None But The Brave: A Novel of the Surgeons of World War II

by Anthony A. Goodman

  Schneider was almost enjoying the walk into the emerging light as the sun warmed the air, his mind fleeing the battle for a few seconds at a time. Then he heard the sound of a coarse zipper being drawn shut, except that the sound was amplified a hundred times. Even Schneider knew it was no zipper.

  Talbot, the point man, seemed to fly backwards then sprawled awkwardly on the ground. The morning air filled with the sound of automatic weapons and rifle fire. The GIs hit the ground. Marsh quickly dropped into a drainage ditch alongside the road. Sorenson grabbed his rifle and went scrambling over the side of the cart, dragging his useless leg after him. Schneider flinched as a spray of wood splinters flew into his face, momentarily blinding him. He stood there wiping his fingers at his eyes. Sorenson grabbed at Schneider’s ankles, jerking him to the ground and dragging him under the cart.

  Schneider recovered his vision and wiped the remaining splinters from his cheeks. His hand came away with blood on it. He knew that he hadn’t been shot, only cut by the sharp bits of wood.

  Then he remembered Claude.

  “Claude! Claude!” he shouted, and scrambled to get out from under the cart. But, he couldn’t move. He was pinned down by Sorenson’s strong arm, a fist holding the collar at the back of his field jacket.

  “Hang on, Doc. Hang on,” Sorenson said quietly. Too quietly.

  Sorenson nodded in the direction of the front of the cart. There in the dirt, the donkey lay on its side, struggling in its traces to get back to its feet. Its braying was lost in the din of the fire fight still raging around it. The blood trailing from its back indicated that the animal had been shot in the spine and was paralyzed. Schneider wanted to shoot the beast and put it out of its misery. But, of course, he had no gun.

  Then he realized that he still couldn’t see Claude. He thought the boy had taken cover in the roadside ditch with the rest of the men. Schneider crawled deeper into his place under the cart with Sorenson, then saw a sandal protruding beyond the donkey’s neck. The sandal was worn and torn and had been repaired many times with thread and tape. It was barely holding itself together even then. Schneider thought how easily he could fix it for Claude with just some canvas and some heavy surgical stay-sutures. He was, after all, a surgeon and had fixed things for Anna and Emily just like this. Then he saw the blood. Then the hand.

  Schneider looked around the fallen donkey. There was Claude, eyes open, staring straight at him and Sorenson. The eyes were already drying in the sun, but tears remained wet on the child’s cheek. He was pale. So pale. A minute ago he was flushed with pride and hope. He was part of an armed force that was going to liberate his village. He was going to be a hero. He was bringing Les Americains home. And now, this. Schneider’s own girls’ faces appeared where Claude was lying. Emily was just about Claude’s age, and Schneider continued to see her face in place of Claude’s. He struggled to hold back his tears.

  The firing continued. The GIs deployed around the cart, moving into the roadside ditches. Within minutes, they established a defensible cordon, now systematically destroying the German positions. Although they had no estimate of the strength of the enemy force, the GIs went to work in a professional, almost detached, way. There was no use in thinking about the possibility that they might be hopelessly outnumbered. That only led to panic and inevitable defeat. They just picked targets and fired. One at a time.

  Sorenson and Schneider stayed under the cart. After a few minutes, Schneider decided that there was no way he would leave his patient, and there was no safer place for Sorenson at the moment anyway.

  Sorenson needed to make himself useful. With the greatest of difficulty, he rolled onto his side, and positioned his rifle across his left forearm, winding the canvas rifle sling into place. Schneider watched with a deep admiration as Sorenson picked out one target after another, firing but a single shot at each. It was as if each bullet were his last. He was completely in control, and Schneider envied his cool professionalism under fire. If it were necessary, Sorenson would go down taking the enemy with him. By Schneider’s count, there were already four. Four dead Germans from four of Sorenson’s bullets.

  Schneider also realized that his own professionalism would be the only thing that would keep him functioning like Sorenson. He would treat one patient at a time, as Sorenson would kill one German at a time, for however long it took.

