by Irwin Shaw
Houlihan laughed politely. “I’ll tell you something, Sir,” he said, in a confidential whisper. “I do believe the Germans pulled out a week ago. If you ask me, you could conduct a walking tour from here to the Rhine.”
Michael stared at Houlihan. The Sergeant’s face was open and childlike. Houlihan had been a conductor on a Fifth Avenue bus before the war, but, Michael thought, he could not have learned this on the run up from Washington Square.
“Good,” the Lieutenant said, smiling. “I must say, it’s a lot more peaceful here than it is back in our message center. Isn’t it, Louis?”
“Yes, Sir,” said Louis.
“No Colonels running in and out, bothering you,” the Lieutenant said heartily, “and you don’t have to shave every day.”
“No, Sir,” said Houlihan, “we don’t have to shave every day.”
“I hear,” the Lieutenant said confidentially, looking down the slope toward the river, “that a man could pick up some German souvenirs down there.”
“Oh, yes, Sir,” said Houlihan, “a man certainly could. That field is covered with helmets and Luegers and rare cameras.”
He’s gone too far, Michael thought, now he’s gone too far. He looked up to see how the Lieutenant was taking it, but there was only an expression of eager greed on the healthy, ruddy face. God, Michael thought disgustedly, who gave you your commission?
“Louis, Steve,” the Lieutenant said, “let’s go down and take a look.”
“Wait a minute, Lieutenant,” Louis said doubtfully. “Ask him if there are mines?”
“Oh, no,” said Houlihan. “I guarantee there are no mines.”
The seven men of the platoon squatted in their riflepits, looking at the ground, motionless.
“Do you mind, Sergeant,” the Lieutenant said, “if we go down and browse around for awhile?”
“Make yourself absolutely at home, Sir,” Houlihan boomed.
Now, Michael thought, now he is going to tell them it’s a joke, show them what fools they are, and send them home.…
But Houlihan was standing motionless.
“You’ll keep an eye on us, won’t you, Sergeant?” the Lieutenant asked.
“I certainly will,” said Houlihan.
“Good. Come on, Boys.” The Lieutenant pushed clumsily through the brush and started down the other side of the ridge, with the two men following.
Michael turned and looked at Noah. Noah was watching him, his elderly, dark eyes steady and threatening. Michael knew that Noah was fiercely signaling him, in his silent gaze, to keep still. Well, Michael thought defensively, it’s his platoon, he’s known these men longer than I have …
He turned back and looked down the slope. The Lieutenant, in his bright brindle Abercrombie and Fitch trenchcoat, and the two Sergeants were sliding heavily down the cold, muddy incline, hanging on here and there to bushes and the trunks of trees. No, Michael thought, I don’t care what they think about me, I can’t let this happen …
“Houlihan!” He sprang up beside the Sergeant, who was peering, with a steady, fierce expression, across the river to the other ridge. “Houlihan, you can’t do that. You can’t let them go out there like that! Houlihan!”
“Shut up!” Houlihan whispered ferociously. “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m running this platoon.”
“They’ll be killed,” Michael said urgently, staring down at the three men sliding on the dirty snow.
“Well, now,” Houlihan said, and Michael was frightened by the look of loathing and hatred on his fine, thin-mouthed, scholarly face, “which would you prefer, man? Why shouldn’t some of those bastards get killed once in awhile? They’re in the Army, aren’t they? Souvenirs!”
“You’ve got to stop them!” Michael said hoarsely. “If you don’t stop them, I’ll put in a report, I swear to God I will …”
“Shut up, Whitacre,” Noah said.
“Put in a report, eh?” Houlihan never took his eyes off the opposite ridge. “You want to go yourself, is that it? You want to get killed this afternoon yourself out there, you want Ackerman to get killed, Crane, Pfeiffer, you’d rather have your friends get it than three fat pigs from the Service of Supply. They’re too good to be killed, is that it?” His voice which had been trembling with malice suddenly became smooth and professional as he addressed the other men. “Don’t watch them down on the field,” he said. “Keep your eyes on the ridge. There’ll only be two, three short bursts, you’ll have to look sharp. And keep your eyes on the spot and call it out … Still want me to call them back, Whitacre?”
