David Robbins - [World War II 04]

by Liberation Road (v1. 0) (epub)

He picked up his pace, intending to disappear into familiar territory. He would wait out the riots in his covey of hideouts. He’d seen enough, and there was nothing he could do except get nabbed or hurt out in the open. Some Communist would brain him if he said he had no intention of helping the uprising, or a Kraut would shoot him for being in the wrong place, which for the next few days was just about everywhere. White Dog intended to go back to Montparnasse and peep out of his alleys while history wracked itself over Paris.

  One thing’s for sure, he thought. The Germans aren’t going to tolerate this for long. The Commies have put out a call to arms. Silly bastards all over Paris are answering them, and getting shot down for waving toilet brushes. The Krauts have nothing to gain by battling in the streets with Frenchmen for a city they can’t hold. They’re either going to give Paris up or blow it up. Either way, in the next few days the Allies’ hand is going to be forced. Four million French were going to become nieces and nephews of Uncle Sam. So much materiel was going to flow into Paris that White Dog could get stinking rich just picking up the bits that fell off the trucks by accident.

  He stopped by a stall on a rare quiet lane. An old fournisseur handed White Dog a patisserie and charged him one hundred francs.

  White Dog bit into the pastry. Whipped cream squirted over his lips.

  ‘Are you selling a lot of these, old man?’

  The vendor stepped back from his cart. He flipped down wooden slats to close it. Lacking a horse, the man stepped into the traces himself to haul his business away.

  ‘I only had to sell one, monsieur. Merci beaucoup.’

  White Dog finished the pastry, watching the old man and liking him. Even more, he liked his own plan for Paris. Wherever history stomped its foot, prices rose.

  This was definitely the right time and place for him.

  ~ * ~

  D+76

  August 21

  Sam stopped the jeep under a copse of trees. The column of ambulances could go no farther. The road and fields ahead were too cluttered. Ben hopped out to walk. Sam followed.

  Medics, litter bearers, and chaplains clambered out of the column of medical vehicles. Men grabbed sacks of supplies and shouldered stretchers. Loaded, they jogged forward. Ben did not hurry. Sam brought a kerchief to his nose and mouth. The boy muttered, ‘Holy moley.’

  Men passed them walking beside the ambulances. Sam edged in front of Ben, agitating to speed up, but Ben kept his pace. When they emerged from the trees at the head of the line, they were the last ones, exasperating Sam.

  The road was gone, cratered out of existence. The pile-up blocking the way told an instant and violent story: a German tank had been destroyed, a second tank tried to shove it off the road and was hit, trucks and carts moved into the fields to go around, they, too, were struck, everything burned, and this escape route grew choked.

  Ben entered the forest of ruined machines, a hundred yards of scrambled steel. Sam kept his rag pressed over his face. Ben breathed in the burned metal, like the smelters in Pittsburgh.

  Behind the vehicles, the pasture of dead was vast. The cadre of medics had run into it and got no farther than fifty yards before every one of them and the litter bearers had work. Ben lost sight of the handful of other chaplains in their scurrying to save.

  He walked, skirting bodies and limbs, and craters with debris flung against the walls. The distinction between what had been human and what was a cow, horse, or machine mingled around his boots. The smells of torn flesh did not stand out from the odors of oil and cordite sown in the ground. Sam had dropped his cloth. His face was white and dashed. Ben turned and waded on.

  Only when the rushing medics were just figurines across the field did he stop. He looked south to the high ground where for two days he’d watched the bombardment that did this. He marveled at the accuracy of the big guns, as well as the constant bombers and fighters that harassed the great enemy retreat. On all sides, emerald land and trees gleamed as they did everywhere in Normandy. Many houses and farm buildings were untouched. Everything else—everything German—was smashed. The road was ripped up like tape. A standing horse, still harnessed to a charred cart, watched Ben weave through the remains of Seventh Army.

  Ben passed artillery pieces twisted by Allied shells, others that had been spiked and abandoned by the Krauts. Overturned trucks spilled food, ammo, stolen artwork. Every vehicle of every sort, from wheelbarrows to bulldozers, and thousands more stretching west, had been devastated. The loss to the German war effort of this much mechanization would be spectacular.

  Strewn everywhere in the ruins, uncountable, were carcasses and corpses. Like the machines in this valley, the German soldiers and their animals had been cut up and scorched. Horses and cattle simply fell to their sides or lay on their backs, legs up like bedposts. The dead men were less composed in their last postures. Soldiers sprawled on tanks, melted into the metal. They lay under trucks that had exploded over their backs. They lay in the open, diced and unrecognizable or stunned and clutching, grimacing or faceless, silent. Nowhere were there foxholes or fortifications that might have given them shelter. The bombs, shells, and rockets never gave them pause to dig. Ben walked on, scanning the demise of this enemy, seeking satisfaction in the absoluteness of it.

