Children of the Promise

by Dean Hughes

  So Afton left her alone, walked down the hall, and took her own shower. And Bobbi poured out her feelings to the Lord. “I’m sorry for my anger,” she told him. “I accept things as they are. But Father, please comfort me. Please let me feel thy love.”

  And then the comfort came, the love. It was like warm water in a bath, filling in around her, touching her, soothing her skin, reaching to her center. She didn’t know why things happened the way they did, but she trusted that God did, and she finally felt able to accept.

  She cried for a long time, and that actually felt good, the life coming back into her. However sad she was, at least she felt a sense of self returning, not the distance, the numbness, she had been living with.

  Bobbi was not surprised when some of her discouragement, even some of her anger, returned again the next day. She knew enough about herself to understand that just because she felt the Lord’s Spirit one day, that didn’t mean she would never have to work to feel it again. And she knew that to get an insight was not to hold it every second, forever. But she had something to go back to now. She had found some things she could say to herself that helped. And what she kept saying was, “I’ll be all right. I do know God loves me. I’ll learn the things there are to learn from this experience.” And she kept reminding herself: “So many others are doing this. I can do it too.”

  One of the things Bobbi did was start to mend some fences. She went to see Ishi, whom she had avoided lately. Ishi was always worried about Daniel, but he was still all right, and Bobbi had been resentful of that–whether she admitted it or not.

  And so Bobbi told her what she had been feeling, acknowledged her jealousy.

  Ishi nodded gently, spoke quietly. “Oh, Bobbi,” she said, “I’ve done the same thing. So many of my friends have husbands who didn’t go to war. I see them with their men, their children, all having a nice time, and I wonder why I have to raise my children alone while my husband is off on the other side of the world.”

  “That must be so hard, Ishi.”

  “But here’s what I know about life, Bobbi. I’m not an old lady, but I’ve seen enough already to know that sooner or later everyone has to go through something–some kind of pain or suffering. And I think that’s how it’s supposed to be. It doesn’t even out exactly, but we all have to pass through our own tests, and if we make it through, we’re better for it.”

  “If we make it through.”

  “Well, yes. Some give up. Some think only of themselves and harbor their resentment.”

  “I’m going to try to do better now.”

  “You’ve done fine. The only thing you’ve done wrong is not come to see me enough. The kids and I miss you.”

  So Bobbi stayed for dinner, and she played with the children. She enjoyed that, but when she left and boarded her bus back to Pearl Harbor, she searched inside herself for happiness and found very little evidence of it. She couldn’t help but think she might never have her own children now, and she had to struggle to keep that thought from driving her back toward self-pity.

  Two days later Bobbi actually got a day off. For a couple of weeks she had worked long hours every single day. But finally, on a Monday, her scheduled day off didn’t fall through, and she was able to get some extra sleep and take the bus into Honolulu. She had some Christmas shopping she wanted to do, and then she needed to send presents to her family. She was very late now, and she knew the package wouldn’t make it in time, but she finally had the heart to bother with something of that sort.

  Bobbi had told her parents about Richard’s ship being sunk, but she hadn’t gone into much detail about her own attachment to him. She had tried not to sound distraught, but her mother had read between the lines enough to send a sensitive letter, which at the time, Bobbi had not really appreciated the way she knew she should have. Now she felt she needed to get a decent letter in the mail. So she bought some new stationery, and on the bus she started her letter. She tried to be more open about her feelings, which she knew was the right thing to do, but it also seemed to open the wound again. By the time she got back to her room, she was having a hard time. Still, she went to her desk immediately. She knew she had to finish the letter before she lost her will. But as she sat down, she noticed something on the floor, and she looked back to see what it was.

  Then she realized it was a telegram. Someone had pushed it under her door. She hurried over and picked it up, and she saw that it was addressed to her, not Afton.

