An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  The train came to a tired halt around 1000 in a mere slip of a town. Max could see two saloons along the main street, a bank, and a small hotel that probably had a few girls available. Two olive green army trucks waited behind the station.

  The guards helped Max and Carls off the train. They stood on the rough cement platform, already baking in the sun; six other Germans were brought down as well. The eight of them lined up as if on dress parade, all shackled in handcuffs.

  A lean sergeant missing his two front teeth addressed them. He wore the broad-brimmed campaign hat favored by U.S. troops in the First War. “Listen up, boys—I know you can savvy American when you want to. You fucking scumbags have been sent here to the remotest corner of God’s green earth because you are no-good, low-down, troublemaking Nazi shitheads,” the sergeant barked.

  Max let the thin desert air fill his lungs. It was hot but dry and clean. So much better than the brutal humidity of Mississippi, but, looking around, he didn’t see much else to commend this place. The heat, even with no humidity, was powerful and it enveloped him, as if he had just been put in a dry sauna. The sergeant went on yelling at them but Max stopped listening to the words. He had a boastful swagger but Max could see that the sergeant’s brass uniform accoutrements had not been polished and his boots were badly scuffed.

  It was no better at the prison camp. Two of the six guards at the main gate had rust on their rifles, and even the officers in charge of the place looked slovenly, moving slowly around the office as they processed Max. One had a soup stain on his shirt. Another hadn’t shaved in several days. But with the big push under way in France, why would the American army send good men to the desert of New Mexico to guard POWs? During the train ride Max had been thinking of explaining his situation to the camp officers: the circumstances of his surrender, the conspiracy plot in Virginia, what Colonel Stoddard had done. But something about the sloppy manner of the officers kept him from doing so. Even if they understood, Max doubted the Americans would go out of their way to help him now, and asking for a private interview in front of the other men would only draw attention. So he stayed quiet. The unshaven officer stamped his papers and issued him a blanket and sheets. “Dismissed.”

  Max came to attention. “Heil Hitler,” he said, giving the Nazi salute. Maybe it would help him blend in and survive.

  The unshaven officer came to rumpled attention. “Fuck you,” he said, giving the Nazi salute in return.

  Max stepped out into the dusty yard. The camp sat on a slight declivity, surrounded by patches of rock with nothing else around but the desert, stretching to the horizon, shimmering like water in the sun. A double barbed-wire fence surrounded the compound at a height of four or five meters, broken by three guard towers. Each tower mounted a fifty-caliber machine gun. There looked to be twelve or maybe fifteen huts for the men, with other buildings scattered around inside the wire, all cheaply constructed of plywood and two-by-fours, white paint flaking from the boards. A hand clapped him on the shoulder.

  “Name?”

  Max turned and found himself facing a German enlisted man.

  “Name?” the man said again.

  “You may address me as Herr KapitänLeutnant and let me remind you that you may not touch an officer.”

  “In this camp, Kamerad, a committee of noncommissioned officers runs affairs because of the lack of commitment to the National Socialist cause among officers. Distinctions of rank have been abolished.”

  Max lifted his eyebrows. This was worse than he’d imagined. There was a radical wing of the Nazi Party that favored the abolition of class and rank, a return to the egalitarian days of the German tribal past—or so they said. Many of the military’s young noncoms had been exposed to this kind of foolishness in the Hitler Youth before the war. Men like Lehmann. But to have them in charge—it was like the Kiel mutiny all over again.

  “Name!” the sailor said again, louder this time.

  “Brekendorf, Maximilian, KapitänLeutnant.”

  The man wrote it down. “Hut nine. Heil Hitler.”

  Max came to attention. “Heil Hitler,” he said, jutting his arm out. A ridiculous gesture, like hailing a taxi.

  He walked to hut nine, which was nothing more than a large rectangular room with twenty bunks along the walls. He stowed his gear: a bundle of letters, including one from Mareth he hadn’t opened yet, a razor, some toothpaste, a bar of soap, a book. That was all he had aside from the fresh bedding and towels provided by the Amis.