  Five. Six. Seven. There were eight killed or wounded when Schneider stopped counting.

  He turned back to Claude. Flies were now gathering on the boy’s face. The tears had dried to little trails of white salt. Nothing of the lively little boy remained. Schneider began to cry. Quietly at first. Then, in ever increasing sobs, until his body shook. Sorenson took a moment to put his hand on Schneider’s shoulder, squeezed it, then returned to his work.

  Crack. Crack. Crack.

  Nine. Ten. Eleven. Eleven dead Germans.

  The firefight lasted a little more than twenty minutes. When the firing stopped, Sorenson and Schneider held their positions. Neither could tell if it were a lull in the battle or if one side had decimated the other. And which side?

  They waited.

  Then they heard the shouting. In English. One after another, voices checked in, telling their comrades that they were OK, and their sector was clear. The Germans were either all dead or had retreated.

  Sorenson and Schneider watched as the men in their group reappeared. One by one, they gathered around the cart, while Marsh ran to help Talbot. Schneider pulled Sorenson from his place next to the rear wheels. He propped him in a sitting position against the wheel. Schneider scurried over to Claude, placing his fingers on the boy’s neck, hoping against any reality that he might feel a pulse. But there was none.

  Then they began to count the men as they returned: a roll call of the living.

  One—only one—was missing. It was the point man, Talbot, who had been cut down in the first enfilade of the ambush. He lay where he had fallen, face up in the middle of the road.

  Schneider rose and jogged down to the front of the line, his eyes searching the brush and the trees for possible snipers. But, he saw none. He found Marsh kneeling in the dirt next to Talbot. From Schneider’s perspective he saw Marsh’s shoulders moving up and down as if he were laughing. Then, as he got closer, he realized Marsh was sobbing. Schneider approached very slowly, in part so as not to startle him, and in part not to intrude on his grief.

  When he got close to Talbot’s body, he knelt directly across from Marsh.

  “You OK, Andy?”

  Marsh quickly collected himself and with a small movement wiped both his eyes, turning his face away from Schneider.

  “Yessir.”

  “Can I…?” Schneider began, but was interrupted by a pouring forth of words—a deluge of story and sorrow and anguish—from Marsh, interspersed with sobbing and tears.

  “I did everything they taught me, sir! Everything! I put pressure on the wounds; I lifted his legs; I tried to stop the bleeding, but nothing I did stopped it. It just ran through my fingers…Look. Look!” And he held out his hands, still covered in rapidly drying blood, the cuffs of his field jacket stained crimson nearly to his forearms.

  Schneider scrambled around the body and took Marsh in his arms. He cradled and rocked the young medic while Marsh poured out his grief. Schneider stayed silent for a long while, until Marsh’s sobbing ebbed and then finally stopped.

  Then Schneider said, in the quietest voice, almost a whisper: “Listen, Andy. There was nothing you could have done. Almost every single wound was potentially fatal. Put them all together, and Talbot didn’t have a chance. He was as good as gone the minute you got to him. I promise you, if he had been shot like this in the middle of an operating room, he would have still died.”

  Marsh started to protest. “But—”

  “But nothing. I wouldn’t lie to you. If I had been the first one here instead of you, nothing would have changed. I would have done what you did, and he still would have died. We don’t do miracles.
We just do our best. If you’re going to be any use at all, you just have to do your best. Can’t do more than that.”

  Schneider opened his arms and released Marsh’s shoulders. He backed away and sat back on his haunches.

  After a few more minutes Schneider and Marsh slowly struggled to their feet, their knees stiff from kneeling.

  The two men walked back up the hill to where the rest of the men had gathered, and joined the group.

  No one spoke, the braying of the donkey was the only sound.

  “Kelly, shoot that donkey,” Sorenson said quietly.

  The paralyzed donkey was still trying to move. Three men gently took Claude’s body away from the animal and placed it next to the cart. Kelly nodded to a private standing next to him. The private walked to the head of the donkey and placed the muzzle of his M-1 right behind the animal’s left ear. There was a loud report. The animal bucked once and was still.

