No. Today is not the day to take chances. Especially not on Easter Sunday.
The burgomaster looks at the floor while he talks to the next burgomaster. The man is animated, waving his free hand in the air telling the next burgomaster how gigantic the American force is. Hundreds of tanks! Thousands of artillery guns. Thousands and thousands of men! The fat official glances up at the captain, currying favor with his eyes and quick, furtive nods, then back down to concentrate on his fairy tale.
Bandy rises, pushing off on his left leg, careful to protect his left arm. The burgomaster gives the okay sign to the American captain, who returns the sign and holsters the Colt. A GI will be left with this burgomaster for a little while just to make sure a trap hasn’t been laid in the village up the road.
Bandy moves outside to the town hall steps. Holzminden looks like a nice small burg. Main street. Shops. Red-tile-roofed houses, gardens. A square with a fountain and statue. A pretty church with a steeple you can see from most of the town. It’s good that Holzminden didn’t have to be blasted and looted. That’s the rule here in the waning days of the war, the days of fast-rolling men and machines, thirty-five-mile-a-day progress, unprecedented advances into enemy territory. If the GIs have to fight for a town, they treat it roughly. Artillery, bazookas, tanks, any firepower it takes to reduce the threat, even if it reduces the town to ruins. These skirmishes are rarely with regular German army units; the Wehrmacht sees the writing on the wall and is surrendering in droves. A half million of them have laid down their weapons in the surrounded Ruhr pocket. Instead, the Americans’ confrontations are almost always with Waffen SS stragglers, zealous Volkssturm, or Hitler Youth caravanned down from Berlin.
Regardless of who’s shooting back, when the fighting is over, the GIs feel obliged to loot. They walk past whatever corpses they’ve made with callous disregard, the proper disdain for fools, they think. Never do the GIs take more than they can fit in a backpack—jewelry, wine, silver. The favorite booty is Nazi memorabilia. Eyes are always peeled for Lugers, swords, pins, flags. The surviving citizens are well advised to stand aside and shut their mouths, especially if the Americans have taken casualties. But if the town surrenders quietly, the populace is handled with much better care. Often the German civilians are glad to see the Yanks, hosting them to meals and drinks, inviting them to sleep in their beds, packing the soldiers off with gifts. You are welcome here, they say, because you are not the Russians.
The German citizens impress many of the soldiers, Bandy too. Villagers and townsfolk seem educated and hardworking, cleaning bricks and sweeping streets, selling items and food from carts when their stores are destroyed. They stand beside the roads and dirt tracks, jaws dropped at the displays of Allied might and mobility. They lift up their children to see over the crowds. The kids wave, loving trucks and noise and unconcerned with friend or foe. Bandy snaps photos with the 35mm Leica. The big Speed Graphic takes two hands to operate fast enough to catch the breakneck pace of the Allied advance. His left shoulder isn’t up to it just yet.
Inside the burgomaster’s office the negotiations have been concluded. The captain comes out on the steps beside Bandy. The day is bright. No one has died here this morning.
Easter bells ring in the church steeple.
“Mr. Bandy?” the captain asks. “You a believer?”
Soldiers and citizens alike gather in the street to enter the church doors. Services will begin in a few minutes at 1000 hours.
Bandy does not wrestle with the soldiers’ paradox of God. He does not ponder how God can save you from doom via prayer when that same deity allows so many cruelties to exist. Why would God save you from Himself? Bandy is satisfied that his role is to take pictures of God’s design. Bandy spreads news of God’s Word, because in Bandy’s life so much of His Word has been War. Bandy suffers no moral dilemma. In his logic, God rewards him for his faithfulness by giving him Victoria and Tennessee and the Leica.
He smiles at the captain. “You go ahead.”
The officer chuckles and walks down the steps. The man says over his shoulder, “Lot of other fellas might become believers after a bullet misses their nuts by two inches.”
Bandy watches the mingle of soldiers and citizens at the church entrance. He raises the Leica with one hand and fires a few frames. As always, he’s drawn through the lens to the story behind the picture. He decides to go inside the church. Hell, he thinks, it’s Easter.
