Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  Captain Wirt later told me that a colonel and a lieutenant colonel had been relieved of their command because of their bungling at the Weser—not that a meal for G Company was so damned important, but the 3rd Armored had been forced to stall around in Wehrden on the other side of the river, losing precious time. Our hearts bled for the 3rd Armored, but we felt that the food failure in itself justified the use of a firing squad. We were hungry. Our only food for many hours had been the single swallow of milk ladled out to us that afternoon by a tearfully happy Meinbrexen frau.

  The civilians who owned the bier stube were gentle, kind folk. They had given us several bottles of wine upon our arrival and asked, timidly, if we wanted food. Confident that our chow would not be long in arriving, we answered, “No, our food will soon be here.” Their relief had been obvious, and they explained that they had little food left—the German High Command no longer provides food for the Wehrmacht, and the German soldiery is expected to live off the people.

  A few hours later, seeing that our food had not yet arrived, they again asked if we wanted to eat, and again we declined. Around nine p.m. they inquired once more and we weakened and said, “Yes!” A boiled egg was prepared for each of us, and they gave us bread and ersatz coffee. Not much of a feast, but it covered the bottom of the most aching hollows.

  We spent the night there, spelling each other at phone guard and sleeping on the big davenport that stretched across one end of the room. Theoretically, the building was steam-heated, and the pipes did hold a tepid warmth until midnight. We were almost comfortable, and (here was a piano on which I fooled around softly for most of the night.

  Monday, April 9.

  No breakfast. No chow trucks. Our gentle hostess insisted on serving us with more boiled eggs, bread, butter, strawberry jam, and coffee. Eavesdropping on her murmured conversation with her young son, I learned that our meal included the last egg, the last morsel of butter, the last piece of bread in the house.

  Shortly after breakfast the order came to pack up. We were moving on, and an engineer outfit, the same one, would take over the town. Presently a first lieutenant of engineers walked in and asked how soon we would be leaving. I told him any minute, and he said very well, he’d take the bier stube for his C.P. He waved an arrogant hand—well, maybe he didn’t wave, but he sure as hell gave that impression—and a noncommissioned flunky hastened to nail a handsomely painted board on the front door, calling attention to the new status of the building. An indication of rear echelon decadence that amused us mightily.

  What followed did not amuse us at all. He swaggered over to our elderly, sweet-faced hostess and brutally ordered her to be out of the building within two hours. Staggered, she lifted pleading eyes and asked, humbly, where they were to go. He answered that he didn’t care: “That’s your worry!” She came to me and asked if they really had to go, if I wouldn’t intercede for them, and sadly I told them that he was an officer and I only an unteroffizier and I could do nothing. And though I ate humble pie and appealed to him, I could do nothing. He wanted them out, and that was the end of it.

  The fourteen-year-old son, in faltering English, asked the lieutenant if they might please stay in one room—they would give up everything else. The bier stube had many rooms, he pleaded, and they would be very quiet. Before the boy had finished speaking, that brass-bound bastard had swung on his heel and walked away, not bothering to look back as he flung over his shoulder the single word “No!” And his ass-licking dog robber, having finished his sign-nailing, said savagely to the boy, “See how you like the same medicine you gave the Polocks!” (But damn it, damn it, we don’t make war on the weak and the helpless! That’s the theory, anyway.)

  My heart was sick and I wanted to leave, fast. In my last glimpse of our hostess I saw her moving bravely down the hall to her kitchen, her back straight and her head held high. But her hands were pressed tight over her face.

  All over the village it was like that—weeping women, frightened children, the trembling, bewildered aged. Whitefaced women hauling unwieldy carts to their doorsteps and loading food, bedding, small treasures, preparing to start out for—I don’t know where. Some few civilians, those who lived in the smallest and most wretched houses, were spared. And the official brass edict was: “The civilians can double up and live together.”

