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

by Anthony A. Goodman

  They had managed to spoon-feed him enough food and fluids to keep him alive, if not actually thriving. He was as emaciated as some of the inmates, and his color was deathly.

  Hamm, Molly, and Schneider sat in a semicircle about his bed. McClintock had gone out to get fresh coffee, and Gwerski was still doing the best he could, following Green’s orders to bring some semblance of normalcy to this wretched place.

  This particular evening, Berg was sitting up in his bed, leaning against pillows Molly had fluffed up behind his back.

  Molly looked at Berg and said, “We can’t put him back into that, that…” she said, pointing vaguely at the camp outside. “I don’t know what to call it. But we can’t let him go back there. This has been his home all these years, and I think we have a chance if we keep him right here.”

  “I have no problem with that, Molly,” Schneider said. “I just don’t think we’re doing him any real good.”

  Hamm stood and paced for a second. This usually meant that he had something important to say, for he always paced when he was making a decision.

  “Here’s what we need to do,” he began, his eyes squinting as if he were reading his plan off a distant backboard. “There’s no psychiatric help coming any time soon. That’s one thing we know for sure. This man is our colleague as well as your uncle, Steve. He stayed here and took care of the sick with nearly nothing in the way of supplies. He defied the SS from what I heard, and he took a lot of chances. He kept a log of the atrocities so we could prosecute the bastards who did this. If nothing else, we need him to testify and certify his diary.

  “But more than anything else, he’s one of us.” Hamm looked at Schneider. “He’s a doctor. He is one of our own. You know how every time one of us or one of our family members goes into a hospital or gets sick, our colleagues fall all over themselves to give us the best treatment. Nurses, doctors, administrators. Everyone. They bypass waiting rooms, they get special rooms and the best meals. You know. It’s just what we do for each other. I’m not letting this doctor fall through the cracks and go back out there. And I’m not going to give up. We’re going to take care of him until he’s better, even if it means taking him into our own quarters until he’s recovered. Period! No arguments!”

  “No arguments here,” Schneider said. “I’ve loved this man all my life. I’m with you.”

  “Me, too, Hamm. I’m with you guys,” Molly said. “So? What now?”

  They all remained silent, the only sound being their heavy breathing, Berg included.

  Then Hamm said, “OK, here’s how we start. We’ve already done all we can with his nutrition and his general health. He isn’t exactly thriving, but neither is he slipping backwards, and I really think he’s better than when we found him. What we do now is we continue the same medical regimen—I don’t want to get off the winning horse at this point—but push harder from the psychiatric point of view. I think he is just shutting out the horror of all these years. Let’s see if we can surround him with normalcy. Pictures of home. Find personal items and make his quarters here, more like a place he would want to be in, not a prison or a death chamber. We can move him into our quarters as the next option.”

  “I saw some stuff in the desk and in the back room as well,” Molly said. “I have time right now. Let’s just do it.”

  So without any delay, they ransacked Berg’s hospital and office space. There was damned little stuff anywhere, but Molly came up with some hidden family pictures that were torn and faded. She showed them to Schneider, who pointed to each in turn. “That’s my Aunt Rachel. These are the children, Max and Aaron. They would be older now. This was before the war, of course.” He choked on his last words as he realized how little chance there was that his aunt or the children were alive.

  Hamm cleaned out all the traces of Berg’s other world: anything to do with the concentration camp part of his life. The logs and diaries which had been carefully removed from their septic hiding place, sanitized and stashed in Major Green’s office safe, along with the identification papers of the dead prisoners. Instruments and clothing were all removed and replaced with as many “normal” items of daily life as they could find. They even came up with some respectable pictures of Germany before the war and hung them on the walls.

  Berg seemed to be paying no attention, so after about an hour’s worth of redoing his quarters, they tucked him in, and turned out the light. Then they all left for the night, completely exhausted but somewhat optimistic. They had, after all, done something.

  Schneider turned to Hamm as they left the room and closed the door.