  Wandering back outside, he stood by the caution line behind his hut, five meters short of the wire, and stared out across the bare land.

  “One hundred and twenty kilometers,” said a friendly voice.

  Max turned to see his old torpedo chief petty officer smiling in the sun. “Heinz!”

  “Herr Kaleu. Carls said I would find you here.”

  Max smiled, too. “So you’re a troublemaker, eh, Heinz?”

  “And apparently so are you, Herr Kaleu.”

  “It certainly looks that way. One hundred and twenty kilometers, you said. To where? Hell?”

  “Mexico, Herr Kaleu. The border is one hundred and twenty kilometers due south.”

  “Has anyone gone over the wire?”

  Heinz laughed. “Why, Herr Kaleu, you’d have to be a madman. One hundred and twenty kilometers of open desert is as dangerous as running through the Bay of Biscay on the surface, and then what would a blue-eyed German sailor do in Mexico anyway?”

  Max nodded. “That must be what the Americans think.”

  “That’s why they sent all us troublemakers out here, Herr Kaleu.”

  “But you’ve got a plan, Heinz, yes?”

  “I have several, Herr Kaleu,” Heinz said, “but the getting out isn’t very difficult—these Americans are careless enough to give us opportunities. It’s the staying out that makes the challenge. Perhaps the Amis feel they can afford to be careless for good reason.”

  “Yes, Carls and I found out all about that in Mississippi.”

  “So I can see. You both look like hell, Herr Kaleu, if I may beg your pardon for saying so, sir.”

  “I know. They knocked us around some. Carls worse than me.”

  Both men turned back to the fence, to the expanse of bleak desert stretching south.

  “When will you make your break?” Max asked.

  Heinz shrugged. “I don’t really know, Herr Kaleu. We’re gathering supplies right now, some of the men and I. We’re collecting food, cereal mostly—we pound it into bits and add dried fruit. Makes a good mixture. We have a tailor from Stuttgart working on civilian clothes. I scavenge all the useful things the Americans leave lying around: maps, canteens. Weapons. Found two compasses on the front seat of a jeep last week.”

  “Sehr gut, Heinz, very good.”

  “Thank you, Herr Kaleu. Not sure what good it’ll come to”—he gestured vaguely toward the enormous nothing beyond the wire—“but it keeps me occupied, at least. That can be a challenge here.”

  “There is a camp university, yes?”

  “In a manner of speaking, sir, but the only classes it offers are in National Socialist thought.”

  “A contradiction, in my experience. I’m surprised the Americans allow it.”

  “They don’t seem to care, Herr Kaleu. Why should they? They didn’t bring the fanatics out here for a cure. The Allies are pushing through France and they’ll go all the way to Berlin by Christmas, and the Soviets are closing in from the East. They’ve broken through Army Group Center—the High Command has admitted it in the communiqués.”

  Max shook his head. None of it was news to him. The Soviets had torn a one-hundred-kilometer hole in the German line in June and pushed the Germans back three hundred kilometers in less than a month. “There are others here from the boat?”

  “Just myself and Lehmann and Bekker. That’s what I’ve come to warn you about, Herr Kaleu. Since the…” Heinz paused. He did not want to use the word surrender. “Since the incident, Lehma
nn has vowed to take vengeance against you. You knew about the plot in Virginia, didn’t you, sir?”

  “I did. Perhaps I’ve been hoping his anger might have faded.”

  “I’m afraid not, Herr Kaleu. He hasn’t stopped talking about it all across the damned country. He is certain that he would have received command of his own boat on our return if we had not been captured, and that he would have proven himself a great Kommandant, a hero of the Reich, and the Führer himself would have hung the Ritterkreuz around his neck.”

  He should have shot Lehmann for insubordination before they ever left the U-boat, Max thought. He drew a pack of Lucky Strikes from his pocket and offered one to Heinz, who declined. “Then I must be very watchful here.”

