David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

  Out of a doorway, three thick Frenchmen in leather coats jumped the German. The first wrapped the boy’s arms so he couldn’t get his MP 40 off his shoulder. The second bulled his comrade and the German to the ground, clapping a hand over the tackled boy’s mouth. The third raised a bludgeon and smacked the soldier in the temple below the helmet. He pounded a second time, and his cohorts stood from the cobbles. The Kraut alone stayed flat. One of them lifted the machine pistol off the downed boy’s arm, another took the sack with the nylons. The third mugger kicked the German’s ribs savagely, stepping back and coming in like a football kick, before melting into the twists of the alleys. White Dog muttered, ‘Oooo.’

  He walked to the German. The boy wasn’t dead, he was breathing, but he’d have a lump the size of a potato. White Dog stepped over the body. Out of the doorway, a voice called, ‘Chien Blanc. Merci.’

  A man stepped into the alley, to walk with White Dog. This one was squat like the first three but older, with wide black rims to his glasses.

  He said, ‘So you see. This is how we must do it. One gun at a time.’

  White Dog chuckled.

  ‘I’ve got to hand it to you Communists. You’re patient.’

  ‘Oh,’ the elder man swept a hand through the alley’s gloom, ‘revolutions aren’t all they’re made out to be. Yes, there’s a few days or weeks of fighting and flash, lots of history in a short period. But for the most part, minds are changed and hearts are won only a little at a time. Revolutions are more like a tide than a flood.’

  ‘When does the revolution in Paris start?’

  ‘Unofficially, it started last week, when the Amis broke out of Normandy. Now that we are certain they are coming, we are gathering for the storm. Paris will come first. The power is in Paris, so this is where the battle will be. Then the rest of France.’

  White Dog wondered why all politicos talked like this, in sentences peeled out of pamphlets. The Commies, the Gaullists, the Nazis. Whenever they tried to sway him one way or another, he became glad he was a businessman, without sympathies. The only thing they all had in common, him included, was treachery. At least White Dog had something to show for his. The man handed over two hundred franc notes. White Dog tucked them away.

  ‘We have plenty of money, Chien Blanc. Can you do a little more to help us get guns?’

  Last week, the day after news of the breakout swept like wind through Paris, thirty-five Frenchmen tried to buy weapons from a man who turned out to be an agent provocateur for the Gestapo. All thirty-five had been lined up and shot.

  ‘No.’

  The man nodded, elegant in his silence. White Dog didn’t know his real name, only that he was called ‘Chef’ and that he ran the Red cell here in the 18th arrondissement. The Communists were the strongest faction in the FFI. The closer the Yanks came, the harder time De Gaulle was going to have reining them in.

  ‘Too bad. It might have made a nice arrangement for you.’

  ‘I have arrangements.’

  ‘Yes, you do. With the Boche, the Party, the Republicans. With hunger, lust, and greed, as well. You ‘em to be truly a man of the people, Chien Blanc.’

  The chef stopped, White Dog alongside. Ahead through the fading alley, a thoroughfare buzzed with traffic, headlamps on. The Germans were restive, many had begun their exodus out of Paris. Neither White Dog nor Chef would walk to the road, into the open. Instead, they would both remain here in the alleys, where there was work for them.

  The Communist asked, ‘Have you thought of becoming a man of principle? Or are you too much of a capitalist to consider this?’

  White Dog remembered a time when he would have been irked at this man’s insults, when he might have bothered to defend his dignity, with a word first, or a fist. Something inside him flicked, some attempt to light a response. But nothing took the flame, the fuse was powder-less.

  ‘Wait for the Americans to get here,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll get you anything you want.’

  ~ * ~

  FOURTH

  In the months succeeding the conclusion of hostilities, I had many opportunities to review various campaigns with the leaders of the Russian Army ... They suggested that of all the spectacular feats of the war, including their own, the Allied success in the supply of the pursuit across France would go down in history as the most astonishing.

  Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower Crusade in Europe

  The armed men went before the priests at Jericho who blew the trumpets; the rear guard came after the ark, while the trumpets blew continually. To the people Joshua gave this command: ‘You shall not shout or let your voice be heard, nor shall you utter a word, until the day I tell you to shout. Then you shall shout.’

  Joshua 6:9-10

  ~ * ~

  D+60

  August 5

  Ben pulled Phineas’s Colt from his waistband. He’d worn it like this for two weeks, the way Phineas had, hidden under his jacket.

  Gun in hand, Ben approached a lieutenant waiting in line for breakfast. The young officer watched him. Dawn came clear this morning, blue and hot.

  ‘Padre,’ the lieutenant said, ‘that’s quite a hand cannon you got there.’

  Ben held out the .45. ‘It belonged to a friend.’

  Others in the lieutenant’s platoon holding mess plates turned to see.

  The lieutenant patted the holster at his own hip. ‘I got me one just like it.’

  Ben rolled the gun over, to show the empty magazine slot. ‘I wondered if you could spare a clip.’

