Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  “All right, far enough,” Jenou says. She stops and uses the muzzle of her carbine to push the German back against a tree. She reaches into her coat and pulls out a cigarette, which she gives to the German.

  Now he knows.

  His hands shake so badly he drops the cigarette, bends to pick it up, and nearly falls over when he stands.

  “Nein, nein, nein,” he pleads as Jenou lights her Zippo and holds the flame to his cigarette. He reaches into his coat and comes out with an oilskin packet. Letters fall from his shaking fingers as he seeks for and finds a photograph. He holds it up for Jenou to see.

  “Mein name ist Heinrich, ja? Heinrich Weber.” He beats on his chest. His name is Heinrich. “Meine kinder.” He points at the picture of a handsome, severe woman, posed with a younger version of the prisoner and two children, a sly-eyed girl of maybe seven and a little boy held in the prisoner’s arms. “Das ist Helga und kleine Fritz.”

  Helga. And little Fritz.

  “Kamerad,” the man pleads. Whether he has chosen to drop or his strength has simply given way, he falls to his knees. He clutches his hands in prayer around the picture, holding it up as he says over and over again, “Meine kinder. Meine kinder. Bitte!”

  My children, my children.

  Please.

  “Malmédy,” Jenou says, and shoots him once through the neck.

  Heinrich Weber lies dead in the snow. Jenou retrieves his packet of photographs, reassembles them in the envelope. She and Beebee quickly strip the body of useful clothing, leaving him naked but for his shirt and underpants. Jenou stuffs the envelope under his uniform shirt.

  “Richlin says we have a couple hours,” Jenou says. “Let’s get to company and see if we can find a hot meal.”

  30

  FRANGIE MARR—ELSENBORN RIDGE, BELGIUM

  Day follows day with deadly routine. The Americans sit in their foxholes freezing. Sometimes they go on patrols to locate the Germans and make sure they’re still where they are supposed to be. Other times the Germans patrol, to make sure the Americans are where they are supposed to be.

  Almost daily the Germans launch a probing attack, which is repulsed.

  And after each patrol, after each attack, Frangie counts the cost. Bullet wounds. Shrapnel wounds. Splinter wounds. Self-inflicted wounds. Friendly fire wounds. Trench foot. Frostbite.

  Her life is snow and blood.

  Her life is screams and groans and final, rattling breaths.

  But more and more it is the minds of the GIs that are the greater problem. Sergeant Geer is found shivering uncontrollably in the woods surrounded by frozen Germans. As tough as Geer is, no one can take it day after day after day. The cold, the cold, the cold. The fear. The numbing loss of hope, the loss even of memories of what the world once was.

  Every few days she takes one or two of the worst off back down to the aid station, where they can sit in a tent with a stove and let warmth torture them with pins and needles. Thawing out has become a vital tool in Frangie’s medical bag: a GI who gets half a day to thaw out is good for more days at the front.

  There is one army doctor and a Belgian nun with nurse’s training at the nearest aid station. The nun is in her thirties or forties—it’s impossible to tell in a world where everyone wears any scrap of clothing they can find. The doctor is a gaunt, gray-faced Maine Yankee whose eyes are as hollow as any frontline soldier’s. Every time Frangie comes, he is on duty. Has he ever slept?

  “What you got, Marr?”

  “Bullet to the right thigh, through and through, but I think it may have clipped the bone. And a combat fatigue.”

  The wounded man smokes a cigarette, takes it out of his mouth to yell, “Goddamn that hurts!”

  The combat fatigue soldier sits on the dirt floor rocking back and forth chanting, “Ring around the rosy,” over and over.

  Is it any surprise that soldiers are going mad? In a mad world what choice did they have?

  With a Belgian stretcher bearer Frangie has manhandled the injured man off the jeep and into the tent. The Belgian is originally from Congo, a black African with whom Frangie would love to talk, some other time, in some other universe.

  The locals, the Belgian people, have been magnificent. They open their homes. They empty their larders. They bring blankets and coats and socks they can scarcely have afforded to part with. There are Belgian doctors and nurses and volunteers working without break, all up and down the Bulge. Many GIs had complained about the French. None has a word to say against the Belgians.

