The Lieutenants

by W. E. B Griffin

  Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bellmon marched in, wearing a faded tanker’s jacket and woolen olive-drab pants. He stopped before the desk and saluted.

  “Lieutenant Colonel Bellmon reporting to the Herr Oberst as directed, sir.” His German was fluent. He was a fine-looking officer, von Greiffenberg thought.

  “I’m comfortable in English, Colonel,” Colonel Graf von Greiffenberg said. “But please don’t take that as a reflection upon your German. It’s quite good.”

  “I have been working on it rather hard, Herr Oberst,” Bellmon continued in German. “There isn’t much else to do here.”

  “I daresay not,” Von Greiffenberg said, in English. He unfastened the lower right-hand pocket of his tunic and took from it an envelope and handed it to Bellmon without explanation.

  Bellmon opened the small envelope and took a picture from it. It was of the Colonel Graf von Greiffenberg as a young cavalry officer. He held a child, a girl most likely, of about eighteen months in his arms, beaming down at her with pure delight.

  Bellmon looked at it, then at von Greiffenberg, and then started to hand it back.

  “You don’t recognize the lady, Colonel Bellmon?” von Greiffenberg asked. “I rather hoped you would.”

  Bellmon looked at the picture again without recognition, and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said. “Never saw her before.”

  “You are married to the lady, Colonel,” von Greiffenberg said. “That is Barbara Dianne Waterford Bellmon at age sixteen months.”

  Bellmon looked again. Now there was no question about it. The baby had Barbara’s eyes. He looked at von Greiffenberg for an explanation.

  “It was taken at Samur, the French cavalry school,” von Greiffenberg said, “by, I recall, your mother-in-law. Your father-in-law was at the time—as he did frequently—cooking beefsteaks over an open fire. The usual result was meat charred on the outside, raw inside, and generally inedible. This never discouraged him in the least.”

  Bellmon had to smile, although in the back of his mind there was a feeling that he had best be very careful dealing with this man.

  “I am sorry, Colonel,” Bellmon said. “But I don’t recall my father-in-law ever mentioning your name.”

  “We last exchanged Christmas greetings in 1940,” the colonel said. “After that, obviously, it was awkward.”

  “What is it you want of me, Colonel?” Bellmon asked.

  “I had hoped to find that you were the sort of officer who does not hate his enemy,” von Greiffenberg said. “Who is aware that there are some events which transcend the war immediately at hand. And I hoped that you would believe that despite our present situation, I regard Porky Waterford as a dear friend and colleague, and I dare to presume he feels the same way about me.”

  “I regret the war, of course,” Bellmon said. “But I must in honesty tell you that I believe the government which you serve is morally reprehensible.”

  Von Greiffenberg neither reacted to that nor seemed even to hear it.

  “Colonel, it has come to the attention of the High Command that the Soviets, in the Katyn Forest, near Smolensk, executed approximately five thousand Polish officers and cadets, who were their prisoners, and buried them in a mass, unmarked grave.”

  Bellmon didn’t reply. It sounded like something from a propaganda movie. But Colonel von Greiffenberg was real. And unless he had lost all powers of judgment, he knew von Greiffenberg was dead earnest, not at all the sort of man who would be capable of invoking an old friendship for some propaganda gimmick. Bellmon looked at von Greiffenberg and waited for him to continue.

  The colonel opened his briefcases and placed thirty or more large photographs on the desk and then, next to them, he laid out corroded and rotting insignia, identification papers, tailor’s labels, the evidence that had been turned over to him in the forester’s cottage outside Marburg.

  “Identification of the remains is underway,” von Greiffenberg said. “So far we have positively identified the remains of two general officers, sixty-one colonels, large numbers of other grades, and more than 150 officer cadets. Each was shot in the back of the head with a .32 caliber pistol. And each had his hands bound behind him at the time.”

