Roll Me Over

by Raymond Gantter

  Impatient with anger, I stomped over to the house and walked in. The civilians were waiting for me, servile enough on the surface but with arrogance showing in the tilt of their chins, indignation in their eyes. I regarded them coldly and told them what I wanted. At once they cringed, they whined, they cowered and complained. No room ... there was hardly room for themselves ... where would they sleep?... The woman who lived upstairs was ill ... the house across the street was much, much larger ... And so on. With every evasion that passed unchallenged, their arrogance rose a little more triumphantly, and now the contempt in their eyes was revealed nakedly and we saw how they despised us, how we seemed weak and soft to them because we did not brutally command and take.

  A commotion at the rear of the house created a sudden diversion. A woman was screaming in anger, “No! No bread, you pig-dogs ... not a bit, you dirt! Go away! Get out!” I ran through the house to the kitchen, followed by Dettman and the suddenly bleating civilians.

  Two ragged men stood in the yard, released slaves from the stalag, and haranguing them from the half-closed door was an elderly harridan. Seizing her arm, I spun her around and bellowed, “Give them bread! Quickly!” All my rage and hate and inner sickness foamed up and I sputtered incoherently. “You are the dirt, not they! You! Du! Du! Slack-jawed, her eyes frightened, she drew a loaf of bread from the cupboard and cut a thin slice with avaricious care. When she slowly offered the meager slice, I intercepted the reaching hands and took it from her, tossing it on the table and firmly removing the loaf under her arm. Giving that to the men, I told them to return to the stalag—there would be more food later. When they were gone, I turned without comment and walked back through the house to the front door.

  I’d come to a decision by the time I reached the door. And so had the civilians—the incident had scared the pants off ’em. Picking up the equipment I had dropped in the vestibule, I told Joe, Howie, and Evans to get their stuff together—we’d take another house. I ignored the civilians.

  As we turned to leave one of the women quavered, “Herr Lieutenant?”

  Coldly I inquired, “Well?”

  She gulped and made flutterings with her hands, pointing to the stalag. At last the words came: “Were all those ... those over there ... would they be released? Were they to be freed at once, free to leave the stockade and wander in the village?”

  I nodded and said yes, they were free. My men would keep order as well as possible, but... of course, it was going to be difficult to control so many men, and unfortunately, I lacked sufficient guards ... of course, there were sure to be regrettable incidents in the village, but they could rest assured that any who did wrong would be punished. That is, if we could find the guilty persons!

  Long before I had finished, their wailing was a thing wondrous to hear, and I observed the temperature of their mounting hysteria with a coldly clinical eye. At that moment these smug bitches could be raped by every man in the stockade and I would not lift a finger to prevent it; “those over there” could take this bulbous and quivering German male out in the yard and slit his throat as they’d butcher a pig.

  They begged, they entreated us to accept the hospitality of their home. Groveling at our feet, they implored us to regard their home as ours—they had fear! Man, I’ll say they had fear!

  I put on a great show of reluctance, indecision, made them squirm awhile longer. At last, still frigid in manner, I consented to establish my headquarters in their home. Then (and you will hardly believe this!) having won their point and thus regained some of their confidence, they had the cheek to propose that my three men and myself make the kitchen our quarters! A small room containing a stove, a table, two straight-backed wooden chairs, and a small couch. I stared silently at the civilians, and their glib chatter became abruptly feeble. Noticing a closed door in the far wall, I stepped across the kitchen and tried it Locked. I glanced inquiringly at the civilians, but they studied the floor and made no move. So it was going to be that way, was it? I turned back to the locked door and lifted the butt of my rifle. One of the women whispered a little as the wood crashed and splintered, but no one said a word. The open door revealed a beautiful bedroom, set with modern blond furniture. Each of the twin beds was large enough for two men, and a porcelain stove filled one corner of the room. Flinging my muddy pack onto the nearest bed, I called to the waiting men over my shoulder, “Bring your things in here!” There was a hubbub of protest from the civilians, which ended when I turned to the German male and said firmly, “Build a fire in here, at once!” Then I walked into the bedroom and slammed the door. I was suddenly very tired of Germans.

