-old boy and tell them that that their son was not.

  “SHOO SHOO BABY”

  It was getting cold out. Once the sun went down, the air had cooled quickly. Kitty rubbed her arms, but kept moving alongside Cassidy, who didn’t say much except to guide her around obstacles. Sharp, brittle weeds snagged her cotton stockings and her useless shoes—spectators with little holes along the seams and heels that sank. Her steps were constantly unsteady.

  She stumbled again.

  Cassidy’s hand steadied her, and he said, “It’s damned dark out here. I can’t see my hand in front of my face.”

  “Me either.”

  She laughed when he said nothing else. “It’s okay, Cassidy. You’re not going to offend me if you laugh at my blind jokes. I’ve lived this way a long time. Stand still for a minute, please.” She used his shoulder to brace herself and pulled off a shoe, then turned it upside-down and shook the dirt out of it. “My biggest problem is these shoes. They were good on the sandy slopes. The heels dug in and kept me from slipping down, but they’re bad on this uneven ground.”