“Achtung!” the Oberfeldwebel called.
Max came to attention with the others. Major Hessler, senior German officer at the camp, smoothed his Wehrmacht tunic into
place, looked around, then came to attention and saluted Stoddard.
“I’m surprised at you, Major Hessler,” Stoddard said. “No escape attempts for six months and now a few of your boys decide
to up and go over tonight.”
Hessler straightened up; he had a tendency to droop. “It is the duty of every POW to escape, Colonel. Those men are veterans
of Rommel’s Afrika Korps and tough as leather.”
Stoddard laughed. “So tough, they surrendered. Listen up, Major, I appreciate their heroic resolve, but it’s a bunch of bullshit
and you know it. Your duty is to convince these men not to get themselves killed for no reason, because they got no chance
to get away nohow. The only thing any of you will accomplish by trying to escape is making me look bad, and I won’t have that.
It’s bad enough I gotta spend the war babysitting you Krauts. I will
not
let y’all make a fool out of me, understand? I’ll do whatever I have to.”
One of the American officers handed Colonel Stoddard a clipboard. “Four unaccounted for, sir.”
The colonel looked at Major Hessler for a long moment without speaking. Finally he said, “You may dismiss from parade, Major,
but remember what I said.”
_________
Max woke early the next day—Sunday, a day he enjoyed because of the Lutheran service offered in German at the camp by a minister
from Jackson. He loved to sing the old hymns, to hear the Bible readings in High German, but most important were the quiet
moments of contemplation when he prayed for the comrades he had lost, for his father, for Mareth, for Germany, for himself.
As he stepped into the yard after the service, Max saw a corporal’s guard of American soldiers leading the four escaped soldiers
through the camp gate. Two had black eyes and swollen faces, another held his arm at an unnatural angle. The fourth had blood
all over the front of his shirt, a split lip, a broken nose.
“Doktor!” Major Hessler shouted.
Stoddard came in behind his men and ordered them to let the four Germans loose.
Hessler advanced on him. “These men are prisoners of war and must be treated as such under the terms of the Geneva Convention!”
Stoddard nodded. “Now listen here, Major, these boys got a little bruised up running through the woods, that’s all. My men
didn’t lay a finger on them.”
A mass of Afrika Korps men, still lean and hard from their months of desert fighting, formed up in back of Major Hessler.
The American soldiers in the guard towers swiveled their machine guns toward the yard.
“Colonel Stoddard, I shall make a full report of this reprehensible behavior to the Swiss government.”
“Major,” Stoddard said, “your men fell down while they were running through the woods. I think that’s plain as day.” Without
waiting for a response, he turned and left through the front gate, a flimsy structure of two-by-fours and chicken wire. The
Americans hadn’t wasted a lot of effort building an escape-proof camp. Why should they? Where were the Germans going to go?
Hessler was angry, but the Afrika Korps men were seething. They had learned to hate the Americans in combat at Tunis, and
they didn’t think much better of their comrades from the stomach battalion, whom they regarded as slackers. Still, Major Hessler
had been a regular infantry officer in the Prussian army before ulcerative colitis had forced him into the premature retirement
from which he’d been recalled; he was not a man to stand for insubordination, and he could hear the desert troops grumbling
all around him. “Oberfeldwebel!” he called.
The senior noncom of the Afrika Korps detachment stepped forward and snapped a salute. “Ja, Herr Major?”
“Dismiss these men at once!”
“Jawohl, Herr Major.” The sergeant spun on his heel with parade-ground precision. “Achtung!” he bellowed, the three hundred
soldiers of the Afrika Korps coming immediately to rigid attention. Damn but their discipline was impressive, Max thought.
“Dismissed!”
Max returned to his tin-roofed hut.
Besides reading books and newspapers from the camp library and teaching a course in English, Max had little to do but think
of Mareth. He had already gone nine months without seeing her, and the pain of her absence seemed only to sharpen as the days
and weeks piled up behind the camp wire. It had been bad enough when he was at war, but he’d been preoccupied then with his
own survival. Now there was nothing to take his mind off the lines of her body he was unable to touch, the sound of her voice
he was unable to hear, her sly humor, the comfort of how well she knew him.
