The house is wired for electricity, but there’s been no electricity for many months. Even with that lack supplied, there are no household gadgets: no electric vacuum cleaner, no electric iron, no electric percolator, toaster, sewing machine, Mixmaster.
But her lack of modern housekeeping conveniences would not be enough in itself to stir my pity: it is the desperation in her eyes when I see her talking to the men billeted in this house, the fear and panic in the twisting of her hands. This is a village of women, and most of the young men who left this place have long since been reported dead or missing or taken prisoner. Few of them will ever return. At night when Maria’s work is done and she sits in the kitchen with a candle and a book she’s read many times before (there are no new books), her face is locked and tight and she accepts despair. Often she does not see the words on the page, and I know that before her eyes are the years ahead, starved and dry and acrid.
More and more the war is dreamlike. There is even the dream knowledge of suspension, of swinging dangerously over black and bottomless space. And you wonder when will it break, this thin and fraying rope….
CHAPTER NINE
… hot water … and nine fried eggs for breakfast …
March 20, and Waldorf is already remote.
This is uber Rhine, east of the Rhine, and the great river is behind us. I sit in what was the courtyard of what was a German farmhouse. Here in the sun, with fat geese grumbling from a muddy ditch and hens exclaiming excitedly over the new crop of bugs this spring, it’s momentarily possible to disdain the broken roof slates under my feet and the bullet- riddled tin washtub that is my easy chair.
We left Waldorf on March 18, heading east. It was spring, and the earth stoutly refused to admit that we were About to Cross the Rhine. War and the passing of armies had preceded us. We took a route well-marked by a web of communications wire strung along the roadside by our Signal Corps. A tree, a telegraph pole, a chimney or a weather vane—any projection where wire could be hung bore the tangled skein. I suspect one linesman of delicate irony, an eye for subtle cruelties. The anguished Christ on a roadside crucifix seemed oddly distorted, out of proportion, and I stared closely as we drew near. Around His middle, in addition to the customary clout, He wore a corset of black communication wire, wound thickly and with careful precision from armpits to loins. A sardonic comment, a deliberate juxtaposition of protagonist and antagonist.
We detrucked in an elegant little Rhine town, with many beautiful villas. The cobbled streets seemed oddly familiar, and then I remembered that eleven years ago I had ridden down these same streets on a bicycle, a hot-eyed, eager young tourist.
We crossed the Rhine on a pontoon bridge two miles above the now famous Remagen span. A smoke screen concealed our crossing and we could not see the other side, but we knew the river was wide from the time it took to cross it. The smoke was white and thick but odorless and nonirritating, barring a faint chemical taste.
The Rhine, behind us, we walked to the village of Rheintal-breitbach. (I think that was its name.) My bunch moved into the home of a widow whose only son was missing in action. Several of the men, including company headache, Frank H., laid claim to the old lady’s bedroom, and tremblingly she came to plead with me, fearful that we might evict her entirely. I assured her that she was safe and that I’d get the men out of her room, and she embarrassed the hell out of me by grabbing my hand and kissing it frantically.
We didn’t stay overnight after all. An hour after our arrival, orders came to pack up again. We climbed aboard tanks and tank destroyers and raced into the town of Aegidienburg.
My C.P. was in a large house, with twelve civilians living in the cellar: two men, an old woman, four younger women, two babies, a pair of six-year-old girl twins named Krista and Kristal, and a Russian slave girl. The owner of the house had owned a tool factory on the Rhine. He spoke enough English and I enough German so that we conversed easily. He was very ingratiating, very contemptuous of the Nazis, and completely a phony. He stated that he had once spent eight months in a concentration camp, but the facts he let slip didn’t jibe with the anti-Nazi feelings he professed. To begin with, he was wealthy. (There were three cars in the barn, and he owned a town house in Bonn and a villa on the Rhine, in addition to this farm.) Further, he was a prominent industrialist, and opponents of National Socialism were not likely to remain the possessors of factories, particularly those that manufactured war materiel. (He boasted, incidentally, that his factory had been in full production throughout the war, until Allied bombing raids knocked it out for the third and final time only a few months ago.)
