The Losing Role

by Steve Anderson

  Luckily, Zoock said, “And what would heading back accomplish? Tell me that. We’d be retreating without authorization. Besides, might be worse medicine than anything the Amis can dish out.”

  They were all speaking German now.

  “He’s commanding officer,” Felix said. “As long as he’s with us, he gets final say.”

  Zoock got out and joined Max and Felix in the road. They stood in a triangle for at least thirty seconds, thinking.

  “The question is—has he acted like a commander?” Max said. He was pushing it, but this was no time to hold back.

  “Of course not,” Felix said. “The real question is, what to do about it.”

  Zoock threw up his hands and slogged over to the nearest tree trunk, to urinate.

  Down at the stream Rattner kept staring into the raging water, still on his knees. He appeared to be muttering. “Look at him,” Felix said to Max. Rattner was gesturing now, pleading with hands, rocking his head. “He does that a lot. It’s his family—he thinks he can talk to them.”

  Finally, Rattner and Max had something in common. For a time Max had tried to reach his lovely Liselotte like this, he missed her so much. He tried it at her grave.

  Felix’s lips had scrunched up as if he’d eaten mud off his boots. He added, “I know what you’re thinking—he’s cracked.”

  “No. I don’t,” Max said. “Far from it.” He held out his pack of Pall Malls for Felix. “It was an air raid. Am I right? He lost some kids, a wife perhaps . . .”

  Max wanted to tell Felix about Liselotte, but held off. This wasn’t his show now. Felix gazed back with hard and narrow eyes. He nabbed the Pall Malls and lit one. “You’re right about the air raid, and the loss part—oh, you’re right on target there. Braunschweig was bombed all to hell. It was his parents, and his grandparents, and six of his relatives. Flattened the house he grew up in. You see, our Captain Rattner never married, Kaspar. As you might imagine. He lived at home when on leave. He had no other home.”

  Max lit a Pall Mall, although they only had two left. He put a hand on Felix’s shoulder. “Look, I was thinking. Why don’t you go back over there and talk ole’ Rattner into sticking to our guns, eh? Inspire him. Whatever it takes.”

  Felix inhaled. He stared. He blew smoke out the side of his mouth.

  “If, you know what I mean,” Max continued. “I know you can. I . . . I’ve seen you—I’ve seen what you two do. So, take your time. I could take Zoock on a little walk, if you like—”

  Felix released a nervous giggle. He patted Max’s shoulder. “Way to take charge. You’ve really impressed me, you know. You’re earning this. Truly, a fine performance.”

  “Oh? Thanks. Thank you.” Max didn’t ask exactly how he was impressing, and what exactly he was earning. It was best not to know. He wanted Felix safe. He wanted him happy. But he wasn’t about to die for the little juggler.

  Max took Zoock on a walk. They scouted the road ahead for ten minutes and turned back. Back at the jeep Rattner was standing tall in the road, his hands clenched on his hips like that first day Max met him. He announced:

  “The Meuse River is within our grasp, comrades, so let’s waste no time.”

  They found a main road and drove a few miles but daylight was thinning fast, so they spent the night at a hikers hut deep in the woods. Zoock and Max slept in the jeep while Felix and Rattner took the hut. It was a dark, wet, and cold few hours. Each rose often and paced around to keep warm, and Max couldn’t help feeling like they were doing it out of mistrust. It was like in an American Western movie—the robbers must camp out, and as soon as the campfire dies, they eye their accomplices all night from under their horse blankets. They needed each other, and yet they were poison to each other. Max, for his part, could not sleep. He considered leaving again—just walking off into the trees and never coming back. He didn’t. This was all about tomorrow, and the day after that. So he rolled up in a ball on the back seat and closed his eyes, squeezing them shut until he’d fooled himself into something like sleep.

  Twelve

  The next morning—December 17, 1944. At dawn Rattner tried the radio again with no success. Felix had their maps out on the hood of the jeep. They had bypassed the towns along the main attack route—Stavelot, Trois Ponts, Werbomont, Ouffet, Seny—and traveled almost a hundred miles. It might as well have been one thousand miles. Their jeep was a banged up, mud-caked bucket. Their fuel was on reserve. Their limbs ached from the night in the cold, their uniforms were damp down to their skin, and their feet wet and freezing in their boots.