A knock on his door.
“Permission to enter, Herr Kaleu?”
“Carls, of course—come in.”
Max looked at the big man. Carls had been very loyal to him—too loyal, perhaps.
“News from home? About the others? The crew?”
“Yes, sir. I has a letter from my mother here,” he said, clutching a small envelope. POWs were not allowed to write each other
directly but sent news to one another through their families back home. “Most are still in Maine, cutting timber same as us,
Herr Kaleu, only it’s cold there and the men like it better. My mother didn’t want to put no details down on paper, but she
says Leutnant Lehmann and Bekker got into some sort of trouble. They got sent to a special camp out west. A place called New
Mexico. A camp for troublemakers, she said.”
“Well, they’ve got that right. Who did she hear this from?”
“Heinz, Herr Kaleu. He got sent there himself because he knocked down two American guards when they snatched the U-boat medal
off his uniform.”
U-114
’s torpedo chief petty officer had been Carls’s closest friend on the boat. Max smiled. Captivity had not changed Heinz.
“Your mother is well, yes?”
“She finally took my advice and got out of Hamburg, Herr Kaleu. Brought herself to my cousin’s farm in Schleswig-Holstein.
Get as close to the Allies as you can, I told her. Don’t go nowhere near the East.”
“The Afrika Korps men, how are they?”
“Restless, Herr Kaleu. Very restless. Seeing their comrades beat up, it’s got their venom up. They’re tough men, almost as
tough as U-boat men. They fought under Rommel for almost two years.”
“Problems?”
“Perhaps, Herr Kaleu.”
Max liked the Afrika Korps men. They were tough and proud and disciplined like the navy he had known in the early years of
the war. Last week Major Hessler had given him a squad from the Afrika Korps to supervise and the desert soldiers went at
the pines like they meant to cut down the whole forest before sunset. Certainly the Americans were getting their money’s worth
for the eighty cents a day they paid these men to cut timber.
That night he sat up late and smoked. It stayed hot now even at night and Max’s sheets were damp from the humidity. How many
nights had he lain awake in this hut, replaying in his mind the events that led to the surrender of his U-boat? Remembering
the sighting of the ship through the mist, the adrenaline pumping through him, the jolt of the torpedoes as they shot from
the boat, the rumble of the explosions, then the shock of seeing all those people scrambling over the top deck of the steamer,
of realizing what he’d done. He’d been right to save the passengers, but he felt such guilt over scuttling the U-boat, and
it hung heavy on him like the thick night air. Carls had told him that he had worried off twenty pounds, and he was right.
Max’s uniform hung loose on his body—the appetite he had lost in France had never returned.
Mareth’s letters arrived once a week, all he was allowed under camp regulations. She was grateful to be in Mexico City and
did her best to sound cheerful. But Max knew it was a front. She yearned for him as he did for her and when not worrying about
him she worried about her father.
Max smoked till dawn, burning through half a pack of Lucky Strikes. He bought the cigarettes with the scrip the Americans
paid him; the scrip was worthless outside the camp but it was easy enough to purchase things at the canteen and sell them
cheap to the American guards for hard currency. Not that hard currency was much good to a POW, but at least it was real. He
had accumulated eleven dollars this way.
After breakfast he found Carls with the ten men of their woodcutting detail formed up by the main gate. An American sergeant
counted out their axes, all of which Max had to sign for.
“All is in order?” Max asked Carls.
“Jawohl, Herr Kaleu.”
“Carry on.”
Carls gave a parade-ground salute, then wheeled around to the Afrika Korps men, wiry youngsters with bright eyes. “Achtung!”
They came to attention as one, like a machine, as the American sergeant looked on. Max had watched the American troops on
the rare occasions when they drilled, and they always looked like a pack of conscripts on their first day in the army. Some
seemed not to know the difference between left and right. No one had the discipline of the German fighting man. No one. Then
again, the Wehrmacht hardly assigned its finest soldiers to guard POWs, and Max didn’t suppose the Americans did either. But
the men of the Afrika Korps were damned impressive all the same, and Max wondered what they would think of his surrender if
they knew.