  Everyone knows the Americans can’t hold out much longer.

  And everyone tells themselves, “Not today.”

  “I need morphine,” Frangie says.

  The doctor shakes his head. “I’m using brandy for amputations now.” He is outraged at this, not at Frangie, at the army, at the world. Brandy is not morphine. It’s little better than aspirin.

  Frangie has two—just two ampoules of morphine left. They are in her armpit to keep them from freezing. She has a bottle of plasma stuffed down the front of her trousers for the same reason.

  The Americans down south in Bastogne, and up here at the Elsenborn Ridge at the northern edge of the Bulge, have run out of almost everything: medicine, food, cigarettes, ammunition. The howitzers and Long Toms still fire rounds toward the Germans, but even Frangie has noticed that the rate of fire is diminishing day by day.

  How soon until the big guns fall silent? How soon until the men and women in holes squeeze their triggers and hear nothing but click?

  “Gauze?” Frangie asks.

  The doctor jerks his head toward a pile of gray rags. Many bear faded bloodstains. Bandages now are whatever rags Belgian housewives boil for them.

  Frangie knows better than to ask after sulfa, let alone the new and exciting penicillin. They’ve been out of those forever.

  Outside the tent Frangie looks up at the sky. Gray. Gray and more gray. Until the weather changes there can be no airdrops of supplies, and the roads are closed, with nothing coming in.

  She stumbles toward the smell of food. There’s a field kitchen, but all it serves are C rations warmed up over wood fires. They are burning the pews of the village church, carried to them, donated by the Belgian priest and a parishioner with a donkey cart but no donkey.

  She makes the mistake of glancing left. There is the pile of unburied dead, frozen, GI and Kraut, their faces the awful maroon that so often results from freezing. A smaller pile is made of nothing but limbs. Arms and legs. Both gruesome piles are dusted with snow.

  Frangie eats with mechanical indifference, pushing fuel in, stoking the failing fire inside her. The first time she’d sat at the rough table outside the field tent she’d earned dirty looks and cruel words from some soldiers. What the hell was a Nigra doing eating with decent white folks?

  But no one has the energy for that now. And everyone, even the greenest yahoo from Alabama, has come to realize the sacred importance of anyone, man, woman, white or black, with a red cross on their helmet.

  Frangie trudges back to her jeep. Despite the desperate lack of fuel, she’d left the engine running—a stopped engine was a dead engine in this cold. But now it has stopped, and when she tries to start it the ignition makes one sluggish grunt and no more.

  It is a mile and a half back to the front, and she walks it on numb feet. She’s already lost a little toe to frostbite. She’d borrowed Rio’s koummya to chop it off.

  One foot in front of the next. That was it. That is what her brain thought of. One foot and then the next. There was no point in thinking of anything else. The world of warmth and clean clothing and warm beds was a lie, a fantasy. It was a fragment of dream she remembered but knew was unreal.

  This was real. These blackened, denuded trees, like black javelins stabbed into the earth, they were real. The sound of artillery was real. The sudden gust that passed through her layers as easily as a knife’s blade and spread goose bumps over her flesh was real.

  She trips and falls
.

  She lies there in the snow and thinks, Just stay . . . just stay . . . Her eyes close.

  Enough.

  Sleep.

  If she lies here, in an hour she will be dead.

  But after twenty minutes there comes the sound of wheels on snow. The squeal of brakes. The sound of boots on snow.

  Hands touch her, grab her clothing, and she thinks, Ah, I’m dead and being stripped . . .

  “Marr! Hey!” A hand slaps the side of her face.

  Frangie opens her eyes and sees dark-brown eyes beneath a helmet marked with a first lieutenant’s rectangle.

  “Come on, let’s go,” the woman says, and Frangie thinks, I know her.

  “What the hell are you doing, Marr?” Rainy asks as she and her driver bundle a nearly frozen Frangie into the passenger seat.

  “Let me go,” Frangie says, though her words are indecipherable.