  They hit the main road. At the first crossroads American tanks, artillery, and troop trucks were heading east to the front, stalling all cross traffic. With only ten miles left until the Meuse River, they had to sit and wait and watch the mighty columns pass, a seemingly unending supply of replacement materiel and men.

  “Look at the fools,” Rattner growled from the back seat. “Throwing in the very last of their forces. And what are they to do when that’s all gone, eh? Send in the donkeys? Or their Negroes?—be lucky if their Southern slave drivers even give them guns. Sorry, Zoock, but it’s true.”

  Zoock nodded, wearily. Felix coughed. Max said nothing. All three knew the truth—America’s resources were endless. They had been there. They had seen it.

  The traffic kept them from Huy on the Meuse until almost ten o’clock in the morning. A narrow forest road carried them to the crest of a wooded hill that overlooked the town. The dense forest obstructed their view, so they parked the jeep next to a thick fir they could climb for a better look.

  Rattner went up first. He stayed there a long time, saying nothing. He climbed back down with ashen cheeks, his binoculars loose in his trembling hands. “Good God,” he mumbled.

  Max grabbed the binoculars and headed up. He saw a medieval fort atop a hill, the spires of a minor cathedral, and a town hall plaza. The Meuse River curved through the center of old Huy. Huy Bridge was stone and arched, centuries old. American soldiers, armored cars, and machine gun nests packed both ends of the bridge. The Americans were going to hold this at any cost. Even entering the town looked impossible. Soldiers manned key intersections and rooftops. Sandbags, tank traps, and barbed wire blocked all roads to the bridge, and anyone who dared approach got the third degree from the MPs. Max watched as a staff car bearing the flag of a two-star general was searched and the general questioned at length.

  He lowered the binoculars, stunned. What a fool he was. Any real soldier would have known the river had to be crossed at some remote place. Swimming it was probably best. Max didn’t even know how to swim. Making it across would be risking hypothermia, pneumonia. It might also require boldfaced treachery and possibly killing. Who was he kidding? He was a better swimmer than a killer.

  A black mood seized him. His chest filled with a dull pain. He should have bolted when he had the chance.

  He clambered back down, grasping at the cold and slippery branches. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

  Felix waved at him to be quiet. “Psst,” Zoock said. Rattner was hunched over the radio down behind the jeep. When Max went up the tree, all he’d heard was crackles and fuzz. Now he heard German voices, and Rattner spoke back to them in a modified code of which Max understood little. Water drops from high branches hit Rattner and rolled down his neck, but he didn’t flinch nor wipe them away. He had gotten through.

  Max was a fool, without a doubt.

  Rattner glared at them. “You’re disrupting my signal,” he sneered, “so go on, take a walk, why don’t you?”

  The three shrugged and strolled off in search of water. They returned with full canteens twenty minutes later. Rattner was sitting in the mud before the jeep, his back against the rear tire, staring into the mud with his hands hanging off his knees. He spoke to Felix:

  “I told them the situation. Huy’s a fortress. The bridge is there, and it’s there to stay. We have nowhere to go but backward.”

  “And?” Zoock said. Rattne
r kept looking at Felix. “And?” Felix said.

  “I requested permission to roll back—request denied till morning, they said.”

  “Till morning? What are we going to do meantime, just sit here? Freeze our asses off.” It was Zoock again. “Son of a bitch,” he said in English and punted his canteen up into the branches. It didn’t come back down.

  Felix spoke softly. “No. Now listen. We’ll just get more intelligence. Confuse the Amis some more. Put some real fear into them. Isn’t that right, Hartmut?” He had called Rattner by his first name.

  Rattner shrugged. “Yes. I suppose. What else is there?”

  “How? We’ll need gasoline,” Zoock said.

  “I’ll get it,” Felix said. “All right? So how about it?”

  Rattner shrugged again, this time violently, practically throwing out his shoulder sockets. As if he cared for nothing now. It gave Max a chill down his back.

  “They told you something else, didn’t they?” he said to Rattner.

  “Is that true?” Felix glared.