  “We always say ‘primum nole nocere.’ Above all, do no harm. But it’s embedded in the soul of every surgeon that doing something is better than standing around with your thumb up your ass. I feel as if we have to remove our collective thumbs and do something, but I just don’t know what the hell to do.”

  Hamm put his hand on Schneider’s back and gently propelled him to the door. “Let him rest, Steve. One day at a time. He doesn’t need a surgeon now. He just needs a family and a lot of rest. And you’re his family.”

  “Dear Daddy,” the letter began as always. It was in pencil, printed neatly on deckled-edged paper with yellow daisies along the borders. It was from Emily, of course, and Schneider could picture her carefully composing each sentence with Anna looming over her shoulder and suggesting sentences faster than Emily could write them. He laughed at the image of his two little girls flopped across Emily’s bed and squabbling over the letter, with Emily playing the role of the older and wiser sister.

  The letter had come in a bunch with several others from Susan. But he always read Emily’s first, in chronological order, because her stories, her enthusiasm for life, lifted his spirits.

  “I can’t wait ‘til you get home!!!!!! I have so much to tell you and show you!!!!!” Emily’s whole life was balanced on the tips of exclamation points.

  “Anna is here bugging me to tell you she has a new teacher this term because her other teacher got sick. Really important, right??!!?? Anyway….”

  And she would go on for pages in her precise handwriting, telling her father of nearly everything that happened since the last letter. Schneider knew that when he got home there would be nothing new for him to learn, but she would tell it to him all over again. Oh, the joys of having daughters!!!!

  Emily was nine now, in the spring of fourth grade, and knocking them dead, according to Susan. She was beautiful and ebullient about almost everything. She was also way ahead in her reading. Anna, seven years old, lagged behind a bit since Emily did a lot of the reading and writing for her. They had become inseparable since Schneider went to war. Susan sent new pictures regularly for they were growing up so fast that he actually might not have recognized them after the years of separation. He made a mental note to bring some of these pictures to his uncle in the morning. And then he felt a sadness, since Berg knew nothing of the terrible struggle Schneider was having over the possibility of leaving his family.

  Each new letter also brought sadness beyond bearing. He was in a constant state of guilt and sorrow since he and Molly had fallen in love. There were so many questions that he dared not ask himself; he was left in a self-made limbo, struggling between his passion for Molly and a longing for his family. Like a spoiled child, he wanted it all. For all the difficulties that Susan and he had been having before he went to war, he still had a family back there who were expecting him to come home to them and start their lives over now that the war was over and won. They had every reason to think that all would be just as it was before he left them; that he would be just the same. It was hard enough to imagine what he was going to say to Susan, who didn’t know Molly even existed. But, far worse, what would he tell the girls? How could he even begin to explain it, if he were to leave them? Only then did he realize that his thoughts were almost exactly the words that Hamm had said to him.

  Molly once asked him if she could see a picture of Susan and the girls. He lied at
first, telling her that his photos had been lost in one of their fast evacuations during the Battle of the Bulge as everyone was calling it now. That, too, left him feeling empty and guilty, for now he was lying to Molly as well. Eventually, he showed her some of the pictures, and he could feel a sadness in her as great as his own. He thought the fact that she had been married too had sensitized her to the idea of loss, whether it was from death or desertion. And he thought she saw herself as the culprit in all of it.

  It all made him wonder, night after night when he was alone with his thoughts: Who was he and what had he become? Was lying a way of life with him, now? Would lying be his stock-in-trade forever? Even Hamm had plowed his way into the quandary, and Schneider had been rude to him far beyond what Hamm deserved. Perhaps the level of his guilt made Hamm’s questions all the more painful.

  “So what are you and Molly going to do when this is over, Steve?” Hamm asked still again one night as they were sorting out their gear. It was not long after they had walked into that hellhole of a concentration camp, and neither of them knew whether they would be there for months or longer. The question of when the war would actually end for them was completely unsettled, except for the daily ration of scuttlebutt. “I don’t know,” Schneider mumbled back, hoping Hamm would just drop it. But he didn’t.

