He turned to me, and his face was a mask of unbearable torment. “I was tasked with this myself as the youngest of the lot. I must have shot twenty children, no older than little Elsa back there. One round to the back of the head. The very small ones, kindergarten age and younger, were lined up one in front of the other…to save a bullet. Like an assembly line.” He mimicked the motion of pulling the trigger with his forefinger, reliving the horror in his mind. “One…two…three…four. Do you know it’s always the children who never flinch, even as they know what’s going to happen? Halfway down the line, I had to pause to change my magazine. The next little boy in front of me. He was maybe nine. Eyes like buttons. He turned to me and asked in the most polite voice: ‘Am I standing straight enough, Uncle?’”
That was all he could say before breaking down into a fit of heartfelt sobs as he reclaimed his humanity that for years had been suppressed by the ice-cold doctrine of Nazi ardor. I put my right hand on his shoulder while holding the wheel in my left.
“My God!” he cried to the roof. “Oh my God, please forgive me! What have I become? I’m just a boy!” Then he cupped his face in his palms, and I let him be.
When he’d cried himself out, he composed himself, wiping the tears from his face with his gray sleeve, the words “Das Reich” on its cuff title. Then he looked at me with the clearest conviction in his eyes. “I do not want to survive this war.”
55
Evening. A mere six miles from Andeville. Still no one harassed us. I was once more approaching exhaustion. Loos offered to drive, but I didn’t want anyone else behind the wheel. I was a shepherd jealously guarding my flock from what still could be an SS wolf in sheep’s clothing. Plus, the boy seemed to be unraveling inside. He might have missed a turn in the road or steered us into a ravine or worse.
I tried to know the boy who had saved me. Emil Loos was from Westphalia near the Black Forest, and had enjoyed hunting and rowing since he was a boy. Like all the young men in his town, Loos was absolutely enthralled by Hitler; when he saw the fine lines of SS men parading through his town during a visit from the Führer himself, he vowed to be one of them. And so he was. Until today.
When I considered this lad, it was hard for me to remember that he’d massacred children in the past. He was, perhaps, a little too much like the rest of us for comfort. Emil Loos was not a monster. He was far worse. He was just a simple boy…a dark reflection of us all.
“You should come with us,” I repeated to him. “There’s nothing for you here.”
He just sank back in his seat. “There’s nothing for me anywhere.”
“What about America?” I asked, vaguely recalling his ironic desire to see his enemy’s country.
“I’m a war criminal, Captain. There is nothing.” I let the matter rest after that.
As the sun began to sink behind its thin veil of gray into the western sky, I cast my eyes about for familiar landmarks that would lead me to my base. I told Loos to be on the lookout for any sign that pointed to Andeville. The land now composed of gently rolling knolls topped with neat ranks of poplar trees. Thicker forests lay on the road ahead, giving me another hint that Andeville was near. I was growing anxious to get to the base, as the needle on the truck’s fuel gauge showed the tank was near empty.
Amelia poked her head through the canvas flap behind our shoulders.
“Did you sleep?” I asked.
“Some. How about you, Harmon?”
“There’ll be time to rest. The sun’s almost set. We can’t do anything tonight anyway. Even if I get us to my base and find a suitable aircraft, I’d have no idea where I’m flying in the dark.”
Actually, I needed the night to think this through. I didn’t really know what to do once we got to my aerodrome. It was mostly single-seat fighters. And the cockpit of a Focke-Wulf was not exactly suited for six, now seven, people. My hope was that one of the transports might be there. Otherwise we risked crossing over Belgium by land into the Normandy front. As I had told my father, the odds of safely slipping through the lines into that boiling cauldron of death were slim.
Amelia glanced over to Loos, who seemed transfixed by something in the distance. He leaned forward to peer through the windscreen. “What is it?” she asked him.
He abruptly raised his hand to cut her off. Then he grabbed my arm insistently. “Stop the truck!”
“What?” I said.
“Do it!”