  Every day, Ben had waited, like these men in line for chow. He held out his hands for God to plop something in them. His hands were empty like the gun, like the mess plates, waiting to be filled. At night, in foxholes, in the beds of bumping trucks, under a tarp out of the rain, slogging on dusty dark roads, Ben closed his eyes, always feeling the Colt press against his side, a prod from Phineas. The gun joined with the last letter from Thomas, prodding at his chest. Ben did not sleep anymore. He waited for God to feed him and take away his hunger, which was fury.

  Ben accepted the full magazine from the officer’s web belt. The bullets were copper-tipped and weighty. He fed the magazine into the butt and slapped it home with his palm.

  ‘Careful with that thing, Padre,’ the lieutenant warned.

  Care, Ben thought. He was far, far beyond taking care. Other forces were at work now, none of them cautious.

  He thanked the lieutenant and turned. The officer spoke.

  ‘Hey, Chaplain, stay in line. Get something to eat. You look hungry.’

  Ben tucked the .45 away and stayed in line. He made innocuous talk with the platoon, accepting a hearty portion of eggs and sausage. He slammed the food in.

  Once he had eaten, he wished the boys luck, then walked to the convoy of thirty deuce-and-a-half trucks. Soldiers of the 357th, on their way to attack another town, helped him climb onboard and found space for him on a bench. Sam followed close behind.

  Ben looked at the two dozen GI’s seated in the truck with him, their two dozen rifle barrels pointed up. Sam lapped his arm around Ben’s shoulders.

  Maybe it was Ben’s first full belly in two weeks that woke him up. Maybe it was Sam’s arm around him and his face close. Ben thought it might have been the load of bullets finally in Phineas’s pistol that brought him around.

  He sat up under Sam’s arm. The boy took down his arm. Ben gave him a wan smile.

  He could not remember where he’d been since leaving Sèves Island. The last thing he could recall was the German Major ordering him to sit, then shattering him in the chair.

  A new book of the Chosen People was being written in Europe, the Major told Ben. The seas here had parted not for Israel, but for Pharaoh.

  Von der Meer spat at Ben what he had seen. In the Major’s eyes, every man was to blame, so every man would suffer.

  Before his assignment to France, von der Meer had fought on the Eastern Front. After the lost battle for Kursk, he went west. In Poland, von der Meer sa
w the incredible. He met an old comrade from Russia and was offered a tour of Sobibor. Later in Czechoslovakia, he passed through Flossenbürg and entered the camp on his own. He did the same at Mauthausen in Austria, Dachau in Germany, Natzweiler-Struthof in France.

  Over his cold teacup, the Major said, ‘The phrase one hears is “the final solution.”‘

  He told Ben about slave labor camps, where Jews were worked to death. They were starved and they were beaten to make sure the labor killed them. Other camps kept alive only those Jews it took to help murder the rest in ten thousands, a cadre to haul carts, sweep ash, and dig pits. The Jews arrived at the camps in droves packed into railroad cattle cars. There were enough in each load to people a village, so with every train another name on the maps of Poland, Russia, Ukraine, France, Italy, Holland, Belgium, the Slavic nations, Germany, was liberated from the Jews. Within minutes of arriving in the camp, the Jews were stripped to the skin, their clothes and possessions vetted in piles for what would be burned and what would be returned to Berlin for reuse. Naked women clutched themselves in shame while the men stood dumb and dangling. Guards herded them to warehouse-size rooms. Their corpses were shoveled out the back by their neighbors, by their children, by their brothers....

  Ben’s horror was complete in the first minutes. But von der Meer spoke on, about the pits of lime-coated corpses where the ovens were overworked or broken, about the mountains of ownerless luggage and shoes when the transports back to Germany were too slow.

  The paratrooper had watched his countrymen and the men of Allied nations do these monstrous things in the camps. At first he held each man responsible for his own morality. He had looked into the soldiers’ faces, searched there for the insanity of their work, and could not find it. How could this be? Where was the disfigurement, the twisting? How can such a thing leave no mark on a man more than smoke?

  Von der Meer told Ben how he held his tongue. Most regular German infantrymen knew nothing about the real nature of the camps. They lived and fought in pleasant oblivion, but that luxury had been stolen from von der Meer. He had seen the camps and so had begun to question, not the killers, but himself. Perhaps, he thought, there was no longer individual morality in this war, a war to bring forth a new Germany, a new world order. Perhaps morality had been replaced by a national code, perhaps duty and strength had redefined decency. Von der Meer knew—everyone knew—the Jews had to be relocated, isolated from German culture. The Jews were a curse, they controlled too much money, they were a cabal of liars and leeches. Certainly there was no role in the new Reich for the Jew. Von der Meer had grown into manhood with this belief, he held it still. And when he saw firsthand Hitler’s solution, the extermination of a people in millions, and the calmness of the men who did this, von der Meer’s shock was short-lived. The soldiers, many of them SS Totenkopf, were harsh men but it was a harsh job. Perhaps the Jews must be vermin after all. For the decade leading up to the camps, posters had said this, boycotts followed, the cinema agreed. Good Germans took part in isolating the Jew. Not criminals or paranoids or maniacs, not just Nazis, but respected men and women in every walk, all of German society turned its back. Once the Jews’ businesses were taken from them and their possessions deposited with the state, what further purpose did the Hebrew serve? The Jews were rats in the house, and Hitler the Father had sworn to clean them out. To be judenfrei was to be fully, finally, German.