  “Forgive me, Colonel,” Bellmon said, trying very hard to keep his voice under control, “but how do I know this atrocity took place under the Russians?”

  “At the site, at this moment, are fourteen forensic scientists, all from neutral countries. They are prepared to give their professional judgment as to how long the prisoners have been dead. Even given the widest latitude so far as the date of death is concerned, there is absolutely no possibility that German forces could have been involved. During the time of the atrocity, Soviet forces, and Soviet forces alone, held the area.”

  “Doubtless, you will make these facts known, via the International Red Cross, and other agencies.”

  “And doubtless, our accusations will be rejected as anti-Soviet propaganda,” von Greiffenberg said.

  “And that’s where I come in?” Bellmon asked.

  “I rather doubt that even you, Colonel Bellmon, would be believed outside the military establishment,” von Greiffenberg said. “Our thinking is this. The honor of the German officer corps is involved. We want a member of the American officer corps, the son of a general, the son-in-law of a general, a man likely himself to become a general officer, to see this outrage with his own eyes. To spare him, if you like, from having to decide from secondhand information whether or not this is anti-Soviet propaganda.”

  “To what end?” Bellmon asked.

  “That should be obvious,” von Greiffenberg said. “What I would like from you, Colonel, what I beg of you, is your parole for whatever time it takes us to fly to Katyn, which is near Smolensk. There you will confer with the neutral physicians and scientists on the scene and then return here.”

  “If you’re going to win the war, what difference does it make?” Bellmon asked.

  Von Greiffenberg paused a long moment before replying.

  “When we win the war, Colonel, I shall take great pleasure in bringing the barbarians who did this terrible thing to justice.”

  “But there is the possibility, which you must consider by now, that the war is lost,” Bellmon said. “Is that it?”

  “As a loyal officer, of course, I believe in the final victory,” von Greiffenberg said.

  “You understand, of course,” Bellmon said, “that I could not make any statements of any kind so long as I’m a prisoner.”

  “Naturally not,” von Greiffenberg said. “However, it is our routine practice to exchange the severely wounded and the dying, and routine practice to assign several officer prisoners to accompany the wounded and dying.”

  “If I go along, you’re offering to have me exchanged?” He wondered if he was being bribed.

  “It would be in our interests to do so,” von Greiffenberg said. “And in yours. Should you become convinced this was a Soviet atrocity, as I believe you will by the evidence, you will then be in great danger should the fortunes of war see you come into Soviet hands.”

  “I’m sure you have considered the possibility that I would accept the offer to be exchanged, and then accuse your side,” Bellmon said.

  “The evidence is irrefutable,” von Greiffenberg said. “And furthermore, Colonel Bellmon, I believe you to be an officer and a gentleman.”

  I am being soft-soaped, Bellmon thought. But then, he thought, what possible harm could it do?

  “Very well,” Bellmon said. “I will give you my parole. When do we leave?”

  “Immediately.”

  (Seven)

  Stalag XVII-B, Stettin

  11 October 1944

  There had been Christmas packages from the Red Cross. By some fluke in the distribution system, they had arrived in Stettin, in northwest Poland, a week after they had come into German hands in Sweden. The commandant had agreed to issue them immediately. The important thing was that for a few days there would be powdered coffe
e (real coffee) and chocolate and gloves and handkerchiefs and paperback copies of Ernest Hemingway novels. There was no sense in putting the packages into a warehouse for issue on Christmas Day. Christmas Day here would be 25 December 1944, no different at all from 24 December and 26 December, just one more day in a former cavalry barracks in northwest Poland.

  Bellmon had made the decision that he would drink his powdered coffee full strength, black. He would not drink it all at once, but save it for when he really wanted a cup of coffee, and then have a real cup of coffee, strong and black. He would not try to stretch it, to make it last longer. He would have as many cups of strong coffee as there were in the tin, whenever he wanted one, and then he would do without.

  He had never felt quite so alone, quite so fearful for his sanity.