  Rattner started to speak, then stopped. He did this twice. “Yes,” he said finally. “It’s way behind schedule. All along the front, from fifty miles north of here to all the way south of Bastogne. We’re doing some real damage, but it’s stalling. And the whole thing depends on schedule.” He cleared his throat and spat, but the attempt misfired and mucous hung from his chin.

  Zoock leaned against the hood, shaking his head, his hands balled as fists. Felix stood over Rattner, as if ready to knee him in the face. “That all?” he said.

  “That all? That all?” Rattner snickered and wiped at his chin. “No, that is not all. Operation Greif, if you must know, has been compromised. The English speakers, the Ami uniforms, our jeep teams, all of it. Special Unit Pielau. Top that off, Amis are using passwords now, and they’re changing from unit to unit, hour to hour. Something happened. Someone was found with our plans, something. The upshot is, the Amis know about us and they have ways of spotting us. And that, my dear Menning, is all.”

  Felix pulled back, his arms slack at his sides.

  Max rubbed at his raw, itching eyes. Of course it was true. American intelligence had to have suspected something ever since that armed forces-wide request for English speakers was issued two months ago. Now they had all the details. If Max was a fool—if they were all fools—then the commanders at the top were the true jokers.

  “All of which means,” Max said, “that we don’t know what the Amis will be looking for—that is, which telltale clues will be giving us away.”

  Zoock banged on the hood. “Always have to be so goddamn correct, don’t you Herr Know-it-All?” he said to Max.

  Rattner let his head hang, and his cigarette dropped into the mud between his legs. Felix let out an anxious, incredulous snigger that sounded like a pig’s snort.

  “I’m only being realistic,” Max muttered, a bitter saliva forming in the back of his mouth. His sore, surging heart seemed to rise up into his throat. He could not go back home, nor flee west, it seemed. And yet he had to keep his comrades together. He had to lead them. It was the only way to find a way out—so that he could betray them.

  They spent the rest of the day traveling along the Meuse, skirting the open valleys and sticking to the forest roads, south then north again, clinging to the hope that the panzer spearheads would catch up to them. They didn’t even hear the distant battles for long stretches. The thick clouds glowed fluorescent, pregnant with snow. Then they grew denser and darker and it started to snow, heavily, the fat flakes blotching the mud white and clumping in the puddles.

  In a village, Felix stole fuel cans from a parked American supply truck. “At least we have the gas now,” Max said, hoping to lighten the mood.

  “For what? To return? Return to what?” Zoock blurted. “Our last Christmas ever? Soon there’ll be no Germany to return to. Better start learning your Ami English,” he yelled back to Rattner, “because soon we’ll all be chewing chewing gum.”

  No one answered Zoock. They let him drive. Felix offered Max the last Pall Mall. A couple minutes later Rattner said, “It’s not over yet. It’s not.”

  All the roads were looking familiar. They were going in circles. Now and then they heard the cracks and pops of gunshots. Artillery thumped again in the distance.

  To the devil with correct—Max had to push it. He blurted: “I know—if we see an open bridge, why don’t we just take it? Or we could make a raft. Now there’s a ploy, comrades.” He knew he was babbling, but he was scared now. He didn’t really want to go it alone. This might be the only way out—simply get them all stuck on the other side, together. “Good? What do you all say to that?”

  Felix was grinning. “That’s bold of you,” he began, but Rattner cut him off:

  “Absolutely not. We are ordered to patrol and recon the eastern Meuse, and that is where we’ll stay. Right here. For better or worse—”

  “Wait, wait,” Zoock said. He had straightened up. He let off the gas. Up ahead was a jeep off to the right side, its rear end between two trees and the hood sticking out into the road, as if it had emerged straight out of the forest. Steam billowed out the radiator grill.

  A GI was slumped over the steering wheel, and another was hanging out the back.