I was surprised at his urgency and immediately slammed on the breaks. We both lurched forward, and Amelia nearly fell over the seat into our laps. I heard astonished utterances from the back, and immediately Krup peeked his head through next to Amelia.
“What is it?” he asked. “Why did you stop so quickly? Have we hit a mine?”
“Quiet!” Loos demanded. For an agonizing moment I thought that maybe this SS boy had led us into a trap. That it was all an elaborate ruse. Perhaps up the road he would be a re-animated Keitel. Still alive, still hunting us. Never stopping until we were dead. Then I heard what Loos heard. Our SS pursuers may have been dead, but mortal danger came in many forms out here.
“Can you see them?” I asked. Loos and I both stepped out of the truck and peered upwards, scanning the sky.
“No, sir. But I hear them. Maybe they’re in the overcast. Unless my ears are toying with me.”
“What are you looking for?” said Amelia, who followed us onto the side of the rural lane while Krup stayed in the vehicle.
“There,” I said. “Hear that?” We stood motionless, our ears straining at the sky like radar discs. Then it became more audible. The low growling of heavy radial engines echoing off the trees.
Loos spotted them first. “Jabos!” he cried, pointing to the southwest. He jabbed his finger at the clouds just above the tree line of a distant forest. My eyes followed his arm until they locked on two silver shapes, like shiny coins, moving low and fast just above the horizon. They pulled up in unison to about five hundred feet and banked over towards us. They were heading in our direction.
“Shit!” I cried. “Thunderbolts.”
I could make out the distinctive oval cowlings of two P-47s coming straight at us. I stared up at them, paralyzed with fear. The huge propeller arcs made wide yellow haloes around their massive radial engines. The elliptical wings jutting out from the fuselage carried eight fifty-caliber guns and plenty of ammunition. The enormous planes swooped in so fast that they were practically upon us before we could even move.
“Get down!” shouted Loos, and he dove for the ground. But with a rush and a roar the planes over-flew us before Amelia and I even twitched a muscle. I marveled at the pilots who maintained that airspeed while buzzing so close to the ground that their propeller blades might clip the trees behind us as they screamed past. Only then did I stop to consider that had they opened up with those machine gun batteries, they would have blown us all to Valhalla.
Loos leapt to his feet. He followed the two fighter planes as they gained altitude before turning in unison in a gentle chandelle. “Get everyone away from the truck!” he called to me. “Quickly!”
As I followed the path of the two Jabos, I could see that they were winging around to make another pass. Then I considered the black military cross painted on our truck and I realized that at first they didn’t want to risk disintegrating some poor Belgian farmer on his way to the market. But now having positively identified us as German and thus fair game, they would bear down with guns blazing.
Amelia bounded to the back of the truck, whipped open the canvas flap and let drop the tailgate. The Krupinskis were already on their feet preparing to jump out of the truck bed and onto the road. “What the hell was that?” asked Jakob as he leapt to the earth with a grunt. He turned to spy the American fighters in the distance banking over to line up on us again. “Oh crap,” he muttered. “Elsa! Mother! Here, take my hand!” He helped them down and then assisted Leo as well.
I raced over to them and then pointed to the forest only fifteen yards off the road. “Come on. Into the forest. Let’s go! Run!”
The whining of the gargantuan two-thousand-horsepower, eighteen-cylinder engines grew more pronounced as they throttled up to maintain their speed through the chandelle. The distant silver specks were now in their groove, and suddenly they were coming for us again. This time more menacing, roaring in for the kill. I could almost feel their gunsights lining us up.
We hurried towards the woods and before we knew it we’d entered a dark outcropping of trees with thick underbrush. “Keep going!” I urged the others as thorns reached out to rip little bits of skin off our faces and forearms. The howling of the engines grew in my ears. “Everyone down!” I yelled, and Amelia and the Krupinskis ducked into the thick green undergrowth, hidden, I hoped, from view. I was about to do the same when I heard another mechanical sound. It was the sputter and cough of the fifty-five-horsepower Opel truck engine turning over. Then I realized we were one person short.