  I reflected bitterly as we trudged out of town. Here was this goddamn bunch of engineers, and they came into a town we fought to take. While we slugged it out, they sat on their tails on the other side of the river. When it was all over they followed us in. They were more brutal, more ruthless in their treatment of civilians, than we were—and surely, if there is ever any justification for brutality (which I doubt) it is with the combat outfits, with the men who’ve seen their friends killed in the taking of towns such as this. But we have little desire to make the civilians suffer. Usually we treat them as considerately as we can and are grateful to them when they’re kind. Now the women and the children had to leave this place, go to some other corner of this weary, God-forgotten land. Maybe someday they’d come home again and to a place they wouldn’t recognize, their houses obscenely filthy, their furniture scarred and smashed and burned for kindling, their livestock devoured, their cupboards bare, and their wine cellars empty. So it’s war, maybe, but there are degrees of war, as there are degrees of peace.

  Assembling at the company C.P., we started the long march to Demthal. Our chow tracks finally met us, and we ate happily and sprawled on the cool grass by the side of the road. In the house behind us lay a dead civilian, his body covered with a red-and-white-checked tablecloth. As we rested, a woman approached, leading a ten-year-old girl by the hand. With a cruelly faithful adherence to tribal custom, she uncovered the body and forced the child to look at her dead father, fixing the ugly sight forever on the terrified youngster’s mind. Then, while the little girl wept hysterically, the woman rocked and moaned and told us—with an embarrassing implication that we were responsible—that this kleine mädchon was now an orphan. There was nothing we could say, and we rose with alacrity when the call came to move out.

  Leaving Demthal, we passed through a heavy woods along a road thick with roadblocks, most of them incomplete. Daily it became more evident that the Wehrmacht was crumbling. At one place every roadside tree for fifty yards wore a dynamite girdle, fused and wired and ready to be blown. The fleeing Germans had forgotten only the final step—pulling the switch.

  We passed an enemy encampment in the woods that gave evidence of recent occupancy. It was a welter of tempting loot: new guns, cases of ammunition, an officer’s jeep, a motorcycle, a staff car, helmets, uniforms, cases of food, boxes of cigars, cases of champagne'. I found the cache of officers’ supplies (the cigars and food and champagne) when I made a brief skonavish of the deserted camp—a stupid thing to do because the area might well have been booby-trapped. Before I ran back to the road to rejoin my platoon, I grabbed two bottles of champagne and thrust them inside my shirt. I told Lieutenant Krucas about the loot in the forest and he said, “The company will take care of it.” His prediction was painfully accurate. Company HQ took the cream, naturally: the pistols, cameras, cigars, and twenty-seven bottles of champagne. But Headquarters was not niggardly, no indeed. Each platoon was graciously allotted three bottles of champagne. Pure white generosity that was! Three bottles per platoon—twenty to twenty-five men in a platoon—and that left fifteen bottles for the headquarters group (twelve men) to whack up.

  Two kilometers from the village of Neuhaus we halted. An overturned wagon on the side of the road was my C.P., and we pawed busily in the spilled junk, finding such stray items as two superb saddles, several bags of oats, cigarettes, blankets, clothing, mess gear, shaving equipment, a bottle of cognac— hell, the list can stop there. Digging a three-man hole in the soft earth of the bank, we made it comfortable with the blankets from the wagon, divvied up the champagne, and drank our share on the spot. We saved the cognac for later.

  We spent the night th
ere. Joe Hudziak, Howie Dettman, and I spelled each other on phone guard through the night—I had set two outposts in the hills behind us—but it was an easy chore. We stayed under the blankets and propped the receiver beside us, each man merely handing it to his neighbor at the end of his trick. It was strangely sweet to lie there and regard the stars, exchanging sleepy comments with the men in the outposts. Our bellies were full and we were warm.

