An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  “I’m glad the Sergeant Major brings us real coffee,” Mareth said, using her nickname for Max’s father. “Where does he get it?”

  Max smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Best not to ask my father questions like that. He knows what he’s doing.”

  Mareth took his arm again when they left the restaurant. “I don’t want a simple country lad like yourself getting lost in the blackout,” she said. Around them night had fallen and it was almost pitch black, the only illumination coming from a weak moon. A stranger who didn’t know his way around would be lost in a moment. You couldn’t read the street signs, couldn’t see the shop windows or addresses, couldn’t see much of anything. You knew where the sidewalks dropped off only because the curbs had been dabbed with thin lines of phosphorous paint at each intersection. You could hear the trams but couldn’t see them, their only illumination a thin strip of purple light on the front. Mareth knew two men in the Foreign Ministry who had been run down. And as for motorcars, there were none, save for a handful belonging to the military. These were equipped with cloth covers over each headlamp; small slits in the center of the covers allowed a narrow beam of light to pass through. So this was the capital of the Reich: everything dark, everything rationed, everyone in uniform, everyone fighting. Max could never have envisioned this.

  He buried his face in Mareth’s hair, moving his hand around to the inside of her thigh until she slapped it away. She always seemed so sophisticated to him. In Paris she could pass for Parisian, in Berlin she seemed like a Berliner to anyone who met her. She’d been raised in the countryside outside Bad Wilhelm, but attended gymnasium in Berlin and spoke German like a Berliner. Berlinerrisch, they called it. Even the cabdrivers thought she was a native so they didn’t cheat her. Compared to Mareth, Max was just a country boy. Yet the navy had given him confidence beyond his provincial roots from the beginning. Going aloft in a three-masted barque and reefing a topsail forty meters above the deck in a Force Ten gale had a way of improving a young man’s self-assurance.

  They passed through the Brandenburg Gate and entered the Tiergarten, so green in spring and summer, but covered now with snow, the evergreens trim and clipped. At least the park foresters were still on duty. Everything else in Berlin looked shabby and unkempt; the formerly spotless streets now filthy. When they were some distance into the park he stopped Mareth and kissed her, his nose cold against her cheek.

  Reading his mind, she gave him a stern look and said, “No.”

  Her lips were soft and warm against his. He slipped his hands under her coat.

  “Max, no.”

  The evergreens and the darkness provided plenty of cover. He led her into a thicket off the path and spread his thick naval great-coat on the snow. She shook her head but a little smile played at the corners of her mouth. “Damn you,” she said, lying down on the coat, her fingers already working on his belt buckle.

  He collapsed on top of her and the two of them lay giggling in the cold, their hot breath escaping in clouds, when the air raid sirens shattered the brittle winter atmosphere. It was a long, undulating warble so loud it could wake the dead. Mareth pushed him up. “Come on,” she said, “that’s the red warning.” There was a thin edge of panic in her voice.

  He pulled up his pants and struggled into his greatcoat. She had him by the arm, dragging him out of the trees. “We have to get to the Zoo Tower. Run!”

  In the distance Max could barely see the tall flak tower rising above the trees. How far was it? A half kilometer, three-quarters? Running was difficult in their heavy winter clothes, the snow frozen into rifts impossible to see in the moonlight. They ran without speaking. Mareth stumbled, recovered. Max steadied her, then tripped himself, sprawling on the snow.

  “Max!”

  He was up again and moving. To the right he saw a brilliant red light in the sky, now two, now more—five or ten at least. They looked like Christmas trees; lighted Christmas trees dropping from the clouds. What in the name of God? He stopped for a moment and stared but Mareth tugged at him, shouting. Max didn’t hear what she said. He pointed at the falling lights.

  “Marker flares! From the pathfinder squadrons. Run! Run!”

  They were thirty meters from the tower when the first bombs hit, somewhere to the left. The sound wasn’t very loud, certainly nothing compared to the tremendous banging of the huge anti-aircraft guns on the tower roof. Red and white flashes now illuminated the night sky as the bright green marker flares continued to burn on the ground, showing the bombers where to aim. Another string of bombs fell. Closer now. The warden at the small side door motioned for them to hurry. An explosion flashed behind Max, then the concussion wave. It knocked him over. Rising to his knees, he saw Mareth crumpled in the snow five meters away. “Mareth!” A terrible chill went through him. “Mareth!”

