by Irwin Shaw
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.
“The usual. Jews, Russians, some politicals, some people from Yugoslavia and Greece, places like that. We locked them all in two days ago. They know something is up and they are getting dangerous. And we only have one Company, they could wipe us out in fifteen minutes if they wanted, there are thousands of them. They were making a lot of noise an hour ago.” He turned and peered uneasily at the locked barracks. “Now, not a sound. God knows what they are cooking up for us.”
“Why do you stay here?” Christian asked curiously.
The guard shrugged, smiling that sick, foolish smile again. “I don’t know. We wait.”
“Open the gate,” Christian said. “I want to go in.”
“You want to go in?” the guard said incredulously. “What for?”
“I am making a list of summer resorts for the Strength Through Joy Headquarters in Berlin,” Christian said, “and this camp has been suggested to me. Open up. I need something to eat, and I want to see if I can borrow a bicycle.”
The guard signaled to another guard in the tower, who had been watching Christian carefully. The gate slowly began to swing open.
“You won’t find a bicycle,” the Volkssturm man said. “The SS took everything with wheels away with them when they went last week.”
“I’ll see,” Christian said. He went through the double gates, deep into the smell, toward the Administration Building, a pleasant-looking Tyrolean-style chalet, with a green lawn and whitewashed stones, and a tall flagpole with the banner fluttering from it in the brisk morning wind. There was a low, hushed, non-human sounding murmur, coming from the barracks. It seemed to come from some new kind of musical instrument, designed to project notes too formless and unpleasant for an organ to manage. All the windows were boarded up, and there were no human beings to be seen within the compound.
Christian mounted the scrubbed stone steps of the chalet and went inside.
He found the kitchen and got some sausage and ersatz coffee from a gloomy sixty-year-old uniformed cook, who said, encouragingly, “Eat hearty, Boy, who knows when we’ll ever eat again.”
There were quite a few of the misfits of the Volkssturm huddled uneasily in their second-hand uniforms along the halls of the Administration Building. They held weapons, but did so gingerly, and with clear expressions of distaste. They, too, like the guard at the gate, were waiting. They stared unhappily at Christian as he passed among them, and Christian could sense a whisper of disapproval, disapproval for his youth, for the losing war he had fought … The young men, Hitler had always boasted, were his great strength, and now these makeshift soldiers, torn at the heel end of a war from their homes, showed, by the slight grimaces on their worn faces, what they thought of the retreating generation which had brought them to this hour.
Christian walked very erect, holding his Schmeisser lightly, his face cold and set, among the aimless men in the halls. He reached the Commandant’s office, knocked, and went in. A prisoner in his striped suit was mopping the floor, and a Corporal was sitting at a desk in the outer office. The door to the private office was open, and the man sitting at the desk there motioned for Christian to come in when he heard Christian say, “I wish to speak to the Commandant.”
The Commandant was the oldest Lieutenant Christian had ever seen. He looked well over sixty, with a face that seemed to have been put together out of flaky cheese.
“No, I have no bicycles,” the Lieutenant said in his cracked voice, in answer to Christian’s request. “I have nothing. Not even any food. They left us here with nothing, the SS. Just orders to remain in control. I got through to Berlin yesterday and some idiot on the phone told me to kill everybody here immediately.” The Lieutenant laughed sourly. “Eleven thousand men. Very practical. I haven’t been able to reach anybody since then.” He stared at Christian. “You have come from the front?”
Christian smiled. “Front is not exactly the word I would use.”
The Lieutenant sighed, his cheese-like face pale and creased. “In the last war,” he said, “it was very different. We retreated in the most orderly manner. My entire Company marched into Munich, still in possession of their weapons. It was much more orderly,” he said, the accusation against the new generation of Germans, who did not know how to lose a war in an orderly manner, like their fathers, quite clear in his tone.
“Well, Lieutenant,” Christian said, “I see you can’t help me. I shall be moving on.”
“Tell me,” the old Lieutenant said, appealing to Christian to stay just another moment, as though he were lonely here in the pretty, well-cleaned office, with colored drapes on the windows, and the rough cloth sofa, and the bright blue picture of the Alps in winter on the paneled wall, “tell me, do you think the Americans will get here today?”
“I couldn’t say, Sir,” Christian said. “Haven’t you been listening on the radio?”