Outside the gate the bus waited for them—an old school bus, Max thought it was, painted olive green, the peculiar color with
which the Americans covered everything associated with their army. The bus driver, a Negro named Malachi, a veteran of the
American Expeditionary Force in the First War, sat quietly behind the wheel. Malachi had been wounded in France in 1918, even
walked with a limp as a result, but the young American soldiers didn’t treat him with any more respect than they displayed
for other Negroes.
“Two minutes late, boy,” the corporal of the guard said, leading his men onto the bus.
Malachi nodded at him.
“Two minutes late, I said.”
“Had to put gas in the bus,” Malachi said. Max noted the omission of “sir” or “cap’n.” Most Negroes around the camp tacked
one or the other onto the end of their sentences when addressing the white guards.
Max had struck up an acquaintance with Malachi. The colored man spoke passable German from the eight years he’d spent working
as a trumpet player in a Negro jazz band in Berlin after the war. “Where did you play?” Max had asked a few days back.
“Place called Johny’s on the Kurfürstendamm.”
“Johny’s? The cabaret? I’ve been there. Next to the Café Wien?”
“That’s the one. ‘Authentic American Negro Jazz Band’ was the sign they put up on the nights we played. Paid us good. Your
people treated me a damn sight better than what I’m used to around here,” Malachi had told him, “and your women…”—he winked
at Max—“let’s just say a colored man in Berlin drew powerful attention from your women back then.”
The Afrika Korps men followed the guards onto the bus, Carls and Max the last to board.
“Okay, boy,” the corporal said, “let’s move it.”
Malachi nodded, then spoke in German to Max: “That white boy ain’t got the sense God gave a cow.”
“If he was in my unit,” Max replied, “I would have him sent to the Russian Front.”
The corporal eyed them suspiciously. “Hey, you boys talk American for me. None of that Hun language. Bad enough you Krauts
using it, but I can’t have niggers talkin’ Hun.” Max fell silent. The only thing these Americans had over Germany was their
inexhaustible resources. They could manufacture anything in unheard-of quantities and ship it all over the world. What had
the leader of the Hitler Youth said? “Every German boy who dies at the front is dying for Mozart.” Americans didn’t even know
who Mozart was. They listened to Benny Goodman and Cab Calloway and the Andrews Sisters, and when Max’s young sailors were
able, that’s who they listened to as well. Whenever Ferret had played American music from the BBC over the U-boat’s loudspeaker,
almost everyone started bobbing their heads to the music. Georg, the control room petty officer, even acted like he was playing
the drums. None of Max’s men had shown the least bit of interest in dying for Mozart.
The bus went down one dirt road for several miles, turned and turned again, stopping at their worksite from Friday last. “You
ever get lost out here?” he asked Malachi, still in German.
“Came up in these woods till we got in the first war with you people and I went to France with the army, and then to Berlin,
but I come back home in ’28 because my folks was getting on, and I been here ever since. Still live over the store my daddy
ran. Guess you just know the territory once you been around it so long.”
“Is it far from here?”
“’Bout six miles north. Place called Poole’s Crossroads. Just a bump in the road. Ain’t even a stop sign.”
In another few minutes they reached the clearing and they divided into two groups. Carls took five men and led them into the
woods to start a new worksite one kilometer north. They were followed by the corporal and another American soldier, rifles
slung upside down across their backs. The other two guards stayed with Max and his five men at the original site. Malachi
came down off the bus and limped to a spot in the shade. He settled down in the dirt, produced a book, and began to read.
“A nigger readin’,” one of the guards said, “now don’t that beat all.”
Taking up one of the axes, Max marked a row of tall pines for his men to fell. He handed the axes out to the young soldiers
and motioned them forward. The rhythmic percussion of axe blades biting into wood rang through the forest. Working methodically,
like the disciplined Germans they were, the men went down the long row of trees, pausing from time to time to stand back when
one of them tilted and pitched over, tearing limbs from other trees as it crashed down, the final thump sending birds to wing.
Later in the day, after a truck had brought lunch to them, Max went to check the progress of the other detail. Because he
was the officer in charge, Max could move between the two groups without an escort. “Guard,” he called to one of the young
Americans. The man sat in the shade, smoking, rifle propped against a tree.