  Sorenson wasted no more time.

  “Kelly! Deploy another point man. Get Talbot’s body back here to the cart, and give me his dog tags. Put the boy in the cart as well. We’ll take him home to his family.”

  Kelly dispatched several more men, then took his knife from its scabbard and began cutting the worn leather traces that held the donkey. Six men dragged the animal to the side of the road. Marsh and Schneider gently lifted the boy’s body into the cart. Only now could they see the pattern of bullets that had stitched their way across his abdomen and chest, making a trail from his right hip to his left shoulder. Mercifully, Schneider thought, his little face was untouched.

  Schneider took some water from his canteen and wet his handkerchief. Then he carefully wiped the salt tracks from the boy’s cheeks. He took the khaki blanket from his pack and wrapped Claude’s body. He put the body along the inside of the cart, keeping a place for Talbot. After both bodies were in place, he helped Sorenson into what little space remained. Four men took up the worn wooden drawbars of the cart, and two more pushed from the rear. Schneider injected another Syrette of morphine into Sorenson’s thigh. Then the band of men set off again on the road to Fauville with what was left of the medical supplies and the bodies of their two dead comrades, Talbot and Claude.

  Far behind, scattered somewhere in the fields and brush, lay the remains of twenty GIs killed in the crash of their glider. Marsh’s uniform jingled as he walked. Unknown to the rest of them at the time, he had risked his life by taking the time to retrieve all the dog tags from his fallen comrades.

  It was seven o’clock in the morning. The D-Day Invasion was one hour old.

  Chapter Ten

  6 June 1944, 0800 Hours

  A Concentration Camp near Weimar, Germany

  Dr. Meyer Berg was trying desperately not to shout. He held back his anger with all his strength, but he was close to losing his temper, and he knew it.

  And that would be dangerous.

  “If we don’t find a place to isolate these patients,” Berg said, “the typhus will spread through the camp like a wild fire. The dead will pile up, and in time there will be no survivors.”

  “My dear Herr Doktor Berg, it is of little consequence to me exactly how they die, only that they die,” Standartenführer Himmel said to Berg, his voice dripping with Weltschmerz. “In fact, this epidemic might be just what we need.”

  Berg stepped back, assaulted by the words of the Waffen-SS colonel. He looked at the ground, assuming the position of subservience that he had developed so well in his four years in the camp: hands at his side, head down. No possibility or suggestion of resistance. Anything to survive just one more day. Anything.

  Himmel’s uniform was spotless, as usual. Clean and black and perfectly creased. It stood in stark contrast with Berg’s ragged white coat, torn and stained with dried pus and old blood. Himmel wiped an imaginary speck of dirt from the glistening toe of his tall black boots with a clean white handkerchief. He leaned back in the rickety wooden chair, Berg’s chair, and said, “My problem right now is the disposal of the bodies, not the killing of them. Burying takes too long, the ovens are overloaded, and I am short of manpower at the moment.”

  Himmel rose to go. He turned away from Berg and started for the door. “In any case, there can be no changes right now. None!”

  As Himmel opened the door, Berg stepped toward him.

  “Some DDT perhaps? Just some DDT?” He tried not to plead. “If we don’t control the spread among the prisoners, then everyone will be at risk—even the SS.”

  Himmel hesitated then walked out into the gray morning, still talking with his back to Berg. He did not deign to look at Berg as he spoke.

  “Yes, yes, then,” he said with a wave of his hand. “See the Oberleutnant. But make sure that all my men are deloused first. All of them. Then you may treat your own kind.” He left without closing the door.

  Berg walked wearily to the doorway and looked out into the day. My own kind, he thought. Doctors? Jews? Vermin?

  The mud was getting deeper, and the skies showed no suggestion that the intermittent rains would end soon. The prisoners would be cooped up for yet another day. One more day of crowding and, with the crowding, the sharing of lice, and with the lice, the typhus. And with typhus, almost inevitably, death. If they were stronger, better nourished, more might survive. But, the way it was, the typhus took nearly everyone it touched.