  “Hey,” Rainy says, taking Frangie’s face in her two hands. “You giving up?”

  Frangie nods. Yes. Yes, she is giving up and letting go of life and will, she hopes and believes, fly to the arms of Jesus in a warm, warm heaven . . .

  “Hey!” Rainy shakes Frangie’s face. “Before you give up, look up.”

  Rainy takes Frangie’s head and forces her to look up. And there Frangie sees something impossible. A field of blue. And in that field of blue great white flowers blossom.

  “S’that real?” Frangie asks.

  Rainy grins. “Blue skies, Marr. Blue skies and parachutes.”

  The great white flowers drift down beyond the trees, each slowing the weight of boxes of food and ammunition.

  The weather has cleared. The C-47s are dropping supplies.

  On the roads leading to Bastogne and the Elsenborn, all over the Bulge, the Americans suddenly find that they have fighters roaring overhead to lacerate the Germans with missiles and bombs and bullets.

  “You hear about General McAuliffe?” Rainy asks, trying to keep Frangie engaged and awake.

  Frangie shakes her head.

  “He’s the 101st’s commander. The Krauts sent him a message under a white flag. Said we should surrender to avoid loss of life.”

  Despite herself Frangie finds a tiny glimmer of interest. “What’d he say?”

  “He sent back a one-word message: Nuts.”

  The fighters roar. The parachutes fall, bringing food and medicine and ammunition. The Americans, down to little more than bayonets and beans, once more will have the tools of victory. Food, medicine, bullets, mortar shells, artillery rounds, and a sky full of P-47s and P-38s.

  From the eternal forest comes the savage roar of soldiers who understand now that they may go on freezing, may go on fighting, and maybe dying, but who now understand as well . . . that they will win.

  PART V

  THE CAMPS

  All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes—all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers.

  —Rod Serling

  31

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN, RIO RICHLIN, AND JENOU CASTAIN—BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, NEAR WEIMAR, GERMANY

  “I need a driver and some muscle,” Rainy says.

  Rio looks up from the letter she’s reading. She is sitting at a table, out of doors, outside the mess tent, in a world that is chilly but not freezing. In front of her is a tray, half-eaten: a mound of scrambled eggs, two fat sausages, a short stack of pancakes, coffee, and strawberry ice cream.

  Actual ice cream.

  Rio wears a reasonably clean uniform and—for the first time in recent memory—is not being tortured by lice. This had required shaving her head bald before taking a walk through the delousing tent, and all she has now is a bare half-inch of dark bristle.

  “Why are you looking at me, Captain Schulterman?” Rio says it with a certain playful lilt. Rio is not in Rainy’s chain of command, not even close, after all. But when she looks up and meets Rainy’s gaze, Rio drops the playfulness. She glances at Jenou, scribbling away in her journal with one hand, spearing a sausage on a fork with the other.

  “What?” Jenou says.

  “Captain wants us to take a ride with her,” Rio says. To Rainy she says, “What’s up?”

  Rainy’s face is stone. Her eyes are hard. “I’ve been interviewing some POWs and DPs. I’m hearing . . . things. I have to go check it out.”

  “And you need some rip-snorting killers with you?”

  Rainy shakes her head, but says, “Maybe. I’m not sure.” She jerks her head. “Jeep’s over there. Finish your meal.” She walks away on stiff legs, and Rio exchanges a look with Jenou. They stand up, grab their weapons, and leave the food.

  This in itself is astounding. Hot food: left on a tray! Just a few months earlier either woman would have personally shot any officer crazy enough to try to separate them from actual, cooked, hot food.

  But that was winter, and it is now April. Spring. The Soviet Red Army is already in the Berlin suburbs. German troops are streaming west, trying to surrender to the Americans and British and not the Red Army: no German expects even the slightest mercy from the Russians.

  The American and British armies are deep inside Germany proper, but Berlin is to be left to the Red Army. The Americans are securing the southwest, driving toward Bavarian Germany and Austria beyond.