  Something I just remembered. Several weeks ago we passed through a town that had been painstakingly, methodically, obliterated by our bombers. It was an old sight, and I walked in a dull haze of weariness, regarding without interest the familiar monotony of this destruction. Ahead of me a roadside sign caught my eye. kindergarten it said, and a black arrow pointed. I followed the arrow with my eyes, noting with pleasure the attractive modern building it indicated. It was low, rambling, many-windowed, built of white plaster and creamy brick. I glanced over my shoulder for a last look as we passed, and immediately the old churning started in the pit of my stomach. The building had been neatly bisected by a bomb, split as though a huge wedge had been driven through the snowy plaster with mathematical precision. Tumbling from the raw wound was a gay cataract of red, yellow, and blue blocks, multicolored beads, swirls and ripples of colored paper. The splintered wreckage of small desks... the diminutive tables and chairs that were exactly the right size for five-year-olds. I thought of Geoff and Sukey ... Geoff and Sukey here ... or the war and the bombs insanely transported there, where they are, to Edward Smith School in the city of Syracuse, New York.

  A wrecked home, a blasted factory, even a ruined church— we’ve learned to accept them calmly or with only the smallest shudder. But a bomb-shattered school, a broken toy, a baby carriage torn by machine-gun bullets—we’re shaken by these fresh reminders that not all the world is old and soiled and weary.

  I thought about the kindergarten and wondered, Where did it start to go wrong, this nation that so loves children? Because it does love them—German songs, German stories, German Christmas traditions offer rich proof. Even the word “kindergarten” is a testimonial of that love. And then I thought, But wait a minute! Love, yes, but a love that is often sickly and dishonest; a love that is too frequently only an arrogant, if sentimental, desire to mold the adult in miniature. Germans, ever mindful of tradition, believe in the fiction of “national” virtues, see themselves as the custodians of a great heritage, and ask nothing more of their children than that they mirror a mythical German “character”; Americans, having no real tradition, see their children not as carbon copies of themselves, but as the potentials of something better. Americans are secretly humble before the promise of their children; Germans are not.

  The thing is, the children of continental Europe work, they are required to earn their right to exist. Children are a crop, a commodity, part of the basic livestock of a European farm. Only in America and England are children reared in the pleasant assumption that life ought to be fun for kids—and work is for adults only. Only in America and England are children given full freedom to experience the fragile miracle of youth, taste freely the subtleties that only the young palate can truly savor. Perhaps we baby our children too much, but I like it that way.

  Most of our prisoners of late are pathetic, bottom-of-the-barrel specimens. The other day we picked up four whose respective ages were forty-two, forty-one, forty-three, and forty-five. They had been in the army four weeks. Yesterday we took three, one of whom was sixteen years old. He’d been in the army eight days. The Wehrmacht machine is worn out.

  Tuesday, April 10.

  We entered Neuhaus, and I had a stroke of luck: the building I took over for a C.P. had excellent beds.

  Feeling unaccountably gay, we had a party, a real party. A raid on the cellar of our house netted all the wine we could possibly want—red, white, sparkling, dry, sweet. We used our bottle of cognac for chasers. Loeb came to call, bringing a box he’d just received from Sally, his wife. Sardines, crackers, olives, and a bottle of whiskey she’d contrived to smuggle through the mails. We drank nauseating combinations of wine, whiskey, and cognac and got satisfyingly drunk. We wound up the evening telling each other in loud and tearful accents how wonderful each of us thought the other was ... what a swell guy... how dear to our hearts....

  April 11.

  No hangover when I awoke, but a reaction infinitely more uncomfortable, which may have had no connection with the preceding night’s revelry. The joints of my body, particularly my knees and hips, were swollen and aching, so painful it was a hardship to move at all, let alone start on a forced march. Which is what we did. Fortunately, we had to walk only a few miles, before being picked up by trucks and carried to the village of Imbshausen, thirty miles to the east. We spent the night in the home of some kindly old people. The grandmother, eighty-one years old, was terrified of us, and we had a helluva time convincing her that she was safe... no, we would not cut her throat while she slept.

  On this day, one of the men found a German boot in the road, containing a foot and part of a leg. There was no trace of the rest of the body.

