The three veterans of the last war were known among the lower ranks as Three Guys Named Moe and, insofar as possible, avoided. Ingo guessed this wouldn't be so easy in Slovakia.
If only, he thought, I had a snowball's chance of washing out.
But that was unthinkable: Ingo was in for the whole nine yards. No matter how badly he screwed up, the Moes only rode him harder.
“Get down there,” growled the largest and toughest of the three, designated One Moe or, in honor of the rifle, M-1. (The man's real name, Ingo happened to know, was Vincent Bloom.) “I'm gonna be timing you. When I say go, you haul your ashes out of here—you've got about forty-five seconds till the shitstorm commences.”
Stu, crouching next to Ingo in the shallow trench, gave a moan he might have picked up from his patients back in St. Louis. Ingo didn't think it was worth the trouble. Go ahead, he thought. Loose the damned dogs of war. Get it over with.
“Go!” barked M-1, staring with malevolent voracity at a battle-scarred Timex.
Ingo scrabbled forward, his weapon—a Schmeisser MP-40, like a shorter and uglier tommy gun—cradled between his forearms, as far from his face as he could get it. His elbows and knees banged the gritty, rust-colored dirt of southern Maryland. Leaves crackled around him as the rest of the squad kicked off. The racket must have been audible clear across the empty ground ahead, a half-drained marsh filled with cattails and sword-leaf sedge, interspersed with alder and islandlike clumps of river birch, whose bare limbs and peeling copper bark made them look plague-stricken. This godforsaken place was said to resemble the countryside of Lower Silesia. Ingo, who had been to Silesia, remembered it differently.
Off to the right, not far away, came the baying of bloodhounds.
“This is kinda like Boy Scouts,” muttered Stu behind him, sardonically. “Only ten times worse.”
As with all Stu's banal comments, Ingo found this both annoying and welcome, as it provided some distraction from the misery at hand.
“Were you ever a Boy Scout?” Stu was scuttling like a crab, trying to overtake Ingo, who could move pretty fast when he was scared enough.
“Shh,” Ingo hissed. “Yes, I was.”
That was more or less the truth—though Ingo's memory of scouting was probably so far from Stu's as to represent a wholly different experience. To his own way of thinking he had never been a Boy Scout, not really, even though he'd spent much of his youth hiking and camping and learning survival tricks cheek-by-jowl with those who were. Wearing the same olive-drab shorts, the same red-and-yellow bandanna. It had marked, he supposed, the start of his long, undistinguished career as an impersonator. Culminating in his present role: a German-American barkeep pretending to be a Jewish partisan, frightened of his own weapon, wallowing through Chesapeake bottomland, hunted by white-hating hounds. Point man of Dog Squad. Having no end of fun.
Afterward, as always, they gathered for an ordeal formally known as the Post-Operation Brief, more familiarly as a chalk talk. These sessions took place in a shed originally built to house farm machinery, with no heat and little shelter from the autumn wind. Two of the Moes were present, along with all twelve members of D Squad and someone Ingo had never seen before—a morose-looking man, somewhere in his forties, with a week's worth of gray and black stubble. His chambray work clothes didn't look right on him. He had been accorded the honor of a wooden packing crate to sit on, while the Moes stood on either side of a dusty slateboard and the trainees hunched dirty and tired on the packed earthen floor of the barn.
The scrawnier of the Moes—Eat Moe they called him, from the Louis Jordan song—began with a general review of the “tactical situation” and ended with a summary verdict on the squad's performance: You guys would be Ralston's Doberman Chow by this time. He then settled into a meticulous accounting of how the assignment ought to have been carried out, noting point by point, with reference to unreadable chalk diagrams, how the squad's actions had strayed from the recommended course. Now and then he would point to a trainee and announce, “Right there, the Krauts woulda been on you like a cheap suit,” or “Congratulations—you just won a free ride in a cattle car.”