“I …” Michael began. Then he heard the firing and he knew it was too late.
Down on the field along the river, the brindle coat was slowly going down, deflating onto the ground. Louis and the other man started to run, but they did not get far.
“Sergeant,” it was Noah’s voice, very calm and level, “I see where it’s coming from. To the right of that big tree, twenty yards, just in front of those two bushes that stick up just a little higher than the others … See it?”
“I see it,” Houlihan said.
“Right there. Two or three yards from the first bush.”
“You sure?” Houlihan said. “I missed it.”
“I’m sure,” Noah said.
God, Michael thought wearily, admiring and hating Noah, how much that boy has learned since Florida.
“Well,” Houlihan finally turned to Michael, “do you want to send in your report now?”
“No,” Michael said. “I’m not going to report anything.”
“Of course not.” Houlihan patted his elbow warmly. “I knew you wouldn’t.” He went over to the field telephone and called the Company CP. Michael listened to him, giving the exact location of the German gun for the mortars.
Now, again, the afternoon was totally silent. It was hard to remember that, just one minute ago, the machine gun had torn the quiet, and that three men had died.
Michael turned and looked at Noah. Noah was kneeling on one knee, holding his rifle with its butt in the mud, the barrel resting against his cheek, looking like old pictures of frontiersmen in the Indian wars far away in Kentucky and New Mexico. Noah was staring at Michael, his eyes wild and burning and without shame.
Michael slowly sat down, averting his eyes from Noah’s, realizing finally the full implications of what Noah had tried to tell him in the replacement depot about going, in the Army, only to places where you had friends.
Just before the early winter dusk set in, the mortars started up. The first two were short, and Houlihan, at the phone, phoned back the corrections. The third one landed just where he asked for it, and the fourth. There was a curious little commotion on the other ridge, where the mortar had hit, a sudden, sharp shaking of the bare, tangled branches, as if a man had tried to stagger through them and had failed and fallen. Then it was quiet again and Houlihan said, over the phone, “That did it, Sir. Just one more in the same place for luck.”
The mortar put one in the same place for luck, but there was no further movement on the other ridge.
As soon as it got dark, the Company of Engineers came through, struggling with pontoons and planks. Michael and the other men helped to get the cumbersome materials down to the water’s edge. They passed a pale blur that Michael knew was the brindle coat, but he didn’t look at it The Engineers were almost halfway through with the bridge, working in the icy darkness, before the first flare went up. Then the artillery began on both sides. There was a little rifle fire, but it was scattered and wild, and the mortars worked on that. The German shells made an eccentric pattern, as though they didn’t have many to spare and their forward observers were rattled by the heavy fire concentrated on the ridge. None of the shells hit the bridge. Three of the Engineers were wounded on the far side, and everyone was drenched by the splashes of the near-misses.
The flares, swinging over the river, lit the scene in a garish, unreal blue, making the struggling men in the river look paper-thin and insectlike. The first few
men of the platoon which was leading the attack got across fine, but Lawson was hit, and fell into the river, and Mukowski.
Michael was crouched next to Noah, with Noah’s hand on his arm, restraining him, as they watched first one man, then another, make his dash across the slippery, narrow planks to the other side. Somebody was hit and fell across the bridge and lay there, and the other men had to jump over him.
No, Michael thought, feeling his arm quiver under Noah’s hand, impossible, they can’t expect me to do this, they can’t really expect it …
“Go,” Noah whispered, “go, now!”
Michael didn’t move. A shell landed in the river ten feet away from the bridge. The water spun up in a black thick curtain, hiding the man who was lying on the rocking and shaking planks.
Michael felt a hard fist hit him on the back of his neck. “Go!” Noah was screaming, “Go, now, you son of a bitch.”