  She was breathing. Thank God. And no blood, so it wasn’t shrapnel. He hefted her onto his back and sprinted the last fifteen meters to the steel door of the Zoo Tower.

  “Hurry!” the guard yelled. With a burly arm he pushed Max through the door, then shut it tight against its rubber seal and dogged it home. That made the shelter airtight; otherwise if a bomb landed on top of them all the oxygen would be sucked out by the explosion and everyone inside would suffocate. “I thought I recognized her,” the warden said. “She’s Mareth von Woller.”

  “Ja.”

  “Get her to the hospital. See the lift?” He pointed down the long corridor.

  “Ja.”

  “Take it to the third floor.”

  Max carried her limp body through the mass of people in the shelter. Housewives, hair pulled up in scarves, sat atop battered suitcases. Several society women, caught on their way to a reception, held dainty evening shoes in their laps. Another woman cradled a terrified kitten. A younger man, missing an arm, read a book. Children wrestled on the floor. In the corner two old men played chess, one of them with a helmet from the First War on his head. The ceilings of the cavernous rooms were covered with luminescent paint, for illumination if the electric light went out. Faces filled with tension looked up at him, but nobody reacted to the shaking ground or the pounding of the guns above.

  A terrible cacophony grew as Max approached the elevator until it pained his ears, louder than anything he had ever heard aboard Meteor or Graf Spee. Farther down the corridor he saw the source: the automatic shell hoist. It rose thirteen full stories to the platforms holding the eight five-inch guns that fired continuously into the sky—a thirteen-story conveyor belt of shells, clattering and screeching from the basement magazine to the roof.

  The young physician on duty knew her immediately. “Mareth von Woller. Stretcher, stretcher here.” Max laid her gently on the stretcher and began to follow the bearers as they carried her off. The doctor made as if to stop him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “you’ll have to wait here.”

  Max looked down at the doctor’s palm against his chest, then looked back up, a warrior’s fierceness in his blue eyes.

  The doctor blanched. “Come with me. This way, please.”

  They transferred Mareth to an examining table down the hall and the doctor inspected her at some length, poking and prodding, listening to her heart. He looked at Max. “Do you have some relationship to her?”

  “She is my fiancée.”

  “I see. You are the U-boat captain.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, not to worry. She just has a slight concussion. I’m certain she’ll come to in an hour or so.”

  Max felt the relief wash over him. His shoulders slumped, falling slack as the tension left them. The stretcher men moved Mareth again, this time to a bed, and Max knelt beside it when they had gone. He stroked Mareth’s forehead lightly, pushing back her blond hair; he took her hand and it was limp, almost lifeless. Laying his head down on her chest, he listened to the slow rhythm of her heart as it methodically thumped away.

  An hour passed, maybe more. He wasn’t sure. Max started to doze and woke only when he fel
t Mareth ruffling the hair at the back of his head. “Max,” she whispered.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey,” she said, lifting his chin, pulling him up to kiss her. Max moved his lips from her mouth to her cheeks, her eyelids, the bridge of her nose.

  In a few minutes the young Luftwaffe doctor came by, his white coat stained with blood. From the gun crews? People brought in off the street? Max didn’t know, though he later learned from a Luftwaffe officer that several of the teenage gunners on the upper platforms had been killed. Bomb splinters. The youngsters were defenseless on the open platforms as they loaded the guns. Unfortunately, a handful were lost in every raid. Nothing to be done for it. Volk und Führer.

  The doctor looked Mareth over quickly and told her to stay in bed for two weeks. “A concussion is nothing to take lightly,” he said. No doubt they saw plenty of concussions in this place with all the damned bombs being dropped on Berlin, Max thought. The building shook continuously as they exploded all around. Even in the hospital the noise was like muffled thunder.

  When the doctor left Mareth put her hand on Max’s arm. “Max, you must go tell my father where I am, and that I’m fine. He’s working late tonight. I need him to send his car for me in the morning to take me back to our flat.”

  Max frowned. “I doubt he’ll even let me into his office.”

  “He’ll let you in now. I telephone him after every air raid, it’s our strictest rule. He’ll be frantic for me. I can’t ring him from here because only the military can use the telephones. Max, please, do this for me. Please.”