Through all of this, the morose visitor sat seemingly indifferent. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, and cast a single long, slow glance around the room, lingering nowhere, as though nothing he saw was worth a second look.
Eventually Eat Moe ran out of bad things to say. He singled out a couple of trainees for qualified praise, then made an exaggerated shrug. “The rest of you guys, what can I tell ya? We'll be posting the final roster in the next couple days. I hope you ain't got your hearts set on an expenses-paid holiday in the Old Country.”
Now a shuffle, as the squad sensed the end of another chalk talk. But One Moe stepped forward and growled in his no-BS voice, “Hold your water, gentlemen. There's somebody here you want to meet.”
The gloomy-looking man showed no more interest than before. He shifted wearily on the packing crate as the big man went on:
“We've been joined today by Captain Aristotle. The captain has come all the way from Hungary, enemy-occupied territory, to give us the benefit of his expertise as we prepare for this mission. I know you'll all be interested in what he has to say.”
The man rose slowly to his feet. Ingo found both name and rank implausible: the man looked less like a soldier than a weary grocer—not even the owner of the store, maybe the guy who comes in after hours to stock the shelves—and scarcely called to mind the philosopher, except maybe by his bone-weary gravitas. But then he began to speak, in a voice that did not match his body or any other, a voice so ancient and hollow it might have risen from a crypt, and somehow you could not keep from listening.
“The Germans know they have lost this war.” His English was clear, accented just enough to lend him an air of worldly sophistication. “They have lost the conquered lands, their source of strategic materials. Their power is spent, their soldiers are too old or too young and are fighting without enough bullets, their tanks are running out of petrol, their General Staff is discredited, the Gestapo is hanging people from lampposts. In the battlefield, they have reverted to the tactics of the Great War. They are dying in place, all across the front. Russian spearheads have penetrated German territory, and the Western allies are nearing the Rhine.”
Weltschmerz, thought Ingo. World-pain: one of those mental states for which only Germans have a name. And this poor Joe has got a bad case of it.
“There can be no clearer signal that the war is lost, and that the army knows the war is lost, than the attempt on Hitler's life three months ago. While they were winning, the gentlemen of the Wehrmacht, the von Thises and von Thats from the old aristocratic families, were happy to avert their eyes while the bullyboys stomped all over the continent, looting and murdering and swaggering like drunken oafs. Now the generals have experienced a remarkable change of heart. They have observed that the war cannot be won. And suddenly their eyes are open to the crimes of the state they serve. This government must be replaced, they have decided, with one that can make peace, a government with whom the Western powers will deign to negotiate. A government led by decent, civilized men. Indeed, consisting of men very like themselves. So let us get rid of this vulgar little Austrian and put an end to this silly quarrel before anything really unpleasant happens—such as a Bolshevik horde overrunning all the great capitals of Middle Europe.
“But you see, here the generals have made an error, these men from the choicest bloodlines. They believe the war is over simply because the outcome is no longer in doubt. In the great game of war, as these men learned it reading Clausewitz at Lichterfelde, in a room overlooking the parade ground, one does not carry things past the point of futility. One shoves the little pewter flag-holders about the map, until such time as the result is determined. Then one shakes hands ‘round the table and goes upstairs to change for the Abendessen. That is how war is fought, or so the members of the General Staff like to think.”
Aristotle p
aused—not for breath, Ingo thought. Rather to give his audience time to absorb what he was telling them. No grocer's stockboy, this one. More like a professor of history. Or a shabby aristocrat who reads history for pleasure, alone in his book-lined study, a poor Hungarian relation of those same Wehrmacht generals he's talking about.