  Bobbi’s breath stopped. The universe seemed to hesitate, hold. Possibilities were firing through her consciousness. She tried desperately to think of something positive that someone would let her know in a telegram. But that was not what telegrams meant these days. Alex could be dead. Or Wally.

  Wally could have been freed, in the Philippines. That was possible.

  But behind all this was the likely truth: it was word about Richard. His parents had promised to let her know. In spite of everything she had told herself today, she still felt the terror of hearing this final word.

  She was holding the telegram, still unopened, when she knelt down by her bed. “Father, I don’t want to go back to where I was,” she said. “Please give me the power to deal with this. Hold me in thine arms while I open this letter.”

  Again she felt the warmth, the comfort, the confidence that she could accept. She shut her eyes for a moment and felt her thanks without using words. Her hands trembled as she opened the envelope. And her eyes filled with tears before she ever began to read.

  But what she read stunned her: “Richard is safe. In a hospital in Guam. He will write you soon.”

  It was impossible. Bobbi’s mind could not accept this. She had thought of everything else. She plunged her face into

  her bedspread and sobbed. And then she read it again and ­continued to cry. “Thank you. I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she kept repeating. “Oh, thank you.”

  When Bobbi could finally think, she had a hundred questions. Why Guam? Why hadn’t he been able to let her know sooner? Why was he in a hospital? How badly was he hurt? But all that didn’t matter. He was alive.

  Bobbi held this joy to herself for a time while she sat and cried, enjoyed the wholeness, her gratitude. Then she started over on her letter and told her parents what she had just learned. Afterward, she walked to the hospital and found Afton.

  Afton squealed with delight, sounding fully like a sixteen-year-old again, but she was genuinely happy for Bobbi, and Bobbi did appreciate that. But Bobbi didn’t feel like squealing; she was feeling too deeply blessed. And she didn’t want to gloat over her good news in a place where so many people had so much to deal with.

  “Maybe one good thing came out of this,” Afton said. “What you said that night made me look at everything a little different. I’m thinking really serious that I might marry Sam.”

  Bobbi smiled. “Seriously that you might?”

  “Well, that’s a big change for me. Before, I always said I knew I couldn’t.”

  Bobbi wasn’t in any mood to give advice, but the advice was in her heart. When you find someone who loves you that much, keep him. That’s what she was going to do. She wished more than anything that she could talk to Richard, go to him and help him, nurse him through whatever pain he had. And then she wished there were a way to get out of the navy so she could take him home to Utah, where they could start building something together. She knew Richard enough to love him, but she wanted to discover all there was to understand about him. He had been dead, and now he was alive. She knew she had received a gift, and she wasn’t going to take it lightly.

  Chapter 22

  Peter was lying on the ground, pressed against a rock wall. His body was convulsing as he tried to get enough air into his lungs to bring himself back to life. He had made a long, desperate run, pushed himself harder than he ever had before, and he expected any moment to be caught by the mortar fire that was crashing in the field around him.

  This was a place to catch his breath, but it was not
a safe place. There were no safe places. For more than a month now, he had been frightened every waking moment. He had slept only when he was so exhausted he could do nothing else–and then only in short snatches.

  He was in eastern Poland, but for an entire month he had been in retreat with his company–or when the chaos was too great, in hordes or in bunches or even by himself. Time and again he and his fellow soldiers had been stopped, organized, and commanded to hold the line at all costs, never to give another inch of ground, and each time masses of howling Russian troops, with their incessant, rattling tanks, had spilled toward his Grossdeutschland Division, and the Germans had fallen back, losing lives by the thousands as they ran. The wounded and mutilated tried to escape by fleeing with civilian refugees, who filled every road in Poland, or they caught trains when they could, but there was little help for these casualties and almost no medicine. Peter had seen men lying on the ground, their wounds gangrenous, their stench disgusting. One man had pled with him, “Can’t you do something for me? Kill me, if nothing else.”