He mentioned carelessly that most of the labor in his factory had been supplied by foreign slaves. Wealthy, an industrialist, an employer of slave labor, and not a Nazi? If I needed further proof, I found it in the way he spoke of the Russian house slave, the familiar and contemptuous manner in which these people always speak of servants and animals: “... stupid, of course, but a good worker.” A dependable animal.
After the civilians had retired for the night, I talked with the Russian girl. She spoke of her “owner” with bitterness and anger and pointed contemptuously with her thumb to the cellar door.
She is from the Ukraine, near Voroshilovograd, and she wants to go home. She does not know whether her parents are alive: when her town was taken by the Germans, the healthy and the strong were put in one group, the aged and unfit in another. The town was looted and burned to the ground, and she doesn’t know what happened to the old people. That is, she cannot be sure. But she wants to go back, and she speaks ardently of the time ahead when she will work for herself and be no longer a slave.
Shortly before the crossing of the Rhine, the Gestapo came to this village and rounded up the foreign slaves, transporting them eastward. Her owner concealed her in the cellar, a neighboring farmer did the same with his young Russian male slave, and then these two good Germans solemnly assured the Gestapo that they had no Russian workers.
When the factory owner relates this story, he offers it as proof of his high regard for the girl: he “saved her from the Gestapo.” She agrees with the facts but gives them a different interpretation: the women of this household are lazy and slovenly. They needed a servant and she was convenient. (Incidentally, she told us that the civilians drank champagne every night during the last week in order to get rid of it before the Americans came. The bastards.)
The dead in the village are beginning to smell. One German soldier lies in a ditch nearby, and in the cellar of a house down the road are two more, very ripe. Yesterday a civilian sought me out and led me to his house, where a young German soldier lay dead upon a bed. He had been wounded the day before, and the civilians had tried to patch him up. I arranged for the disposition of his body and then engaged in a flirtatious conversation with the farmer’s sister, a refugee from Bonn. She was a sophisticated and provocative blonde, wearing well-fitting slacks and a thin blouse open down to here! She spoke French, used her eyes and hands with effect, and wiggled her plump rear as she talked. When she leaned forward and the blouse gaped and I smelled her perfume—oh brother! I steamed with hayloft visions and ogled her like a Victorian dandy (ogled is the word!), clicking my heels and bowing over her hand as I said “Au ’voir. ” As I walked back to my C.P. I mentally arranged guard tricks for the night that would suit my convenience. But alas for the best laid plans of mice and men—only the mice got laid that night. Orders from HQ kept me busy long past the witching hour, and I slept alone (when I slept) on a red plush sofa in the living room of the tool manufacturer’s house. The following day we were transferred to another section of the town. And the sun beats warmly on me here, and the geese grumble contentedly. I’ve decided geese have more character than chickens.
The past several days are a blur of color and movement.
Three days ago I sat on a washtub by a ruined farmhouse and wrote letters, the sun warm and the war far away. That afternoon we climbed into trucks and moved out for a town whose name
I do not know. En route we crossed the Reich- autobahn, the famous superhighway of Germany. Shell holes pockmarked it as far as the eye could reach, and grass grew rankly through wide cracks in the concrete. Route 20 in New York State was never like this.
There was the customary confusion when we reached our destination and detrucked. Harried officers and noncoms debated our disposition for the night while we stretched on the muddy grass along the road and chain-smoked and bitched. Night fell, the discussion continued, and the grass was cold. Finally we were led to an imposing mansion and instructed to settle ourselves for the night.
The front door of the building was locked, and we climbed in through a broken rear window, cursing over the furniture that barked our shins in the dark hallways. Suddenly a woman’s voice, old but as faintly sweet as the ringing of an old bell, called, “What is it?” The voice came from the cellar and the words were English.
I hesitated, then replied, “Do not be afraid! We are American soldiers and we are going to spend the night here.”