“The radio.” The Lieutenant s
ighed. “It is very confusing. This morning, from Berlin, there was a rumor the Russians and the Americans were fighting each other along the Elbe. Do you think that is possible?” he asked eagerly. “After all, we all know, eventually, it is inevitable …”
The myth, Christian thought, the continuing, suicidal myth. “Of course, Sir,” he said clearly, “I would not be at all surprised.” He started toward the door, but he stopped when he heard the noise.
It was a flood-like murmur, growing swiftly in volume, swirling in through the open windows, past the pretty drapes. Then the murmur was punctuated, sharply, by shots. Christian ran to the window and looked out Two men in uniform were running heavily toward the Administration Building. As they ran, Christian saw them throw away their rifles. They were portly men, who looked like advertisements for Munich beer, and running came hard to them. From around the corner of one of the barracks, first one man in prisoner’s clothes, then three more, then what looked like hundreds more, ran in a mob, after the two guards. That was where the murmur was coming from. The first prisoner stopped for a moment and picked up one of the discarded rifles. He did not fire it, but carried it, as he chased the guards. He was a tall man with long legs, and he gained with terrible rapidity on the guards. He swung the rifle like a club, and one of the beer advertisements went down. The second guard, seeing that he was too far from the safety of the Administration Building to make it before he was overtaken, merely lay down. He lay down slowly, like an elephant in the circus, first settling on his knees, then, with his hips still high in the air, putting his head down to the ground, trying to burrow it. The prisoner swung the rifle butt again and brained the guard.
“Oh, my God,” the Lieutenant whispered at the window.
The crowd was around the two dead men now, enveloping them. The prisoners made very little noise as they trampled over the two dead forms, stamping hard again and again, each prisoner jostling the other, seeing some small spot on the dead bodies to kick.
The Lieutenant pulled away from the window and leaned tremblingly against the wall. “Eleven thousand of them …” he said. “In ten minutes they’ll all be loose.”
There were some shots from near the gate, and three or four of the prisoners went down. Nobody paid much attention to them, and part of the crowd surged, with that dull, flickering non-tonal murmur, in the direction of the gate.
From other barracks other crowds appeared, coming into view swiftly, like herds of bulls in the movies of Spain. Here and there they had caught a guard, and they made a community business of killing the man.
There were screams from the corridor outside. The Lieutenant, fumbling at his pistol, with his dear memories of the orderly defeat of the last war bitter in his brain, went out to rally his men.
Christian moved away from the window, trying to think quickly, cursing himself for being caught like this. After all he’d been through, after so many battles, after facing so many tanks, artillery pieces, so many trained men, to walk of his own free will into something like this …
Christian went out into the other office. The trusty was there alone, near the window. “Get in here,” Christian said. The trusty looked at him coldly, then walked slowly into the private office. Christian closed the door, eyeing the prisoner. Luckily, he was a good size. “Take off your clothes,” Christian said.
Methodically, without saying anything, the prisoner took off his loose striped-cotton jacket and began on his trousers. The noise was getting worse outside, and there was quite a bit of shooting now.
“Hurry!” Christian ordered.
The man had his trousers off by now. He was very thin and he had grayish, sackcloth underwear on. “Come over here,” Christian said.
The man walked slowly over and stood in front of Christian. Christian swung his machine pistol. The barrel caught the man above the eyes. He took one step back, then dropped to the floor. There was almost no mark above his eyes. Christian took him by the throat with both hands and dragged him over to a closet door on the other side of the room. Christian opened the closet and pulled the unconscious man into it. There was an officer’s overcoat hanging in the closet and two dress tunics and they gave off a slight smell of cologne.
Christian closed the closet and went over to where the prisoner’s clothes lay on the floor. He started to unbutton his tunic. But the noise outside seemed to grow louder, and there was confused shouting in the corridor. He decided he didn’t have time. Hurriedly, he put the pants on over his own trousers, and wrestled into the coat. He buttoned it up to the neck. He looked into the mirror on the closet door. His uniform didn’t show. He looked hastily around for a place to hide the gun, then bent down and threw it under the couch. It would hold there for awhile. He still had his trenchknife in its holster under the striped coat. The coat smelled strongly of chlorine and sweat.
