An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  The Reichsbahn didn’t offer private compartments with hot water and clean linen like the U-boat train. He couldn’t even find a seat. Soldiers bound for the Eastern Front were jammed aboard, their backpacks piled everywhere, cigarette smoke hanging in a dense cloud above their heads. A few civilian families sat scattered among them, their children staring wide-eyed at the soldiers. Most of the windows had been blown out by bomb concussions and replaced by sheets of wood that blocked all ventilation and most of the light. The cars were hot and stuffy and stank of unwashed men.

  He stepped out onto the small platform between two cars and set his suitcase down, dropping his tired body down beside it and leaning back against the metal wall. An army captain had done the same and the two of them sat facing each other. It would be a cold and drafty ride out here but at least they would have room to stretch out. “Guten Abend, Herr Hauptmann,” Max said to the captain.

  The man nodded. “U-boat?”

  “Ja,” Max said. The captain wore the Eastern Front Medal, awarded to those who had taken part in the initial Russian campaign. Soldiers called it the Frozen Meat Order. He also had a silver wound badge on his left tunic pocket, just below his Iron Cross First Class.

  Max pulled a pack of Murattis from inside his coat. U-boat men could still get them but no one else. “Zigarette?” he asked, extending the pack.

  The captain took one, sniffed it. “Danke.”

  “Ost Front?”

  “Ja.”

  “How is it out there with the Russians?”

  “Cold,” the captain said. “Damned cold. And you, in the ocean?”

  Max shrugged. “Cold.”

  The train got under way and as it rumbled through the dark country they talked about the war—about the Russians in their endless numbers, inexhaustible and relentless, ready to keep dying forever, and the Americans, who the captain had heard were poor soldiers but could supply anything and everything the Allies needed, including the six-wheel-drive Studebaker trucks of which the Soviets seemed to have so many. And Jeeps, which the captain especially liked. His unit had five of them, captured from the Soviets. A coat of feld grau paint and the small vehicles were ready to play their part in the struggle against Bolshevism. Max had to laugh. What next? Capture Benny Goodman and force him to play for the U-boat men in Lorient? The captain produced a bottle of schnapps and offered it up. Max smiled, accepted the bottle. He took a long pull and the two of them fell silent for a time, passing the schnapps back and forth as the train rolled on toward Berlin.

  The captain gazed at the passing countryside as if watching for a Russian ambush. Without shifting his eyes, he asked if Max had ever been to America in his travels with the navy. Yes, during his training cruise. And was it as big and powerful as everyone said? No, it was much bigger, much more powerful. And where had Max gone? Where in America? California first, for twelve days. He saw the sights, met some pretty American girls, even took a tour of Hollywood. They laughed at that. Hollywood, the captain said, smiling. Hollywood. As if such a place could even exist on the same planet as them. What had the Führer said: “What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records, and Hollywood?” Max shook his head. All of Germany could fit into the state of California with room to spare, and there were forty-seven other states besides. Americans had no culture, they worshipped money like a god, but they had energy, and no one ever need tell an American what to do. They just did it, unlike the Germans, who were always waiting for a word from the man in charge. And what about New York? Yes, Max had been to New York. And what had he done there? Gone to the top of the Empire State Building and drunk a Coca-Cola. The captain laughed again. He looked down at the bottle in his hands, took a sip.

  “And to think,” he said, “we declared war on America.”

  Max leaned his head back against the metal wall of the platform. “Just as we did on the Soviet Union, Kamerad.”

  They talked through the night. Max didn’t introduce himself. Names weren’t important. The captain knew what it meant to order men into battle, to see them die, to live with that responsibility. He had seen friends die and die horribly—one set afire in his Kübelwagen, stumbling out to stagger a few steps in a ball of flame before he dropped; another run down by a Soviet tank, ground into the mud by the forty-ton monster.