“But this war has never been like that. It has never been the kind of war fought across a map table. Yes, there have been classic encirclements, stolen marches, cavalry charges and the rest of the Lichterfelde repertoire. But this war has never been a struggle for territory, never a duel of opposing field commanders. This is a Hassenkrieg, a war of hatred, and it belongs to a much more venerable tradition—the history of tribal enmity, Huns against the Visigoths, Saxons against the Gauls, each side seeking nothing less than the total destruction of the other. Militarily, one cannot understand this war by studying the campaigns of Bismarck or Napoleon, as they like to do at General Staff College. No, one needs to look back to Frederick Barbarossa, the era of the Crusades, when the struggle was not truly won until the last infidel had been slain, and his family with him, and the village he was born in razed, and his cattle slaughtered, his fields laid waste, the scrolls of his heretic creed thrown into the flames and his head stuck on a pike as a warning to others. And only then, when from every tree waves the cross—the holy cross or the hooked cross, take your pick— only then can victory be declared.”
Aristotle turned his head, as though he heard something, a call from on high. “But by the same token, defeat cannot be acknowledged either. The True Faith is not dead as long as a single believer still holds the sacred banner aloft. The struggle must continue. Perhaps there is time to slay an infidel or two. A few heathen screeds might yet be stuffed into the mouths of heretics. There may be fields left to burn, or children to dismember in front of their parents. If so, to carry on the fight is a sacred obligation.”
He gave them a slow nod. “Yes: this is the nature of the Hate War. It is hard reality, and at the same time something out of old German myth.
The dark romance of the cross-bearers, the Teutonic Knights. I feel it is important that you understand this, even if the gentlemen of the Wehrmacht do not, or pretend not to. Because you will not be fighting the Wehrmacht if you go over there. The Wehrmacht is busy with the Russians. No, you will be fighting the holy warriors themselves—the SS, the blood-sworn defenders of the faith. Bearers of the hooked cross, which they call the swastika. I have been fighting these men for many years now, and have learned a thing or two about them. Perhaps I can teach you something, those of you who still wish to go. Or perhaps you will decide not to go after all, once you hear what I have to say.”
Behind Ingo, Stu shifted noisily, his ammo bandoliers clanking against the entrenching tool on his back. “This guy's a million laughs,” he muttered. To Ingo, it sounded like a cry of despair.
There was no getting it out of your head for a while—neither the introduction nor the graphic details that followed. Which made the hoo-rah planned for that night even more ridiculous.
Ingo slumped in a bentwood chair on the lawn behind a stucco-sided bungalow, the kind people used to order back in the Twenties from Sears, Roebuck. Your house arrived on a flatbed truck, a neat pile of precut and numbered pieces, complete with assembly manual. This style of home-building was popular with colored folks especially, because you could gather a whole neighborhood—or a big extended family like Vernon's— and knock the thing together in a week or two, no need to hire carpenters. Ingo had seen bungalows like this one, standing two decades or longer, that from the outside looked fine but on the inside were still awaiting such finishing touches as electrical wiring and a flush toilet.
Unlike those, this Craftsman-style house and its matching, well-kept outbuildings showed all the little signs of prosperity, from fresh cream-yellow paint to a stoop of poured concrete, that accrued to successful farmers in a time of food rationing. Ingo wasn't sure how Charleva had managed this with her husband away in the Artillery Corps. He supposed that the chickens, delivered to the city each Saturday, were part of it. But there were other parts, such as the regular coming and going of local people, white as well as colored, paying cash for fresh eggs and butter and home-canned preserves. He couldn't help wondering what had impelled Charleva to offer up the farm's wide tracts of fallow land and scrubby, cutover woodlots for the training of three dozen strangers in the art of guerrilla warfare. If it was an act of patriotism, surely it was one of the oddest he'd ever heard of.
But he didn't want to wonder about that just now. He preferred to think of nothing—or, failing that, about the smell of roasting veal and hickory embers that filled the big yard and overwhelmed, thank God, the smell of penned livestock. He had dragged his chair close enough to feel the warmth of the long-smoldering fire. Half a dozen children played touch football nearby while the real thing, Redskins vs. Eagles, was broadcast from Griffith Stadium, the announcer's voice belting out of a big console set up on the side porch. He was neither following the game, exactly, nor ignoring it. He was brooding, like the hens in the low, sprawling barn across the field, camouflaged by eight-foot stalks of joe-pye weed.