  The destruction in this valley had been monumental. But it might have been even larger. Five days ago, the prospect among the GIs was for the total surrounding of the Seventh Army, a complete annihilation. Canadian and American troops had fought to within a few miles of each other. Then, for some reason, Patton and Montgomery did not close the ring. Ben and all the officers of the 90th kept waiting for word that 100,000 Germans were in the bag. But for five days, a small escape route remained open, between Argentan and Falaise. Montgomery had only slammed it shut today. Up on the Le Bourg-St. Léonard ridge, talk among the artillery officers was that maybe the Generals had been afraid Canadian and American forces might collide in the heat of battle, perhaps even fighting each other in the confusion, which would have been a catastrophe. Perhaps there were territorial concerns between nations and leaders, even egos. No one knew. But a portion of the Seventh Army had escaped the pocket. Estimates were still unclear; the rumor was that twenty thousand men got out. Even so, that left another eighty thousand killed or captured.

  Ben halted his march at the sound of running boots. Before turning, he looked farther into the valley. In the distance, other ambulances moved through the debris field. Medics from another division kneeled in the clusters of hulks. Ben surveyed all of the carnage he could take in. He nodded to himself.

  Sam caught up. Ben waited while the boy found his breath.

  ‘Rabbi?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  Ben assumed Sam had come to check on him. The look on Sam’s face said differently.

  ‘Rabbi, geez. Don’t you hear ‘em?’

  That moment, the moaning of the wounded struck him. The air buzzed with bleating calls.

  ‘You speak German.’ Sam raised his hands to Ben. ‘You know what they’re saying. How can you just...?’

  Ben smelled the stench of the bodies floating on August heat. He noticed the lifted hands.

  ‘Rabbi, open your eyes.’

  Ben looked around, no longer in a landscape of victory or vengeance. There was horror here, miles and miles of it.

  ‘They’re open.’

  Sam’s lifted hands shoveled at Ben. The boy needed an explanation.

  Ben said, ‘Multiply this.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  Ben grabbed Sam by the lapel.

  ‘Do it. Multiply every dead man you see by five hundred.’

  He pivoted the boy in a circle, tugging him hard. He swept his other hand across the terrible landscape.

  ‘Every corpse, every voice, by five hundred. Look, look down that way, there’s more. See them? Multiply them, too. Five hundred times. More, six hundred. The dead won’t fit in this valley, Sam.’

  Ben struck his own chest, his hear
t.

  ‘They won’t fit. You understand?’

  He let the boy go. Sam backed away, timid and leery. He looked over the field. Ben could tell the boy was trying to do what he was told, to imagine.

  ‘It’s not about my son or Phineas anymore,’ Ben said, gentler, at last giving his son and his friend their rest. ‘They’re gone.’

  Sam took several moments with his eyes on the dead Army before asking, ‘Then what’s it about?’

  Ben told him, to the backdrop of moans and the ten thousand unburied.

  Sam did not believe it.

  ‘Millions? That’s... that’s impossible. Rabbi, if that was the case, we’d know about it. It would’ve been in all the papers. We’d have put a stop to it. There’d be air raids and... and ... I don’t know what, but there’s no way we’d let that happen.’

  Ben let Sam fumble with the obliteration of his people. He listened to Sam deny it, rationalize it, and refuse to lower his assessment of mankind to the possibility of it. Hadn’t he, too, doubted when von der Meer told him? Sam was right to stumble over the magnitude, to question that the Allies wouldn’t have known or acted, right to find mass murder on an international scale unfathomable. Why would regular German folks allow this to happen under their noses? Wouldn’t the Jews fight back somehow? Wouldn’t America tell the whole world what the Nazis were doing? Murder millions, how can that be kept secret? Sam was sure that Kraut Major had just made this up to hurt Ben before letting him go. But the German Major had been angry and too precise in his descriptions of the lineage from propaganda to pogroms, group executions to the mass-killing camps, the integers of the final solution. Ben believed von der Meer.

  Sam shook his head. Ben read that the boy’s rejection of him was total.

  Sam dug into his pants pocket. He handed over the keys to the jeep.

  ‘Here you go.’

  ‘What are you going to do, Sam?’

  ‘I’ll hook up with the stretcher bearers. See if the Army’ll let me do some good.’

  ‘I’ll talk to your CO. Get you reassigned.’

  Ben watched Sam walk away into the field of metal. He didn’t say goodbye to this son, didn’t say a word to thank or keep him. Slowly, the boy disappeared behind the slaughter that was everywhere.

  ~ * ~

  D+79

  August 24

  At daybreak, White Dog came out of his alleys.

  What the hell, he thought.

  In his year and a half of hiding in Montparnasse he’d grown fat in the waist and wallet. But years before that he’d become a bomber pilot for adventure. Over the past five days he watched skinny French boys and girls and doddering old gents have the adventure of a lifetime, rioting to free Paris. While he peered out from shadows, they knocked over trees, tore up cobbles, and tossed them in piles, flipped cars, filled sandbags, and planted their flag on top of the mounds in the middle of boulevards. Obstacles were thrown up all over Paris to restrict the Krauts’ movements around the city, making them unable to respond to flare-ups. The brave French flung stones at approaching Germans, fired rounds from a handful of weapons, and shouted curses. The only ones who got hurt were the ones who came out from behind cover or were slow to run away. The rest of the time they congratulated themselves and spread rumors.