  Max nodded. He didn’t have much of a choice. Besides, von Woller would have to meet him sooner or later, one way or another. “I’ll go,” he said. “Just tell me the way.”

  Mareth gave him the directions. Her father’s offices were not in the fortresslike Foreign Ministry itself, but in a smaller building several blocks away. Max stayed with her until the siren sounded the long steady blast that signaled all clear and the tower’s guns fell quiet. Then he took the elevator downstairs and filed outside with the women and children and frail old men leaving the shelter.

  The streets were like a scene from the H. G. Wells novels Max had read as a boy—motorcars on fire, trams overturned, buildings burning everywhere, the heat and roar of flames coming at him from every direction. Broken glass covered the pavement, crunching underneath his boots like thin ice on a winter’s morning. Shop windows had been blown out, goods spilled across the sidewalks. Sirens wailed in the distance as units of the Fire Protection Police made their way through the wreckage. Emergency workers helped panicked families dig through the rubble of demolished apartment blocks. On the sidewalks rows of bodies were lined up with Germanic neatness. The smell of cordite from the bombs hung thick in the air, as it had on the bridge of Graf Spee during the Battle of the Rio Plata, but this was madness. Shopkeepers, office workers, housewives, schoolchildren—screaming, digging, laying out bodies.

  Noises like gunfire rang out as wood popped in the flames. Water sprayed in fountains from shattered mains. Bricks were scattered everywhere. Books had been blown into the street from flattened buildings. They made an incongruous garnish atop the smoking debris. Max picked up a leather-bound volume at his feet. The Bible. He almost laughed out loud. Farther on he stopped where a crowd had gathered around a ragged bundle on the sidewalk. Looking down, it took Max a moment to realize that the bundle was a body—the body of a small girl. Her head had been blown off. Blood was still spreading in a dark pool from her neck. Nobody in the crowd had moved to cover her.

  Where was that shit Göring and his aeroplanes when all this was going on? No wonder sailors in France back from leave in Germany picked fights with Luftwaffe men and beat the tar out of them.

  Finally a policeman came along and spread a tarp over the little girl’s headless corpse. Max walked on.

  Von Woller’s office building did not appear to have sustained any damage. Max climbed the steps and entered the lobby. He drew an engraved calling card from his wallet and handed it to the woman on duty. When he was first in the navy, the use of such cards had been standard practice. Calling cards were no longer required with the war on, but Max still abided by all the old traditions of the service. “My compliments to Herr von Woller,” he told the front-desk woman. “It is important that I see him.”

  Usually his uniform and bearing produced immediate compliance, but here in Berlin uniforms and officers were everywhere and the clerk spoke brusquely. “State your business.”

  “It is personal and urgent,” he snapped. “Send in my card immediately!”

  The woman nodded and scurried away. Max attempted to compose himself. The clerk returned, scowling at him through narrowed eyes. “Herr von Woller will see you now.”

  Max straightened his tunic, drew himself up in his best parade-ground posture, and followed her down a hallway to a heavy wooden door. The clerk pushed the door open. Max stepped inside. The door closed behind him and he came to full attention with a click of the heels.

  Von Woller stood up from behind his desk, less severe in the flesh than in the pictures Max had seen, but not by much. Winged collar. Striped pants. A ring of steel gray hair surrounded his otherwise bald head, but the baldness gave von Woller a forceful look. His eyes and lips were thin. He advanced on Max. “My daughter?”

  Smart old goat. “Slight concussion from the bombing. In the hospital at the Zoo Tower, sir. Doctor prescribes two weeks of bed rest. She asks that your automobile call for her in the morning.” It was like giving a damage report to Langsdorff, Max thought, fighting the reflexive urge to salute.

  “You have seen her personally?”

  “I have.”

  “And it is not serious?”

  “No.”

  Von Woller rubbed his forehead. Some of the starch left his face. “Thank God,” he whispered. He looked up at Max again. “She is my only child. Nothing can be allowed to happen to her.”

  “I feel the same way.”

  Von Woller fished a monocle from his breast pocket. Fixing it in place, he examined Max slowly before finally extending his hand. “Yes. A meeting long overdue, Herr KapitänLeutnant. Of course, I have heard a great deal about you.”

  Max gave a slight bow and they shook hands. “As I have about you, sir. And I must thank you for clarifying my misunderstanding with the Paris Gestapo. Your assistance was most appreciated.”