He picks his way down the town hall steps and enters the street. He winds up limping to the church beside an old man with a cane. The man offers Bandy his cane. Bandy declines, using some of his smattered German, “Danke, nein, danke schön.” The man insists and hangs it by the loop over Bandy’s wrist. The old German stands there gesticulating like a man shooing goats out of the road, wanting Bandy to use the cane, impatient that the American resists. Then he turns away and outwalks Bandy to the church.
Inside, the church is full with a few hundred worshipers. The pipe organ plays an entry tune. Soldiers and citizens sit in pews shoulder to shoulder. Rifles are laid rattling on the floor at the soldiers’ feet. Children fidget and giggle when GIs smile and make faces at them. Candy bars are broken in pieces and handed out. An American pastor stands at the altar beside a German counterpart in a white robe. Bandy finds a place in the last pew near the door. He’s glad of the cane when he folds to sit.
The service takes place in both tongues. Throughout the service some silent signal tells the gathering to kneel and then return to their seats. Bandy can’t do it and stays in the pew. When the times come to stand, he finds the cane a lifesaver. He can’t take pictures in here. He grows bored.
The private next to him seems particularly hard-praying. During a German part of the service when the boy is taking a break, Bandy taps him on the leg and whispers.
“Son?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Mind if I ask you what you’re praying so hard for?”
The soldier is not troubled by the query. Bandy sees gentleness on his young face. He wonders what other expressions have rent these smooth features, what rage and killing-passion, shattering panic, doubt?
“No, sir,” the soldier whispers in return. “I don’t mind.”
Bandy waits. The boy looks into his own lap, as though to repeat his prayer out loud requires the same bowed head.
“I was askin’ God for two things.”
“Uh-huh.”
“First, I want Him to let me git home all in one piece. I figure everybody’s askin’ for that one.”
Bandy nods at this and senses the bandage around his right leg. He concurs, a good request. -
“And two, I wish for God to bring this country down to its knees so bad they never try to make war again.”
The boy seems ashamed to have asked this. He does not lift his eyes to Bandy’s. But Bandy understands. From the mouth of this young soldier has come the wish that’s been shared by every fighting man across history, in the aeons before history: May the war he is fighting be the last one. May the sacrifices of his comrades be for a purpose, and the destruction be enough to make men turn away forever from warfare.
The soldier is ashamed because he doesn’t pray for peace, for everyone to join hands and forgive and fashion a new day. That would be a better, more Christian and charitable prayer. But this American boy has seen too much and realizes too much to believe that even beseeching God for peace will make it happen in this world of men. So he asks instead for the right thing, the brave thing, the prayer that will most likely work: that God be sufficiently vengeful and desolating to make us stop ourselves.
This soldier, Bandy thinks, knows the truth. What he doesn’t know is history. There’s never been a final war.
Bandy thanks the GI with one more finger’s touch on his leg. The soldier returns to his private dialogue with heaven. Bandy takes up the cane and leaves the church.
In the street in front of the church, the Eighty-third Infantry of the Ninth Army readies itself to
surge forward. Bandy was moved by the boy’s sad and sage prayer, but now he lets out a fresh laugh at the Eighty-third.
A vast collection of vehicles stretches from the central square out past the town limits. Though the Eighty-third is an infantry division, they’ve gone mobile through another clever tactic. In every German town, whether surrendered or fought for, the division commandeers a quota of vehicles. The Eighty-third’s Major General Macon has given the order: “Anything that moves, no questions asked.” The men dress up the vehicles with a fast coat of olive drab paint and slap on a white U.S. Army star. Then the ten thousand-plus soldiers climb on board and off they go in a startling convoy of captured Wehrmacht jeeps and Mark V or Tiger tanks, civilian and staff cars, motorbikes, buses, and two fire trucks. One of the fire trucks leads the motley parade, displaying behind it a large banner reading: next stop: berlin.