Michael got up and ran. A shell hit near the other side just as he crossed the first ten feet of the slippery boards, and Michael couldn’t tell whether the bridge was still there or not But he kept running.
A moment later he was over. A voice was calling, in the darkness, “This way, this way …” and he obediently followed the voice. He stumbled into a hole and there was somebody else there.
“All right,” the voice said harshly in his ear. “Hold on here until the rest of the Company is over.”
Michael pushed his cheek sideways into the wet, cold earth. It felt refreshing and comfortable against his sweaty skin. He slowly stopped gasping for breath. He raised his head and looked back at the shadowy, paper-thin figures running across the bridge between the geysers of water. He took a deep breath. I did it, he thought. I advanced under fire. I can do it. I did what everybody else did. He was surprised that he was grinning. Finally, he thought, turning back toward the Germans, I am liable to be one hell of a soldier.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
IT DIDN’T LOOK BAD, it looked almost like an ordinary Army camp, quite pleasant, in the middle of wide green fields, with the sloping, forested hills behind it. The barracks-like buildings were a little close together, and the doubled, barbed-wire fences, spaced with watch towers, tipped you off, of course—and the smell. Two hundred meters away, the smell suffused the air, like a gas that, by a trick of chemistry, is just about to be transformed into a solid.
Still, Christian didn’t stop. He limped hurriedly along the road toward the main gate, through the shining spring morning. He had to get something to eat, and he needed information. Maybe somebody inside the camp was in telephone communication with a functioning headquarters, or had been listening to the radio … Maybe, he thought hopefully, remembering the retreat in France, maybe I can even pick up a bicycle …
He grinned sourly as he neared the camp. I have become a specialist, he thought, in the technique of personal retreat. It was a good skill to have in the spring of 1945. I am the leading Nordic expert, he thought, on disengaging tactics from dissolving military organizations. I can sniff surrender in a Colonel two days before the Colonel realizes himself what is passing through his mind.
Christian did not want to surrender, although it had suddenly become all the style, and millions of men seemed to be spending their entire time figuring out the most satisfactory means of accomplishing it. For the last month, most of the conversation in the Army had been an examination of that subject … In the ruined cities, in the sketchy and hopeless little islands of resistance set up across main roads and town-entrances, the discussion had always followed the same course. No hatred for the American Air Forces which had destroyed cities that had stood unmolested for a thousand years, no feeling of revenge for the thousands of women and children stinking and buried in the rubble, only, “The best ones to hand yourself over to are, of course, the Americans. After that, the British. Then, the French, although that is a last emergency. And if the Russians take you, we’ll see you in Siberia …” Men with the Iron Cross, first class, men with the Hitler Medal, men who had fought in Africa and in front of Leningrad, and all the way back from Ste. Mère Eglise … It was disgusting.
Christian was not so certain as everyone else about the generosity of the Americans. It was a myth that a myth-ridden people had invented with which to comfort themselves. Christian remembered the dead paratrooper, swinging from the Norman tree, his face harsh and unrelenting, even then … He remembered the Red Cross convoy, with its pitiful horses, raked by the. fighter pilots who must have seen the crosses, known what they stood for, and who had not held their hands … The generosity of Americans had not been spectacularly demonstrated over Berlin or Munich or Dresden, either. No, by now, Christian no longer was susceptible to myth. And it wasn’t as though even the Americans had ever promised anything. Over the radio they had announced again and again that every guilty man or woman in Germany was going to pay for his crimes. At best, there would be years in prison camps and on work gangs, while they sifted the charges from one end of Europe to another. And what if some Frenchman had remembered Christian’s name from Normandy, remembered the time he’d denounced the two men along the coast, after Behr was killed, and they had been tortured in the next room? You never knew what sort of record had been kept by the Underground, how much they knew. And God knows what that woman Françoise would have to say. She was probably in Paris now, living with an American General, filling his ear with venom. And even if they weren’t particularly looking for you, once you were in their hands, any crazy Frenchman might happen to see you, and take it into his head to denounce you for some crime you never committed. And who would take your word, and who would there be to help you prove you were innocent? And there’d be nothing to stop the Americans from handing over a million prisoners to the French, to take up mines and rebuild damaged cities, and anything would be better than being in the hands of the French for years … You’d never come out of that alive.