  Von Woller waved his hand. “It was nothing. You mean very much to my daughter and she means everything to me. I was pleased to help.”

  Of course you were. “Nonetheless, I thank you, Herr…” What was his title anyway? Ministerialrat? No, it was higher than that. “Herr Ministerialdirektor.”

  “Of course you know, Herr KapitänLeutnant, that Mareth’s mother and I have attempted to dissuade her from seeing you. Only for her own good, you understand. Some might think us old-fashioned, but a correct marriage can do a great deal for a woman—perhaps more than a lad such as yourself would know. Marrying the son of a grocer is unlikely to be so helpful. I trust a young man of your intelligence can see that it’s nothing personal. In any event, Mareth has her own ideas and a strong will behind them. I expect you are aware of this already.”

  “Yes, Herr Ministerialdirektor, I certainly am.”

  Von Woller seemed almost to smile. “I understand you’re in the U-boat force now?”

  “That is correct.”

  “Commanding your own boat?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is most urgent work for our Fatherland, young man, most urgent work. Germany will need men like you to win the war. Quite apart from my daughter, it never would have done for the Gestapo to have you shot. I’m glad I was able to prevent it.” He went to the large wooden coat stand and put on his heavy overcoat, leather gloves, and a homburg. A real gentleman. “Will you accompany me to the Zoo Tower?”

  “A pleasure, Herr Ministerialdirektor.”

  “Very well. This way then.” Von Woller led Max out of
the building. “My brother Ernst always spoke very highly of your father. Said he was one of the finest men he had known.”

  “I’m honored to hear that, sir. I know my father will be honored to hear it as well. He is proud to have served under your brother.”

  “I believe he was there when Ernst died.”

  He believed? “Yes, sir, he was. At Verdun.”

  Like so many high-ranking Nazis, von Woller favored an open car, in his case an eight-cylinder Horch complete with a starched chauffeur who detoured around the most badly damaged streets and brought them up on the far side of the Tiergarten. Max could see that no bombs had fallen in this area today. The rubble was old, covered with snow pitted black from the soot of the coal fires people used to heat their homes. Rats by the hundreds were everywhere. On the remaining wall of one collapsed building, someone had scrawled in chalk, ALL MEMBERS OF THE SCHLEICHER FAMILY ARE DEAD. Max looked away.

  Von Woller said, “We’ll pay them back for this, after Final Victory.”

  Max nodded, drawing his greatcoat around him. It was freezing now and he’d lost his scarf in their dash for the shelter. A ten-mark scarf, real silk. He’d bought it in Paris.

  “And you men on the front line, you are keeping faith with the Führer and Final Victory?”

  “Of course, sir,” Max said, but it was nothing more than a hollow reflex. One of his crewkameraden on the Naval War Staff had told him the war might be over in a year if they could shut off the flow of supplies reaching Britain. Oberkommando der Kriegsmarine claimed that loss rates among the British and American merchant fleets were becoming intolerable—though not so intolerable that the Allies stopped sending convoys. Still, everyone spoke of Britain’s weakening resolve. Dr. Goebbels said the people of London booed Churchill in the streets, that children in the city were starving, that factory workers all over England had walked off their jobs. The British were finished. But Dr. Goebbels had said the Brits were finished in 1939. And after Dunkirk in the summer of 1940, he said it again: the Tommies are finished, once and for all. And they were finished again in the autumn, when the glorious German Luftwaffe had reportedly shot down the entire Royal Air Force in the Battle of Britain—twice. In 1941 Dr. Goebbels assured the nation that the entire British Empire was a mere house of cards; one small blow and it would collapse. And 1942 was more of the same: the Brits were on their way out of the war, finished. They were used up, ruled by a corrupt Jewish plutocracy, a syphilitic drunk for a prime minister. The Brits were effete, feeble-minded, spineless. Their time in history was up. They were finished. But the Tommies had not yet lain down and surrendered and now it was January 1943, and the Royal Air Force was still bombing Berlin. Worst of all, the British now had their American cousins in the war with them. Max had seen America on his training cruise. He’d spent three weeks in California and had seen half a dozen American port cities from Galveston to New Orleans to New York. He knew the Americans weren’t finished. The Americans had barely begun.