  Peter had kept going. He didn’t want to kill the man, and there was nothing else he could do except wait there with him as the Russians pushed forward, and that only meant that both of them would die.

  Peter hardly knew any longer who he had been before he had arrived on the Russian front. He knew that he had vowed not to kill anyone. But he had killed almost immediately. In his first battle, he had crouched in a trench, terrified by the noise of the attacking army, their artillery fire, their tanks. He had no intention to fire his rifle. But the Russians, screaming and shouting, had charged. They ran straight at Peter’s trench, and when Hauptmann Albrecht had shouted “Feurer frei!” Peter had waited. But a huge man had bolted toward him, his face full of fury, his yellow teeth bared, and Peter had pulled the trigger. The man had fallen in front of him and then had lain on the ground groaning. For several minutes–the worst minutes of Peter’s life–he had listened to the air sucking through the hole in the man’s chest, heard the blood gurgle in his throat, and finally heard him choke on the blood and die.

  Soon after, Peter had jumped from the trench and run, had caught up with his friend Hans, who had abandoned the trench before him, both of them defying the order to hold their position and not retreat. Machine-gun fire had sprayed around them, even taken a chunk from the heel of Peter’s boot, but they had made it to a village and to a barn, where they had found the remnant of their company. Twenty men of the company had died that day, Hauptmann Albrecht told them. What he hadn’t done was reprimand them for running. He had fallen back himself, even though he had told them before that they must hold the line or be shot for treason.

  Peter and Hans had lost Helmut in the confusion, but they found him in the barn. They were happy for the reunion, though Helmut looked dazed. “They killed Karl,” he said. “We were running. A mortar, or something, hit right next to him. It tore him to pieces. His insides were smeared all over the ground.”

  Hans sat down on the ground, leaned against the wall of the barn, and cried. There were veterans in the barn, older men who had seen it all, men who had been through four or five, even six years, of battle. They didn’t say a word to Hans, didn’t begrudge him his emotion. Instead, they sat and stared, their eyes full of a weariness that ran too deep to call exhaustion. Peter had never seen such haunted faces. The men complained about the food, the cold, the lack of equipment and ammunition, but there was no passion in anything they said. One man, maybe forty-five or so, told Peter, “I don’t care whether I die. I can’t remember why I ever wanted to live.” But still, he had run when he had faced death.

  Peter found himself a spot in the barn away from Hans and Helmut, who needed to talk about the friend they had lost. Peter had something else on his mind. Now that he had time, and quiet, he was tormented by the groans of the Russian he had killed. He didn’t know what to tell himself. In another second, the Russian would have killed Peter. Wasn’t that reason enough to fire his rifle? But was he a murderer now? Back in Basel–what seemed years ago now–he had pushed a Gestapo agent off a train platform, hurt him badly. But Peter had lived with that by telling himself that he was defending his family, fighting the Nazis. What was he doing now, fighting for the Nazis?

  And yet, horrified as he was by what he had done, what he had seen and heard, he didn’t feel the regret he thought he should. He couldn’t bring himself to play the hypocrite and ask God for forgiveness.

  After a time, Hans came to him, sat down next to him. “I killed two of those stinking Bolsheviks today,” he said. “Tomorrow I hope to kill a hundred. They’re going to pay for what they did to Karl.”

  Peter didn’t say anything. He could hear the truth in Hans’s voice. Hans was still a freckle-faced child from a Black Forest village, and he had shown it by running for his life, by crying for his friend. Now he was trying to make up for his disgrace.

  “They’re not human, those Russians,” Hans said. “If they overrun us, they won’t give us any mercy. They shoot their prisoners and then mutilate their bodies. If they’re hungry enough, they’ll even eat the men they kill.”

  Peter didn’t know whether he believed any of that. It was what the veteran soldiers claimed. On his march to the front, Peter had seen German soldiers drive civilians out of their homes into the cold–just to have a place to sleep for the night. He had seen them eat everything in the house and let the family starve–or die from the cold. Sometimes, too, they had shot civilians for no apparent reason. “Filthy partisans,” they would say, and offer that alone as their justification.