  Berg was barely holding himself together these days, as he had lost nearly forty pounds since he came to the camp. He was one of the lucky ones. There were always extra rations for the prisoner Herr Doktor. It had been four years. Four years inside the walls where Arbeit Macht Frei. Work would set them free. And in a way, it did, for his work as a doctor kept him alive, gave him a reason to survive. Forty-eight years old now, though he was sure he looked decades older.

  And almost every day of those four years the trains came with the new prisoners. Thousands of them. They were disgorged into a siding, and there they saw the sign:

  Arbeit Macht Frei

  The great black Gothic letters arched over the curved portal.

  That same day, fifteen hundred wretched souls would be deposited at the train platform. Of these, thirteen hundred would disappear into the gas chambers and from there into the open pits or the ovens. The “selection” would be made as soon as the prisoners emerged from the boxcars. The SS would give them a cursory glance and point left or right. To the left was death, and to the right was life, if it could be called that.

  Most of the women and young children were killed right away. The old and the infirm were also killed. Only those with skills such as the doctors and the nurses or the mechanical engineers were spared. Also, of course, the very strong who could be useful doing hard physical labor in the camp. Those chosen to be factory workers usually survived three months, if they were lucky. In the mines and the quarries, a month.

  Every day for four years, Berg watched from the hospital window as the living bodies moved this way and that, wandering the muddy yards. They all looked the same to him now. No color. Just a gray world of gray people. After they disappeared through the doors of “the showers,” their bodies and their souls would rise into the air as gray smoke from the tall brick chimneys of the crematorium. Some of the inmates told Berg that they could tell from the smoke who was being burned that day. There was a different smell and a different color depending upon how much fat was left on the bodies fed into the ovens. Berg avoided dwelling upon that unhappy distinction.

  The SS would get complaints from the German citizens living in the nearby town. The ashes, they said, were ruining their laundry as it hung out to dry in the sun.

  “How awful for them”, Berg sneered aloud.

  For the past year, Berg had stopped learning the names of his patients. He would not listen when they told him of their families, of their lives. He didn’t want to know them. He didn’t want to like them. So many would die no matter what he did. How could he continue to share their pain by caring? He began to wonder how different he now was from
the Waffen-SS who ran the camp. If the Jews weren’t people, weren’t individuals, it didn’t quite hurt so much to lose them. He heard the German officers talking one day. They said that an inmate who arrives at this camp is already dead. So, killing them wasn’t murder. You couldn’t murder a dead man, after all.

  It was just about four years ago to the day, he realized, that he had returned home from his clinic in Berlin. He had been working steadily since the early morning, seeing his post-operative patients at the hospital, then returning to the clinic after lunch. There had been no surgery that day, which was unusual for Berg. He had a busy practice and was well admired and respected by his peers. Considering the lingering effects in Germany of the Great Depression, his family wasn’t too badly off. That he was a Jew didn’t help. But, somehow he had gotten by until….

  One day a colleague of his, Joseph Stein, a pediatrician, did not show up for work. No one had called to say where he was. A rumor circulated that he had disappeared. Nothing more. Then another man failed to show up for work, and another, all Jews.

  Until it became clear that the rumors were true. But these rumors were almost benign at first. There were whispers of the arrests of political prisoners. Of jails. Of deportation. But, no one ever described this place.

  For no one who left ever came back.

  If anyone had described the conditions—the torture, the murder, the inhumanity, the bodies stacked thirty feet high like cord wood—who would have believed them? No one, surely. Not even Berg. No stretch of the imagination could accept such a terrible tale.

  So Berg had continued his work at the clinic. Surely nobody would come for him. He had not spoken up for his missing comrades. He had not gone to the authorities. Better to stay silent and invisible, his wife Rachel advised him. Better to be a rabbit. Rachel had an understanding of these things. She was so often right.

  Besides, he wanted to believe her, for in his heart, he was afraid. It would be better not to disturb the status quo. And safer. Surely Rachel was right.