Bandy struggles in the deep steps of soldiers making their way ahead of him. No one stops to shoot at anything, the Germans have left the bank and fallen back to the town. Through the winter-bare trees appear streets, a steeple, red slate roofs. The drier the ground gets under Bandy’s boots, the clearer are the sounds of battle; near the river all he could hear was the swoook, swoook of muddy treads. Behind a clump of bushes, he drops to his knees and takes from his camera bag the 35mm Leica. He loads a roll, slaps the case shut, and sticks three more rolls in his coat pocket. The Leica is Bandy’s action camera, compact and quick to focus, and he can handle it with one hand. The negatives are less crisp than those of the big Speed Graphic, but that’s not a concern this morning. He won’t be photographing faces. The subject will be smoking, crumbling buildings.
On the edge of town Bandy joins a squad of fifteen men. Their assignment is to move up and take a block in the southwestern corner of Jülich. The troops who came over the Roer by boat in the dark didn’t bother to take the town; their task was to keep moving, deeper and deeper, to expand the bridgehead. The second, larger echelon will consolidate the gains.
The American soldiers have reaped the methods of street fighting from France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg. Now they know what to do, and because they’re in Germany they take a particular pleasure in doing it.
Bandy squats with the squad in a mound of rubble. About fifty feet away is the first of a row of brick buildings along a wide street. The structures are all two-story, attached. They appear to be businesses mingled with private homes. A sign has been painted in white letters on the wall facing them: welcome uncle sam. see Germany and die! Without looking behind him the squad sergeant wags a finger over his shoulder. The two-man bazooka crew skittles forward.
The sergeant says, “My guess is right on that big ol’ G in Germany.”
The two bazooka handlers, grizzled and sable-toothed from tobacco chaws, purse their lips and spit together. Bandy snaps their picture, spittle in midflight. Not publishable, he thinks, but a great shot for his private archive. The twin soldiers arrange themselves, one knee each on the ground. The rest of the squad clear the areas in front and rear. The bigger of the two hefts the bazooka pipe to his shoulder and lays his eye to the sight. The second soldier—a face bearded and squinty; Bandy sees how a shower, a shave, and a weekend in Bermuda would turn him into a handsome man—pats his comrade on the back. He gets a quick helmeted nod and slides in a shell the size of a bread loaf. He ducks, the bazooka recoils with a belch of flame out its tail, the firing man rocks, but the bazooka is firm in his grasp. Across the clearing the building explodes in the same moment. The bazooka stays in place, the crew is ready to fire again if necessary. The rest of the squad get set to rush forward. Smoke swirls out of the way, and the sign reads only welcome uncle sam.
Someone pulls the pin on a smoke grenade and rolls it into the open. It spews a small cloud bank. Four men scurry out, making slits in the mist, which quickly heals itself. Bandy waits for gunfire. The unit that has dashed inside is rushing from room to room looking for enemy soldiers. They’re kicking in closed doors, going leapfrog down halls, with hand signals and tense trigger fingers.
Around the town, from other blocks, Bandy hears sporadic bursts of gunplay. More thumps of bazooka fire. More Americans pour into the town, Jülich is being swarmed. By afternoon when the heavy bridges are built over the Roer, there’ll be tanks and artillery growling around whatever’s left of the place. Any German soldiers will be dead, captured, or somewhere else. Waiting in the rubble, Bandy takes a photo of the blasted brick wall showing through breezy fissures in the haze. He can read the funny remainder of the message; great story, this shot might get in Life. By nightfall there’ll be a command post set up in the best remaining building in town. The brass will move in. Bandy will have a press liaison officer to hand his film to for the flight to London, where the military censors get first crack, then the photo pool, then New York. In the middle of this thought a whistle comes through the smoke. The sergeant leaps first, his Thompson machine gun is leveled and ready. Bandy waits until last and runs through the greasy coils. He rushes with one hand over the Leica strapped around his neck to keep it from flying up and busting him in the nose.
The building is secure. Stepping into the wrecked first floor, Bandy sees it was a home. Everything is smashed. Furniture is splintered, white cushion foam is splattered around like a hundred dead doves. Over the hearth there’s a framed photograph of Adolf Hitler, the glass oddly unbroken by the blast. Below the picture on the mantel are several decorative beer steins with metal caps, the only other things that survived unharmed. A few of the men grab the steins and put them in their rucksacks, then kick through the debris looking for other mementos. A corporal takes down the Führer’s picture. This soldier is mud-caked like the rest of them. He moves not like an invader on foreign land but like a man in his neighborhood bar, slowly and easily. He’s a veteran. He’s got a beer gut, Bandy can’t figure how he maintains that protuberance over here with the exertion and frayed nerves of war. But it makes him look cheery. The corporal throws his belly into his laugh.
“Hey, Pendleton!”
One of the bazooka men answers, the handsome one. “Yeah?”
The corporal hangs Hitler on the intact inner wall that divides the building from the one attached to it.
“I think right on the fucker’s kisser would be nice.”