  The roads are often jammed with refugees, great masses of displaced persons, called DPs, often in rags, carrying their few possessions. But as they set out in the jeep, Rainy in the back with Jenou, Rio riding shotgun, and Corporal Rudy J. Chester—no longer “Private Sweetheart,” but a bona fide hard-core soldier with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart—drives.

  Every GI has remarked on just how undamaged most of Germany is. Yes, Berlin is a smoking pile of rocks, and some of the other cities are similarly annihilated. Hamburg was burned to the ground in 1943 by a vengeful Royal Air Force. And just two months had passed since the RAF and USAAF had turned Dresden into a torch so hot that stone melted and Germans untouched by the flames and the smoke suffocated in their cellars as the firestorm consumed all oxygen.

  But the farms and villages and small towns were in far better shape than the Belgian countryside, or French Normandy, or parts of Holland. And if one-tenth of the stories about Poland and Russia were true they had endured still worse. But Germany?

  Germany, outside of a dozen big cities, was as bucolic and serene as Rio’s own Sonoma County.

  “What are we looking for?” Chester asks.

  Rio turns to Rainy, who says, “I don’t know for sure. A camp of some sort, a string of camps around a central facility.”

  “Like refugee camps?” Chester asks.

  “No,” says Captain Schulterman.

  “What is that smell?” Jenou asks, wrinkling her nose.

  They drive on, veering around three cows being tended by a small boy with a stick.

  “Must be those cows,” Jenou says doubtfully.

  Rio smells it too. And as a woman raised around cows, she knows this smell is nothing to do with cattle. There is something wrong with this smell, this stink that carries sense memories of corpses within it. It’s a smell that even Rio, who has spent days within arm’s reach of rotting corpses, feels seeping into her, unsettling her.

  She looks back at Rainy and for the first time in a long while is afraid, because Rainy’s face shows that she smells it too, and she, unlike Rio, guesses at what it might be. The G2 officer’s face is as blank as a marble statue, like her cheeks and mouth have never moved. But her eyes . . .

  Suddenly a creature lurches onto the road. Chester slams on the brakes and the jeep skids to a stop. Rio swings her Thompson up to firing position and trains it on . . .
on . . .

  He is naked but for a scrap of what must once have been a shirt. His penis and testicles are visible between legs so thin that at first Rio believes he’s been skinned down to the bone. His knees are huge knobs. His thighs are gone, just nothing, just human leather over sticks.

  The man raises an arm so emaciated that the two bones of his forearm are clearly visible. Skin sags where muscle had once been. The shirt is open, revealing ribs and collarbones. His head is a skull with eyes so deep they are invisible.

  The four Americans sit frozen in the jeep.

  The man, the walking skeleton, the stick figure, collapses, falls to his knees, and tries to clasp his hands as if in prayer. But his strength is gone, and he falls onto his face. His bare buttocks are empty sacks of flesh, all fat long since gone.

  Rio forces herself out of the jeep, advancing as she unlimbers her canteen. She turns him over, shocked at the feel of his body. He cannot weigh seventy pounds. He might as well be a child.

  The man whispers something, words maybe, but no language Rio knows. She kneels and holds her canteen to his cracked lips. He seems almost to smile as the thin trickle of water glides down his throat.

  He speaks again.

  “I don’t understand,” Rio says.

  “Zenen ir faktish?” Rainy says, standing behind Rio now. “It’s Yiddish. He’s asking if you’re real.” Rainy kneels, takes off her helmet, and sets it on the road. She speaks in the same language, the never-quite-learned and largely forgotten language of her mother and father.

  “We are real,” Rainy says in Yiddish. “Americans.”

  The man looks at her with eyes terribly large in his fleshless skull. As he looks at Rainy, his breathing stops. And slowly the faint spark in his eyes goes out.

  Chester is there now, and Jenou. “I’ll help you move him out of the road,” Chester says.

  Rio shakes her head. “He weighs nothing.” She slides her hands beneath him and stands up. He is a broken doll in her arms. They leave his body by the side of the road for graves registration, and without a word between them drive on, guided by the terrible stink of filth and death.