  “Susan have any idea about all this?”

  “Of course not!” Schneider snapped. He was really afraid that Hamm assumed he had told Susan, and that Hamm might have written home something in a letter to Allison. So Schneider asked him directly.

  “You talk to anyone about this? At home, I mean? Allison?”

  “Take it easy, Steve. I haven’t had a single conversation about it, not even with Molly. I doubt there’s anyone in the entire Army of Occupation who doesn’t know, but nobody out here really cares. Everyone has just one thought right now, and that is when are we going home? So, no, I don’t think that Susan will ever hear anything from this side of the Atlantic.”

  Schneider cooled down a little, but he could feel his heart racing, whether from anxiety or embarrassment he couldn’t decide. It was as if he had been caught at something. Perhaps it was a projection into the not-so-far-off future when he might be having this conversation with Susan. But, Hamm wasn’t his superior officer. He was a friend, and Schneider realized his questions were out of concern for him and for Susan. And for Molly. Everyone in the group, he realized, was in love with Molly in one way or another. Even Hamm. They would die for her if it came to that.

  “I don’t know…I just don’t know,” Schneider said. “When we were so close to dying at the hands of the SS—when they captured the whole field hospital—I couldn’t think of anything else but how I was going to save Molly. There wasn’t anything else. I lived every day the way we did all through France. I just hoped to live one more day, and I would take what was given to me.”

  Hamm said, “It isn’t about taking, Steve. We’re well beyond the taking stage of things. You have a hell of a lot of responsibility back home: Susan and the girls, a home, a whole life you built. Are you going to throw it all away on a battlefield romance?”

  Schneider turned to face Hamm, furious at his relegating what Schneider felt for Molly into something transient and sordid.

  “What the hell does that mean, a battlefield romance? You have something to say on that?”

  But Hamm never blinked. He never backed down. He just kept his usual calm, the same calm that he had when the whole world was going to hell, when tents were falling down and the OR was ventilated by shrapnel. No matter how bad it was, Hamm always just kept his head down, put out his hand, and asked for another clamp. Or needle holder. Or suture. Schneider usually admired his steadiness in the worst situations; Hamm was the rock. Now, his friend’s steady calm just pissed him off.

  “Steve,” Hamm said without a pause, “I know you, and I know Susan, and I know Molly. I’m in as good a position to see this in a realistic light as anyone. And this is not the real world. It’s no more real than the midnight emergencies we used to do back home. Remember? The car accidents, the gunshot wounds, the ruptured aneurysms; everyone running around trying to save lives in the middle of the night.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “It has everything to do with everything. We have spent a lot of our lives in a surreal environment. We’re dealing in life and death, up at two or three in the morning, dressed in pajamas with colleagues, men and women whose adrenaline is surging and their hormones buzzing. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve been there. How many quick romances have you seen after a big night in the OR? Trips to the unmade bed in the on-call room. You know just what I mean.”

  “So, you’re saying—”

  “I’m saying,” he cut Schneider off, “that this is no different, except there’s even more adrenaline and more craziness. People are trying to kill us, and none of us know when our number’s coming up. So we throw our values out the window because life seems so short. Why deprive yourself of anything when you may not live to get back to the old world?”

  Schneider had no answer, and by then he knew exactly what Hamm was talking about. He started doing busy work organizing his stuff, folding clean clothes and arranging his bed.

  “I understand falling in love with Molly. She’s young, and smart, and brave, and beautiful. She’s a wonderful woman. Who wouldn’t fall in love with Molly? If I weren’t married I would be first in line! The issue is that you are married to Susan, and you have made promises to her, and indirectly to Anna and Emily, and you now have to keep those promises. I won’t insult you by saying that you’re thinking with your dick. I know there’s a lot more to this than that. But for God’s sake, Steve, you’re married! Susan is your wife, and you now need to end this with Molly and go on home again.”