It did not fit in Christian’s plans to. die. He had learned too much in the last five years. He would be too useful after the war to throw it all away now. He would have to lie low, of course, for three or four years, and be agreeable and pleasant to the conquerors. Probably right back at home the tourists would come again for the skiing, probably the Americans would set up huge rest camps there, and he could get a job teaching American Lieutenants how to make snowplow turns … And after that … Well, after that he would see. A man who had learned how to kill so expertly, and handle violent men so well, was bound to be a useful commodity five years after the war, if he preserved himself carefully …
He didn’t know what the situation was back in his home town, but if he could manage to get back there before troops got in, he could put on civilian clothes, and his father could invent a story for him … It wasn’t so far away, here he was deep in Bavaria, and the mountains were just over the horizon. The war had finally turned convenient, he thought with grim humor. A man could fight his final action in his own front yard.
There was only one guard on the gate, a pudgy little man in his middle fifties, looking out of place and unhappy with his Volkssturm armband and his rifle. The Volkssturm, Christian thought contemptuously—that had been a marvelous idea. Hitler’s home for the aged, the bitter joke had run. There had been a great deal of resounding talk in the newspapers and over the radio, to the effect that every man, of whatever age, fifteen or seventy, would, now that their very homes were threatened, fight like raging lions against the invader. The sedentary, hardened-arteried gentlemen of the Volkssturm had obviously not heard about their fighting like lions. One shot over their heads and you could pick up a whole battalion, with their eyes running, and their hands up in the air. Another myth—that you could take middle-aged Germans away from their desks and children out of school and make soldiers out of them in two weeks. Rhetoric, Christian thought, looking at the worried fat man in his ill-fitting uniform at the gate, rhetoric has deranged us all. Rhetoric and myth against whole divisions of tanks, armies of airplanes, all the gasoline, all the
guns, all the ammunition in the world. Hardenburg had understood, long ago, but Hardenburg had killed himself. Yes, there would be a use, after the war, for men who had been cleansed of rhetoric and who had been once and for all inoculated against myth.
“Heil Hitler,” said the Volkssturm guard, saluting uncomfortably.
Heil Hitler. Another joke. Christian didn’t bother to answer the salute.
“What’s going on here?” Christian asked.
“We wait.” The guard shrugged.
“For what?”
The guard shrugged again. He grinned uneasily.
“What’s the news?” the guard asked.
“The Americans have just surrendered,” Christian said. “Tomorrow the Russians.”
For a moment, the guard almost believed him. A credulous flicker of joy crossed his face. Then he knew better. “You are in good spirits,” he said sadly.
“I am in great spirits,” said Christian. “I have just come back from my spring holiday.”
“Do you think the Americans will come here today?” the guard asked anxiously.
“They are liable to come in ten minutes, or ten days,” said Christian, “or ten weeks. Who can tell what the Americans will do?”
“I hope they come soon,” said the guard. “They are preferable to the …”
This one, too, Christian thought. “I know,” he said shortly. “They are preferable to the Russians and preferable to the French.”
“That’s what everybody says,” the guard said unhappily.
“God,” Christian sniffed. “How can you stand the stink?”
The guard nodded. “It is bad, isn’t it?” he said. “But I’ve been here a week and I don’t notice it any more.”
“A week?” Christian asked. “Is that all?”
“There was a whole SS battalion here, but a week ago they took them away and put us here. Just one Company,” the guard said aggrievedly. “We are lucky to be alive.”
“What have you got in there?” Christian nodded his head in the direction of the smell.