Bandy has cast his lot with this inventive, hell-bent-for-leather bunch. Formerly it was called the “Thunderbolt” Division; American correspondents have renamed it the “Rag-Tag Circus.”
Like the Eighty-third, the weight of the Ninth Army has set its sights on the final prize of the war, the German capital. The Ninth’s commanding officer, General Simpson, has issued instructions that he wants an armored division and an infantry division set up on the Autobahn above Magdeburg on the Elbe River as fast as possible. From there, he wants to move on Potsdam, “where we’ll be ready to close in on Berlin.” Every division in the Ninth that isn’t involved in reducing the surrounded German force in the Ruhr pocket has laid its plans for heading to Berlin. The Second “Hell on Wheels” Armored Division is moving pace for pace on the Rag-Tag Circus’s left flank. The Second is so ponderous a force that reporters say it takes half a day to move past a given point at two miles per hour.
Elsewhere along the Ninth Army’s fifty-mile-wide front, just slightly behind the Second and Eighty-third, course the legions and weapons of the Fifth Armored “Victory” Division, plus the Thirtieth, Eighty-fourth, and Hundred and second Infantry Divisions. Taken together they form an inexorable thrust plunging east across the German interior.
Bandy looks over his chosen Eighty-third. He’s saddled them up and races them to Berlin against all the others, a jockey on a crowded track. Right now the Rag-Tag Circus is in a tight heat, a close second to the Hell on Wheels boys.
Holzminden has offered up two tractors with attached hay wagons, two more buses, a motorcycle with sidecar, and a dump truck. Out in front the fire truck sounds its siren. To Bandy the thing looks hilarious painted green, it still bristles with ladders and hoses. At the loud blast the last soldiers file out of the church and surrounding buildings. For the ninety minutes they’ve been in Holzminden making sure the town is secure and gathering up all weapons, the Eighty-third has about doubled the town’s population. Bandy waits for the captain to come out, and waves to him. He asks the officer if he might have the space in the motorcycle sidecar. It will give him 360 degrees of open air to shoot his photos. And no one will jostle his tender shoulder or leg. The captain cheerfully agrees and finds a driver for the bike. Bandy climbs into the sidecar with delicate motions. The driver, a corporal, locates two pairs of goggles in the sidecar’s luggage boot. He and Bandy slip them on over their helmets. The young man enjoys revving the bike’s engine. He grins and shouts to Bandy that he’s in ecstasy. He says he’s from Jersey.
When all the GIs are mounted, the fire truck begins the parade. The hundreds of trucks, cars, motorbikes, and tractors of the Rag-Tag Circus lurch out of Holzminden issuing every kind of mechanized sound, spits and backfires, a clanging bell, diesel coughs, and the hums of many Mercedes engines. Bandy and his Jersey driver wait for several minutes before they begin to pull forward. Citizens line the road and stand on balconies. Their send-off is divided about in thirds, Bandy observes. Some folks smile and wave goodbye, some grimace, some are stunned.
Bevern is only five miles off. By the time the lead vehicles of the Eighty-third reach the village outskirts, the last soldiers will have just rolled out of Holzminden. Bandy and his driver are in the second half of the convoy, about three miles behind the wind-rippling sign on the tail of the lead fire truck. The road is a tarmac and gravel two-lane strip through easy hills and unfilled farmland. Wooded patches worry Bandy, especially near bends in the road. Bandy won’t even hear gunfire over the roar of the motorbike. But the Eighty-third’s fleet takes up both sides of the road and fills the horizon fore and aft. An ambush would be suicide. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It has happened. The size of the division simply placates Bandy’s worry; there are many other targets besides him.
The plan for the day—so long as the connect-the-burgomaster game keeps working—is to follow this road through three more villages and bivouac for the night in the town of Alfeld. Tomorrow the objective is to enter the city of Braunschweig. At this rate, without any serious scrapes with the enemy, the Eighty-third should have a good shot at being the first division to reach Magdeburg on the Elbe, the staging ground for the final push to Berlin. There, the Rag-Tag Circus will leave the back roads and hit the highway, Hitler’s Autobahn.