  I spent the night almost comfortably on a red velvet sofa. Now, mid-morning, I sit by an open window, writing lazily and forgetting to write for minutes on end. I lean forward to meet spring, and the nagging, faint perfume of unseen flowers drifts through the open window. Brushing a deluded bee from my arm, I thought, Surely not even a spring-mad bee could mistake stale sweat for the scent of honeysuckle? Ah, it’s spring, and time for me to be home! I’m tired of war, and tired of male smells. It’s good to be sitting in a comfortable chair, a cushion at my back, the sunlight making patterns of peace on the green-dappled cobblestones of the street. It’s good, but not altogether good. Under the placid surface of my content I’m restless, feeling the first stirrings of the dark surge of homesickness that moves steadily upon me. It’s always this way between actions; the only way to keep from brooding upon home is to keep fighting.

  Why won’t these bastards cry enough? Why do they continue to fight? Not because they still have faith in a final victory, surely! Nor can it be in the hope of winning a negotiated peace: they must know by now that they won’t get it. Why won’t they quit? They straggle now within the borders of their own land, seeing their own women and children frightened, hungry, and fearful of next year’s starvation. (In these broad farm areas we make daily acquaintance with that fear, seeing women and old men each day confront the dry malevolence of empty fields and unfilled soil.)

  Tonight the woman of this house wept hard, painful tears as she told me of how desperately she and her aged mother must work for the little food that will keep them alive. They exist on a vegetable diet, enriched by an occasional egg or a rare morsel of cheese. They get no meat. I’d watched her in the garden, eighty-one years old and laboring most of the day in the vegetable patch. The younger woman told me of her father, dying last year at eighty-three, and how he’d worked like a beast of the field all his life, from small boyhood until the very day when a stroke cut him down and left him paralyzed and helpless for three months, when death was merciful. She said passionately that there ought to be more to life than this; more than eighty-three years of toil, and then death. And so there ought. Life is stunted and barren for people like this. It’s easy to see how the figure of Hitler, blazing with tinsel glory and posturing heroically to the echo of Wagnerian horns, offered release to the festering turbulence of German emotion. But there’s more to the picture than that: these people are hag-ridden by tradition and by an inbred, servile respect for authority. I think the people of Europe are never young—they’re born old and they just grow older. They lack the hope and belief of Americans, qualities that are the rare prerogatives of the young.

  Maybe this is what Germany is fighting for, the Lorelei song that persuaded the young and hopeless to National Socialism: the fierce desire to be young, to make life more than a drudgery rounded with a death. They’re working for it the wrong way, and that’s why it’s worth fight
ing them, but I begin to see a glimmer of the light that draws them, and the dark shadows from which they have attempted to flee. Poor stragglers... poor, blind runners.

  April 12.

  We traveled by track on the first leg of an eighty-mile push to the east, reaching Herzberg at dusk. Our assignment was to clear the Harz Mountains. Last night we heard the good news that the 2nd Armored had crossed the Elbe and was sixty-eight miles from Berlin. We felt cocky with victory and our spirits were high, in spite of a weariness that teetered on the very brink of exhaustion.

  Our house in Herzberg contains five civilians: an elderly couple, two daughters, and a three-week-old baby. Fearful at first, they became pathetically eager to please, once convinced that we intended no harm. But in spite of their friendliness, in spite of the fine piano in the living room, I’ll be very happy to leave this house. Only the baby smiles and is content—the adults have been damp with tears from the moment we arrived. They spell each other; as soon as one stops crying, another starts, and the house is forever filled with the sound of weeping. That sounds flip, and I don’t intend it to be. The tears are genuine, and we’re not unsympathetic, but we cannot permit ourselves the dangerous luxury of emotion.

  The weeping started when we answered their questions about Berlin. Had the Russians taken it yet? Did it still stand? Was anyone alive in Berlin? And when I told them, in all innocence (or was it deliberate cruelty?) about the success of the Russian push and the present condition of Berlin, they burst into tears, even the old man. There is a daughter—or there was—in Berlin. I was shown snapshots of her and her children, handsome, sunny-haired twins of five. Last summer the twins were there with the grandparents in Herzberg, but they’d been sent back to Berlin in the fall. There’s been no word of them since, nor of their mother.