There was a pause, and then I saw the moving glimmer of a light in the dark hole of the cellar stairway. The light moved upward, grew larger, became a candle flame. Then the same voice, nearer now and remarkably beautiful, said gently, “You are welcome, of course. But this is a hospital, and we have sick ones downstairs.”
Now I could see the speaker, a nun, white-coiffed, and the aging, patient face. Abashed, I told the men to settle themselves quietly and with a minimum of breakage. We talked for a moment longer, she standing on the top step of the cellar stairs, her face innocent in the candlelight. I was miserably aware of my unshaven cheeks, my dirty hands, the foul smell of my clothing. She assured me that the sick in the cellar included no German soldiers, only the civilians of the town— women and children and old men whose bodies had been shattered by bombing and privation. Finally she said good night, and wished me a pleasant sleep under the protection of Our Lady. I watched her go downstairs. When she had gone and the last faint flicker of light disappeared, the night was a lot blacker than the absence of one small candle would explain. She to her job, and I in the morning to mine. But mine was to destroy, to maim, and hers to minister to those we hurt. Where was the right and where the wrong in this? Where did the black leave off and the white begin? I slammed and locked a door against the painful probing of these questions and set off to find the men. They were already settled, and soon I was, too. I slept on an operating table.
We moved out at dawn. In the dim half-light the handsome old mansion was clearly identified as a Catholic hospital. Commemorative plaques, holy pictures and plaster saints, a large sign over the front gate, and a Red Cross flag on a pole in the garden. One wing of the hospital had been devastated by a bomb that had sliced smoothly through three floors, shearing away the outer wall. We assembled in the road and I watched the door, half hoping. But no one appeared. And so we started on the road to Soven. It was March 21.
We made one stop en route; not really a village because it was only a single building. But it was a big building, a giant square of masonry with an open courtyard in its heart. Two sides of the square constituted living quarters, three and four stories tall, and the remaining sections were a labyrinth of barns, stables, sheds, granaries, and storerooms. There were a lot of civilians wandering about. Feudal estate or communal farm, it was a self-sustaining unit, reminiscent of Brook Farm and similar nineteenth-century utopias.
We were ordered to hold up there for further orders, and I stationed the men in an apple orchard on the crest of a hill. On the far side of the valley the red roofs of a tiny town appeared dimly through a thick haze of smoke: Soven, perched on the summit of a hill. Fighting was going on in the valley below us, and every now and then a batch of prisoners trailed up the hill, escorted by a few grinning doggies.
Early in the afternoon we saw a heartwarming sight: a long column of prisoners, 161 of them, and striding at their head a German colonel, complete with swagger stick and monocle a la Erich von Stroheim. He stepped along disdainfully, refusing to acknowledge by the flicker of an eyelash the cameras that started clicking the moment he came in sight.
A couple of men from the company that earlier in the day had taken the courtyard village, which seemed to be a communal farm, told us there was something in the stable we should see. We looked. The “something” was a dead Jerry lying in the hay, the back of his head a gaping ruin, the flies thick on the still-wet blood and brains. For some reason he was wearing a GI uniform. Shoes, trousers, shirt, sweater, overcoat—all unmistakably American. Maybe he wasn’t a spy, maybe he’d had another answer—but if so, no one had bothered to hear it. Apparently, five minutes after he was brought in, he’d been led into the stable, a carbine placed behind his ear, and his brains blown out I wish I knew his story. He was sprawled on the hay ... slender, bespectacled, intelligent-looking. His lips, half open, were finely cut and sensitive.
Shorty and I discovered a storeroom and raided the canned fruit. Delicious cherries and prunes, very cold and sweet.
There was a kind of caravan parked in the courtyard, great covered wagons like old-time circus vans. They were padlocked, but we peered through the tiny windows. The wagons were filled with the belongings of refugees, probably from one of the Rhine towns, who had retreated to this place for safety.
