White Dog was positioned perfectly. In the shadows at the heart of it all, waiting, planning, he’d worked every angle. The Germans knew he was an American, he’d been betrayed a dozen times over. But the Gestapo never stepped in to stop him because, quietly, he’d made himself invaluable, trading goods, services, and most importantly, information. The Krauts rewarded him with tolerance of his presence, some business, and they’d taken Acier off his hands for a fair price. Besides, the French black market played into the Krauts’ hands: It demoralized the citizens, enflamed disgust with Vichy. The French were kept hungry, desperate, and pliable, eating from the black market trough. The marché noir fed them just enough and made them hate themselves for it, even as they groveled in the shadows.
And the Yanks? Who’s kidding who here? The Americans weren’t going to stop him. They were going to join him. Who would be greedier than a poor, dumb GI his first time in Par-ee?
White Dog had made all the right moves so far, timed everything to a tee.
‘I’m going.’
‘Back to Montparnasse?’
‘Got to keep moving, cher. It’s what I do.’
He slipped off the mattress to take his voluminous trousers off the back of a chair. He stepped into them, leaving the braces dangling, and searched for his socks.
‘Chien Blanc?’
He found his socks and sat on the bed again to slide them on.
‘Qui?’
‘Why do you dress like a zazou?’
These were the children of the well-to-do, the young ones who showed their contempt for collaborationist Vichy by wearing zoot-suit clothes and indulging their love for all things Americain, like jazz and dancing -banned by Vichy—and ‘potluck parties.’ Because of the German curfew, zazou parties usually went all night.
‘Do you miss America, cher? Is that why?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Chien Blanc?’
‘What, mon cher?’
‘Are we cowards? Les Français?’
White Dog drove his arms into his starched white shirt and tugged his braces over his shoulders.
‘Are the French cowards? No, cher, you are not. Why do you want to ask me that?’
‘Because,’ she said, gathering the sheet over her own nakedness now that he was dressing, ‘when the Americans come, will they think we did not fight the Boche?’
White Dog found the packet of sugar in his deep coat pocket. He set it on the bedside table.
‘No, cher, they won’t think that at all.’
He stood beside the bed, buttoning his shirt,
‘Lookit, you got your asses kicked by the Krauts, no question. But it wasn’t a fair fight. It’s taking the Americans, Great Britain, Canada, the Soviet Union, ail of ‘em together to beat the Krauts. You never stood a chance. That’s not cowardice, doll. That’s reality.’
He patted her dull hair and turned the doorknob.
White Dog could have left her more francs. But he closed the door, leaving her only the sugar. The cash in his pocket, White Dog’s own salvation—his reality—went with him.
~ * ~
D+15
June 21
Rain pecked at the shed roof. Ben leaned back in an old cane chair. He watched the dive of drops out of dark and ancient joists. The drips splashed into puddles, the ground could no longer drink fast enough, so soaked was it from the three-day storm.
He sat at a salvaged rickety desk. Phineas had made this dairy farm shed his little office while the regiment was stalled by the weather. The desk stood in the only dry circle inside the shed, the rest of the floor had gone muddy from leaks. The air in here thickened with the musk of rust. Tillers and tines jumbled in the shadows, mule harnesses grown moldy hung on nails. A long-handled harvest scythe, its blade unstained, slanted against the wall, alone, odd and ominous.
Ben tilted the chair forward. He set his fingers to the keys of the Underwood typewriter Phineas had secured.
He typed. The military made available form letters for chaplains, but Ben would not use one. The parents of Lt. 2nd Class Lawrence Mendelsohn would receive this letter, and even before the officer who brought it was gone from their door, they would ask God why. They’d weep and soon know how their tears would dry and leave only salt. The letter would tear a hole in them the way a German sniper’s bullet did their son. The somber father might carry it with him in a pocket or the mother in her purse, until they framed it or buried it in a trunk in an attic. They would never forget the moment they received this letter sent from Rabbi Ben Kahn and, writing it, he felt the slap of every keystroke, the blows of ink against paper.
... I was with your son when he passed. His death was quiet and dignified. He was struck down at the front of his company, leading his men with courage. He received comfort at the last and the blessings of God.
Please receive the thanks of a grateful nation and a proud United States Army. The sacrifice you have made and the gallantry of your son Lawrence will never be forgotten. The cause for which he gave his life will never be forsaken.
Your son has been buried in France at a location I cannot disclose. However, in due time, a permanent, national cemetery will be established here and your son’s grave site will be one with full honor as an American and a hero of war.
With respect and regrets, I remain...
Ben spread the letter on the desk—Lawrence Mendelsohn’s first, thin headstone—signed and folded it, then typed the family’s address on an envelope. He left the unsealed letter on the desk for Phineas’s assistant to post, later to be read in England by the censors. Then to the Mendelsohns.