  Eighteen months had passed since his trip to the Katyn forest. During that time there had been thirty-one letters from Barbara, single sheets of paper which folded to make a self-contained envelope. Some of these had arrived out of sequence, and none had arrived on any sort of predictable schedule. He had once gone five months without any letters at all.

  He kept the letters in a Dutch Masters cigar box on the table beside his bed. The cigars had come without explanation six months before, half a box for each officer. Before the cigars had come, he had kept Barbara’s letters wrapped up in a sweater.

  Bellmon was executive officer of the prisoner staff. The senior prisoner was an infantry full colonel who had never served in the infantry. He was a professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin who had been commissioned as a military government officer, and who had been captured in Italy. He was not a soldier, although he wanted to behave like one, and he vacillated between relief that he had a professional soldier on whom to rely for decisions, and resentment toward Bellmon, based on the fact that Bellmon’s competence pointed out his own incompetence.

  Bellmon had not told the colonel about Katyn, and he had not told him about the package he kept hidden within the thin cotton mattress on his bed. The package, according to a letter from Colonel Count Peter-Paul von Greiffenberg, contained twenty-four eight-by-ten-inch photographs of the horrors of Katyn. Others showed Bellmon at the site with the neutral forensic experts. It also contained identification papers, letters, and insignia taken from the corpses. It was sealed with a wax seal of the Oberkommando of the Wehrmacht, and beneath a sheet of acetate was a letter on OKW stationery, signed by Generaloberst Hasso von Manteuffel, stating that the package was in the possession of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bellmon, United States Army, by direction of the OKW, and that it was neither to be examined, nor taken from him, by any member of the German military or security forces for any reason. The letter bore the seals of both the OKW and the SS. Bellmon could not read the signature of the SS official.

  He was clearly being used by the Germans. And he had been tempted, more than once, to throw the package into the small cast-iron stove, to remove any suggestion at all that he was offering aid and comfort to the enemy.

  But there was no question in his mind that the Soviet secret police, with the full support of the Red Army, had in fact taken 5,000 captured Polish officers—among them at least 250 cadets, some of whom were no older than fourteen—tied their hands behind their back, forced them to lie in open trenches, and then shot each of them in the back of the neck with a small caliber pistol.

  There was no question in his mind, either, after seeing this atrocity with his own eyes, that at Katyn he had become one with Colonel von Greiffenberg and other Germans like him, and that now the Russian ally had become his enemy. Sure, war by its very nature was obscene, and there were atrocities on battlefields. He’d heard about those all his life, and he’d seen some in North Africa. Indeed, he had expected to be shot, instead of taken prisoner, when they got his tank.

  But that was the battlefield. What the Russians had done was barbaric beyond understanding. They had decided to subdue the Poles for the future by wiping out their leaders, young and old, even their chaplains. Bellmon had identified with the dead Poles. Many of them wore cavalry boots. They were cavalry officers, captured probably as he had been, without real fault of their own. Because they had been taught to expect it, they would have expected the treatment required by the Geneva Convention. Instead, they had been slaughtered like cattle.

  At first, he had told himself that when he was exchanged, as Colonel von Greiffenberg said he would be, he would wait thirty days to regain control of his emotions and of his ability to think clearly and objectively, before he turned the package over to the proper authorities.

  But then it had become apparent that he was not to be exchanged. He didn’t understand why, and there were fifty possibilities. But he had come to accept that he was not going to be exchanged, that there would not be thirty days’ liberation leave to spend with Barbara in Carmel, at least not until the war was over. He had no idea what had kept him from being exchanged as von Greiffenberg had promised; but he sensed, somehow, that it had nothing to do with the German officer.

  As executive officer of the prisoner staff he was ex-officio chairman of the escape committee. The escape committee was brave, enthusiastic, imaginative, and in Bellmon’s professional judgment, incredibly stupid. There was no way that they could get out of Poland, much less out of German-occupied Europe. There was no underground here who could help them, as there was supposed to be in France. That was the primary reason the Stalag had been established in Poland. The Germans were not fools.