Bandy loads a fresh roll into the Leica, no small feat with one good hand and a rattling lap. His instincts tell him to stay ready, everything has gone too nicely the past few days.
The moment he snaps closed the camera back, his Jersey bike driver dodges in a quick shift to the left, rocking Bandy in the sidecar. Bandy grits his teeth at the shear of pain from his stitches, right through his groin, it hurts so much he has to hold his bladder. He curses the driver, knowing the kid won’t hear him. The soldier pivots in his bike seat and waves forward a long black Mercedes. The car pulls alongside, scooting fast between Bandy’s bike and a farm truck loaded with GIs beside them in the other lane. The Mercedes is a German staff car, flying twin swastika banners from the front bumpers. Bandy thinks the car must have been requisitioned at the last moment in Holzminden and there was no time to paint it green and yank off those flags. But the man driving the big car wears a chauffeur’s cap, black gloves, and a fretful look. In the rear seat, a well-dressed civilian careens from window to window gawping at the American column on both sides of him.
The chauffeur leans on the horn and weaves through traffic. Each vehicle in turn pulls aside and lets the Mercedes through, each American soldier stares in amazement at the lost German staff car. Bandy shakes his head; apparently the Eighty-third has captured so many German vehicles that this misbegotten staff car mistook the Rag-Tag Circus for a Wehrmacht column. Bandy starts taking pictures. There is too little real comedy in war.
A burst of machine gun fire brings the Mercedes to a halt. The convoy slows around it. A jeep escorts the car to the shoulder of the road. Passing, Bandy recognizes the German-speaking captain, pointing his pistol again, smiling again. The Mercedes will be painted green in about five minutes, and those Nazi flags will be tucked in some soldier’s backpack.
The procession moves east at less than ten miles per hour. The Jersey driver keeps heaving the rpm’s on the motorbike, wanting to peel out of the pack and go touring with Bandy locked at his hip. Bandy doesn’t know the driver’s name, and takes his picture as an anonymous Italian boy fighting overseas. He’s got a great face, Bandy thinks, swarthy and all lit up, American as apple pie because he looks so European.
The road ahead is straight and unobstructed, and green vehicles packed with soldiers fill every inch of it. Riding in the open sidecar like this, Bandy senses the power of the Allied advance. Beyond the fields and heights on all sides of him there are other American and British divisions on the offensive, knifing into central Germany, every minute taking more miles of enemy land under occupation. Bandy wonders, Why do the Germans resist? Why do they make us wreck their towns, why do they blow their own bridges, why do they sacrifice themselves? Bandy wants to ride the Rag-Tag Circus all the way into Berlin and nab that sick fuck Hitler, get the Kraut-speaking captain and his .45 Colt and ask these and a few other que
stions.
The column proceeds unimpeded. This is a good sign. If Bevern had plans to resist, the shooting would start around now, with the green fire truck in the lead nearing the village outskirts. Another burgomaster has seen the common sense of surrender.
So have a small group of Wehrmacht regulars standing beside the road. Ten German soldiers in a line on the left-hand shoulder have their hands in the air and rifles at their feet. Every olive drab truck, tractor, car, tank, motorbike—Bandy snaps the men’s picture in his turn—bus and jeep sliding past thumbs them to the rear, telling these quitted enemies to keep walking west and give up back there, we’ve got no time to stop, read the sign, pal, BERLIN.
After twenty minutes on the two-lane road, the first cluster of dwellings appears. These are small farmhouses with roofs of red clay tile or thatch. Those barns left standing appear ancient, weathered to a lovely woody gray, pleasing to Bandy’s farmer’s eye. Other outbuildings are scorched to the ground, just ridges of charcoal in the dirt like the spines of long-dead giant beasts. The Jersey boy slows the motorbike. A canopy of bare branches over the road marks the outer boundary of the village. f
The End of War - A Novel of the Race for Berlin - [World War II 02] Page 34