This is how the platoon works its way to the end of the street, as do all the other Americans who are taking Jülich. They stay off the streets, moving through the cover of buildings, blowing holes in shared walls or across narrow alleys to scoot unseen through the block. At the end of each brick row, when they need to cross a street, they start over: knock an opening in the initial wall, smoke grenade first, then go! The ten thousands of men who died in the streets of the months before are not on their minds right now. But the lessons those men made them learn are.
The squad is done scavenging. They move to the opposite wall, crouching behind upturned chairs, tables, and a sofa. The bazooka crew takes a position as distant from the wall as they can get. Hitler’s image hangs in the center of the target, a determined, thoughtful bull’s-eye, showing the way to his country’s destruction one wall at a time. The man in the rear handles the shell. He pats his partner on the shoulder, gets a nod.
The men of the platoon all shout at the tops of their lungs. They’ve done this before.
“Heil Hitler!”
~ * ~
* * *
February 23, 1945, 1430 hours
Six kilometers east of Posen
Poland
ilya watches the boots of the five dozen germans in front of him.
Their heels shamble on the road through the forest. Livestock walk with more bearing, Ilya thinks. A defeated man loses his honor so fast; even a cow on the way to the abattoir walks with its head up. A rooster squawks with your hand around its throat until you cut it. But a man heading to his fate has imagination. He sees the unseen territory. These men see Siberia. So they shuffle, they stink, they dissolve into captivity. Ilya prefers death to becoming one of these scarecrows.
Yesterday the Germans surrendered. The commander of the Posen garrison laid a Nazi battle flag on the floor in his office inside the citadel and shot himself in the head. What kind of officer does that? It’s desertion in the face of battle. Is that some Prussian notion of honor? Ilya doesn’t fathom these Germans, who fight so ferociously then become unmanned when they lose. A soldier doesn’t have to be victorious to remain a soldier. Duty defines him; do it or don’t do it. Simple. Victory is for politicians and historians.
One of the Germans stumbles. He’s awkward, exhausted, freighted with shame. And well he ought to be, considers Ilya, recalling what he’s seen not on battlefields but in unforgivable places: mass executions in Polish villages, the Majdanek concentration camp, bodies lining the roadways of the German retreat, unmarked mass graves, naked death
heaps. One of the men in Ilya’s company kicks the prisoner in the ribs to prod him off the ground and moving again. This German is slow, he’s been battered once before on this march already. He looks starving, like the rest. He gets another kick until a sheepish comrade helps him upright and he continues. Ilya says nothing.
He takes off his stocking cap. His big palm feels bristles over his pate. Time to shave it again. With the battle of the citadel lasting almost a month, there was no time.
Today is Red Army Day, the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Soviet force. General Chuikov announced this morning that in Moscow they’ve celebrated the taking of Posen with twenty salvos from over two hundred guns. Ilya rubs his head harder, he is aggravated. He was an officer in the Red Army. Even yesterday, he was a soldier. This afternoon, he’s a shepherd.
The line of captives is becoming too ragged. Ilya wants it straight, for no good reason other than he can’t bring himself to kick the Germans but he can make them march properly. If he’s going to be a damn shepherd.
“Misha. Tell them to firm up.”
A few meters away Misha calls out some command in German. The order has little effect.
“Tell them again.”
Misha strides over to walk beside Ilya. A bandage covers his right cheek and ear. A local Polish doctor helping to treat the Russian wounded stitched him up. Beneath the bandage, Misha has a black row across his cheek like barbed wire.
“It doesn’t matter, Ilyushka. Leave it alone. They’re moving.”
“I want them to march in an orderly fashion.”
“Why?”
“Because I said so.”
“Who are you giving orders to?”
Ilya draws out the word.
“You.”
Misha walks, nodding. “I see. And what am I supposed to do, Private? Follow them?”
Ilya crushes his cloth cap in a fist.
Misha asks, “Why’re you in such a foul mood? You’ve been like this since we left Posen.”
Little Misha with his pirate scar forming doesn’t put any distance between him and Ilya, he’s not afraid to stand close beside his gargantuan comrade and question him, even disobey him. Ilya eyes the sixty captives. Walking in a loose cordon outside them are six others from the punishment company, assigned with Ilya and Misha to escort the prisoners on foot twenty kilometers to the rear, to process the Germans for transport to detention. No one else speaks, just bare trees, dragging soles, dust, and eight guns.
“This is shit, Misha.”
“This is an honor, you lunkhead. We took these men prisoner! We stormed their citadel! Marching them to the rear and handing them over is recognition. Pushkov is actually rewarding us with this.”
Everyone else in Zhukov’s force is heading west to the Oder, massing for the attack on Berlin. Ilya’s walking the wrong way. How’s that an honor?
“I’ve taken ten thousand prisoners. I’ve never once been told to leave the front line to nursemaid them.”
“You were an officer. This is an acknowledgment for foot soldiers. And that’s what we are, Ilya. Foot soldiers. Lucky-to-be-alive foot soldiers, at that. So stop giving me orders.”
Ilya takes a cold breath. “Is that an order?”
“No. It’s a request. From a friend.”