  Who was there to question this? Few voices were raised for the Jews, hardly even their own. These were quickly ignored or silenced. Some protests came from outside Germany, but proper Deutschlanders did not listen to outsiders; this was considered a strength, a patriotism.

  It was war that returned von der Meer his senses. Two months earlier, America had invaded Normandy. Von der Meer fought Ben and his GIs in the terrible hedges and sucking swamps and he awoke to fear. What would America think if they discovered the camps? America would not understand what Germany had to do to free itself from shame and the Jew. If America won this war, they would question. There would surely arise in the world a new hatred, for Germans themselves.

  ‘That is why I fight,’ the Major told Ben. ‘To keep you away from the camps.’

  Ben could not look at von der Meer speaking, the German’s lips making the words were too horrible. In Ben’s chair, the weight of cattle cars crushed him. Bullets exploded his head, gas gagged him. Fire cleansed the chair, he was gone. Ben lay in ashes with his people.

  On the desk in front of him rested Phineas’s pistol. Ben found only the power to take the gun in hand, and, when von der Meer was done, to ask:

  ‘Why tell me this?’

  ‘Because you’re a Jew, and an American. You’ve hurt Germany. Since I’m letting you go, I had to hurt you somehow. It’s only fair.’

  ‘Fair?’

  ‘It’s a war, Rabbi. In war, we hurt people. Stop sniveling like you didn’t know this.’

  Von der Meer stood behind his desk. The interview was finished.

  ‘Get up,’ the Major snarled when Ben had not risen.

  Ben pushed back the chair. The heft of the pistol felt enough to collapse him.

  ‘Put that gun away and take out your white flag. You’ll get shot or they’ll bring you back to me.’

  Ben put the .45 in his belt, under his jacket.

  ‘Rabbi Kahn.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look well into the faces of your soldiers when you tell them what I have told you today. Look deep into their eyes. And you will see that they won’t care. Roosevelt, Churchill, your Generals—they know what we are doing and they’ve done nothing to stop us. No camps have been bombed, no railroads leading to them have been blown. There has been no outcry in the world newspapers. We have murdered millions of Jews, Rabbi, and no one cares. In any land you live, in any time, you are Jews.’

  Ben turned. The Major spoke to his back.

  ‘When the camps are discovered, they won’t say the rotten Germans killed men, women, and children. They’ll say we killed Jews.’

  Ben stumbled down the stairs and out of the farmhouse. He walked north alone, out of St. Germain. He unfurled the Red Cross flag but did not raise it. The banner dragged in the grass beside his boots.

  In the fields approaching the river, litter bearers, medics, and Chaplains Bolick and McGwire continued the search for wounded. Some German gunners pointed out soldiers they’d shot near their positions. The swap of enemy wounded for eight wounded GIs was done.

  Ben saw Sam running across the reeds to him.

  Ben dropped the white flag. His knees buckled. Sam could not lift him out of the grass. The private called for a litter squad to carry Ben off the meadow. When McGwire and Bolick heard this, they came running, too. Ben told them Phineas would not be released, and nothing else the German Major had said.

  Now, piecing himself back together, Ben did not recall what happened next in the field, and not much of the time since. For two weeks Sam was his only conduit, feeding him news with bites of food. Forty-eight hours after the surrender on Sèves Island, the 90th surrounded the village and found the Germans had withdrawn. At St. Lô, the carpet bombing and breakout had gone better than hoped. The T-Os moved forward, taking Périers, then the division was assigned to a week of rest in the rear. Again, the division’s CO was relieved in disgrace, for the failure on Sèves Island. Another General was in charge of the 90th, and one more blow was delivered to the men’s morale. This morning they were on the way to take another town, Mayenne. Ben was in the back of a truck.

  A dough reached a hand to his knee. Ben leaned out to him. This was a good-looking boy, blue-eyed. Stubble roughed his chin. He’d seen some action.

  ‘Chaplain, I was wonderin’ maybe you’d say a prayer for us.’

  If I told him, Ben thought, if I told him five hundred miles from here Jews were dying in mounds? If I spoke, would it crush him, too, would he help me bear this?

  ‘You do it,’ Ben said.

  ~ * ~

  A bouquet flew
in the cab, straight toward McGee’s face. The boy dodged, flashed a grin at Joe Amos, then grabbed the flowers off the floorboard. He leaned out his window and tossed the stems back to the crowd one by one.

  Two women climbed on the running board beside Joe Amos. One reached out to tug him for a kiss. Joe Amos said, ‘Thank you.’

  He grabbed McGee by the belt, to pull the boy back from being hauled out his own window into the arms of the women of Fougères. Joe Amos didn’t know why the thirty-truck convoy had stopped, but he guessed it was to keep from running over the townspeople thronging the street.