  Felix grabbed a Colt and passed one up to Max, while Rattner pulled out a tommy gun. Zoock dropped it into first, inching them closer. Bullet holes dotted the jeep. Its tires were flat. On the other side of the road, at the edge of the forest opposite, lay the bodies of two more GIs. Zoock stopped about fifty yards from the scene. They jumped out and spread out with guns aimed, crouching as they walked, peering into the woods for sounds and signs. Nothing. No one. The shot-up jeep’s engine made pinging noises. Felix took the lead, while Max went over to check the two GIs across the road. One was on his side as if sleeping. Blood still ran from his stomach and into the mud, releasing steam. The other was on his back, his legs bent up high like a frog’s, arms out straight. His eyes were open, staring up into the clouds. The snow already covered the eyeballs. The flakes filled the folds in their uniforms.

  “Don’t get it—why would dogfaces shoot at each other? And from this close?” Zoock shouted across the road to Max in English.

  Max had been thinking the same thing. He crossed over to the shot-up jeep. Two more dead lay on the other side of the vehicle, curled up in balls as if they’d been shot trying to jump out and find cover. In total, four had been in the jeep. The snow was sticking to them too, dusting them white.

  Felix, Zoock and Rattner went silent. They stood in a line, their guns pointed to the ground. Max thought he understood—none of them ever saw the dead so up close and freshly expired. He had. It was the only part of combat he knew, it seemed.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he began to say—

  Then he saw it. What they really saw. On the ground were a lieutenant and a corporal. The lieutenant was staring up at them with blue-gray eyes that were still melting the snowflakes, and his hands were clenching at his tunic, which he’d obviously tried to rip open. Underneath was the field gray uniform of an SS corporal.

  Thirteen

  They unbuttoned the other three’s American tunics. All wore SS uniforms underneath. The jeep’s hood had a white A in the corner. It was team A from Special Unit Pielau. Lightly, with fingertips, they brushed snow off the four faces.

  “Poor Hasko—dear God,” Zoock whispered. The driver was his sailor friend, Hasko, the one Felix had mockingly called “the goat” back in Grafenwöhr. The phony US lieutenant dead on the ground was a once-great ballet dancer, Scherling.

  Rattner scurried back to their jeep to try the radio.

  “Should we hide them, get their German uniforms off?” Felix said.

  “What’s the use?” Max said. Clearly, the GIs across the road hadn’t bothered to question jeep A—somehow, even they had been able to spot the four as Germans.

  Zoock carried his friend Hasko into the forest, a few trunks in
side the tree line. He struck the ground with a shovel. It clanged at the icy earth. Felix started toward him but Max held him back by the elbow. Zoock sat Hasko up against a tree. Kneeling, he spoke a few words to his friend, in his ear, then he placed Hasko’s cap over his eyes, which made Hasko look to be napping. Zoock reached in Hasko’s tunic as if looking for photos and letters. He found none. They’d been forbidden.

  Rattner strutted back smiling, the steam pumping out from between his gapped teeth. “I got through. The battle plans have shifted. We’re to return at once. Check out any towns on the way, they said. Radio in enemy strength. So let’s be off and fast.”

  They sped away, back east toward the German front lines. All knew what Rattner’s news meant, though none of them voiced it. The surprise offensive had failed. When they made it back, they could be reinserted into another absurd and risky scheme. They might even be thrown into a regular unit.

  Zoock drove hard and fast. After a couple miles he steered the jeep into the woods, stopped, got out and began scraping the X off the corner of their hood with his knife. Max helped him, and Rattner and Felix went to work scraping the X off the rear. They did all this without speaking.

  The road turned rough and icy. The suspension clattered and knocked, and the tires spun on frozen patches with a ripping sound like the squeals of stampeding boars. Crusty snowflakes whipped around inside their canvas cab. Yet Max burned hot under all his wool. The sweat rolled down his chest and back and itched under his hair. With every mile they went, the Meuse—and Paris, and Amerika—lay further at his back. He was missing his chance altogether. He wiped the sweat off his neck and forehead and unbuttoned his overcoat. Even if he were to break free, how could he know the Americans wouldn’t shoot him on sight? This would take more than an escape—it would take a miracle.

  Now he was cold, freezing cold, and he wrapped a GI-issue scarf around his neck. He blurted: “We should’ve crossed the river when we had the chance. Shouldn’t we? Swam it, stolen a dingy, what have you.” Zoock kept his eyes on the road. Max glared at Felix and Rattner in back. “Am I right? Kameraden? So perhaps we should just split up now, eh? Go our own way.”