From beside the typewriter, Ben lifted another sheet, the letter he carried always. He didn’t need to read it; he knew every jot on it. He folded it along well-worn creases and slid the page into his breast pocket, buttoning the flap. Absentmindedly, he tapped it there. A covetous moment twisted in his heart, that the Mendelsohns should know the ending of their son—they will know it was brave and quick—and he did not know the end for his. This was the way of it always, selfish, wanting it over. Was Ben wishing for Thomas’s death even while the boy was out there somewhere fighting to stay alive? Was Ben praying for his son’s life even after God had taken it for His own? Unsettled, sad, an endless burning fuse, Ben balled his fist and tapped his chest.
Thunder, not artillery, boomed. Every rusting implement in the shed shivered.
~ * ~
Water coursed down the folds of Ben’s poncho. His boot heels idled in puddles on the floorboard of the topless jeep. Drops bit his helmet so hard, he felt them strike. The windshield did little to keep the spray out of his eyes.
Behind the wheel, Phineas Allenby intoned, ‘How long, O Lord?’
Ben winced and raised his head to the leaden, pelting sky.
‘Three days of this,’ Phineas called through the rain. ‘Back in Little Rock we’d be sitting on our roofs by now. This is one of y’all’s plagues, isn’t it?’
The Baptist chaplain laughed. Inside the tunnel of his poncho hood, Ben looked into the tempest and the grim, wet road. Fifty yards ahead, the blackout taillights of a Jimmy glimmed red through the downpour. The truck’s tailgate was up, and Ben could not see its cargo, buttoned in white sheaths.
The little chaplain paused, made unsure by Ben’s quiet.
‘Anyway, how were things up in the 357th?’ Phineas would not let the rain and the corpses dampen him.
Ben licked drops from his lips. ‘Same as everywhere else.’
‘Yeah, this storm’s put a stop to everything. Ammo, food, fuel—everything’s rationed, nothing’s coming across the beaches in this weather.’
The jeep swept along behind the Jimmy. Ben surveyed the gray-green fields turning to bogs.
Phineas kept talking, loud into the rain and the grinding jeep.
‘It’s no wonder the men are all upset. They’re glad for the rest, but boy howdy, their pride’s mighty wounded.’
Ben had heard the talk in the regiment
s. Every officer and dogface knew the 90th was originally scheduled to be one of the divisions making the move up the peninsula, to roll up the Germans and attack Cherbourg. Now that mission was no more, not for the 90th. The hedgerows had cost them that shot. When the whole division got snarled in the bocage, the 82nd and the 9th leapfrogged them. Those two divisions drove west side by side all the way to the Atlantic, to the applause of the generals, cutting the Cotentin and claiming the laurels. That failure had lost the Tough Ombres their reputation and their commanding officer. It also cost them three thousand casualties and their self-esteem. Now the 90th was on babysitting duty, watching the backs of other divisions speeding north to capture the biggest plum in Normandy, Cherbourg’s port. Add in the storm and the cutback on supplies, and the soldiers of the 90th had little to do but squat in foxholes, duck under canvas, bail with their helmets, and gripe.
Last night at dusk, near Le Ham, a Kraut battalion attacked the 357th. They’d come through the rain, hidden beneath the sluicing drops. The firefight lasted only an hour. The 357th held their ground. The Krauts backed off, looking for an easier way south out of the peninsula. Again, a 90th regiment paid and got nothing in return, no victory, no captives, just the ground they started with. They ended up swinging at shadows and rain sounds, after taking fifteen wounded and nine KIAs.
Ben tested his own gray mood. ‘I think it’s letting up,’ he said.
Phineas took his hands from the wheel in mock holy thanks. ‘Thank you for that weather report, Rabbi Noah.’
Ten more minutes passed. The jeep crossed a bridge above a swollen stream. Without expecting it, they rode through the ruins of another little town. Ben had missed the name sign at the limits. Just the one street curled through here, the village was no more than twenty buildings. Rain tumbled into every interior, not a roof was left intact. Elderly French men and women wandered with goats in the ruins.
Outside the town, the sign read Reigneville-Bocage. Ben had no idea where they were. Phineas drove with confidence, guiding the jeep behind the truck, dodging into a break in a fat hedgerow, bumping through a ditch, and into an apple orchard.
The truck and jeep labored across mud between the trees.
‘You know,’ Phineas narrated under the rain, pleased to be knowledgeable, ‘Normandy’s the only region in France where it’s too cool to grow grapes. So the old Norman farmers planted apples here. Instead of wine, they made cider. They called it Calvados. The hedges were planted to keep the winds from the Channel off their apples.’
Ben looked into the dripping branches of the apple orchard. It did not lift his heart the way it did for Phineas to consider a thousand years of peaceful fermenting done in these pastures and hedges. Ben saw only rain and, through its curtain, the truck filled with corpses stop beside four soldiers in ponchos leaning on shovels.