“Loos?” I turned and tripped back to the very edge of the woods. I spied the truck sitting exposed on the open road. Loos had climbed into the driver’s seat and was shifting the revving vehicle into gear.
“Emil!” I shouted as loud as I could over the din of airplane and truck engines. The Thunderbolts were almost upon him now, and they were flying no higher than fifty feet, following the contours of the road so tightly that at a certain angle it might have looked like they were on the road. I doubt if their propellers, thirteen feet in diameter, would have cleared a haystack should one have appeared from nowhere, or even a slight rise in the ground. “Get the hell out of there!” I screamed.
Amelia called to me from behind: “Harmon, for God’s sake, get down!”
I ignored her and instead focused on Loos, who must have heard me because he turned his face to me. With a shake of his head and a faint, resigned smile he stomped on the accelerator and lurched forward along the road. I realized what he was doing for us. He was drawing the Jabos’ attention away from the trees and towards him and the more enticing target of the truck. Even though they could’ve sprayed the woods with bullets and surely ripped us to shreds, they forgot about us entirely and focused instead on this SS boy in his puttering vehicle.
As the truck gathered speed and bounced down the rough road surface away from the rest of us, I shifted my gaze to follow the two fighters racing after it. Still standing, but hidden among the heavy underbrush, I covered my ears as the Thunderbolts howled past me so close that I felt their prop wash as they kicked up a dust storm behind them.
Emil Loos never had a chance. And I knew he didn’t want one. For him this was his redemption. His final nod to his humanity before answering to God for all he’d done.
It was over in seconds. Just as the huge war birds screamed by so close I could make out the pilots’ determined faces, I saw puffs of smoke from their wings and heard the POW! POW! POW! POW! POW! of heavy machine guns blasting away. They sounded different from the outside. I’d only heard them before from the enclosed womb of my canopy. I never realized how much power was in the weapons that had been trained on me, and shuddered to think that I’d been in the line of fire of such guns in the past with nothing but the skeletal frame of a fighter plane and a half-inch steel plate behind my seat as my only defense. They seemed like overkill against a single truck.
A fountain of dirt chased after the lumbering Opel until it overtook the hapless vehicle, which disappeared in a shrieking tornado of smoke and sparks. An orange fireball reached into the sky; at the same time I felt the concussion of the thunderclap as the P-47s blew Emil Loos and his vehicle apart. The fighters whooshed through the black pall of smoke from their burning target and pulled up again. Satisfied with their work, they continued to climb for the gray clouds until they disappeared above them. Only the fading acoustic shadows of their engines echoing this way and that off the trees gave any hint at who had just been here. On the road the motionless truck was a flaming hulk, and I could just make out through the ripples of heat Loos’ charred body, like one of those figures from the Pompeii ruins, frozen in time in his death thrall, draped out of the open driver’s side window.
I bowed my head and thought, if I did not say out loud: Well, boy, you got your wish. Oberschütze Emil Loos was dead and, yet again, it was we who still lived.
Behind me the five remaining members of my flock raised their heads above the greenery. Twigs snapped behind me as they formed beside me along the edge of the woods. “Oh, Harmon,” cried Amelia as she looped my arm in hers. “Has the world gone mad?”
Constanze tried to shield Elsa’s eyes from the gruesome sight of the boy’s charbroiled remains, but after all she’d seen, who knew how sensitive this child’s psyche could have been at this point? Jakob and Krup stood in silence as they watched the vehicle burn. It was as if we were observing a moment of solemnity to honor the brave lad who had saved us twice, but knew he could never save himself. I know that his sins were many—I witnessed them myself—but perhaps in his last act of self-sacrifice he escaped the damnation he so feared. Either way, Emil Loos made it possible for me and my friends to live another day.