  So that was our V-E Day. If it was V-E Day. The radio had been proclaiming it throughout the day, but all commentators were careful to add that no official statement had yet been issued by Washington, London, or Moscow. That official pronouncement is expected tonight.

  At any rate, the captain sent us a quarter barrel of beer, and we’re going to celebrate. A quarter barrel isn’t very much for thirty-one men: it will be token drinking only, unless we can acquire more from other sources. As for myself, it won’t be V-E Day until I’m home, until I feel familiar arms around me, press my tired face against the satin of the young faces I have not seen for so many months.

  I am beginning to realize how tired I am, a weariness that has been mounting imperceptibly for a long time rather than a simple physical exhaustion from the intensive pushing of the past week. V-E Day has been as I predicted some weeks ago. It brings only a great weariness of relief, the sense of a heavy load sliding from tired shoulders. I’m still alive—that’s the important thing. Most of us feel this way—Christians who have crossed our particular Sloughs of Despond, our common Rivers of Death. And in the midst of our weariness, and even while the slow bubble of joy swells within us, we are sobered by the thought of the men in the Pacific Theater. For the first time we feel a kinship to that faraway war and a warm affection for the guys fighting it. So this is V-E Day.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “… the last parade ...”

  May 10.

  The day before yesterday we left Bukovany and moved to Goldorf, Czechoslovakia. We’re stationed on the main highway outside the town, our roadblock serving as the first of a series of funnels through which the surrendering Germans must pass on their way to the vast P.W. enclosure a few miles to our rear. More than 100,000 German soldiers will pass through our lines before our task is completed.

  We’ve been on duty here since six yesterday morning. It’s now one-thirty a.m., and I write this while serving my tour of duty on the phone. The principal part of our job is to keep the prisoners moving as rapidly as possible without permitting a traffic jam to result.

  The task has a strange unreality. There are so few of us and so many of them that we find it difficult to sustain the fiction that we’re the victors here and they’re our prisoners, no longer to be feared. There’s the frightening sense of something gone askew, and we must resist the impulse to dive for the nearest ditch. It’s like a bad dream. Confronted by the living shapes of our fears, we fumble nervously for the safety catches on our rifles, our uneasy hands seeking to complete the conditioned action.

  All day and all night the Germans have passed. I hear them now on the road before this house, moving sullenly toward the barbed wire they have themselves loved so well. They pass in a bewildering variety of vehicles: vans, lorries, staff cars, halftracks, buses, mobile kitchens, ambulances, motorcycles, wood-burning trucks, charcoal-burning civilian automobiles, horse-drawn wagons and buggies and farm carts. They come on bicycle, on horseback, on foot. It’s not uncommon to see one car towing several others that have exhausted their fuel supply.

  Most of the cars are benzine-powered, but many have been converted to wood or charcoal burners with great furnaces attached to side or rear. Frequently a converted vehicle will pull out of line and halt on the shoulder of the road while its occupants shovel in more fuel and wait for a fresh head of steam. Today I saw a Germ
an staff car that had familiar lines, in spite of the built-in wood burner in the rear. It turned out to be a 1938 Chevrolet.

  All manner of prisoners: the wounded and the whole, German WACs, nurses, whores, wives and children, SS men, Luftwaffe, Panzer Grenadiers, snipers, medics, foot soldiers. High-ranking officers (I talked to a general yesterday). Boys of fourteen and fifteen in uniform (I saw one today who admitted he was twelve years old). And men of sixty. Some of them sullen, some of them arrogant still, many fawningly eager to sing whatever tune we choose to pipe, ready to swear with willing tears that they “never hated the Americans.” All of them weary, most of them dirty—but not the officers! Even in this fallen moment the officers are polished, erect, clean-shaven, Prussian in their bearing whether their birthplace was Schleswig or Baden.