  White Dog put his white linen jacket over his shoulder. He wore his baggy zazou trousers and spats, topped with a gray fedora. He lit a cigarette and strolled out to the barricade built across Avenue du Maine at Avenue d’Orleans. White Dog said good morning and helped roll a car over.

  After breakfast, he killed a soldier.

  It was a remarkable piece of luck. He’d thrown a broken cobblestone dug from Avenue du Maine. The block struck a German soldier who was backing away.

  A German patrol, just five gray boys on foot, had turned a corner. They froze at first sight of the barricade, this one constructed of iron railings, bed frames, old furniture, a tipped-over public pissoir, and five vehicles rolled on their sides. The soldiers edged around the corner and moved slowly into the open to investigate. When the five were close, one of the Communists behind the barricade fired his rifle, an ancient carbine dusted off from an attic. The shot missed. The young Krauts showed no stomach for a street fight, with no reinforcements and no reason to make a stand. They backed off. More men popped from cover to throw bottles and rocks, brandishing ax handles and crowbars. White Dog, hiding behind a snooker table mounted on the barrier, rose, too. He heaved the cobble as far as he could. The square stone hit one of the soldiers flush in the face, between the eyes. White Dog was amazed. The German fell backward. A battle cry rose from the barricade, the avenue, and every window and doorway. Lamps and household items rained from balconies, women tossed them down with curses. The four soldiers grabbed the legs of their downed mate and dragged him around the corner. Standing at attention, the French sang the ‘Marseillaise,’ the hymn banned by the Germans for four years. When some bold souls looked where the Krauts had gone, they found the German boy dead with blood run out of his ears. The fifis and Commies and women of the barricade cheered White Dog.

  Hugo the mobster approached from one of the many shadows of Paris.

  ‘Careful, Chien Blanc. You’re coming very close.’

  ‘To what?’ White Dog asked, basking in the man’s grin.

  ‘To choosing a side.’

  Hugo ambled off, leaving White Dog with a pat on the arm. What fucking luck, he thought. Not just smacking that Kraut with a rock, but Hugo saw me do it. I’m definitely in like Flynn now.

  A woman tied a white brassard around his biceps, a blue-and-red patch depicting the tricolor. Other men wore the FFI initials on their armbands. White Dog knew the names of none of the Parisians who manned the barricade, and no one asked him his. None of his regular Mack market crew were on the street; his cadre of petty thieves kept to their blackness. White Dog stood in the sunlight, tossing another little brick to himself should one more patrol round the corner. He thought he might jettison his old network, specialists in nylons, vegetables, smokes, butchered meats, currency exchange, all trivialities of daily life, and start fresh with Hugo and his Voltaire gang. The mob was well organized. White Dog would need to strike big with his gasoline scheme, and he needed professionals around him, men of action, men like these who stood on the barricades for France today, for profit tomorrow.

  He lunched at café tables set up behind the obstacle. Around him were other young men in shirtsleeves, some carrying revolvers, a few in military helmets. In the high windows of buildings framing the street, like opera boxes, people waited for something to happen. White Dog enjoyed being a performer on the barricade, the dose of danger and the safety in numbers, an audience in attendance. He figured some of the other young men might be Hugo’s gangsters, and for them especially he kept up his appearance of patriotisme. A phone rang in an open window. Someone shouted down news from other districts:

  - There’s fighting in Neuilly!

  - There are Boche tanks in the Place de la Concorde!

  - The Mayor’s office in the fifth arrondissement is under attack!

  In the early afternoon, the phones went out again. On the street, rumors replaced the news: the Americans were only five miles to the southwest; a fresh Panzer Division had entered the city; the Boche had mined every monument and bridge in Paris; the Resistance had cut the wires to the bombs; the fifis were out of ammunition. No one could be certain of anything that was happening in the rest of Paris beyond their own street and barricade. Even the new FFI radio station, broadcast only when the power was on, could do little more than read proclamations, play the ‘Marseillaise,’ and report that people should stay away from certain areas. The Palaise du Luxembourg and the Place Saint-Michel should be avoided, as the Boche had a clean field of fire from both strongholds. The Germans were strengthening their forces in the Palais Bourbon, the École Militaire, the Invalides, the Hôtel Majestic, and the Hôtel Meurice.

  One fact every Parisian knew: the command
ant of the German garrison in Paris, Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, was also called the Butcher of Stalingrad. Two years earlier the man had reduced that Russian city to ashes. The Butcher might have the same lack of remorse when it came to Paris.

  A stout boy with an FFI armband got into a shoving match with another who wore a red kerchief at his neck. Others separated the two, but their shouts continued. White Dog listened out of boredom.

  The FFI boy yelled, ‘This all your fault! Why couldn’t you jerks just play along with the truce?’

  The red neckerchief shouted back: ‘It wasn’t our truce. It was de Gaulle’s!’

  ‘Who cares? Everything was fine. The Germans were quiet, the Americans were coming, and now there’s fighting and people are getting killed all over the city. All because you Commies couldn’t sit quiet for three days. It’s just like Warsaw. Now the Boche are going to burn Paris!’