  “Yes, sir, but it would have been much better had you not come at all. The men in this camp, many of them are very committed to the party. None of them are March violets, Herr Kaleu,” Heinz said, a reference to the opportunists who had joined the Nazi Party only after Hitler seized power. “They are true believers. When Lehmann tells them what you did in the Atlantic, they will not understand. They will not be sympathetic. Bekker is already on his side. You must be on guard, Herr Kaleu. Carls and I will do everything we can to protect you, but it won’t be easy.”

  Max drew on his cigarette. He felt a headache building in the brutal sun. This was worse than Kiel: it was like Munich after the First War, when Communists took control of the city and shot every military officer, policeman, and industrialist they could find and drove the King from the throne. “I do not wish for you or Carls to risk your life for me, Heinz. It is not required.”

  The torpedo chief petty officer nodded and looked away. “Perhaps not, but you saved us all, Herr Kaleu, and more than once. That surely is the truth, sir. It was a miracle we ever come home from our second patrol. One engine, every piece of equipment in the boat shattered—no crew has ever made it back to Lorient in worse shape, sir. And losses in the U-boat fleet have grown to almost one hundred percent these last months, Herr Kaleu. Worse than ever, worse than when we left on patrol. That’s what I hear. For every Allied merchant ship we sink, they sink a U-boat. All of our boats have been withdrawn from the North Atlantic again—all of them. You know what that means, sir.”

  Max nodded. It meant the same thing it had the last time they did it: the Anglo-American convoy defenses were so formidable they were on the verge of destroying the entire U-boat force.

  “If you had not surrendered the boat,” Heinz said, “all of us would be dead.”

  “Nonetheless, Heinz, I order you and Carls not to risk yourselves for me.”

  Heinz smiled. “Herr Kaleu, don’t you know that officers are not permitted to give orders in this camp? Here, sir.” He produced a knife and offered it to Max. “Use it if you have to.”

  Max accepted the knife, bone-handled with a six-inch blade. He felt its solid weight in his hand. He hadn’t made use of a knife in years, not since his days on the sail training ship. But how much was there to know? If someone comes for you, bury the knife in his guts. “Thank you, Heinz.”

  Heinz said nothing, simply giving a quick nod to acknowledge Max’s rank—saluting officers was forbidden—and walked away, leaving Max alone at the caution line. A hot wind came down from the north, ruffling the edges of his hair as he stared into the ocean of sand.

  _________

  Life at the camp quickly became a mix of boredom and fear for Max. There was nothing to do: no trees to cut or courses to teach. Max spent much of his time in his hut. It was unbearably hot, but the roof protected him from the scorching and unrelenting sun. He lay on his bunk all day, smoking Lucky Strikes, drinking Coca-Cola, and reading movie magazines passed on by one of the guards in return for cigarettes. In Mississippi the prisoners had to buy their tobacco with credits earned on work detail, but in New Mexico there was no work detail and the cigarettes were free.

  The guards would trade for anything—they viewed their job as a business. Tallulah Bankhead was having romance troubles again. Clark Gable had gone off to make a propaganda film for the American Bomber Command. Incredibly, Max thought, Gable was actually trained as a waist gunner and flew half a dozen bombing missions over Germany, his plane coming back full of holes on several occasions. Only men who had never been shot at wanted to be shot at.

  Men stared at him like a cripple in the yard, whispering to one another, no doubt spreading some wildly exaggerated story of what Max had done off Florida. Carls and Heinz stayed with him as often as they could, but few others approached. Lehmann certainly didn’t. He strutted around like a peacock, surrounded by Nazi friends, moving around the compound in a pack like a squad of bully-boy storm troopers in Berlin, Bekker among them. Occasionally they looked over at Max and gave him condescending smiles.

  Returning to his hut alone after breakfast one morning, Max found three of Lehmann’s toadies waiting at the door, blocking his way. The three men stood blinking into the sun, saying nothing. Max stopped in front of them.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  “Yes, excuse you,” said the man in the middle—hardly a man, even: tall and burly, but still young enough to have a tight cluster of acne on each cheek.

  “You’re in my way,” Max said.