  While I stood at the roadblock today, a traffic jam snarled up the road and I halted the moving line of prisoners until order could be restored. A car containing several company-grade German officers had halted only a few yards from me, and one of the young officers leaned from the car, an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He smiled in friendly fashion and pointed to the cigarette, saying, “Bitte!” I could not refuse him the small mercy of a light, and silently I handed him a paper book of matches. He lit up, puffed quietly for a moment, then commenced to talk. His ease of manner suggested that the late war had been a kind of football game or cricket match in which the German team had been the loser, but “let’s shake hands like good sports, what?” He expressed his joy that the war was over at last and that once more “Germany and America could be friends.” I was grimly unimpressed by his naive presumption, but he was not embarrassed. On the contrary, he had the monstrous arrogance to attempt a little proselytizing, saying carelessly, “It is a pity that you Americans do not see the Russians as we do. Ah, they are horrible! They are not even human! Like animals ...!” Staggered by this insolence, I could only gape in reply. Then I turned on my heel and walked stiffly away.

  All day they come in an endless swarm that shows no sign of lessening. Many are legitimately our prisoners, but a vast number are properly Russian prizes. They’re throwing themselves into our hands rather than surrender to the Russians. How they fear the Russians!

  The tragic note in this crowded scene is struck by the ragtag and bobbletail of civilians who seek to flee westward from the advancing Russians. Most of these civilians are residents of East Germany, now engulfed in the Russian flood, but many are refugees from Cologne, Aachen, Bonn, Munich, Frankfurt, homeless wanderers who fled to the then-safe east when the Allied forces broke through the Rhine barrier. Now they flee to the west again, running from the Russians. Today I talked to some refugees from Bonn, two women and two small children. For five months they have been walking: first fleeing eastward from Bonn, now trying to return to Bonn. The women pushed a four-wheeled cart piled mountainously high with luggage, a load weighing several hundred pounds.

  The heartbreak for the civilians comes when they learn that this main road is a military highway from our roadblock onward, rigidly Verboten to civilian travel at the present time. Our orders are strict: under no circumstances will civilians be permitted on this road. They must be kept off, forced off if need be, and if they choose to continue westward, they must take to the woods and follow rough trails and paths.

  A hike through these well-mannered forests would be no hardship for people traveling light. Unencumbered, they could move quickly and reach the sanctuary they seek. But they come pushing baby carriages, wheelbarrows, four-wheeled carts weighted with what precious household goods they’d been able to save, and the forest trails are rough and narrow, impassable for vehicles. They must abandon their bicycles, their carts and carriages, or turn back to the waiting arms of the Russians. There is no other choice.

  And so we order the weeping women from the road and wince with the helpless knowledge of our own brutishness. The fields along the road have become an encampment of the stubborn, the hopeful, and the despairing—gray faces that lift imploringly and beg what we cannot grant, desolate shapes of grief weeping beside the treasures they must abandon and know they must abandon, yet cannot.

  Surrendering German soldiers, dispossessed civilians ... yet two other groups also pass along this road. They are the foreign laborers who were either lured to Germany with the promise of fat wages or were dragged forcibly from their homelands and put to work in German fields and factories. Now they’re on their way home—Latvians, Poles, Russians, Frenchmen, Belgians, Italians, Spaniards, Dutchmen, Danes—an ambulant League of Nations. And there are the prisoners of war, freed now from German prison camps and forced labor camps. Hundreds and hundreds of them, most of them British.

  Some have been imprisoned for as long as five years, working twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours a day for seven ounces of bread. This morning I waved hello to four British soldiers on bicycles, and they paused and swung into the drive. I gave them water and pressed cigarettes and chocolate on them. For twenty minutes they rested on the straw in the goat shed and answered my eager questions with weary indulgence. Although thin to emaciation, they were possessed of a lean and brittle strength, the kind of strength that is capable of short, fierce bursts of energy but lacks staying power. They felt they’d been luckier than many prisoners: the skilled factory work to which they had been assigned required strength and endurance, and the Germans had been forced to feed them reasonably well. Two had been prisoners for more than four years; the others for only two years. When they spoke of the Germans, the dry and burning hate in their voices made the hair on my arms stir uneasily.