  “I—”

  “And don’t leave any doors open with Molly,” Hamm said, cutting him off. “You have to be clear. Don’t give her false hope. That would be too cruel. She has already had one terrible tragedy in her life, losing her husband. Don’t drag this out and give her false hope, like, ‘Let’s just go our separate ways and think this over.’ None of that crap. She needs to start her life over clean and find a man who loves her and have a family—just like the one you already have.”

  Schneider had nothing to say. He didn’t want to agree with Hamm, but he couldn’t argue with a single thing Hamm had said. He was totally deflated.

  He nodded weakly and said, “I know, Hamm. I know. Thanks, pal.”

  A few days later, Schneider was sound asleep in his cot when he felt someone pushing him. He started to tell them to beat it when a hand covered his mouth, a small warm hand that smelled of…what did it smell of? Of Molly.

  It was pitch black in the tent, so Schneider still couldn’t see her. But he knew that scent, and it made him crazy.

  Molly pushed in and crawled under the light army blanket alongside Schneider. He was wearing skivvies, and she had on a scrub suit. This was not going to help his resolve. Her head had barely touched the pillow before he had an erection, and she was doing nothing to stop them from going down that path. Then he realized they weren’t exactly at the Ritz in Paris.

  “What about Hamm?” he whispered into her hair.

  “He’s operating. Just started a thoracotomy, so he’s gone for a couple of hours. I just had to see you, Steve. We haven’t had a second alone in this place since I got here.”

  Schneider could feel every part of her body stretched out along her scrub suit and his shorts did nothing to separate them. She was down lower in the cot than he was, so her breasts were pressed against his stomach, her head into his chest. He was quickly losing control. He wanted her so badly right then that he had to squeeze his eyes shut in an effort to refocus on what Hamm and he had talked about. But, if she asked him right then to go AWOL with her and start their lives over together somewhere, he would have been packed in seconds and gone. Nothing Hamm could have told him would have stop
ped him.

  “I spent the last several hours listening to a lecture from Mary,” she whispered. “She told me it was time to leave you, to get on with my life. She said when they let us go home, you’re going straight to Susan and the girls, and you’re not even going to look back. Said this is all a combination of fairy tale and nightmare all rolled up into one. A romance and a horrible war. That none of it’s real. Said I should cut my losses and run.”

  “She sounds like Hamm. I got the same lecture.”

  “I’m not doing it, Steve. I’m not just walking away without a fight. This isn’t some one-night stand, some teenage quickie in your father’s Chevy.”

  “Oldsmobile.”

  “Oldsmobile?”

  “Yeah. My dad had an Oldsmobile.”

  “Who makes love in an Oldsmobile?” she said looking at him as if he were from Des Moines.

  Schneider laughed and pulled her head back onto his chest. “Actually, nobody. I never did get laid in that car. But I sure made a lot of plans.”

  They laughed and then were quiet for a minute. Then he asked, “How is anyone back home going to understand what went on here, Molly? How can they possibly know what we’ve been through together?”

  “They’re not going to understand. The war changed everything. It’s changed us. It’s changed the whole world, and everyone thinks we’re just going home, and everything’s going to be just like before. But it’s not. Not for me.”

  “Me neither,” Steve said. “I just don’t know how…” He stared into the darkness of the tent.

  “How what?” Molly asked him.

  “I don’t know how we can return to that same life. I can’t just pretend that you and I never happened.”

  “All of this happened, Steve. All of it. Nick was killed at Pearl. He is dead. We did meet and fall in love, and there’s no denying any of it. I’m in love with you, and I don’t care what Hamm or Mary or any of them say we should do. I’m not letting you go without a fight. I’ve fought my way through this whole war, and I’m not giving you up. I love you. I want to be with you for the rest of my life, and I’m not going to make it easy for anyone. Not Susan. Not even you.”