56
But now we had a practical matter to contend with. It was getting dark, and although I could sense my base nearby, we had no means of transport to get to it. I considered my ungainly procession of refugees. A sickly man, a physically weakened woman, and her little girl. Jakob was still relatively robust, as was Amelia, but we were all suffering the debilitating effects of little sleep and less food. I decided we should rest here for the night within the cover of the woods. Fortunately, Jakob thought to bring the SS canteens. We should have been laid low with thirst otherwise.
With the blackened shell of Loos’s truck still smoldering on the roadway out in the open, we hid in the woods and lay with the biting insects in the dirt. Nighttime brought with it a cool breeze from the northeast and a much-needed rest for all of us. We were relatively safe here, but soon we would be out in the open once more and dangerously exposed. Andeville was just over the next rise several miles away. The next day would show whether my extraordinary luck would hold.
The heavy clouds of the previous day slid off to the east as we slept. A mantel of bright stars greeted my eyes as I awoke about a half hour before the dawn. My mouth was parched, and I took a last swig of water from my canteen. Well, I thought, now comes the hard part.
Everyone was curled up in the dewy underbrush as they lay with their eyes closed, breathing deeply. We were all so tired that we could have found sleep on a bed of pinecones. I went from person to person gently shaking them awake. “Amelia, get up.… Come on, Leo, Constanze, we have to get moving.… Jake, get your little sister up, it’s time.”
After draining the canteens we left them behind, well-hidden in the brush, as we moved on. We were headed towards a nest of German soldiers on my base, and had we been found with SS canteens we would’ve been implicated in the massacre of Keitel’s detachment, surely long since discovered, and shot on the spot by Seebeck.
“How will we get to your base?” asked Krup, fearing the answer he already knew.
I looked around at this pathetic band. “We walk,” I said. And so we did.
We trekked for what felt like several miles through the edge of the woods following the road to Andeville that cut through them, but careful not to show ourselves in the open. A thick mist shrouded our movements. I knew we had to make it to the base by early morning. It was right around here. Everything looked familiar to me now. The tree lines, the roadways, the scattered farmhouses along the narrow lanes. Even though the sun was just showing its full self through the trees, already an intense heat was building. I took stock of my hapless band of refugees and knew that they would not be able to go much farther. Krup’s breathing had grown steadily more labored, and Constanze, her ragged frame weakened from years of inade
quate diet, was on the verge of fainting. For a while I carried Elsa on my shoulders and she made a game of it by plucking leaves from the branches that she could now reach and snag with her little fingers. I saw Jakob smiling up at me as we stumbled through the undergrowth, grateful for the kindness I was showing his baby sister.
“Captain,” he said at one point.
“It’s Harmon,” I said. “I was only a kid when you were born.”
“Harmon then.” He smiled. “I’m sorry for all I said about you.”
I patted Jakob on the back. “There’s nothing to apologize for. You were right.” I looked over to see Amelia almost in tears as she watched me with Krup’s children. Even though I stooped at times to prevent Elsa from being clotheslined, I felt taller than I had in many years.
“Do we have much farther?” asked her big brother. He looked back to his parents, who were lagging behind us. “I don’t know how much longer they can last.”
“We’ll be there soon,” I said. “Trust me.”
Jakob nodded. “I do trust you, Harmon.”
No sooner had I made that prediction than we came to where the woods abruptly ended. At the apex of the corner embracing the trees like an inverted Y was a road junction. About a hundred yards down the Y’s stem was a checkpoint. The red, black, and white gate, manned by two helmeted guards, was the southern approach to the new airbase, which literally was just an open grass field. Farther off, well in the distance and barely visible, stood the ruins of Château LeClaire, in whose warm embrace I’d been comforted through much of the struggle. Now it was just a bullet-riddled exoskeleton of stone. But actually it was better for us that the base was no longer on the grounds of the estate. The old one was much more expansive and open, with no covered approach to the airfield. Our new base was more like a hideout, in which the shroud of the woods was used to conceal our parked fighters from marauding Jabos until they were ready to burst into the clear and make a quick scramble to take off on the lawn.
Of Another Time and Place Page 32