Phineas halted alongside the truck. When the vehicles shut down their motors, with Phineas quiet, the hiss of rain was everywhere. The little Baptist jumped from the jeep to take control, and Ben kept his seat, hammered in place under the driving drops and by how trying it was to bury more children. He felt as ancient as the orchard, rutted and sunken as the Norman roads. No one here, not Phineas or the boys with shovels or the dead boys in their shrouds in the truck, was more than half his age. Again, and unbidden, Ben struggled to stay out of the trenches of the other war, when he was that young and there was rain and French mud and there were bodies and shallow graves. He grappled, too, as he had hours ago beside the Underwood typewriter, with the wish that one of these bodies would finally be Captain Thomas Kahn.
The hole was a broad rectangle, enough for all ten corpses. It had been sloppily dug in the rain and was only three feet deep. On a sunny day, this place had been chosen as the division’s cemetery because it was in an orchard, a beautiful spot. This was not a final resting ground, just a temporary grave until the doughs could be moved later to a permanent cemetery in Normandy. White stakes throughout the sodden orchard marked hundreds more resting places for the Tough Ombres.
Three soldiers of the Graves Registration detail moved to the tailgate of the truck. The fourth dipped a barrel into the brown pool at the bottom of the hole, then spilled it out. Both Jimmy drivers, colored boys without ponchos, scrambled down into the rain to help unload the wrapped bodies, not their job. They grew soaked in an instant. Ben stood beside the hole, watching as the soldier bailed and the rain filled the grave at almost equal rates. Phineas came beside him with an armful of hastily nailed-together crosses, and one Star of David. He handed Ben the star. Ben held it by the post, like a scepter. Phineas had built them of lathe sticks pulled from some wrecked French building.
The bodies were hefted from the truck bed without reverence, the rain seemed to make for urgency. Each was carried over to the hole, gripped by shoulders and feet inside the white mattress covers. The bodies were lowered all but the last few inches, then dropped. They splashed in the murk at the bottom, smirching the pristine sacks.
Phineas had marked each cover with the soldier’s serial number, for later when they would be dug up and transferred. Over each, he had scribed in black ink a cross, except on Lieutenant Mendelsohn.
The Jewish soldier was laid in the center of the row of white sacks in the hole, not by design but just where he fell. Mendelsohn had lain unburied for three days; this was unacceptable in Judaism, the law commands the dead be interred as soon as possible. But with the rain, and Ben the only rabbi in the division, three days had to do. Mendelsohn was laid to rest with brothers, shoulder to shoulder. Ben hoped this would count for something with God, and he swore to do better.
Phineas pressed a lathe cross into the damp ground at the head of the first soldier.
‘We therefore commit this body to the ground. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’
Ben knelt and drove the post bearing the star into the orchard, the first Jew he’d buried in France. It should not have mattered so much that this was a Jew. This was a boy, a man, a soldier, a son, like any other, he told himself, but he longed to stay with this fallen son, to linger until the sun came out and hearts had healed and war was done. Phineas came and laid a hand across the poncho on Ben’s back. This brought Ben out of the star and to his feet again, back to the rain.
~ * ~
‘No. Leave me alone. I’m eating.’
McGee Mays tugged on Joe Amos’s sleeve.
‘C’mon, please. I told ‘em you’d do it.’
Joe Amos glanced across the crowded mess tent to the table McGee had left. Seven drivers leaned in their faces at Joe Amos and smiled as if he held a camera. They were all young and new privates, like McGee.
‘C’mon, man. I’ll drive an extra shift.’
Joe Amos looked at his chipped beef and bread, his corn hash, and saw it would all cool into paste by the time he got back to it.
Three days, Joe Amos thought, and not one damn run in this weather. All the trucks stopped, nothing to move. Man, the troops have got to be starving for everything by now. Joe Amos wanted to get back behind the wheel, do his job, and quit talking about his shot-up truck.
The drivers slid aside to make room.
‘Fellas.’
‘Corporal Biggs.’
‘So what’d McGee here tell you so far?’
One private, small and thin with gold caps on his front teeth, spoke first.
‘How you two drove right up to the fightin’ in the hedges. Took them soldiers all they ammo. And you was up in the fifty cal.’
Joe Amos heard the rural slur in this soldier’s speech. He sighed, thinking this colored boy probably had only a few years of country education between his ears. He had no business being in the military. This was the joke, that to be taken into the U.S. Army all you had to be able to do was see lightning and hear thunder.
‘What’s your name, Private?’
The skinny boy swallowed. ‘Charlie.’
Odds were that Charlie here was living the highlights of his life right now in France. He might
never again have this kind of responsibility or stage. But just in case Charlie wanted more, in case he was made of better stuff than some others when the shit hit the fan and wanted to show it, he wouldn’t get much of a chance in this war, just the way Boogie warned. That was the big difference between the war the whites fought and the one set aside for McGee and the others at this table. Joe Amos was different, he’d had a streak of luck come out of the sky. But no one can count on that. So, Joe Amos figured, after Charlie here goes home to the life that’s been set aside for him there, too, let him say he knew some heroes, some black heroes.
David Robbins - [World War II 04] Page 13