  Of course, he questioned that judgment, too, wondering if he had lost his courage, or if he was subconsciously identifying with the German enemy because of what he had seen at Katyn, because von Greiffenberg had gone to the cavalry school at Samur with Porky Waterford and cradled Barbara in his arms.

  He had imagined he’d get some sort of pressure from the Germans, at least a subtle pointing out that the Germans and the Americans were the same kind of people, functioning under a Christian ethic; that it was really absurd that they should be fighting each other, rather than the common, godless Soviet enemy; that Hitler, had after all, gone out of his way not to get into a war with the Americans.

  But there had been nothing at all like that. The only propaganda to which he had been subjected was the magazines and newspapers in the Stalag library. And that was to be expected. There was nothing more reprehensible about providing captured American officers copies of the German Army magazine Signal than there was in providing captured German officers copies of Yank.

  In September, the British and French officers who had been in the stalag with them had been transferred elsewhere. Stalag XVII-B was now entirely American.

  That had posed certain administrative and logistic problems. Without Bellmon having paid much attention to it, captured British and French enlisted men had been the logistic backbone of the stalag. They were the cooks, the orderlies, the latrine cleaners, the laundry workers, the bedmakers.

  When the British and French officers left, so did their enlisted men, and that left the kitchen and the laundry without people to operate them. There was a cook, a phlegmatic Bavarian, and a laundry supervisor, but no labor force.

  Bellmon had crossed with the senior prisoner over that.

  “What we’ll have to do,” the senior prisoner said, “is simply take turns. On a roster. Make it fair.”

  Bellmon was furious but kept his temper. If the colonel did not realize that they were not boy scouts out roughing it in the woods, he would have to teach him.

  “We are officers,” Bellmon said. “In many cases field-grade officers. We will not work in laundries. Commissioned officers of the United States will not be kitchen helpers. Commissioned officers will not clean latrines.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Bob, we’re prisoners.”

  “We’re officers,” Bellmon said. “You, Colonel, as a reservist, as much as me.”

  “Since you bring that up, Bob,” the colonel said, without much conviction, “I am the senior officer. I could order
you to do what has to be done.”

  “And I would obey your order. And the day we get out of here, I would bring you up on charges of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” Bellmon said.

  “Who the hell would ever know if your precious officer’s dignity was relaxed?” the senior prisoner demanded. When he said that, Bellmon had sensed he had won. The colonel was more afraid of him than of the Germans.

  “The enemy,” Bellmon said, gently. “That’s the point, Colonel.”

  The commandant said that he had requested a contingent of enlisted prisoners to take over the housekeeping duties, but he had no idea when, or even if, they would be sent.

  No officer details were sent to the kitchen, and none to the laundry. Two German soldiers were sent to the kitchen to help the cook. Officers carried their mess plates to the mess, ate, washed their plates and cutlery, and left with them. Officers washed their own underwear, and if they wanted clean outer garments, washed and pressed them themselves.

  Bellmon spent long hours with a cast-iron clothes press, keeping his trousers, shirts, and tunic neat. He tested the principle of inspiring by example. It had a thirty percent effectiveness factor, he found. One officer in three followed his example and tried to look as much like an officer as he could. Two out of three let themselves go.

  Bellmon stopped talking to the unpressed and unshaven, or even acknowledging them with a nod of his head. When they sought him out, mostly for his skill as an interpreter, or for his opinion on the legality of a move they planned in connection with an escape attempt, he refused to deal with them.

  “Can I have a moment of your time, Colonel?”

  “You need a shave, Lieutenant. And your uniform is foul.”

  They came back, shaven, in slightly more presentable uniforms. He told them what they wanted to know. He shamed the senior prisoner, who not only resumed shaving daily, but began a British-style mustache.