  Toward 0200 the train came to a halt in a wheatfield ten kilometers outside Berlin. Max had fallen asleep but was wakened by the jarring of the cars banging against their couplings as the air brakes exhaled. A roar sounded as the engineers blew the steam pressure from the engine. The train and all aboard her fell silent. Max heard the droning of the aeroplanes. He got up, unlatched the heavy metal exit door, and leaned out. Others did the same up and down the line of cars, their faces visible in the bright moonlight.

  On the horizon, the searchlights ringing Berlin sent up white columns that swept the night sky. Sometimes one of them would catch a bomber in its cone and hold it there, illuminating the aeroplane so one of the German night fighters could home in and attack—or, if the bomber was at low altitude, so the anti-aircraft batteries could take it under fire. Max could hear the staccato beat of the flak artillery pouring shells into the darkness. The projectiles were fired in specific patterns set to explode at a designated height and spew metal fragments at the British planes, which had to fly in strict formation on their bomb runs, practically wingtip to wingtip, to minimize their time over the target. The flak reached a crescendo—every barrel in every battery firing—as each formation swept down on its run. But more prominent was the heavier sound of the falling bombs destroying Berlin. Fires burned all over the city, lighting the horizon with an orange glow.

  The RAF had a method for this, the murder of a city, a method so terrible it was worthy only of Gog and Magog. They began with blockbuster high-explosive bombs to blow the roofs off buildings and blow the windows in, exposing wooden beams and interiors, giving fire endless pathways along which to spread and providing through-drafts of air to rush it along. Then came the small incendiary bombs, falling in their hundreds of thousands into buildings; and then the fires began. Fires medieval in their terror; fires that could not be extinguished because they were composed of burning phosphorus; liquid fire that flowed in burning streams down gutters and into the basements where women and children took shelter; fire so terrible, fire so merciless, there was nothing to do but run from it with all the strength God had given you; fire spreading so fast that running with all your strength was never enough. Fire so hot it set the very asphalt in the street ablaze and if your feet became stuck in the liquid tar, you burned like a torch, your screams unheard over the roaring of the firestorm. This was the hell brought down on Hamburg by the Tommies, and now they were bringing it to Berlin. And Mareth was somewhere in that godforsaken pyre, its columns of poisonous yellow smoke twisting slowly into the heavens.

  Max dug his fists into his eyes. He couldn’t look anymore. Was she safe in the flak tower? Safer than the Führer bunker, they said, but was this one of her nights on duty? His whole body was tense and trembling. He pulled his hands from his face and watched again. Damn the English and the Americans, damn them all to bloody hell. This terror bombing—just dumping bombs blindly on women and children, on a defenseless city. It was a crime. It was murder—against the laws of war, the laws of humanity, against the Hague Convention. After the war the Allies would be made to pay for this. He should have shot the English sailors in that lifeboat, payback for what was being done to Berlin. Wave after wave of aircraft came over the city loosing their bombs, the muffled explosions shaking the earth until the entire horizon seemed to be burning. If a British pilot parachuted from his bomber and came down close by the train, Max would take out his pistol and shoot the man on the spot like a dog. It happened all the time now, all across Germany: mobs of enraged citizens beating downed pilots to death before the Feldgendarmerie could arrive.

  Max stood and watched the firestorm, the night still and soft once the aeroplanes had finall
y gone. Could anyone in Berlin still be alive? It seemed impossible. Occasional towers of fire exploded into the night air where a building had collapsed, or a delayed-fuse bomb had gone off. And Mareth was there. He pictured her unconscious, half buried by fallen beams. He pictured her gasping, screaming as fire consumed her. Finally he looked away, pulled himself back into the train, sat down again with the wall at his back. His army friend hadn’t moved a muscle through the whole attack. He just stared, his eyes passing through Max to someplace else.

  Without focusing his vacant stare the captain asked, “You have someone there, in Berlin?”

  “My fiancée,” Max said, trying to say more, but he couldn’t even speak for long moments. Finally he said, “I went through a raid myself, but not like this… there are more planes now. I don’t know how we’ll ever…” He stopped. Hands still shaking, he drew out a cigarette and offered one to the captain. “Have you seen this? What the Allies do to us?”