From where he sat, he could see the rest of the Brigade gathered around a long table where deviled eggs, potato salad, Coca-Cola and beer had been laid out on a checkered cloth. A big outdoor roast like this would be an occasion, regardless. But today's was downright surreal, not least because of the species of animal charring in the pit.
The whole thing had been arranged, on the sly and at long distance from California, by Ari Glasser, with covert assistance on the ground from Vernon and his Uncle Leon. Besides breeding hounds that hated white people, Leon also was the most esteemed hog-roaster in Queen Anne's County, if not on the whole Eastern Shore—so Vernon claimed. In summer you had to book him weeks ahead, though things did slow down after Labor Day.
The pit had been dug yesterday morning, while the squads were on maneuver, and the fire laid around nightfall in order that the coals would be ready at dawn. And only after that, when Ari arrived late in the evening, breathless from a cross-country flight and a taxi ride that must have seemed just as long and even more dangerous, did it occur to him that roast pig might not be the perfect feast to cap off these particular five weeks of unparalleled chaos and misery.
“What was I thinking?” Glasser was said to have said.
Leon viewed the situation as a professional challenge, and the two men spent hours in the middle of the night driving along the muddy shores of the Chesapeake in an aged Ford he'd rigged out with a special bed for hauling slaughtered animals and kitchen implements and confidential ingredients from job to job. As Ari told it, Leon had finally pulled into a run-down place owned by a friend of his, declaring, “It comes to my mind that we could make do with a fatted calf.”
Hence the carcass that now hissed and popped and gave off fragrant smoke within spitting distance of Ingo's cold feet. Seven hours in the fire, it had turned black all over, with red splotches from the secret seasoning slathered on at intervals by Leon, or by Vernon acting as his deputy. Ari had stood for a good deal of that time nearby, nursing a cola, transfixed. You don't see much of this kind of thing in Hollywood, Ingo supposed. He wondered how often, after tonight, the roasted-calf motif would crop up in coming feature films. Maybe some biblical costume drama, East of Gomorrah … but then a pang somewhere near the heart nearly doubled him over.
He had broken a personal taboo. He had thought about the future, allowing his mind to drift past the fourth quarter of the current Redskins game. It was something he'd been drilling himself not to do, just as his thirty-odd companions, now gathered around the deviled eggs like apostles at the Last Barbecue, had drilled themselves to crawl through mud and shoot automatic weapons and defecate outdoors like real honest-to-God guerrillas.
For his own part, Ingo could not believe the war would be won or lost by his failings as a Scout. On the other hand, he could easily believe that he personally wou
ld die of dread if he allowed his thoughts to range unchecked for a single moment.
“It sounds like a close one,” someone nearby said.
Ingo started, then recognized Timo. “Close one?”
“The game,” said the driver, with a flash of bad teeth. “The Eagles are up by seven but haven't scored in a while. They got the talent, no question. I just think maybe the Skins got more staying power.”
Ingo nodded, trying to focus on football, generally a safe topic. The rules were clear and, at least where the formidable Skins were concerned, the outcome seldom in doubt. But win or lose—in marked contrast to the war in Europe, despite predictions to the contrary—the whole shebang really would be over by Christmas.
“I would like to offer a toast,” said Ari Glasser, raising his can of National Bohemian just as an annoying jingle for the very product came floating from the radio on the porch. Ingo missed the first part of whatever Ari was toasting to, listening instead to the chipper advertising ensemble. What did these people do when they weren't singing fifteen-second oratorios?
National Beer, National Beer,
You'll like the taste of National Beer.
And while we're singing, we're proud to say,
It's brewed on the shores
Of the Chesapeake Bay.
Glasser concluded, “The Varian Fry Brigade!”
There were murmurs and laughter and, from out in the field, a bit of yelling when one team of kids scored a touchdown against the other.
“What did he say?” Ingo whispered to Martina, who was standing beside him.
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