  “Oh—oh, excuse me, then. I hadn’t realized.” The young man grinned and stepped aside.

  Max felt for the handle of the knife tucked into his belt but didn’t draw it yet. He moved forward, up the two steps to the doorway. A blow struck the back of his head, and a hand caught his ankle, sprawling him face first into the hut. He flipped over in a panic and yanked the knife out—muscles taut, pulse racing—but Lehmann’s men were already walking away. Max could hear them laughing.

  “Careful there,” the tall one called back over his shoulder. “Watch that last step up.”

  Max sat on the floor with the knife in his hand, watching the three men amble across the yard. Finally he stood, brushing himself off, wiping the sweat from his eyes. They were just trying to scare him. And he was scared.

  He thought again about writing Admiral Dönitz in Code Irland, the secret code all U-boat crews learned so they might communicate useful information if captured, explaining Lehmann’s insubordination, the circumstances of his surrender of U-114, of asking the admiral to issue a coded command for his protection. But Lehmann was unlikely to obey orders from anyone. And truth be told, Dönitz would agree that Max should die for surrendering his boat. Max buried his face in his hands. His mind was fixed on hopeless alternatives out of bare desperation, but the truth was that nobody could help him.

  Certainly not Mareth, though he badly wanted to unburden himself to her. But the American censors would read whatever he wrote, and if they began questioning the other prisoners it would only make matters worse for him. He was convinced of that. Besides, why send Mareth into a panic when there was nothing she could do?

  He took the bundle of her letters out from under his mattress and unfolded the latest one to read through the first line again, as he did four or five times a day.

  July 27

  Dearest Max,

  How can I complain? How can I complain when you are safe and I am safe and when this war finally ends we will be together.

  Max pictured Mareth crying as she wrote these letters on the veranda of her temporary home in Mexico City, taking refuge from the merciless sun. She would be tan now, her blond hair gone almost to platinum. He would never see her again.

  Max sat alone in his room for the rest of the day, sometimes smoking, mostly staring at nothing. The next day was more of the same, as was the day after that. He skipped most meals and appeared only for mandatory roll call in the morning. Carls smuggled food out of the mess hall—apples once, bread another time, and then a few of the miniature cereal boxes that served as breakfast for the prisoners. Max liked Kellogg’s Corn Flakes the best. Luckily, he found that sitting all day on his bunk without moving reduced his appetite even more: he was never hungry, he ate only because Carls tol
d him to.

  Nights were the worst. He tried to sleep but was too anxious, lying there gripping his knife, waiting to be set upon in the dark, listening to the men snoring around him, his body going tense at the slightest sound. It seemed impossible to control his nerves once the sun went down. But after three such nights, nobody had come for him, and Max knew he couldn’t keep living this way. In the morning he went to the mess hall with Carls and Heinz and bolted three boxes of Corn Flakes.

  Coming out of the latrine after the meal, Max found Lehmann waiting in the hall. He was alone, smoking, his back against the wall. He smiled and said, “Guten Morgen, Maximilian. I haven’t seen you in these last few days. Thought maybe something had happened to you.”

  Max fixed his best parade-ground stare on Lehmann. “Thank you, Leutnant. I find such sentiment on your part heartwarming.”

  Lehmann scowled, pointed the end of his cigarette at Max. “You’re a traitor, Maximilian. You ruined my navy career and betrayed me—me and the crew and the Führer as well. You’re a traitor to the Fatherland, you swine, and the men in this camp know it.”

  “The men in this camp have no respect for the proper discipline of the Wehrmacht. You are a traitor to the German navy, Leutnant Lehmann. You and your friends should all be court-martialed for insubordination.”

  Max had the knife secured beneath his uniform. He could slit Lehmann’s throat right now and maybe it would be better that way. He stared at the young man without saying anything.

  “You should be more at ease,” Lehmann said. “When we want you, we shall come for you. There is little you can do to stop us, so don’t lose your rest over it.” He dropped the cigarette butt and crushed it with his shoe, smiled again, then walked away.