  From them I heard stories that verified and amplified the charges of brutality that have been laid at the Nazi door. Stories about crewmen from fallen American planes who were mauled and beaten by SS men and then, bleeding and semiconscious, delivered over to the cruelties of maddened civilian mobs. (The screaming German woman who fell upon one such beaten and half-conscious American flyer and castrated him with a paring knife while the mob and the SS men watched.) Stories about the floggings in the work camps, the cold, the disease ... the five thousand Jews who were marched from Sunday morning to Thursday night without pause, and those who collapsed dispatched on the spot by a bullet at the base of the skull... the thirty Jews, selected carelessly—You ... you ... and you—and killed with exquisite slow cruelty, one at a time, and no explanation given to those who watched, horrified. (“Just an object lesson.”) The special brutality accorded Russians and Poles. (“But a Russian is not quite human, he is not like other men! Oh, but our scientists have proved it: it is a scientific fact that the Slavic peoples have less sensitive flesh, fewer nerve endings. They do not feel pain the way human beings do!” Thus it was explained to me once by a young German prisoner. He believed it, too. And the unwelcome thought rose in my brain: by substituting the word “Negro” for the word “Russian” these same “scientific statements” parroted by a young German become, almost word for word, the “scientific statements” I once heard from a young American in the sovereign state of Georgia. Hello, Broadway—good-bye, Unter den Linden!)

  Stories that made you want to shut your ears ... the blackest accusations ever leveled against a Christian nation. But you listened, and you entered them on one side of the ledger, and on the other side you recorded the sniveling complaints of the German civilians, the whines of “keine brot, kein sucre, kein milch—alles kaput!" (But never a “Mea culpa!”) And when you totaled up the scores and compared them, you stopped thinking for a moment because you were

  blinded by the impulse to run with torch and sword among these savages, so good, so kind, so seemingly placid. You tried to tell yourself, “Maybe they were deluded, maybe they didn’t know!” But you remembered the house next to the stalag in Bukovany, and you knew that all through Germany they had closed their eyes deliberately and would not see. The death camps—the quick-death camps for the unwanted, and the slow-death camps for the still useful—were scattered throughout Germany and German Europe, not concentrat
ed in remote and guarded seclusion. They could not have been unknown to the civilians who lived nearby, the townspeople who closed their minds and their hearts. It was the easy, the safe way out—to learn to ignore the screams of men being whipped, the blood in the gutters, the miles of hasty graves, the smell of death and dirt and rotting food and fear.

  So it passes... the last parade... a slow, inglorious review on this quiet road in the Sudeten. And we savor the throbbing triumph of this moment, the sight of the world’s enemies inching their sullen way to the stockade. We take an additional and special pleasure in our task here: all Allied peoples, whether civilian or released P.W.’s, are given free and immediate passage through our roadblock. They take honored precedence over the surrendering enemy, and we delight in ordering the Germans to the side of the road in order to clear the way for a score of ragged former slaves.

  And all day they come: the bemedaled, beribboned officers, the sullen men, the tired nurses, the flabby (but frequently beautiful) whores, the tattered, emaciated, exultant P.W.’s, the barefoot, painfully moving slaves, the frightened refugees, bewildered and lost. There should be motion-picture cameras to record this last parade. America ought to see this, and the whole world, and it should be required seeing for every school-child at home.

  May 13.

  It’s time to quit this now. It was intended as a combat record, and the combat is done. Now we’re engaged in a different kind of war, a war with many curious overtones and implications. Already there is restlessness, unhappiness, slovenly performance of duty, inefficiency, drunkenness, and crime among our own men. We are anxious to go home, and tired, and the careful bars of our disciplined restraint have been lowered.

  And I am tired, too, and anxious to go home—sick of this whole dirty business, sick of writing about it, sick of everything in the world and wanting only to go home. Let it be soon ... please, let it be soon!