Ilya puts on his green watch cap. They did storm the citadel. And they did it in more ways than Ilya has ever seen in battle. With Misha’s rolling exploding drums. With bundles of sticks filling the moat for bridges. With heaps of chairs and crates thrown into the crevasse to obscure the vision of enemy gunners at the bottom. With burning barrels of oil to smoke them out. With lashed-together logs for trestles and ladders. With cudgels and bayonets and flamethrowers and bullets and man after man after man.
For the final week Ilya, Misha, and two dozen men who followed them into the citadel fought in close quarters with the Germans. It was like Stalingrad all over again, and Ilya was ready. He taught the men with him by example and stern whispers how to survive and kill in the bowels of a building. Creep. Stay low. Stay apart. Stay alert. Storm a room or a stronghold from many angles. Roll grenades ahead of you to clear paths. Work at night and in the morning, around the clock, wear the enemy down, no rest for them or you until they’re finished. Use feints, false attacks, dummy positions, fool them, be everywhere and nowhere. No mercy, no grief, swallow your fear. Ilya and Misha survived the citadel with the six men who are with them right now. Ilya does not know any of their names. He saw no need inside the citadel to become familiar. He commanded them first with his own actions, and when he needed them to move he pointed and said, “You, you, and you!” In the citadel fighting, Misha stayed near Ilya. He’s not a terrific fighter but is a gifted tactician. Misha has the rear officer’s tolerance for sending men to their deaths.
Ilya casts his eyes over the line of haggard prisoners tramping in ersatz-wool greatcoats. Another loses his footing, trips over himself, two others stumble over him. In confusion the line bunches to a halt. Two of the guards make angry noises and approach. Why did they fight like that, Ilya wonders? Why did the Germans have to kill and be killed, sixty thousand defenders in Posen ground down to twelve thousand. Defending what? How many young Russian men are dead, hurt, ruined, how many more to come? How much needless destruction is there in Posen, all of Poland, Russia, and now in Germany because of them?
Duty. The lone answer to every soldierly question. There is nothing beyond it.
But what about all the havoc that’s gone beyond duty? Again, Ilya smells Majdanek. The mounds. The ditches. Ashes. Cruelty.
That is not the work of soldiers. It’s the spawn of madmen. Rabidness. Hitler’s not here. Who answers for it?
Do these men in line?
Is revenge part of Ilya’s duty?
He hates these Germans. He doesn’t detest them in constellation but individually, each sunken face and skittish eyeball, each defeated brute, one at a time, the way he’s killed them.
The march has stopped. Ilya holds his ground at the rear of the pack. Misha strides forward. In German he tells the fallen soldiers to get up, schnell! Two of them climb to their feet, the third lifts no farther than his knees before he collapses again to the earth. Misha reaches down and clasps the collar of the prisoner’s coat. He yanks, but the man like a downed mule will not rise.
Misha sends a swift kick into the prisoner’s midsection. In Russian he shouts, “Get up, you piece of shit! Get up!”
Ilya sees his own hatred taking form around the Germans, like blood clotting. The other guards and Misha take steps away from the fallen man. The prisoners close ranks around their comrade, who can barely sit up on the ground. The air thickens into a paste of anger and tension.
Misha puts his little fists to his hips. He says in Russian, so it is intended not for the prisoners but the armed guards around him, “I said get up, you German piece of shit.”
The German knows what Misha wants. The man looks ill. His cheeks work as though to keep down vomit. He does not—probably cannot— stand.
With a flourishing hand Misha draws a pistol, a captured Luger. The six other guards see this. One by one they follow suit, leveling their rifles behind Misha into a firing line. The Germans’ eyes go wide, their knees stiffen before the guns.
One of the guards spits on the ground. In a snarling voice he says, “Smolensk.”
Another Red soldier spits. He says, “Leningrad.”
A third. “Moscow.”
These are Russian cities that withstood sieges of terrible carnage. These are curses the Russians put in the ears of the Germans.
A fourth. “Minsk.”
“Chelmno.”
“Kursk.”
Misha looks over to Ilya, who has not moved. In the surrounding woods a crow caws, a bad sound.
The guards hurl more names at the Germans. Names of prison camps, Rovno, Ternopol, Zitomir; names of occupied villages, Braslav, Balvi, Vigala; names of death camps, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Treblinka; names of dead comrades,
Kazora,Vozny, Smirnov, Zubkov, Mastavenko; names of fathers and mothers, brothers, women. The Red soldiers vent themselves on the Germans, who cower under the onslaught of condemnation. The names are stones. Russian throats strain, neck tendons bulge, faces go red with the effort of throwing them.
Ilya stands watching Misha.
They’re on a country road, far from any town, hidden in Poland. What they do here no one else will see. What happens here, no one will care. The eight of them can report back to their company in Posen claiming the prisoners made a break into the trees. Shrugs will answer that tale. Perhaps it’s even expected of them. They will have been poor shepherds, that’s all. They can join the rest of their battalion on the river Oder, aimed at Berlin, to unleash more anger.
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 20