Finally, we moved on toward Soven, hurrying into the valley on the double because the road was under fire. We paused briefly in a village that had just been taken and took refuge against a fierce burst of enemy shells. In one house we found a slab of bacon, potatoes, and onions, which we fried in a savory mess. It tasted fine.
There was a Russian slave girl in the house, tanned, stocky, and strong. Her teeth, both uppers and lowers, were of polished steel, and when she stood in the sun and smiled—oh, brother! But she was merry and friendly and cooperative. How cooperative I cannot say: several of our lustier men tried to get a little hayloft cooperation, and I suspect that our alliance with Russia became a little more solidly established on a popular level. It was a tough war.
We were briefed on the plan for taking Soven: first, an artillery barrage to soften it up, then an assault by two platoons of infantry, of which we were one.
We set out, moving up a deep draw that knifed the smoothside of the hill. Moss was gentle under our weary feet, and the task awaiting us at the top of the hill seemed unreal and impossible: this small world in the heart of the hill contradicted violence and flame. Violets and snowdrops lipped the banks of a tumbling little brook, and primroses and daisies spilled jubilantly down the slopes on either side. At one place the brook formed a small pool, and seven fat white geese paddled contentedly there, unperturbed by the shells whistling overhead. I am more and more convinced that geese have character.
We rushed the village, a desolate place of blazing ruins, smoking timbers, and dead cattle. Many buildings were still burning, and a heavy pall of smoke hung low. For ten minutes it was an accelerated version of our customary assault procedure: clear one building, rush another, clear and rush, clear and rush. I don’t know when I first became aware of the planes—I’d seen them and heard them, but their presence hadn’t quite registered. Suddenly they were there, low in the sky and heavy over us. At that moment a tower of smoke and debris rose into the air like a dark geyser fifty yards away, and simultaneously something knocked me to the ground. Then I was being pounded by fragments of brick and wood, and someone was screaming. But these were our planes—I could see the markings on the wings plainly, they were our planes and this couldn’t be happening to us, God wouldn’t let this happen to us!
I don’t think I was really scared at first—that came a few seconds later. First it was incredulity, bewilderment. But fear moved in fast and nightmare followed. We rushed for the nearest building—one man scratched at the ground in nerveless hysteria while we belabored his ass with our boots to get him to his feet and moving—and into the safety of the cellar, which was jammed with screaming women. I hugged the corner of the bu
ilding, yelled to stragglers, and watched the village blossom hugely in puffs of orange flames and black smoke. 1 could see some of our men only a short distance away, lying on their stomachs among the cabbages in a garden.
Someone threw a yellow smoke grenade—yellow means “We are friendly troops”—in a desperate attempt to halt this attack by our own planes. But the wind whipped away the first puffs of smoke, and the next bomb, falling near, smothered the grenade with dust and debris. Meanwhile, the planes began to strafe, the heavy cr-rump of the bombs punctuated by the screams of the diving planes.
Suddenly it all ceased, and there was a silence so intense that the crackling of the burning houses seemed very loud and the droning of the planes like the intimate presence of bumblebees. I learned later that my friend Loeb had managed to spread a yellow “panel” where the planes could see it and realize their mistake. (Wonder how those bombardiers felt when they saw that yellow strip?) “Panels” were made of a kind of oilcloth and came in various colors, each color conveying a specific message. They were peculiarly brilliant in tone, almost luminous, and could be seen for miles.
When the planes were gone, we picked up where we’d left off, working our way through the village, clearing and rushing, clearing and rushing. As we neared the road that was our primary objective, I heard the rumble of nearby tanks. Knowing damn well that there were no armed units with us, I reflected that this was turning into a bitch of a day. We concealed ourselves and waited. The rumble grew louder, and a moment later the evil snout of a German tank appeared on the road. In the open turret the tank commander stood erect, a bold and careless figure. That was a good sign: obviously the Jerries didn’t know that a handful of verdammte Amerikanische were within spittin’ distance. The situation was one of rare perfection—the tank only fifty yards away, traveling broadside to us, and moving slowly. Even in basic training you never got such a perfect bazooka shot.
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