  But Peter did understand what Hans was saying and feeling. Peter did hate the Russians. He had been at the front forty-eight hours, and already he felt the deepest hatred of his life. He couldn’t explain it, but he had felt it as the Russians had fired the first volleys of artillery shells into the German trenches, and then as they had come over the horizon, early in the morning, their tanks clanking and their riflemen hunched and charging forward. These men wanted to kill Peter, and if they managed to do it, they wouldn’t stop to ask themselves whether they were sorry.

  Worse than that, they were going to kill him sooner or later. That was already clear to Peter. And he hated them for it now. He didn’t care whether that made sense; he only knew what he felt.

  That night Leutnant Schuldt had come to the barn. He told the men that the company would fall back a little in the ­morning, but then they would draw the line at a river–some river the name of which Peter could no longer remember. They would make their stand and hold–or they would die. Once the Russians were stopped, reinforcements would arrive, and then, probably in the spring, the Germans would rise up and push the Russians back. “These animals fight like barbarians, but they don’t have our will. I’ve seen it before. Once we break through, they’ll run like scared rabbits all the way back to Moscow. We will never be forgotten for what we do in the next few days. Our children and grandchildren will sing our praises forever.”

  So the men had dug in and prepared to make their stand. Then the tanks had come again, the artillery, the throng of infantrymen, the smoke and dust and the smell of explosives in the air, and once again the lines had broken and the Germans were the ones running like rabbits. Peter had tripped as he ran, and he had felt a bullet buzz over his head. The fall had saved his life. That night he tried to thank God, but he didn’t feel it. He had fired his weapon plenty that day. And maybe he had killed again. He didn’t know. He only knew he would fire the next time the Russians came after him.

  Eventually the Grossdeutschland Division had been reassembled at Lodz, in central Poland. Half of Peter’s company was wearing the heavy Russian jackets they had pulled off dead soldiers, and all of them were suffering from fatigue and undernourishment. But for two days they rested, and they were issued somewhat better uniforms. Replacement troops joined them there, too, and Peter was astounded by what he saw. He had thought the men who had entered the army with him were surprisingly old or young, but
some of these soldiers were men in their sixties, with wrinkled faces and bent backs. The rest were little boys. The oldest of them were sixteen, and some who said they were fourteen looked younger. They looked frightened, like any child away from home the first time, but when they had the chance, they would laugh and roughhouse like kids on a camping trip.

  In Lodz the men of the division heard great speeches. The Russians must never reach their homeland, never enter Berlin. If that were to happen, the division would be “covered with shame.” Here a “definitive rampart” would be established. The progress of the Bolsheviks would be stopped entirely. It was what the veterans had heard before, many times, they said.

  At the end of the last speech, delivered by the camp commander, a major, the infantry soldiers did not react. They waited, silent, to be dismissed. Finally, an officer shouted, “Heil Hitler!” and the men did repeat the cry. But there was no spirit in it. And after, Peter heard the soldiers mumbling about winter. For these men, most of whom had lived through Russian winters before, the cold was as much an enemy as were the Russians. They did almost anything, while in Lodz, to secure enough warm clothes, and they told the newcomers to do the same. They talked in almost reverent tones about the viciousness of the winter, the misery of surviving out in the open.

  The experienced soldiers expected the worst. One, a gruff old trooper named Kitzmann, had returned from a hospital in Frankfurt am Oder, in eastern Germany. In the place where he’d once had an ear was only a patch of delicate pink skin now, but Peter had already seen so many men with gouges and scars that he hardly paid attention. The men wanted to know from Kitzmann what was happening at home. He sat on his bunk and stared at the men. “Frankfurt is gray,” he said, “like the color of dead trees. There are a few walls sticking up, all black and burned. Nothing else. The people live in trenches, like infantry.”