Christian went to the window. New batches of prisoners, the doors of their barracks battered down, were swirling around below. They were still finding guards and killing them, and Christian could hear firing from the other side of the Administration Building, although on this side, no one seemed to be trying to handle the prisoners at all. Some of the prisoners were knocking down a double door on a barnlike structure a hundred meters away. When the door went down, a large number of the prisoners surged through it and came back eating raw potatoes and uncooked flour, which smeared their hands and faces a powdery white. Christian saw one prisoner, a huge man, bent over a guard, whom he held between his knees, choking him. The huge man suddenly dropped the guard, who was still alive, and bulled his way into the warehouse. Christian saw him come out a minute later with his hands full of potatoes.
Christian kicked open the window and, without hesitating, swung out. He held by his fingers for a second, and dropped. He fell to his knees, but got right up. There were hundreds of men all around him, all dressed like him, and the smell and the noise were overpowering.
Christian started toward the gate, turning the corner of the Administration Building. A gaunt man with the socket of one eye showing in empty, scarred tissue was leaning against the wall. He stared very hard at Christian and began to follow him. Christian was certain the man suspected him, and tried to move quickly, without attracting attention. But the crowd of men in front of the Administration Building was very dense now, and the man with one eye hung on, right behind Christian.
The guards in the building had surrendered by now, and were coming out of the front door in pairs. For a moment, the newly released men were strangely quiet, staring at their erstwhile captors. Then a big man with a bald head took out a rusty pocket knife. He said something in Polish and grabbed the nearest guard and began to saw away at his throat. The knife was blunt and it took a long time. The guard who was being slaughtered did not struggle or cry out. It was as though torture and death in this place were so commonplace that even the victims fell into it naturally, no matter who they were. The futility of crying out for mercy had been so well demonstrated here, so long ago, that no man wasted his breath today. The trapped guard, a clerkish man of forty-five, merely slumped close against the man who was murdering him, staring at him, their eyes six inches apart, until the rusty knife finally broke through the vein and he slid down to the lawn.
This was a signal for the execution of the other guards. Due to the lack of weapons, many of them were trampled to death. Christian watched, not daring to show anything on his face, not daring to make a break, because the man with one eye was directly behind him, pressing against his shoulders.
“You …” The man with one eye said. Christian could feel his hand clutching at his coat, feeling the cloth of his uniform underneath. “I want to talk to …”
Suddenly Christian moved. The ancient Commandant was against the wall near the front door and the men had not reached him yet. The Commandant stood there, his hands making small, placating gestures in front of him. The men around him, starved and bony, were for the moment too exhausted to kill him. Christian lurched through the ring of men
and grabbed the Commandant by the throat.
“Oh, God,” the man shouted, very loud. It was a surprising sound, because all the rest of the killing had taken place so quietly.
Christian took out his knife. Holding the Commandant pinned against the wall with one hand, he cut his throat. The man made a gurgling, wet sound, then screamed for a moment. Christian wiped his hands against the man’s tunic and let him drop. Christian turned to see if the man with one eye was still watching him. But the man with one eye had moved off, satisfied.
Christian sighed and, still carrying his knife in his hand, went through the hall of the Administration Building and up the steps to the Commandant’s office. There were bodies on the steps, and liberated prisoners were overturning desks and scattering paper everywhere.
There were three or four men in the Commandant’s office. The door to the closet was open. The half-naked man Christian had hit was still lying there as he had fallen. The prisoners were taking turns drinking brandy out of a decanter on the Commandant’s desk. When the decanter was empty, one of the men threw it at the bright-blue picture of the Alps in winter on the wall.
Nobody paid any attention to Christian. He bent down and took his machine pistol out from under the couch.
Christian went back into the hall and through the aimlessly milling prisoners to the front door. Many of them had weapons by now, and Christian felt safe in carrying his Schmeisser openly. He walked slowly, always in the middle of groups, because he did not want to be seen by himself, standing out in relief so that some sharp-eyed prisoner would notice that his hair was longer than anyone else’s, and that he had considerably more weight on his bones than most of the others.
He reached the gates. The middle-aged guard who had greeted him and let him in was lying sprawled against the barbed wire, an expression that looked like a smile on his dead face. There were many prisoners at the gate, but very few were going out. It was as though they had accomplished as much as was humanly possible for one day. The liberation from the barracks had exhausted their concept of freedom. They merely stood at the open gate, staring out at the rolling green countryside, at the road down which the Americans would soon come and tell them what to do. Or perhaps so much of their most profound emotion was linked with this place that now, in the moment of deliverance, they could not bear to leave it, but must stay and slowly examine the place where they had suffered and where they had had their vengeance.