  The captain accepted the cigarette, lit it, took a long inhale. “My family was killed in a raid in Berlin five months ago.” He finished his cigarette before speaking again. “They send a thousand planes from England—from England! And Dr. Goebbels told us the English were through. They send a thousand planes over Berlin whenever they like, while the few bombers we have left are trying to stop the Russians. My wife and children were killed by the incendiaries, burned to death, in the capital of the Thousand Year Reich.”

  Max met the captain’s stare until he finished talking and then Max looked away. That kind of talk could put a man in the hands of the security police, but the captain could have cared less. What was left for the Gestapo to do to him? Arrest his dead family? Kill him? He would die soon enough in Russia anyway. Max closed his eyes. Mareth could just as easily be burning as they spoke.

  Toward dawn, the train began to creep forward again, the screeching and banging of the cars loud in the morning stillness. Most of the passengers had slept after the raid. The few who didn’t sat quietly, shocked into silence by the fury of the attack. They came awake now and so did Max, who had been passing in and out of a restless sleep from pure exhaustion. He smoked, the tobacco bitter in his dry mouth. In the daylight he saw the notice that the rail car to his right was a no-smoking car. Yet another rule made laughable by the war.

  No one had bothered to close the metal exit doors. The trains were short on crews, every available man having been drafted into the army, so railwaymen long retired had been pressed back into service. Closing and latching the exit doors was too much for them, or maybe they just didn’t care. Who could blame them? Max rose and stood in the open doorway, watching Berlin as they approached. A smoky red haze hung over the city, eerie in the breaking dawn. As they crept through the outskirts of town, buildings shot up flames in the distance—toward the center of the city, where Mareth lived and worked.

  A year ago when they were training in the Baltic, a young sailor on Max’s boat got his arm caught in a mooring wire as they were coming in to dock. A sudden jerk caused the wire to tighten and it cut the sailor’s hand clean off. The lad stared in disbelief at the bleeding stump for the longest time, shocked into numbness. Now Max felt much the same looking out over Berlin as the train rolled in. Ahead, a Reichsbahn worker signaled with a lantern, directed them onto a new track, heading them north, skirting the city, making for one of the rail stations on the far eastern edge of Berlin.

  In the residential neighborhoods they passed through, most of the houses seemed to have suffered little damage except for missing windows that had been replaced by cardboard or wood. Maybe one in five had burned, blackened timbers and smashed brickwork lying abandoned in a scorched yard, often with a sturdy brick chimney standing sentinel over the devastation. As they creaked along an overpass, Max looked down. A bright red post office van lay on its side. The rear doors had burst open and letters lay scattered on the street, mixed in with the glass and bricks from a toppled home on the corner. A postal worker picked through the debris, gathering the letters, occasionally glancing at passersby working their way to their offices in the middle of all this chaos.

  In the distance, a thick tower of smoke rose from the city center, which had been the target of the raid. The bombs had shattered the water mains; fires would burn for days. Berlin’s Fire Protection Police could rarely access water after severe raids, excepting small amounts they could pump from the Havel or the Spree or the Landwehrkanal. All they could really do was dynamite buildings to make firebreaks and try to keep the flames from spreading.

  The army captain gave Max a salute when they finally got off the train an hour later. “Good luck and good hunting, Kamerad.”

  Max saluted in return. “Keep your eyes open and your ears stiff, old fox.” They would never meet again on this earth.

  Max checked his suitcase at the station, went outside, and flagged down a member of the Orpo, the uniformed police, distinctive in his shako. “How do I get to the Zoo Tower?”

  The policeman saluted him. “The 122 tram will take you there, sir, but it is not recommended. Not recommended at all, sir. They were hit hard last night. The Fire Protection Police are still calling for help—we’ve sent every spare man from this precinct, and two of the Luftwaffe’s heavy rescue units are being brought in as well. Todt Organization crews, army men, too. It’s hell down there. Headquarters says it was one of the worst.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Max said. “I have to go.”

  The Orpo man pointed to a tram coming down the middle of the street. “That’s the one, sir. It will take you as close as you can get.”

  He was surprised to see a female conductor collecting fares aboard the tram. Were they this short of men? Or were these women just pushing their way into these jobs to get out of working in a munitions factory? That was the new decree: any woman not already working was to be sent off to make ammunition. The tram waddled down the tracks, stopping every other block to take on passengers, the driver slowing where debris was strewn across the pavement, letting the wheels of the streetcar gently push the flotsam aside. Max wanted to seize the tram at gunpoint and make them go faster.

  Closer to the center, the roar of flames became audible. It sounded like seawater rushing into the ballast tanks of the U-boat. Thin strips of aluminum lay everywhere: in the street, on the sidewalks, scattered over roofs and lawns, caught in the branches of trees, hanging from the few phone lines that remained. RAF bombers dropped the strips to make false images on German radar and confound the Luftwaffe controllers who vectored in German night fighters.

  Rounding a corner, the driver slammed on the tram’s brakes, throwing up a shower of white sparks. The shells of burnt-out buses and trams blocked the way ahead. Several buildings had collapsed into mounds of rubble in the street. Policemen armed with military rifles stood atop the smoking piles to guard them from looters, who now faced summary execution. A typewriter from one of the toppled office buildings sat upright on the sidewalk as if waiting for a secretary. A row of bodies, mainly women and children, lay on the opposite sidewalk.

  The tram wasn’t going any farther. Max jumped off and began to run, guided by the smoke that spiraled into the sky up ahead. If he could find the Unter den Linden, he could follow it to the Tiergarten.

  The devastation mounted as he ran, forcing him to dodge around heaps of wreckage where offices and homes had stood—splintered boards, burnt black, broken brick and stone, a bicycle bent and crumpled on the curb. Survivors poked through the wreckage, cloths knotted around their noses and mouths to protect them from the smoky air. One woman held a lamp she’d found, tears pouring down her face. Max stopped for a moment to catch his breath, gulping in air and coughing from the smoke. Two men dug frantically in the remains of a building. Looking for what, he wondered. Their families? Friends? Money? A squad of soldiers appeared from a side street and their sergeant approached him, went rigid as a lamppost and snapped a salute. “Orders, Herr Kapitän?”

  Max shook his head. “I’m not in command he
re. Ask him.” He pointed vaguely to a policeman across the road. No army sergeant would like taking orders from a policeman, but what did it matter? The two of them conferred briefly, without exchanging salutes, and the sergeant quickly set his men to digging.

  Max moved on, walking now, picking his way over the rubble. Everything had been flattened here. Only the odd section of wall remained standing, whether as a testament to skillful masonry or the vagaries of a bomb blast. The heavy smell of charred wood was strong in his nose, and beneath it he could make out the rotten-egg stench of natural gas.

  He walked and climbed for another hour, twice having to produce his identity papers for the police, before reaching the Unter den Linden, its broad boulevards littered with overturned automobiles and buses. A Mercedes-Benz had been hurled upside down against the snapped trunk of a tree. Trams lay crossways on their tracks, windows blown out, advertising posters hanging in colorful strips that fluttered in the breeze. Occasional explosions sounded in the distance as delayed-fuse bombs went off—designed to take out the rescuers and onlookers who gathered after a raid.

  As he made his way to the Tiergarten, Max recognized the side street he’d used to reach von Woller’s office in January, and he could see from the corner that the building had been obliterated, reduced to a smoking pile of stone. A group of Luftwaffe men from one of the special rescue battalions pushed past him and Max followed them down the street. As they approached the place where the building had been, he realized that the hatless man waving his arms and shouting on the sidewalk was Herr von Woller.

  “Hurry!” he yelled at the Luftwaffe crew. “Hurry! For God’s sake, there are people trapped down there.” He was pointing feverishly at the ruins of his collapsed office. “Right here, come quickly, quickly, I insist!”